“I sat down on the grass and looked up at Brae. He was still shirtless and - although it pained me a little to even think it - it suited him. He was in really good shape and he looked less uptight without it, more relaxed. If it wasn't for his weird silver hair he could have looked perfectly ordinary. Better than ordinary in fact.”

“I'm not trying to avoid you,' I replied lamely, but what else could I say? Sorry Brae but when I first came down to meet you I had no idea how hard it was going to be to avoid telling you that I was turning into a grotesque monster and I am worried that there is a good chance I could wake up one morning with a sudden lust for your blood. Somehow I didn't think that would go down particularly well.”

“I forced myself to breathe deeply; perhaps they would have vanished. Perhaps I'd been imagining them because Brae was gone and I was scared without him, and now that he was back I'd feel safe enough again that they would go away. Perhaps it was just paint or something and would have been washed out by the sea spray earlier. I breathed again, feeling much calmer and then, slowly, opened my eyes.”

“It was exactly the sort of thing I needed to be reading that afternoon: a story where, no matter how bad things got, you knew everything was going to turn out fine in the end.”

“The hero was the sort of character you could feel yourself falling in love with, no matter how much you tried to convince yourself that he wasn't real”

“I felt as though a large knot of flames had been lit in my stomach, making me feel nauseous and excited all at once”

“Your powers don't work in the rain do they? A little bit of water and your fire fizzles out? So Little Miss Perfect does have a weakness after all!”

“I loved him, more than anything else in the world and that when he was away it was hard to breath and that I couldn't go through a single second without thinking about him.”

“Vincent laughed. "No, you still need to look like a Helian.""So I should burn everything to a crisp?""Well, that would definitely get your mother's attention, but I think that she's looking for something more sophisticated and less... scary.”

“I don't know if it was the cold sincerity in my voice or the shock of being straddled by a wild, mud covered woman, but he didn't try to argue. "Give me your ring. Now.”

“I closed my eyes and let a wave of heat pass over me, tingling right down into my fingertips. As my eyes flickered open I let my hands shoot out in front of me, sending a spiral of flames into a nearby tree. The entire structure caught alight and glowed grotesquely."Remind me never to make you angry!" A now all-too familiar voice said behind me.”