Sublime

she had silky auburn hair down to her waist and a beautiful, tulip-shaped face.

The basic rule of Roman history is that those who were assassinated were, like Gaius, demonised. Those who died in their beds, succeeded by a son and heir, natural or adopted, were praised as generous and avuncular characters, devoted to the success of Rome, who did not take themselves too seriously.

Dressed all in black, his shoulders were drawn up around his pointed ears. His chest rose and fell with the sawing of his breath. Tattoos writhed and shifted like smoke across every patch of visible skin, creeping up the back of his neck and swirling over the backs of his hands. It was Death. In such a feral state,

The last time she’d seen Sonia, in her villa blooming with birds of paradise and geraniums in Beverly Hills, he had just died and Sonia simply glowed away, only stronger, so strongly that Jacaranda had a feeling that Sonia’s blood—which was probably made of pink roses—was, each evening at twilight, bled into the sunset so that she could live

The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other.

Lilith considered this, nodding slowly. “I am not afraid,” she said. Vale grabbed her hand, as if trying to drag her back to her seat. “Lilith—” he grumbled. But despite her fractured Obitraen, Lilith’s tone was final, her stare not breaking from Raihn’s. “If it is what the House of Night needs,” she said, “then we will do it. That is it.”