“Have you ever had such a horrible day that you wondered why your mother didn’t just eat you at birth like a gerbil does and spare you the hassle?We’ve all had days like that. I’ve had a lot of them—way more than my fair share if I want to be whiny about it (which I don’t because I try really hard not to be a whiner), but none can compare to the day I accidentally opened a demon portal with my zit cream.”

“He had kissed me. Put his demon tongue in my mouth. I had kissed him back. Yet I had a boyfriend. Adam. Who I believe I’ve mentioned. More than once.Boyfriend named Adam, demon named Levi kissing me—that pretty much meant I had cheated on my boyfriend, didn’t it?Didn’t mean to do that. Yikes.I bit my fingernails and knocked on Brandon’s door and tried to rationalize my way around it. It hadn’t been a premeditated kiss. It hadn’t been initiated by me. Did that really make it cheating? Or just a sort of accidental meeting of the mouths?Shouldn’t there be like a five-second rule, anyway? Like dropping food on the floor.If you retrieve it immediately, you can still eat it. If the kiss lasted less than say, a minute, it didn’t count. Right?”

“What does that mean, really? Be good? How does a person know she’s fallingwithin her mother’s interpretation of Be Good? “Always!” I called back. What else was I going to say? Though I was tempted to just once say, “I will never be good—I am Satan, I want to drink your blood, have orgies, and hurt bunnies.” It would totally amuse me, but somehow I don’t think my mother would see the humor in it.”

“Try to keep up with me,” he said very slowly, like I was a candidate for the short bus. “De-mon. Demon. Me demon, you teenage girl.”

“You’d think I was the first sixteen-year-old ever to drive a minivan through the kitchen the way my parents were acting. Seriously. It’s had to have happened before. Somewhere. Maybe. For reasons clearly not as good as mine.”

“This sucks. You didn’t have to take chemistry or government or anything. And that is so unfair that she’s letting you take art.”“It’s because I’m cute.”“It’s because you brainwashed her.”“Jealous?” he asked, waving his schedule back and forth in front of my face.Like I was going to fall for that. “No.”“Liar.”Totally. But I’d never admit it.”

“This is why you don't call the police. Or Preternatural Control. No matter what. Ever. If I'd doubted that rule--and I was fairly sure I never had--I certainly never would have again. My skin itched just talking to the authorities....The police department had more than a few open cases with my name on them--figuratively, and I had no desire to make that literal [where they connected me to] the vigilante responsible for dozens of area beastie slayings....”