Once, she made a boy come out of his house and kiss her under the streetlight. It was her first kiss. She thinks it was probably his, too. She never told him and she never, ever will.

I know how to be the witness to her grief. I don't know how to be this kind of villain.

I'm not very good at explaining things," she said. "But I think you have beautiful eyes. I love the gold in them. I love that they're different from my eyes- I see mine all the time and I'm bored with them.

If they were real, then maybe the world was big enough to have magic in it. And if there was magic — even bad magic, and Zach knew it was more likely that there was bad magic than any good kind — then maybe not everyone had to have a story like his father's, a story like the kind all the adults he knew told, one about giving up and growing bitter.

Even from the beginning, that was the problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.

Poisonous jealousy thrummed through my veins.

Death’s favorites don’t die.