Bianca

“Oh, good, it worked,” Archer said, his ghostly face relieved. Unlike Elodie, his voice came in loud and clear, and so familiar that my heart broke all over again.
I stood frozen, my back against the door. Even though he was faint, I could see him smirk.
“Um…Mercer? Haven’t seen you in nearly a month. I was expecting something like, ‘Oh, Cross, love of my heart, fire of my loins, how I’ve longed—’”
“You’re dead,” I blurted out, pressing a hand against my stomach. “You’re a ghost, and you think—”
All the humor disappeared from his face, and he held up both hands. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not dead. Promise.”
My heart was still hammering. “Then what the heck are you?”
Archer almost looked sheepish as he reached inside his shirt and pulled out some kind of amulet on a thin silver chain. “It’s a speaking stone. Lets you appear to people kind of like a hologram. You know. ‘Help me, Sophie-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.’”
“Did you steal it from the cellar at Hecate, too?” Archer had collected all sorts of magical knickknacks back when we had cellar duty at Hex Hall.
“No,” he said, offended. “I found it at a…store. For magical stuff. Okay, yes, I stole it from the cellar.”
― Rachel Hawkins, Spell Bound

“Yeah, and we still have to deal with The Eye being…Eyeish, and me learning to be Head of the Council, which will probably involve lots of boring books and—” Archer pressed his mouth to mine, effectively shutting me up and kissing the hell out of me. When he pulled back, he was grinning. “And you have an arrogant, screwed-up former demon hunter who is stupidly in love with you.”
― Rachel Hawkins, Spell Bound

“What else did he say?”
She screwed up her face. “Oh, some weird thing about telling you that he still feels the same way about that tent, and he promises to say it to you in person next time he sees you.”
I gave a bark of laughter that was more of a sob. “That asshat,” I blubbered.
Elodie nodded in sympathy. “Such an asshat.”
― Rachel Hawkins, Spell Bound

“One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel