A turmoil of winds rushed around him, spiraling up in to the air: he was thinking.

Reading always calmed me down: filling my head with other - made up - people's problems and conflicts made my own seem less terrible, less real.

I loved him, more than anything else in the world and that when he was away it was hard to breath and that I couldn't go through a single second without thinking about him.

It was exactly the sort of thing I needed to be reading that afternoon: a story where, no matter how bad things got, you knew everything was going to turn out fine in the end.

The hero was the sort of character you could feel yourself falling in love with, no matter how much you tried to convince yourself that he wasn't real

Seclusion wasn't good for anyone; it made you forget how to protect yourself.

I forced myself to breathe deeply; perhaps they would have vanished. Perhaps I'd been imagining them because Brae was gone and I was scared without him, and now that he was back I'd feel safe enough again that they would go away. Perhaps it was just paint or something and would have been washed out by the sea spray earlier. I breathed again, feeling much calmer and then, slowly, opened my eyes.

I'm not trying to avoid you,' I replied lamely, but what else could I say? Sorry Brae but when I first came down to meet you I had no idea how hard it was going to be to avoid telling you that I was turning into a grotesque monster and I am worried that there is a good chance I could wake up one morning with a sudden lust for your blood. Somehow I didn't think that would go down particularly well.

They're terrified of us Firefly, all of them are.""Well, good," I replied, forming a tiny ball of flames in my fingertips, which were curled round the handle on the back of the bike. "They should be.