“What is she to me? Except a menace — a danger you’ve chosen to inflict on all of us.”

“Why do some of us turn menacing?' she whispered.”

“Don’t you read?” I asked Nicholas, disgusted. “If you leave me here now that you’ve got Solange all safe, they’ll grab me to get to her.” Solange opened the back door and I leaped in. The car sped off . Shadows flitted beside us, menacing, hungry. I shivered. Then I smacked the back of Nicholas’s head. “Idiot.”

“The truth is only dangerous if it can inflict injury.”

“Everytime he brushes me with his fingers, time seems to tether for a second, like it is in danger of dissolving. The whole world is dissolving, I decide, except for us. Us.”

“We fight monsters and unholy creatures for a living here. Grotesque, evil, violent, dangerous; they’re certainly all these things. And yet, we somehow manage to go to sleep each night and wake up each morning. The terror wears off. What was horrific becomes mundane. We lose ourselves to a numbed normalcy after a while, a self-inflicted detachment. You forget how you got here, what it was like before. And then someone comes along, someone new, someone who sees it all with fresh eyes, and it snaps you out of your daily coma, reminding you of what you’ve forgotten. Of what you’ve become.”