“The only customers they'd get on a day like this were lunatics -- well, lunatics and hopeless romantics with a fetish for the smell of dusty old books, which in their eyes probably amounted to the same thing.”

“I kinda looked like a wanna-be Goth chick, or an unfortunate Persian girl in a Gothic romance who was wasting away from Tuberculosis. But that was alright. Oz had mentioned he wasn't human. He was probably into that sort of thing.”

“Oh yeah, I'd almost forgot. Forneus was beautiful, with purple hair, purple eyes and a smile that could probably only be described as devastating. Not that I'd ever seen such a smile, or wanted to. After watching him rot and ooze blood on top of my mom's oven in his "true" form and learning that he'd tried to drag me off to Hell, he'd lost a bit of his sex appeal.”

“Well, you can't be a vampire." I struggled to make it sound like I was teasing, not feverishly wishing. "You're not sparkling.”

“The four of us were together at last--me, the angel, the devil, and my demon. I felt like the moment should have seemed more momentous, or at least more pleasant, like we should have made jokes as we meandered down to the beach, collected driftwood for a fire, and leisurely toasted marshmallows. Instead, I was struggling to keep my eyes open, the angel was looking at the ground, Oz was glaring at the trunk, and for some reason I just knew that Forneus, locked down and wrapped in a sheet, was glaring right back.”

“How old are you?""Not too old, in this incarnation anyway." He smiled again. "I recently inherited it.”

“To Oz's credit, he didn't say anything, probably because he'd decided that trying to converse with someone so temperamental wasn't worth it.”