“He threw back his shoulders, a hunter preparing to stalk his prey across the night...and pulled an iPhone out of his pocket."You are kidding me." I watched as he tapped through screens with practiced swipes. "There's an app for that?”

“My shift isn’t over until six,” I say glumly.“Hold on,” he says. He pulls a Blackberry from his coat pocket and taps out a text. It buzzes, and he taps out another text before stashing it back in his pocket. “I think you can take the rest of the afternoon off.”“I only have a week left, but my boss would kill me,” I say.“I’m your boss, Anna.”“What do you mean?”There’s that smile again, the one with all those teeth. “I just bought Walmart,” he says.”

“I pulled him in and kissed back, and he threw his hands through my hair, his tongue licking hard over mine, picked me up by my thighs and wrapped them around him, he had a leather couch in his office and he threw me onto it, he quickly yanked his tie off and ripped his shirt off. I lay on the sofa looking over his sculpted chest, his deep pecks his hard abs, he came at me and grabbed my hair, he pulled it back exposing my throat, he kissed from my jaw down to my collarbone.”

“Ten minutes later the kid came out trailing his mother. She hurried out the door. He stuck out his tongue at me. Loser, I thought, until I saw the white pill sitting on his pink tongue. He coughed into his hand, then mouthed the word remember, tapping his cast, and tossed the pill into the trash can.I watched him leave. He wasn’t glossy. He wasn’t dreary, either. He was something else.He was all there.”

“On the beach, Roran stood alone, watching them go. Then he threw back his head and uttered a long, aching cry, and the night echoed with the sound of his loss.”

“He [Death] pulled a pure-black iPad from thin air. Death tapped the screen a few times and all Frank could think was: Please don't let there be an app for reading souls”