“… you had to own your feelings, all of them. You didn’t have to act on them, but you had to acknowledge them. Buried feelings always found a way to uncover themselves. You could do it voluntarily and have some control over it, or you could stuff them down into the darkest part of your psyche and give your inner demons new ammunition to use against you. I was really trying not to do that anymore.”

Laurell K Hamilton, Serpentine

“We were badly outnumbered if this spread, and the only way for me to help lower the numbers was to risk hurting people badly. I was too small and too female not to fight to put people down as quickly and violently as possible. Sometimes you could scare people with what you were willing to do, and the fight would end just because the price wasn’t worth it to them. Police didn’t scare that easily.”

Laurell K Hamilton, Serpentine