Note to self: never cockblock demons or werewolves.

We are all the playground of angels and demons.

It’s ironic, since they’re supposed to be immortal, but vampires are kind of like small businesses: half of them go down within their first year

Note to self: never cockblock a sex demon.

Tonight there was something different. Something both deeper and shallower than friendship. Familiarity, perhaps, the sudden realisation that we lived our sealed-up little lives in closeness to each other. That we had something to share...

I thought of Marius. Wild, wonderful, Byronic-fantasy Marius, who had somehow found something he wanted in the everyday quietness of me. Until he hadn’t.

He did his thing, and I did mine. Mine involved standing there with a sword in a bin liner waiting for something to try and kill us. Nothing did.

I closed my eyes, adding dark to dark, and the wanting unfurled like the sails of a phantom ship. This could be my universe. This nowhere world, circumscribed by skin and breath, where nothing mattered...

He was wearing a gleaming cream-coloured linen suit, and a Panama hat. The weirdest thing about this was that he was not the most outlandish-looking person in the room by a long way. Not that...

I fended them off as best I could while trying to shield my eyes but, tragically, I’d left my flamethrower in my other suit.

I have a sort of . . . thing, I suppose, for certain words. They spark inside me, somehow, turning me to touchpaper, but I don’t know what they are until someone says them.

And when he kisses me it feels a bit like fear and tastes a bit like tears, but it’s as bright and sweet as sherbet, and I decide to call it joy.

Was it wrong that I kind of wanted to do her right there? Okay, Kate. Be professional about this. Also you have a girlfriend. A girlfriend who can juggle cars.

I’d wasted so much of my life. So many of my days, and all of my promise, all of my dreams, lost to hospitals, to depression, to wanting to die. This wasn’t how it was...

I never interrupt people when they’re speaking because I know only too well how annoying it is. But with my every brattish interjection, the dimples deepened at the corner of his lips. And I was...

Thank you,” I said bravely, dropping the syllables cleanly, like marbles, and secretly full of the most pathetic pride imaginable. I had spoken to strangers.

Sometimes I though about killing myself. The idea of it circled my head, shining and lovely like a tinsel halo. How beautiful it would be if everything could just stop. If I could stop. If...

Life is so full of rough edges – small tasks and expectations that scratch you bloody and remind you that you’re naked and alone.

It’s something I imagine occasionally: waking up to discover civilisation has ended, leaving nothing but empty streets and silence. I don’t actually want that to happen, but I ponder what I’d do, and how I’d...

When I was lost in the fog, it was as though nothing else existed. And, afterwards, it seemed incomprehensible that I had ever really thought like that. Self-recrimination inevitably followed.

I’m not saying you should marry wossisname. Just give yourself a chance with him.””A chance to what?””Be with someone again.””I w-w-want to,” I whispered. “But what if it goes the same way? W-what if I’m...

In daylight and up close, he was merciless, all smiles and freckles, the brightest, boldest flame a moth could wish for.

The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman’s weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient’s patience, one following...

Nim handed me a mug of tea. I took a sip and it was just how I like it, strong and sweet. If you added psychotic and emotionally unavailable to that, it would also cover...

I’m not trying to upset you. I just think it’s about time you moved on.””I have moved on.””Have you? Because it looks a lot like standing around to me.

There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to...

His attention. Sweet and intense at the same time. Like a barley sugar I could untwist from its plastic and hold in my mouth. A flood of secret pleasure.

This is the story of my life: standing on the edges of things and worrying, when I’m supposed to just walk through them.

Days passed in a grey fog. I was becalmed. Without energy, without hope, with no sight of land, I could remember feeling better but I somehow couldn’t believe in it. There was nothing but this.

Miss Kane, I have been worried.Sorry, I’ve been in a faery closet and a werewolf dungeon.Business or pleasure?Business.

Behind my eyelids, I saw him dancing in spirals of coloured light, emerald, blue, and brilliant purple, enfolding him like the wings of an electric angel.

When we’d moved in, she’d welcomed us. When Marius moved out, I sat on her floor and cried. I suppose I could have called any number of our friends, but that was the problem. They...