“Qhuinn looked at each of the hoods again. How ironic, he thought. Nearly two years ago, an Honor Guard of black robes had been sent to him to make sure he knew his family didn't want him. And now, here these males were, come to draw him into a different kind of fold-- that was every bit as strong as that of blood.”

“I told him about how Cole wanted me to return with him.I told him almost everything. I didn't talk about what had happened just before I left with Cole and I didn't tell him that the Tunnels of the Everneath were coming for me soon. Jack would freak out if he knew I was leaving again, and I didn't want to waste time trying to convince him it was hopeless.I didn't tell him I'd thought of him every day. That even when every other memory had faded,he never left.”

“I had a chance at him now. Things were a bit more even. He knew my name, I knew his. He had six years' experience, I had five thousand and ten. That was the kind of odds that you could do something with.”

“Even his highly emotional Italian mother didn't believe that true love could blossom overnight. Like his brothers and sisters-in-law, she wanted nothing more for him than to marry and start a family, but if he showed up at her doorstep and said that he'd met someone two days ago and knew she was the one for him, his mother would smack him with a broom, curse in Italian, and drag him to church, sure that he had some serious sins that needed confessing.”

“There was no point in looking again. He [Cork] knew that. No point except to feed the coldness inside him. In a strange way, that was exactly what he wanted now. He wanted to feed himself to the cold until the cold had consumed him and he didn't care anymore.”

“I'd accepted a while ago that there were too many reasons for me to even think about him romantically anymore. Every once in a while, I slipped a little and kind of wished he would too. It'd have been nice to know that he still wanted me, that I still drove him crazy. Studying him now, I realized he might not ever slip because I didn't drive him crazy anymore. It was a depressing thought.”