“Jules lips quivered, and I feared she was about to cry. Then she asked, “He bit off more than he could chew, didn’t he?” She made a motion as if she was biting into a tough piece of steak. Gabriella’s lips sealed shut as she tried to hide her grin, though she failed at it when Andrew asked, “Was he eating?” He turned desperately to Gabriella, confused.Jules wasn’t about to cry, she was trying not to laugh! She giggled then, the sound tinkling and odd in the outlandish setting.Andrew straightened and shook his head at Gabriella. “Did you see him eat?”

“She asked him if he could teleport. (He could.) She asked him if he had superhuman strength. (He did.)She asked him if he enjoyed the taste of human blood. (He didn’t.) She asked him why he was always being depicted as having the head of a goat in the movies. (He wondered about that, too.)”

“I think I found your vampire,” Andrew said, except this time he wasn’t so amused.However, Gabriella was, her smile huge as she laughed, the sound a trill in the densely packed cold air.“You think this is funny?” The words came out surly, but Andrew couldn’t stop his lips from twitching over her amusement.“I thought they’d be bigger,” she said, stifling another round of giggles. “Are you okay?”“Just a flesh wound.”

“She wasn’t going to lie and she wasn’t going to try to hide Terrible or who he was. She loved him and he was hers, and that made her so proud her chest hurt, and if anybody didn’t like it they could go fuck themselves.”

“He wasn’t looking at her, was at such an oblique angle to her that his face was little more than a sliver, but she knew him at once. “It was like reading,” she would try to explain later, and she wasn’t talking about phonics. She didn’t break him into syllables—shoulders, hair, shirt collar, hand, nose, cheekbone—and put him back together again; she didn’t sound him out. He was a language she knew, and it was whole-word recognition: Will.”

“What are you doing?” Egnatious asked, eyebrows furrowed as he watched Gabriella do a flip.Firen mimicked Gabriella and turned to Egnatious. “Fun times. Go with it.” She didn’t even crack a smile, though her body language said she was laughing on the inside.Instead of following their act, Egnatious simply dove for an outcrop just as it began moving away. He nearly lost his balance, but Firen caught his flailing arms.“Are you having a seizure or something?” she jested, displaying a rare vein of humor.Egnatious sent her a queasy glare.”