Kelly Creagh

“You yourself could be nothing more than a shadow, someone else’s dream who is, themselves, someone else’s.”

“Though Isobel could recall only a few specifics regrading the appearance of Poe's wife-a handful of vague characteristics picked up during her study with Varen, retained from the one or two glimpses she'd had for her portraits- Scrimshaw, it seemed, had forgotten nothing.”

“So." [Isobel] cleared her throat. "What are we doing?""We," [Varen] said at last, "are doing a project on Poe.""Didn't he marry his cousin or something?""The man is a literary god and that's all you have to say?”

“I keep telling myselfThat you’rejust a girl.Another leaf blown across my pathDestined to pass onAnd shrivel into yourselfLike all the others.Yet despite my venomYou refuse to witherOr fade.You remain golden throughout,And in your gaze I am left to wonder if it is me aloneWho feels the fall.”

“You were dropped as a child, weren't you?" Varen asked her."Maybe once or twice," Gwen said, "but at least I wasn't raised by highly literate vampires who, every night just before bed, fed me a steady diet of dark sarcasm and gothic horror fiction.""Every morning before bed," Varen corrected. Stepping forward, he moved toward the headstone. "We slept during the day.”

“It is naught but pain and regret when we think of the things and people we will never have, the opportunities we may never get. But to pine for those we have had and loved and once held but will never clasp again, it is torture of an unbearable degree. It is the worst pain possible. Enough to drive you away from yourself...”

“Not anymore, though," he said. "And I guess that's the one perk of loving a dead girl. She never changes.”

“Isobel had entrusted the note to Gwen just before Baltimore. And the small scrap of paper still remained her only tangible evidence that Varen had loved her.Expect...he didn't anymore.”

“You're a dream. Like everything else.”

“Isobel moved farther into the kitchen, not knowing whether to be relieved that her mother hadn't had an atomic meltdown, or mortified that she'd taken it upon herself to play head chef with the nearest thing Trenton High had to a Dark Lord.”

“As though sensing her heightening alarm, Pinfeathers halted his advance."I can’t help it that I’m susceptible to you," he whispered. "You know that. It’s just that you’re so...unreal...and so I have to touch you. If only to be certain that I’m not the one who’s dreaming. You see, I hear that sort of thing is going around.”

“The more this guy talked, the more he sounded like a fortune cookie.”

“You loved her," Isobel”

“Death always wins.”