A stray dog, I might understand," she said. "But this? You are too softhearted." No, Mabry," Ravus said. "I am not." He looked in Val's direction. "I think she wants to die." Maybe you can help her after all," Mabry said. "You're good at helping people die.

As the last Seelie left the hall, Roiben, self-declared King of the Unseelie Court, nearly fell into his throne. Kaye tried to smile at him, but he was not looking at her. He was staring out across the brugh with eyes the color of falling ash. Corny had not stopped laughing.

On the way out to the car, Philip turns to me. “How could you be so stupid? I shrug, stung in spite of myself. “I thought I grew out of it.” Philip pulls out his key fob and presses the remote to unlock his Mercedes. I slide into the passenger side, brushing coffee cups off the seat and onto the floor mat, where crumpled printouts from MapQuest soak up any spilled liquid. “I hope you mean sleepwalking,” Philip says, “since you obviously didn’t grow out of stupid.

A girl like that, Grandad said, perfumes herself with ozone and metal filings.

People said that video games were bad because they made you numb to death, made you register entrails splattering across a screen as a sign of success. In that moment, Val thought that the real problem with games was that the player was suppossed to try everything. If there was a cave, you went in it. If there was a mysterious stranger, you talked to him. If there was a map, you followed it. But in games, you had a hundred million billion lives and Val only had this one.

I thought you needed to be tougher. But I've been thinking that protecting somebody by hurting them before someone else gets the chance isn't the kind of protecting that anybody wants.

I thought weirdness was a good thing. I don't mean that defensively, either. I thought it was something to be cultivated.