We all have our security blankets in this world. Some are just sharper than others.

Why is it always the world? Why is it never just half a block? Or Jersey? You know, something we could live without?

He tried to turn me into a buffet?” I gritted my teeth. “Before he killed me? He couldn’t kill me first and then eat me? That’s just fucking rude.

Niko caught my hand and slapped it lightly down on the bar. “Pistol whipping elderly women isn’t precisely our mission statement, Cal.” I hadn’t been going to pistol-whip her. Yell at her a little more, then pick her up and toss her out into the street. Some risk of a broken hip there, but that wasn’t pistol-whipping… unless she tried to come back in.

The fact that the bodies weren’t my first concern–-pissing and bodies were, in that order—-helped too. Killers have different priorities.

Wouldn’t you leave a light on? Knowing what I knew and not knowing anything else at all, why would I want the darkness where the monsters hide?Because killers hide there too.

Every inner touch, every one of its fingerprints on my brain, burned like acid. It shredded the walls of my soul like tissue paper, it clawed its way into my very center, I couldn’t tell anymore where it began and I ended. It poured into me like a river into the sea, mixing, melding, until we were one. One. For better or worse. Until death do us part.