Kay

“The Sinsar Dubh popped up on my radar, and it was moving straight toward us.
At an extremely high rate of speed.
I whipped the Viper around, tires smoking on the pavement. There was nothing else I could do.
Barrons looked at me sharply. “What? Do you sense it?”
Oh, how ironic, he thought I’d turned us toward it. “No,” I lied, “I just realized I forgot my spear tonight. I left it back at the bookstore. Can you believe it? I never forget my spear. I can’t imagine what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t. I was talking to my dad while I was getting dressed and I totally spaced it.” I worked the pedals, ripping through the gears.
He didn’t even try to pat me down. He just said, “Liar.”
I sped up, pasting a blushing, uncomfortable look on my face. “All right, Barrons. You got me. But I do need to go back to the bookstore. It’s . . . well . . . it’s personal.” The bloody, stupid Sinsar Dubh was gaining on me. I was being chased by the thing I was supposed to be chasing. There was something very wrong with that. “It’s . . . a woman thing . . . you know.”
“No, I don’t know, Ms. Lane. Why don’t you enlighten me?”
A stream of pubs whizzed by. I was grateful it was too cold for much pedestrian traffic. If I had to slow down, the Book would gain on me, and I already had a headache the size of Texas that was threatening to absorb New Mexico and Oklahoma. “It’s that time. You know. Of the month.” I swallowed a moan of pain.
“That time?” he echoed softly. “You mean time to stop at one of the multiple convenience stores we just whizzed past so you can buy tampons? Is that what you’re telling me?”
I was going to throw up. It was too close. Saliva was pooling in my mouth. How far behind me was it? Two blocks? Less? “Yes,” I cried. “That’s it! But I use a special kind and they don’t carry it.”
“I can smell you, Ms. Lane,” he said, even more softly. “The only blood on you is from your veins, not your womb.”
My head whipped to the left and I stared at him. Okay, that was one of the more disturbing things he’d ever said to me. “Ahhh!” I cried, letting go of both the wheel and the gearshift to clutch my head. The Viper ran up on the sidewalk and took out two newspaper stands and a streetlamp before crashing to a stop against a fire hydrant.
And the blasted, idiotic Book was still coming. I began foaming at the mouth, wondering what would happen if it passed within a few feet of me. Would I die? Would my head really explode?”
― Karen Marie Moning, Faefever

“The farther you go...the harder it is to return. The world has many edges and it's easy to fall off.”
― Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival

“Hope strengthens. Fear kills. It's how you go on that defines you”
― Karen Marie Moning, Dreamfever

“I put my pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else. It's the way I take them OFF that makes me better than you.”
― Jessica Park, Flat-Out Love