Strange Beasts

The thing you have to understand,” Hel said quietly, as if the shadows might overhear, “is that someone like my father doesn’t have ‘men.’ He’s a whisper of information, a nudge on someone’s baser instincts, a finger on a domino whose effects spiral out in unseen designs.

Because,” Sam said fiercely, “as a wise woman once told me, men are entirely too quick to call a woman mad or monstrous just because she can do something they can’t. Don’t do it for them.

Men like him are entirely too quick to call a woman mad or monstrous just because she can do something they can't.

The darkness doesn't mean the monsters are gone - it only means you can't see them coming.

Sam winced. “We, um, might have run into one of the guards.” “With a typewriter,” Mme Frossard added. “A couple of times,” Sam finished, her cheeks pinking.

Sam chose her next words carefully—“I hear she’s very clever.” What she’d actually heard was that Dr. Helena Moriarty, when faced with a man who wouldn’t stop harassing her, had taken up beekeeping, distilled the queen bee’s scent, and slipped it into the offending man’s shaving cream. After that, bees had swarmed him—impossibly finding him no matter where he went, wriggling and squirming through cracks and keyholes, air vents, and chimneys. It was enough to drive a man mad. They just want to be friends, Dr. Moriarty was said to have echoed back at him. For indeed, he was only stung two or three times. Needless to say, he’d left her alone after that.

The cruelty of humans was far worse than that of literal monsters.