“How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.”

“I’m a total freak!”“Yeah.” Harrison grinned as he thread his fingers through her belt loops and pulled her towards him. “But you’re my freak.”

“Then, when people saw you strolling around at high noon holding your rosary beads, they’d think, ‘Well, that can’t be a vampire.”

“The world that was the emonation of divine had been reduced to a handful of dust. Thousands of people, all caught in profile looked into their mobile fish tanks. Each face, each car, transporting grief, boredom, rage. Someone in one of these cars was contemplating murder. Someone, rite now, in the privecy of his aquarium, threaded the beads of his suicide through his fingers, praying along the chain like a rosary. Someone begged for help from a God he didnt quite believe in, yet had no one else to appeal to. ”

“Connie drove a silver Camry with rosary beads hanging from her rearview mirror and a Smith& Wesson stuck under the seat. No matter whatwent down, Connie was covered.”

“Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.”