Well, duh. You're cuter than she is." He said it like he might say, Grass is green or, Gravity works. Something warm opened up inside my chest. It was a nice feeling.

Some of the djamphir are so pretty it almost hurts to look at them. And it was hard to look without feeling rumpled and messy in comparison.

His eyes were green chips of flame, and the growl was so thick it blurred the air around him, the sound of a very pissed off skinchanger.

Next to her, even the prettiest djamphir boys looked gawky.

His smell—the scent of a demon, cinnamon incense, amber musk—wrapped around me, filled my lungs. I felt like I could breathe again, without every breath being tainted by the stench of dying cells. The smell of him seemed to coat my abused insides with peace, and flow down into the middle of my body to spread through my veins. I filled my lungs again. While I could, before what was undoubtedly a hallucination vanished.

What you cannot escape, you must fight; what you cannot fight, you must endure.

People don’t really want to know anything about you. They just want you to fit into their little predetermined slots. They decide what you are in the first two seconds, and they only get nervous or upset if you don’t live up to their snap judgments.