My nose is broken," I said. Damn that Dumbo. Made me self-conscious."My ankle's broken," he said."Then I'll come to you.

The shadow raised its arm high in the air and I knew - I knew before I heard my name - that he'd found me again, keeper of the promise he couldn't make, the one I had marked with my blood and who had marked me with his tears, a Silencer all right, my silencer, stumbling toward me in the impossibly pure light of a late winter's sunrise promising spring.

Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself.

If your job is to kill us, why didn’t you kill me?” I ask.He answers without hesitating, as if he’s decided long before I asked the question what his answer would be.“Because I’m in love with you.

I’m about to pee myself with relief that we’re all alive, but mostly because he is.He drops into the room, landing on the balls of his feet like a cat. I’m in his arms in the time it takes to say “I love you,” which he does, stroking my hair, whispering my name and the words, “My mayfly.

He was a finisher who could not finish. He was the heart of a hunter who lacked the heart to kill.In her journal she had written I am humanity, and something in those three words split him in two.She was the may fly, here for a day, then gone. She was the last star, burning bright in a sea of limitless black.Erase the human.In a burst of blinding light, the star Cassiopeia exploded and the world went black.Evan Walker had been undone.

People change spouses more often than they clean out closets. And every time they say, 'This is the one. This is the person I'm going to spend eternity with.' Then forty or fifty years go by and you're just sick of each other, utterly sick, and it's on to the next 'true love.' My question is what good is eternity if you are eternally falling in and out of love?

But I don’t panic. I don’t bolt like a frightened gazelle. I am more than the sum of my fear. It isn’t fear that will defeat them. Not fear or faith or hope or even love, but rage.

Bear proves that true love doesn’t have to be complicated—or even reciprocated.