So." [Isobel] cleared her throat. "What are we doing?""We," [Varen] said at last, "are doing a project on Poe.""Didn't he marry his cousin or something?""The man is a literary god and that's all you have to say?

Isobel moved farther into the kitchen, not knowing whether to be relieved that her mother hadn't had an atomic meltdown, or mortified that she'd taken it upon herself to play head chef with the nearest thing Trenton High had to a Dark Lord.

Dancers churned around them like storm tossed flowers, their heads held to either side as they whirled with abandonment.“Look at them,” he whispered, his voice in her ear. “Have you ever seen anything like it? They have everything, don’t they? Everything except a single care to dwell on.

She’d never seen a boy with hands like that, with long, delicate fingers, beautiful but still masculine. His fingernails were long too, almost crystalline, tapered to points. They were the kind of hands you’d expect to see under lace cuffs, like Mozart or something.

Despite all the dark armor, the kohl liner, the black boots and chains, she saw him clearly now. She’d peered through the curtain of that cruel calmness, through the death stare and the vampire sentiments and angst and, behind it all, had found true beauty.

Painted faces laughed. It was like a mad carnival where everyone was oblivious, lost in the bliss of chaos, a throng unaware of a bomb planted beneath thefloorboards.

Lady Ligeia," he began again, "is a woman in the literature who returns from the dead, taking over another woman's body to be with her true love.""Oh, yes. Lovely" Isobel blanched. "I guess the other chick didn't mind at all?

You loved her," Isobel said."Worshipped," Scrimshaw corrected. "But more ludicrous than that, let us not forget, she loved me." He gave a short ironic laugh. "Not just him-the poet. But me as well. I, the epitome of our own penchant for self-destruction. Do you know how difficult...how impossible such a feat must have been?

Isobel had entrusted the note to Gwen just before Baltimore. And the small scrap of paper still remained her only tangible evidence that Varen had loved her.Expect...he didn't anymore.