When Niniane had disappeared, he had gone to a place he had never been to before. He had panicked.

There’s my bad boy,” she whispered. God, he was breathtaking.

How exactly does one break the news to her husband that she’s standing in a closet with the dead body of one of their dinner guests?

Locks, wards – you name it, and she could walk through it. Nothing could cage her. Nothing, that is, unless it plummeted out of a clear blue sky and sat on her.

He also ate every scrap of the cold meat she had cooked for him, and good gods, it was pretty awful. Somehow she had managed to wreck the simple task of browning chicken in a skillet. The outside was charred black, and the inside oozed juice that was still pink.

Trying to get pregnant is one of my very favorite things to do. We’ll have to practice frequently, and with great enthusiasm.

Honestly, what had she done? She had taken one look at a pretty face and forgotten everything her mom had taught her about survival. It sucked so bad she might as well put a gun to her head and pull the trigger. Except she didn’t own a gun because she didn’t like them. Besides, pulling the trigger on a gun was pretty final. She had issues with commitment and she was so freaking dead anyway, so why bother.

And if he had to do it all over, he would do it again. In the deepest privacy of his soul, down at the bottom of a well where no one else could hear him, the part of him that had weighed life and death decisions over the last several hundred years took her life and weighed it against all else. –.

There was no surviving some loves. No matter what happened to the love affair, whether it flourished or failed, those loves struck mortal blows one carried for the rest of one’s life.

Sometimes at Christmas she would slip into neighborhoods just like this one. She would walk along the streets and peer into windows at family and holiday gatherings, and marvel at the shiny gold, crimson and green decorated trees covered with tinsel and twinkling colored lights, while she wondered what it must be like to experience the beauty of such an ordinary, unattainable life.