Kelley Armstrong - Expectations

VIP免费

2024-12-15 0 0 240.85KB 18 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Expectations

As I sat listening to Victor Tucci’s story, a single refrain ran through my head.

And what do you expect me to do about it?

I wouldn’t say such a thing, of course. Perhaps some variation on it, something more polite,

without the inherent connotations of indifference such a phrase could carry. Yet the gist would

be the same. What did he expect me to do about it?

A rhetorical question. I knew precisely what he expected me to do, without so much as a

hint as to his intentions in his words, his bearing or even his eyes. I knew. And I knew that

when he finished, and made clear that expectation, we’d both be disappointed. Perhaps I even

more than he, for I was about to receive yet another glimpse into my future, where my value

would forever be measured only by my parentage and what that parentage could do for men like

Victor Tucci.

I thought of stopping him. I suppose I should have, to save us both the bother. I certainly

couldn’t afford the waste of this hour. It was two A.M., I had an exam at eight and, when it

came to sleep, I was well below my quota, a combination of a busy exam study schedule and a

stressful visit from my father two days ago having deprived me of all but a few restless hours of

slumber. So, I should have said, “Look, I know what you want, but I can’t help you” . . . or

some more polite variation on the sentiment. Yet I didn’t.

My father taught me to hear people out, whether it was a VP with a new marketing concept

or a junior custodian complaining about a switch in toilet paper brands. Cutting people short

demonstrated a basic lack of courtesy, and made people feel their thoughts and opinions weren’t

worthy of your attention. Ironic, isn’t it, that as fast as I run from my father’s influence, in so

many things, it’s his words I hear, and his words I follow. Does that mean I lack the will to

really break free? Or that I’m mature enough to acknowledge when he was right about

something? I don’t know.

I swallow a yawn and blink hard, hoping my eyes aren’t glazing over.

Maintain eye contact. Don’t fidget, don’t check your watch, don’t glance at the clock, don’t

do anything that might make it seem you have better things to do. Don’t just try to appear

interested; try to be interested.

That last part was easy. I was interested in what Tucci had to say. Any conversation

involving the words “rare,” “black-market” and “spellbook” were guaranteed to get my attention.

Of course, I could have informed him that the correct term for what he was describing was

“grimoire,” but it’s never polite to correct someone when you know perfectly well what they

mean. Of course, the first thing I thought when Tucci mentioned the book was “where is it and

how can I get hold of it?”

From the sounds of it, though, this book didn’t contain the sort of spells I’d care to add to

my repertoire. I have no aversion to dark magic, not in principle nor in practice, provided that

the principle and the practice are guided by ethical standards. All martial forms of magic are

considered dark magic. Dark, not evil. The morality of dark magic depends on the application.

Armstrong 2

One cannot argue that using an energy bolt spell to kill a business competitor is moral (unless

you happen to be my father, in which case, morality is a clay that can be molded to suit the

requirements of circumstance). Yet nor would most people argue that using that same spell to

foil an assassination attempt is equally immoral.

Still, while I’m cognizant of the value of such magics, and have been actively studying

martial and lethal spellcasting, there is a limit to how many such spells one conceivably needs.

They are, after all, only weapons. A non-supernatural who foresees the need for self-defense

may acquire a gun, perhaps a knife, and learn a form of martial arts. Different weapons for

different circumstances. Yet the only person who requires a dozen varieties of guns is one who

is not fending off assassination, but carrying it out.

Given the type of spells Tucci was describing, a more accurate analogy would be, not

additional varieties of guns, but ones specially designed to do more than kill, perhaps to put out

an eye or disfigure a face or create a wound that will cause untold agony before death. In other

words, not instruments of defense, but instruments of torture. And that is one form of weapon I

have no use for, proof that I have not absorbed all of my father’s teachings.

“So you can see why I’m concerned,” Tucci said as he finished.

“Naturally. Such spells should not be in the public domain, and I will agree that it is a cause

for concern, and yet . . .”

I paused, about to ask some variation on “what do you expect me to do about it?’ and try not

to cringe as I awaited the inevitable response, when a thought struck. Perhaps Tucci didn’t

expect that at all. Perhaps what he wanted was . . .

“You’d like me to retrieve these grimoires,” I said, straightening, the drowsiness I’d been

fighting finally falling away. “To remove them from circulation.”

Armstrong 3

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ExpectationsAsIsatlisteningtoVictorTucci’sstory,asinglerefrainranthroughmyhead.Andwhatdoyouexpectmetodoaboutit?Iwouldn’tsaysuchathing,ofcourse.Perhapssomevariationonit,somethingmorepolite,withouttheinherentconnotationsofindifferencesuchaphrasecouldca ry.Yetthegistwouldbethesame.Whatdidheexpectmet...

展开>> 收起<<

Kelley Armstrong - Expectations.pdf

共18页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Kelley Armstrong - Expectations

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: