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.

Magic gives you a lot of choices," Grandad says. "Most of them are bad.

She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.

One fine day, in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other. They pulled out their swords and shot one another. One deaf cop, on the beat heard the noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.

in her dreams, blood tasted like fizzy strawberry soda. If you drank it too fast, you got brain freeze. When she was older, after she'd licked a cut on her finger, the taste of that became the taste in her dreams: copper and tears.

I'm the best kind of thief, the kind that leaves behind items equal in value to those he's stolen.

It’s hard to come up with a scheme to thwart some other scheme you don’t even know about.