You're as ugly as we are, [ he spits, and it's the closest to anger as he's ever allowed himself to show the thing. (Cold is the most that he usually offers it — his version of winter, where nothing grows.) ]

You take and you take, you destroy. I don't have anything left to give you, not even this town.

[ (You took my son. Another principle that he knows the growth cannot comprehend: love, not to mention the emptiness that it leaves behind. It's sickening, in a way, to watch the Strangler learn as his boy might have. But it learns without feeling, even if it takes a shell that should.) ]