“The worst part was the silence. Death was supposed to be loud — gunshots, explosions, screams and thunder. Not this eerie quiet that wrapped around me like a shroud.”

“You will die a worse death if you do not leave my domain,” a voice thundered down from the third story of the old tenement. “I am a servant of the Sacred Fire, the wielder of the flame of Arnor—”“So I should call you Gandalf?”

“They always assumed that I did not speak. That I could not. So many had plotted my death, discussed it, laughed about it, even while I was in the same room, because they assumed I was mindless. Like one of the failures of their kind, born mad. But I was not a failure. I was what I was supposed to be. I was dhampir. And they never lived to tell anyone they were wrong.”

“If I'd had enough breath, I would have screamed, both at the sensation and at the sheer pettiness of the bastard who wouldn't allow me even a tiny chance of escape.”

“I looked up to find a slim blond figure standing in the doorway to the kitchen. For a frozen second, I looked at him and he looked at me, and then I screamed and threw my coffee, which hit him square in the groin.”

“I’d been declared—over my loud and sustained protests—Pythia, the chief seer of the supernatural world.”

“The war mages might have been running a full-on offensive, but she'd been right there with them. She'd sent them screaming in terror. She'd imprisoned one like a bug under glass. She'd run one the hell down.Mom, I realized in shock, had been kind of a badass.”