“May I search it?" she asked. "We screen for weapons."I stared at her, always a risky thing to do to a vampire. "Of course not. I have no weapons.”

“It's not enough that we have to handle our own race's problems," Claude said. "Now we're sucked into the fucking vampire struggles, too.""No," I said, feeling I was walking uphill in this conversation. "You as a group weren't sucked into the vampire struggles. One of you was taken for a specific purpose. Different scenario.”

“I snuck a look to see how Eric was taking this, and he was staring at me the same way the Monroe vampires had. Thoughtful. Hungry."That's interesting," he said. "I had a psychic once. It was incredible.""Did the psychic think so?”

“You take I-55 south, and you'll run into I-20. Or you could take..."I was about to be overloaded with information. "Oh that sounds just perfect. Let me do just that, or I'll lose track."Sure, glad I could help."Oh, you surely did."We beamed at each other, just two nice women. I had to fight an impulse to say "I have a tortured vampire in my trunk," out of sheer giddiness.”

“I had never realized a woman could have to struggle to keep her hands off a man, but here I was, digging my nails into my palms, staring at the inside of my eyelids as though I could maybe see through them if I peered hard enough.”

“Men are incomprehensible assholes," I said to Amelia. "NO shit," she said. "When I was searching for Bob today, I found a female cat in the woods with kittens. And guess what? They were all black-and-white.”

“My mother finally took me to a child psychologist, who knew exactly what I was, but she just couldn’t accept it and kept trying to tell my folks I was reading their body language and was very observant, so I had good reason to imagine I heard people’s thoughts. Of course, she couldn’t admit I was literally hearing people’s thoughts because that just didn’t fit into her world.”