“Six months ago when she first came up with the idea to kill Wilson, back when she was living in Memphis, she'd started going to church again. Since she was spending so much time thinking about sinister things, the least she could do, she reasoned, was to think about God and his love twice a week at church so that she wouldn't become a total sociopath. And rather than kill other people who were stand-ins for the person she really wanted to kill, like serial killers did, she'd be kind and generous to others and hone in on the one who deserved to die. And her plan had worked extremely well. Since she'd started planning to kill Wilson, and then decided to destroy his family instead, she felt no animosity toward anyone but him. Almost none at all!”

“These last few months Vida had started believing in all kinds of strange things she'd have laughed at when we lived back in Avalon. She'd tried every spell she could find in the dusty old books she brought home from thrift shops and garage sales; none of them ever worked, and it was awful watching her try.”

“Mother Nature was one angry slut. She'd try and kill you the first chance she got. You'd screwed with her for so long that she was happy to eliminate you.”

“She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She'd remain outside the public sector. She'd be an anarchist, she'd travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She'd fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She'd really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She'd have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow - no that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.”

“Today she had to acknowledge that she was avoiding her mission. She could explain away all the other times she hadn’t killed Beckett so far. I’m just going to see what his inner circle’s like…If I find out who he loves, I can kill them while he watches…If I make him fall for me, it will hurt worse when I kill him. But there was no excuse for tonight. In that men’s room she’d had another perfect opportunity. He’d gone willingly in front of her knife and fists.”

“She'd been a good nurse, and now she'd never be a nurse again. She was bitter about it and had turned herself into the slut bride from Planet X, as if even in human form, she wanted people to know what she was now: different, other. Trouble was, she looked like a thousand other teens and early twenties who also wanted to be different and stand out.”