Winning ugly is still winning.

Oh, I know. They’re dwarfs pretending to be elves. No, they’re not dwarfs either. Okay, okay, they’re “little people,” I’m sorry! Can’t believe I have to be politically correct when you’re the only one who can hear me.

Awesome! I'd just bullied Jesus into doing a shot with me. Nobody would ever believe it, but I didn't care. We ordered the insanely expensive stuff, seventy-five dollars for a 1.75-ounce pour of premium Irish whiskey, because if you're doing a shot with Jesus, you don't buy him scotch.

That’s what a skinwalker is: a mean asshole with a meaner spirit squatting inside.” "I’ve run into some of those at the dog park," Oberon said. "They’re usually attached to Chihuahuas.

But now that she was my apprentice, every such thought caused a guilty twitch in my neck, as if someone had dropped a sleek, stinky ferret there. Guilt ferrets are bastards.

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.

I yawned and stretched luxuriously in the morning. I make noises when I stretch because it feels ten times better than stretching silently.