"Remember when you tried to convince me to feed a poultry pie to the mallards in the park to see if you could breed a race of cannibal ducks?""They ate it too,"Will reminisced. "Bloodthirsty little beasts. Never trust a duck."
"Well, she's not responding to my advances,"he observed more brightly than he felt, "so she must be dead.""Or she's a woman of good taste and sense."
"Pulvis et umbra sumus. It's a line from Horace. 'We are dust and shadows'. Appropriate, don't you think?"Will said. "It's not a long life, killing demons; one tends to die young, and then they burn your body - dust to dust, in the literal sense. And then we vanish into the shadows of history, nary a mark on the page of a mundane book to remind the world that once we existed at all."
"Let me give you a piece of advice. The handsome young fellow who's trying to rescue you from a hideous fate is never wrong. Not even if he says the sky is purple and made of hedgehogs."
"Henry turned as if to dart out of the room, then swung around and stared at them, a look of confusion passing over his freckled face, as if he had only now had cause to wonder why Will, Tessa, and Jem might be crouching together in a mostly disused storage room. "What are you three doing in here, anyway?"Will tilted his head to the side and smiled at Henry. "Charades,"he said. "Massive game."
"Will rolled up his sleeves. "We'll probably have to knock down the door--""Or,"said Jem, reaching out and giving the knob a twist, "not."The door swung open onto a rectangle of darkness. "Now, that's simply laziness,"said Will."