“I've lived here ... my whole life. It's where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they'll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident.”

“Oh my God!” Sam said again, his voice shaking. I’ve given birth to something inhuman, Phoebe thought. A lamprey with row after row of teeth.”

“Phoebe realized how very wrong she’d been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she’d grown up in. In the dingy little apartments her mother rented, everything was out in the open. Their lives were dirty and squalid, but they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Here, things seemed so normal, so perfect, but it was all a deception.”

“The world was full of dangers now that she was pregnant: mercury in tuna, hot tubs, beer, secondhand smoke, over-the-counter medicine. Not to mention crazy baby-abducting fairy kings.”

“As my future crumbled before my eyes, I grasped for the rope. My entire life's struggle was ending here, in plain view of my enemies. How was it possible? Had had I let things come to this?”

“Lisa smiled. 'You know how sometimes, you catch the faintest hint of movement in the corner of your eye, then you blink and it's gone? That's them.”

“What if things happened to you—special, magic things—because you’d been preparing for them?”