“When we mated I felt your heart stop beating and it was as if the world had stopped turning. It was only while surrounded by death that I realized I had never felt more alive.”

“My world stopped when we were apart. I felt like I had nothing to live for. Now you are back… Now you are back and I’m alive again.”

“I've never felt normal, because I'm not normal, and I don't wanna be. I've had to face death and loss and pain in your world, but I've also never felt stronger, like more real, more myself, because it's my world too. It's where I belong.”

“Somehow, by dealing with the dead, I had never felt so alive.”

“There in that pool stained with green blood, he had learned two things: one was that all the pain stopped when you stopped fighting death; and the other was that as long as you could still hear your heart beating, you had to keep fighting back.”

“I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin.”