“I’d gone heavy on the black eye makeup until raccoons and I could pass for cousins.”

“Yet even so the darkness thickened, until it covered his eyes and filled his nose and stopped his ears, so he could not see or smell or hear or run, and the grey cliffs were gone and the dead horse was gone and his brother was gone and all was black and still and black and cold and black and dead and black…”

“I’d noticed that his eyes were black – coal black.”

“No one answers when I knock. But I left a cake and a card on the porch last night, and this morning when I was jogging I noticed that it was gone.""That could mean anything. Maybe raccoons took it," I suggest and then want to do a forehead smack. Discovering vampires has really thrown a wrench in my concept of reality if my first theory is cake-stealing raccoons.”

“She wore too much eyeliner then, at age thirteen, and now, at eighteen, she wears so much black under her eyes, she looks like a slutty linebacker raccoon.”

“An evil spark flared in his eyes. "Trade: raccoon for some answers.”