I hear laughter and someone asks if I need help, not in a nice way. I snarl, "What I need is for your mother to have thought a little harder nine months before your birthday.

The best-case scenario here is that you make friends with a boy who's going to die." "Ah," said Calla, in a very, very knowing way. "Now I see." "Don't psychoanalyse me," her mother said. "I already have. And I say again, 'ah'.

Some people see what they want to see.

Are you alone?" So that's what this call was about. For some reason, the question made my throat tighten. "No," I said, "Elvis is here. Would you like to talk to him?

My mother always said that I was born out of a bottle of vinegar instead of born from a womb and that she and my father bathed me in sugar for three days to wash it off. I try to behave, but I always go back to the vinegar.

In that moment, Blue was a little in love with all of them. Their magic. Their quest. Their awfulness and strangeness. Her raven boys.

They bit you. You should've changed, too, you know." "Sometimes I wish I had," I told him. He closed his eyes, miles away on the other side of the bed. "Sometimes I do, too.