It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins. It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish, the knowledge of a thing that could never be undone. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead.

— Hazel Butler

James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known people who died at their own hand because life became unbearable, or because something happened, something terrible. That wasn’t so for James—there was something inside him, something a part of him, something over which he had no control, but which had absolute control over him.

— Hazel Butler

Joshua had always been able to get away with things—things for which he should never have been forgiven. He was a lot like James in that respect, for while my husband had bought his grace with his brilliance, Joshua did so with his looks. I considered that a moment, before turning away, suddenly finding I could not bear to look at him for fear of what I might forgive next.

— Hazel Butler

She stood in the snow, effervescent, all pale skin and blonde hair, clad in white and bathed in moonlight. She should have looked angelic, instead she looked like a corpse, freshly raised from the grave, frosted in ice and darkness, swaying precariously in a graveyard.

— Hazel Butler

The night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at the stars, held down by an insidious, weightless lacing of snowflakes. I gazed idly at the moon and wondered if it truly had the power to sway the will of men.

— Hazel Butler

The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over. For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped in the terror of the moment. Not so for my poor, elegant wraiths. They were like the old-fashioned zoetropes you find at the seaside: a tiny slice of a world in a box, brief yet somehow also eternal.

— Hazel Butler

The reflection was that of a putrefying corpse. By some trick of the light, her face seemed sallow and slipping, the patches of darkness giving the appearance of skin sloughing off in small pockets. I’d almost forgotten the knife in my panic; the woman was far more dangerous than the weapon. Blood drizzled down the blade, obscuring the macabre reflection of Natalya’s face, and suddenly I was transfixed by a thought that should have been immediate:Whose blood is that?

— Hazel Butler

The same good folk who would burn me for a psychic now paid me to use my cursed granary to guard their sheep.

— Hazel Butler

Was James bipolar?” The tears returned, and I watched her battle them. “We don’t use that word in our family.” I stared at her for a moment. “Why not?”“Mum and Dad don’t believe in it.” She kept walking. “James was always … troubled. But there was nothing wrong with him, nothing more than anyone else anyway, everyone feels a bit down sometimes.”“Olivia! It was more than feeling down.” She laughed, bitterly. “I know, Dee, fuck, do I know that. I’m just telling you how it goes. The party line—what we told people when they asked.

— Hazel Butler

Without Barnaul's pelt about me, I felt naked before the crowds, yet I knew what I would invite if folk saw me wearing it. The whispers would become shouts, the shouts accusations, and finally cries of terror, and even if they did not whip me at the post or burn me for my granary, the fear would swell within their minds. Their thoughts would focus on naught but me. And I would find myself at the mercy of an onslaught of gate from which even Lynne would be unable to defend me.

— Hazel Butler