“And bottom line, without John by her side, everything seemed to be just a big, resounding meh.”

“And speaking of on board, she'd moved into John's room properly. In his closet, her leathers and her muscles shirts were hanging next to his, and their shitkickers were lined up together, and all her knives and her guns and her little toys were now locked up in his fire proof cabinet. Their ammo was even stacked together. How frickin' romantic.”

“Too bad the freedom seemed like a prison.As his boots hit the mosaic floor at the bottom of the stairs, John Mellencamp's old-school, bic-lighter anthem echoed in his head-and though he'd always like the song okay, he'd never truly understood what it meant.Kind of wished that were still the case.Life goes on...long after the thrill of living is gone...”

“The thing had woken him up as usual, an alarm clock. as reliable and stiff off the ground as Big Fucking Ben. [John Matthew]”

“John Matthew was her well of soul, as the symphaths called it,or her pyrocant, to the vampires. Her essential weakness.”

“Slipping in the side door to the VIP section , she scanned the crowd , well aware that she was looking for one male in particular.And he was there. Fucking John Matthew.”

“Every night I went into Hannah's room and sat with her stuff. The thing I couldn't get was how her clothes and her books and her drawings were still there, but she wasn't. It just didn't compute. Her room was a like a car without an engine, everything where it should be, except all it was was potential. None of it was going to get used again.”