“You can go back to blacksmithing in Hintindar and live a quiet happy life. Do me a favor and marry some pretty farm girl and train your son to beat the crap out of imperial knights.""Sure," Hadrian told him. "And with any luck he'll make friends with a cynical burglar who'll do nothing but torment him.”

“You told Zeb before you told us?" Mama shouted.Oh, crap. "How could you do that?" Mama cried. "We're your family!""He found out the night I rose, " I said. "But no one else knows. Except for some of the vampires I've met. And Andrea, a girl who hangs out with a lot of vampires. Oh, and Jolene, Zeb's fiance. ""Zeb's getting married? Before you?"Double crap.”

“Smalls, my parents' house is pretty big. The odds are more in favor of a burglar sneaking around than your boy-boy. I can't let you take that risk alone. If you're gonna get murdered, then I'm gonna get murdered with you." She shrugged. "It's what any good friend would do.”

“He reads histories and mythologies and fairy tales, wondering why it seems that only girls are ever swept away from their mundane lives on farms by knights or princes or wolves. It strikes him as unfair to not have the same fanciful opportunity himself. And he is not in the position to do any rescuing of his own.”

“Hadrian leapt to his feet. Royce was already up.“Don’t bother,” Esrahaddon told them. “She’s dead, and there’s nothing you can do. The monster cannot be harmed by your weapons. It—”The two were out the door.”

“He'll have to do without me, Jamie thought, not looking back. And then clearly, as if he'd been told, he knew Grenville /could/ do without him. There was somewhere else he had to go now, somewhere else he had to be.”