Iyela

“Do you think I’m pretty?”
Smitty glanced away from the computer screen he’d been staring at for the last three hours, looked at his sister, and shook his head. “No.”
“What do ya mean no?”
“You asked. Sorry if you didn’t like the answer. I always thought you were funny lookin’. Asked momma, ‘What is that thing laying in your bed?’ And she said, ‘I found it hiding under a car, you be nice to it now.”
― Shelly Laurenston, The Beast in Him

“Understand?”
“Sure.”
“Good.”
“’Cause I always love a challenge.”
He’d caught her with that when she was halfway in the cab. With one foot in and the other still braced against the curb, she stared at him. “What challenge?”
“You’re challenging me to get you back into my life.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Your exact words were ‘I challenge you, Bobby Ray Smith, to get me back into your life.’”
“I never said that.”
“That’s what I heard.” The beauty of wolf hearing. You heard only what you wanted to, made up what was never said but should have been, and the rest meant little or nothing.”
― Shelly Laurenston, The Beast in Him

“It wasn’t until someone kicked his legs that Nik woke up. Alek, snoring beside him, his head resting on his shoulder. Ban snoring on the other couch, the noise rivaled only by the dog. He looked into the impossibly cranky face of Zach Sheridan. “Y’all get food?”
“We had a full refrigerator before you three got here.”
“Where I come from, we don’t let the refrigerator get empty.”
“Where you come from, you marry your sister.”
― Shelly Laurenston, Here Kitty, Kitty!

“You will die a worse death if you do not leave my domain,” a voice thundered down from the third story of the old tenement. “I am a servant of the Sacred Fire, the wielder of the flame of Arnor—”
“So I should call you Gandalf?”
― Karen Chance, Death's Mistress