Betty’s accent was everything Cent’s wasn’t-deep and New England. Her ending R sounds were more like an H, and her word choices…they’d all but needed dictionaries to understand each other when they’d met the year before.

Every minute I decide not to kill you is a minute your life is saved. You owe me everything.

In life, when you have a partner–someone you can rely on and trust with everything that you are–there isn’t anything you can’t accomplish. I will always be there for you, if you let me.

Mattie, I'm sorry to drag you away." "Don't worry about it. It's late. My mother always said nothing good happens after midnight." I barked out a surprised laugh. "Your mother, clearly, is not a Sidhe.

Are you single?” inquired − rather bluntly − the email titled “Career Opportunity.

A shade flickered to my left, an eerie shadow balanced even more precariously on the railing than I. Her plimsolls struggled to grip the same rail my fingers now held. I knew her face, just as I knew her death; I’d watched it often enough, those times I’d been unable to avoid crossing here. Nerys was always here, tied to the moment of her death, an echo, forever hurtling down into those waters, only to reappear an instant later, once more wavering on the rails.

The reflection was that of a putrefying corpse. By some trick of the light, her face seemed sallow and slipping, the patches of darkness giving the appearance of skin sloughing off in small pockets. I’d almost forgotten the knife in my panic; the woman was far more dangerous than the weapon. Blood drizzled down the blade, obscuring the macabre reflection of Natalya’s face and suddenly I was transfixed by a thought that should have been immediate:Whose blood is that?

The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over.For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped in the terror of the moment.Not so for my poor, elegant wraiths. They were like the old-fashioned zoetropes you find at the seaside: a tiny slice of a world in a box, brief yet somehow also eternal.

She stood in the snow, effervescent, all pale skin and blonde hair, clad in white and bathed in moonlight. She should have looked angelic, instead she looked like a corpse, freshly raised from the grave, frosted in ice and darkness, swaying precariously in a graveyard.

Joshua had always been able to get away with things—things for which he should never have been forgiven. He was a lot like James in that respect, for while my husband had bought his grace with his brilliance, Joshua did so with his looks. I considered that a moment, before turning away, suddenly finding I could not bear to look at him for fear of what I might forgive next.