And there is the girl. When I first see her and her dun mare from my vantage point on the cliff road, I am struck first not by the fact that she is a girl, but by the fact that she's in the ocean. it's the dreaded second day, the day people start to die, and no one will get close to the surf. But there she is, trotting up to the knee in the water. Fearless.

People shouldn't have to earn kindness. They should have to earn cruelty.

She had a short fuse this morning, because it was a day that ended with y, you see.

Are you really going to work in that?" Maura asked. Blue looked at her clothing. It involved a few thin layering shirts, including one she had altered using a method called shredding. "What's wrong with it?" Maura shrugged. "Nothing. I always wanted an eccentric daughter. I just never realised how well my evil plans were working.

As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.

I've been waiting for you forever." "Forever' as in several hundred years, or forever as in since my lesson began?

Once upon a time I would’ve leaped at the rare opportunity of curling up with Mom on the couch. But now it sort of felt like too little too late. I had someone else waiting for me.