“When Theolyn died, the humans had built an enormous pyre and placed his body at the center. How was [Veka] supposed to know humans cremated their dead instead of cooking them? She had figured it out quickly enough, but not before Jimar and his ilk had spotted her standing at the pyre, fork in hand.”

“That is a trial I must face," Veka said."No, that is a multiheaded snake thing, Jig snapped.”

“A cop friend downstate had once described what he called the 'pucker effect,' the body's automatic response when something just wasn't right. He wasn't talking about the lips; the puckering happened farther south, and every cop learned to trust that instinct.”

“Of course, once you had yanked Conan the Barbarian's sword out of a book to fight off a rabid weresquirrel, "impossible" lost a lot of its punch.”

“Every libromancer had a first book. Etched more sharply into my memory than my first kiss, this book had been my magical awakening.”

“Two libriomancers had been disciplined for trying to get an early copy of the last Harry Potter book.”

“Like any child raised on tales of magical worlds beyond paintings and mirrors and wardrobes, I had yearned to enter Middle Earth, to reach through.”