“[Jean] had the guts to kill herself, and I admire her for it, although, of course, she was quite crazy at the time, with a brain misfiring like a cross-wired laptop. Pressing the keystrokes love, the screen read die. Pressing the keystrokes survive, the screen read die. The damn thing, her mind-machine, was shot.”

“The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages.”

“May I search it?" she asked. "We screen for weapons."I stared at her, always a risky thing to do to a vampire. "Of course not. I have no weapons.”

“Then the sluice gates opened and Lotte said it had been a long time since she saw her brother, that her son was in prison in Mexico, that her husband was dead, that she had never remarried, that necessity and desperation had driven her to learn Spanish, that she still had trouble with the language, that her mother had died and her brother probably didn’t even know it, that she planned to sell the shop, that she had read a book by her brother on the plane, that the shock had almost killed her, that as she crossed the desert all she could do was think of him.”

“You’ve read your press, right? You know they call you a hard-ass.” She lifted her hand and touched his face. “But they’re wrong.” She pressed her face to his throat and inhaled him...”

“Her mother held a wet cloth to her brow for fifteen months while bees died in the space between the window and screen.”