“He huffed. I twisted to the left, leaned over him, and reached around his body.“What are you doing?” he asked, alarmed.“I’m hugging you goodbye,” I said. “What do you think I’m doing? I’m putting your seatbelton.”I pulled the belt across his chest and wrestled it into the buckle. Then I sat back and fastenedmine.“Seat belts save lives,” I said, annoyed.”

“I just thought vampires would look, you know, vicious while drinking blood," I said. "You look like you're in kindergarten with your juice pack.”

“You should be grateful that you were even blessed for a moment. You have been rescued from your rotting corpse. You have experienced immortality. You have experienced perfection. Look at yourself. This is your purest form. Your worst qualities have been sifted out, the flaw and weaknesses blown away. The way you have been experiencing the world with your pathetic human senses? Now you know. You were living in a fog. You were appreciating only a fraction of what this world has to offer. That life was worth nothing.”

“Your past wouldn’t frighten me,” I said, buckling my seat belt across my lap. “I’m guessing I’d be more appalled than anything.”

“You talk too much.""Maybe you talk too little.""You're going to live forever. Pace yourself.”

“Please don’t do this—don’t do this to me. If anything happened to you—”He looked at her with surprise. There was already a red stain on the white bandages that wrapped his chest, where his movements had pulled his wound open. “I…”“What?”“I’m not used to you loving me,” he said.”

“Courage, my child, is not the absence of fear. It's the triumph over fear.”