“You don’t know where west is?” Sarah asked with disbelief.I wasn’t going to drop her to the ground. I was going to throw her. “Do I look like I have a compass on me?”Sarah waved a hand at the sky. “Can’t you use the stars to navigate?”“I ’m twenty-nine years old, not two hundred and twenty-nine. I navigate by GPS, MapQuest, or TomTom. Not the fucking stars, ’k?”

“See, Don, I have this question, and I hope you’ll be honest with me.”He pulled at the end of his eyebrow. “I think you know you can count on my honesty.”“Can I?” I asked with an edge. “All right, then tell me: How long have you been fucking me?”That caused him to stop tugging his brow. “I don’t know what you’re saying—”“Because if I was going to fuck you,” I interrupted, “I’d get a bottle of gin, some Frank Sinatra music…and a crash cart for the heart attack you’d have. But you, Don, you’ve been fucking me for years now, and I haven’t gotten any liquor, music, flowers,candy, or anything!”

“Mencheres dropped his hands from my shoulders. “You know that’s what he wants. He’ll want to trade, you for her.”“Then I’ll do it,” I said.Bones’s grip on me turned to steel. “No, you won’t.”

“Do you know what happened the last time I loved someone?”Growled against my skin with such tempered violence that my shiver turned into a shudder. I nodded.“No you don’t.” Another lethal growl. “You only know how she died. Let me tell you how she lived— in fear. My actions horrified her, as they horrify you. My enemies exploited her, as they exploit you, so it was more than an advancing army that made her throw herself from our roof. It was me.”

“Do it your way, but I suggest another one. You could go ahead and beat her bloody, or…you could give me such loud, screaming orgasms that the sound of them blisters her ears. If you have any former-whore-turned-promiscuous-vampire tricks you’ve been holding back, well, bring them on. I only have one stipulation: You’d better outperform any service you gave to her or anyone else, because if I don’t wake up tomorrow red in the face from embarrassment at what you did to me, I’ll be disappointed.”

“Mom, this is Annette. Back in the seventeen hundreds when Bones was a gigolo, she used to pay him to fuck her, but after more than two hundred years for banging him, now they're just good friends." p”

“Before we go, I gotta know: If mind-reading abilities are real, there's something else I wondered if fiction got right about vampires-""Ask me if I sparkle and I'll kill you where you stand," Bones cut him off with utmost seriousness.”