When I turned to writing fantasy, and writing for young people, it was joyous. It was like discovering an underground lake of ideas that went on forever.

Kizzy wanted it all so bad her soul leaned half out of her body hungering after it, and that was what drove the goblins wild, her soul hanging out there like an untucked shirt.

Just then, lit only by the flicker of his wings,the sight of him was so..right somehow. He was right. It made no sense at all, but the feeling flooded through Karou

Once upon a time, an angel lay dying in the mist. And a devil knelt over him and smiled.

Heavily and hypnotically,with her soul flattening itself back like the ears of a hissing cat,Kizzy leaned in and drank of Jack Husk's full,moist mouth,and his red,red lips were hungry against hers,drinking her in return.Their eyes closed.Fingers clutched at collars and hair,at the picnic blanket,at the grass.And as they sank down,pinning their shadows beneath them,the horizon tipped on its side,and slowly,thickly,hour by hour,the day spilled out and ebbed away. It was Kizzy's first kiss, and maybe it was her last, and it was delicious.

In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil's magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint....Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin. And it would begin with fire.

In all that was to happen, there would be that feeling of inevitability and rightness, and the sense that the universe was conspiring in it. It would be easy.