“I stopped. She was bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet red tracks across her skin. She hadn;t hit her veins when she did this; death hadn't been her goal.”

“Amy pulls away and looks into my face. Her pale skin is blotchy red, her eyes are veined and shadowed, and a shiny line of snot trickles from her nose to the top of her lip.She wipes her face and with her arm, smearing tears and mucus. She never looked more BEAUTIFUL to me.”

“Alan had still stopped her in her tracks with one of those slow, devastating kisses at her side door.He hadn't insisted on coming in.Shelby might have been grateful for that if she hadn't suspected it was just part of his planned siege.Confuse the enemy, assail her with doubts, leave her with her nerve ends tingling.Very clever strategy.”

“When she reaches down to touch his shoulder—a gesture only a few species and a million or so years removed from lifting a leg and marking him as her territory with a stream of urine—enough bracelets and bangles to lay track across the Australian Outback slide down her arm and come to a jangling stop at her wrist.”

“She was in love with the Great Sultan of Kad. And this was no crush. It was as real as the sun rising each morning, as the blood in her veins and the curve of the rail under her fingers. She felt the truth in every nerve, every inch of her skin.”

“Her skin is slowly peeled from her body. She knows something low and guttural must be coming out of her mouth, She can feel it ripping its way out of her lungs and past her throat. But she can't hear it because there is a roar in her veins like a hurricane. A bright, pure light pierces her, fixes her on a single point of space and time, and she is screaming still, though not from pain, but from fear and wonder. Like she's just been born.”