“Probably these children were not demonic. Possibly they were quite typical. But collectively, they were hell.”

“I so seldom had to dispose of a human body myself, I was at a loss. Fairies turned into dust, and vampires flaked away. Demons had to be burned. Humans were very troublesome.”

“You were so sweet when you didn't know who you were.”

“But there was something in the air, a watchfulness laced with a charge of malice. The eyes observing us were invisible, but were observing us, nonetheless.”

“The fundamentalists were equally stymied. “We were worried about Adam and Steve,” a Baptist minister said. “Should we have been more worried about Rover and Fluffy?”

“I put the books I was returning on the appropriate desk, and I began looking at the shelves of new arrivals. Most of them were some permutation on self-help. Going by how popular these books were and how often they were checked out, everyone in Bon Temps should have become perfect by now.”

“His eyes were still like caves with ghosts dwelling in their depths.”