“I did a quick injury check on my organs and bones. The routine was familiar, one I paced my way through every other morning as I went from dispassionately watching my body heal to wondering if this time, I might have pushed things too far.”

“After getting dressed at warp speed, I actually managed to drive all the way to high school before I realized I'd forgotten my morning coffee. Mystery, intrigue, and naked dreams aside, that didn't bode well for my chances at making it through the morning without killing myself. Or someone else.”

“Bryn?"Chase's voice was a whisper in my mind, and the sensation sent a single chill up my spine."Yes?""You asked me what I liked, before." He paused, and all the silence tickled my mind, the chill in my spine climbing its way to the hairs on the back of my neck. "Before, I loved cars, Yeats, having a bedroom that locked from the inside, and you.”

“Rather than sleeping myself, I practiced. I practiced taking everything I'd seen in the last few days-every horror, every drop of blood-and locking it away, so deep in my mind that I could pretend that nothing had happened.And then I practiced letting it out.This time, I didn't start with a specific memory. I didn't walk myself step by step through a scene. Instead, I built a room inside my head-a tiny room with white walls and no windows and no doors. No way out.In that room, I put the sound of screams, tearing flesh, and heavy breathing, the smell of rancid blood. Everything I'd been holding back, everything threatening to devour me whole was there-in the ceiling of that room, the corners, the floor.”

“You're a very pretty girl...Did you know? Once upon a time, I had a pretty, pretty boy.' She reached forward and touched my cheek with one manicured hand.”

“I smiled half a smile at her puppy antics, wondering what it would be like to be able to join her, to shed my human skin and the confines that went with it and just live in the moment as a wolf. What would I look like with four legs and fur—would I be light-colored like Katie, or a darker timber, like Dev? I wondered if I would be velvet black with ice-blue eyes, like Chase.”

“I had my knife in hand before I realized I'd reached for it and had kicked open the...front door before it ever occurred to me that it might have already been unlocked.”