Nenia Campbell

“Maybe it frightened them, to admit that a woman could be master of her fate.”

“I was cyber-bullied before all those Myspace-related suicides, so my school principal wasn't really impressed when my mom complained about what was happening to me on my Xanga blog and on AIM chat.“Get your life sorted out, you fucking scitzo [sic] dyke tranny bitch,” one comment might say.Another comment would say something like, “I know she's reading this, she's so pathetic.”And, perhaps most frightening of all: “I'm going to fuck you up until your mother bleeds.”

“A quick and brutal fuck from behind usually served as an effective reminder of where you stood in the pack hierarchy.”

“People say hate is like a poison — but they're wrong. It's like a drug. You never forget your first hit, how it seduces you with its strength and power, and takes you completely by storm. It colors your world in light and meaning, until you wonder how you ever managed to get by without it. And then, eventually, you get to a point where you can't. It takes over your life, until hating becomes your reason for living.”

“We spend much of our lives going about completely blind to reality, and yet we still have the gall to act victimized when it invariably catches up to us.”

“Happiness is such a fragile thing, isn't it? So easily burst, like a bubble blown by a child, and always on the verge of being carried away.”

“When we mated I felt your heart stop beating and it was as if the world had stopped turning. It was only while surrounded by death that I realized I had never felt more alive.”

“The villains were always ugly in books and movies. Necessarily so, it seemed. Because if they were attractive—if their looks matched their charm and their cunning—they wouldn't only be dang”

“Nobody should have to choose between a cold heart and a dead heart.”

“That's what I fear: being subtracted from myself. Negation. Forced against my will to become a beast.”

“I feel I could kill. I feel that I might like it. And I know that this should scare me. But it doesn't. It excites me. I am in Plato's cave, watching the shadows and fraught with the desire to hunt what casts them.”

“Come closer, my dears, let me give you a warning,Of the fate that befalls those who stay out past morning,In the darkest hours before the dawn,When witches roam and demons spawn,And children die with spirit gone,Magicked away in the gloaming.”

“If a woman defined herself solely by the man she was with—and vice versa—the world would be a very shallow and insipid place, indeed.”

“Once a flower is picked it immediately begins to die.”

“It's like an itch, isn't it? You can feel it in your throat. You want to scream for me.”

“It takes many sheep to satisfy one wolf.”

“Fear could drive one to violence as quickly as anger could.”

“A geas was a contract with the goddess of Fate. Sometimes one was born indentured, other times it was bestowed upon one as a curse. Because if one did not fulfill the terms of one's geas, one died. It was old magic, the magic of the gods, spoken in the tongues of those who controlled the dragons—and it was supposed to be extinct.”

“In a fight between a shifter and a witch, the shifter would often win—but only if they could keep the witch from speaking, usually by severing the throat or tearing out the tongue. If the witch was powerful enough, and quick enough, physical size didn't matter. Catherine had heard of the horrible ways the witches could kill their victims. Cooking them alive from the inside out, restricting oxygen flow through the nasal and oral passages by creating a vacuum, drowning them with vapor pulled from the very air.It made fights between shifters look almost humane by comparison.”

“Only the cruelest hunters set their traps with terror and trepidation.”