Favorite Quotes from Book One

"All right," I said to the presence on the window seat. "Who the hell are you?"
     To say that the guy looked surprised to be addressed in this manner would have been a massive understatement. He didn't just look surprised. He actually looked over his shoulder, to see if it was really him I was talking to.

Shadowland, p. 40-41

"I do know where you're going, Susannah. You are going down to the school to talk to the girl who is trying to kill that boy, that boy you seem...fond of. But I'm telling you, querida, she is too much for you to handle alone. If you must go, you ought to have the priest with you."
     I stared at him. I had a feeling my eyes were probably bugging out, but I really couldn't believe it. "What?" I sputtered. "How could you know all that? Are you...are you stalking me?"
     He must have realized from my expression that he'd said the wrong thing, since he straightened up and said, "I don't know what that word means, stalking."

Shadowland, p. 128-129

Jesse made what I'm quite sure was a rude gesture--back in 1850. "You," he said, "aren't going anywhere."
     "Oh, yeah?" I turned heel and stormed toward the door. "Try and stop me, cadaver breath."

Shadowland, p. 129

He hesitated. For a second, I thought he was going to do it. But he didn't in the end. He just stood there, looking uncomfortable...but firm.
     "Suit yourself," I said, and walked around him, straight across the room to the bay window. I put my foot onto the seat Andy has made, and easily lifted the screen in the middle window. I had one leg over the sill when I felt his hand go around my wrist.
     I turned to look at him. I couldn't see his face since the light from my bedside lamp was behind him, but I could hear his voice well enough and the soft pleading in it.
     "Susannah," he said.
     And that was all. Just my name.
     I didn't say anything. I couldn't, sort of. I mean, I could--it wasn't like there was a lump in my throat or anything. I just...I don't know.
     Instead, I looked down at his hand, which was really big and kind of brown, even against the black leather of my jacket. He had a heck of a grip for a dead guy. Even for a live guy. He saw my gaze drop, and looked where I was looking, and saw his hand holding tight around my wrist.
     He let go of me as if my skin had suddenly started to blister or something.

Shadowland, p. 131

Favorite Quotes from Book Two

Tad was expressing his interest by deepening our kiss from just a little good-night one to a full-fledged French--which I was enjoying immensely, by the way, in spite of the necklace and the silk shirt--when I happened to notice--yeah, okay. I'll admit it. My eyes were open. Hey, it was my first kiss, I wasn't going to miss anything, okay?--that there was somebody sitting in the Porsche's tiny little backseat.
     I pulled my head away and let out a little scream.
     Tad blinked at me in confusion. "What's wrong?" he asked.
     "Oh, please," said the person in the backseat, pleasantly. "Don't stop on my account."

Ninth Key, p. 114

We were so mad at each other, and had been standing there yelling so hard, our faces ended up only a few inches apart. For a split second, I stared up at Jesse, and even though I was totally mad at him, I wasn't thinking about what a self-righteous jerk he was.
     Instead, I was thinking about this movie I saw once where the hero caught the heroine kissing another man, and so he grabbed her and looked down at her all passionately and said, "If kisses were what you were looking for, little fool, why didn't you come to me?" And then he laughed this evil laugh and started kissing her.
     Maybe, I couldn't help thinking, Jesse would do that, only he would call me querida, like he does sometimes when he's not all mad at me for Frenching guys in cars.

Ninth Key, p. 117-118

"So," Jesse said without so much as an excuse-me-for-eavesdropping-on-your-private-conversation. "You and Tad? You are no more?"
     I glared at him. "Not," I said, stiffly, "that it's any of your business. But yes, it appears that Tad is moving to San Francisco."
     Jesse didn't even have the decency to try to hide his grin.

Ninth Key, p. 286

Favorite Quotes from Book Three

The courtyard is actually one of my favorite places to sit and meditate about stuff like...oh, I don't know: how I've had the misfortune to be born a mediator, and not a normal girl, and why I can't seem to get Jesse to like me, you know, in that special way.

Reunion, p. 50

"I don't understand why you are so unhappy about it," Jesse said. He had stretched out across the tiles, contended as I'd ever seen him. "I like it much better this way."
     "What way?" I groused. I couldn't get quite as comfortable. I kept finding prickly pine needles under my butt.
     "Just the two of us," he said with a shrug. "Like it's always been."

Reunion, p. 76

"You don't remember what else she said?" Gina demanded. "About you, I mean? About how you were only going to have one love in your life, but that it was going to last until the end of time?"
     I stared at the lace trim of the canopy that hung over my bed. I said, my throat gone mysteriously dry, "I don't remember that."

...

     If it was true--and I had no reason to doubt it, since Madame Zara had been right about the mediator thing, the only person in the world with the exception of Father Dominic who had ever guessed--then I knew perfectly well who it was.
     And it wasn't Michael Meducci.

Reunion, p. 89-90

Favorite Quotes from Book Four

"Are you all right?" Jesse wanted to know.
     "Yes," I said into my pillows.
     Jesse said after a minute, "Well, you don't seem all right. Are you sure nothing is wrong?"
     Yes, something is wrong, I wanted to shriek at him. I just sepnt twenty minutes reading a bunch of private correspondence from your ex-fiancée, and might I add that she seems like a terrifically boring individual? How could you have ever been stupid enough to have agreed to marry her? Her and her stupid bonnet?

Darkest Hour, p. 58

It was totally Jesse. It captured him perfectly. He had on that look he gets when I'm telling him about some great conquest I had made at an outlet--you know, scoring a Prada handbag for fifty percent off, or something. Like he couldn't care less.

Darkest Hour, p. 78

"And do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, Clive, that the person who wrote these letters would do something like that? Go away without a word to his family? To his little sisters, whom he clearly loved, and about whom he wrote so affectionately? Do you really think that the reason these letters turned up in my backyard is because he buried them there? Or do you find it beyond the realm of possibility that the reason they turned up there is because he's buried there somewhere, and if my stepfather digs deep enough, he just might find him?"
     My voice had risen shrilly. I supposed I was getting a little hysterical over the whole thing. So sue me.
     "Will that make you see that your grandfather was a hundred percent right?" I shrieked. "When my stepfather finds Hector de Silva's rotting corpse?"
     Clive Clemmings looked more astonished than ever. "My dear Miss Ackerman!" he cried. I think he said this because he'd realized, at the exact same moment as I had, that I was crying.

Darkest Hour, p. 83

"If they find your body out there, not only is Maria going to be really mad, but you...you're going to move on. You know? From here. Because that's what's been holding you back, Jesse. The mystery of what happened to you. Once your body is found, though, that mystery will be solved. And you'll go. And that's why I couldn't tell you, you see? Because I don't want you to go. Because I l--"
     Oh my God, I almost said it. I can't even tell you how close I came to saying it. I got out the L and then the O just seemed to follow.
     But at the last minute I was able to save it. I turned it to "--like having you around, and I would really hate not seeing you anymore."
     Swift, huh? That was a close one.
     Because one thing I know for sure about guys, along with their inability to use a glass and lower the toilet seat and refill ice trays once they're empty: They really cannot handle the L word. I mean, it says so in just about every article I've ever read. And you have to figure this is true of all guys, even guys who were born a hundred and fifty years ago.
     And I guess my not using the L word paid off, since Jesse reached out and touched my cheek with his fingertips--just like he had done that day in the hospital.

Darkest Hour, p. 112-113

In the end, he persuaded me to come back to my own bed. He said he'd make sure his ex-girlfriend didn't come after me in the night. Only he didn't call her his ex-girlfriend. He just called her Maria. I still wanted to ask him what he'd been thinking, going out with a ferret-faced ice bitch like her, but there never really seemed to be a right moment.

Darkest Hour, p. 115

"That ghost you exorcised?" I said, facing Jack with my hands on my hips. "He was my friend. My best friend."

Darkest Hour, p. 228

"Good," he said. "We need to talk."
     Suddenly, I didn't feel so relaxed anymore. Talk? What does he want to talk about? The part where I nearly died? I didn't want to talk about that. Because the fact is, that whole part, the part where I nearly died, well, I nearly died trying to save him. Seriously. I was hoping he hadn't noticed, but I could tell by the look on his face that he totally had. Noticed, I mean.
     And now he wanted to talk about it. But how could I talk about it? Without letting it slip? The L word, I mean.
     "You know what?" I said, very fast. "I don't want to talk. Is that okay? I really, really don't want to talk. I am all talked out.
     Jesse lifted Spike of his lap and put him on the floor. Then he stood up.
     What was he doing? I wondered. What was he doing?
     I took a deep breath, and kept talking about not talking. "I'm just--Look," I said as he took a step toward me. "I'm just going to give CeeCee a call and maybe we'll go to the beach or something, because really...I just need a day off."
     Another step forward. Now he was right in front of me.
     "Especially," I said, significantly, looking up at him, "from talking. That's especially what I need a day off from. Talking."
     "Fine," he said. He reached up and cupped my face in both hands. "We don't have to talk."
     And that's when he kissed me.
     On the lips.

Darkest Hour, p. 314-316

Favorite Quotes from Book Five

I didn't want to show the guy with whom I have been madly in love since the very first day I met him my hideously disfigured feet. I especially didn't want him to see them considering that he didn't know that I had burned them in an effort to get away from a guy that I shouldn't have been with in the first place.
     On the other hand, you should be able to go over to boys' houses without them jumping on you and kissing you and making you want to kiss them back. It was all sort of complicated, even to me, and I am a modern young woman with twenty-first-century sensibilities. God only knew what a rancher from the 1850s would make of it all.
     But I could see by Jesse's expression that he was not going to leave me alone until I showed him my stupid feet. So I said, rolling my eyes, "You want to see them? Fine. Knock yourself out." And I pulled my right foot from the water and showed him.
     I expected, at the very least, some revulsion. Chastisement for my stupidity, I felt quite sure, would soon follow--as if I didn't feel stupid enough. But to my surprise, Jesse neither chastised me nor looked revolted.

Haunted, p. 156-157

"That's enough of that," Jesse said. Next thing I knew, he'd scooped me up.
     Only instead of carrying me to my bed and setting me down on it all romantically, you know, like guys do to girls in the movies, he just dumped me onto it, so I bounced around and would have fallen off if I hadn't grabbed the edge of the mattress.
     "Thanks," I said, not quite able to keep all of the sarcasm out of my voice.

Haunted, p. 159

"I think," Jesse said, cracking open the book Father Dom had loaned him, "it's time for a little reading out loud."
     "No," I groaned. "Not Critical Theory Since Plato. Please, I am begging you. It's not fair, I can't even run away."
     "I know," Jesse said with a gleam in his eyes. "At last I have you where I want you..."
     I have to admit, my breath kind of caught in my throat when he said that. But of course he didn't mean what I wanted him to mean. He just meant that now he could read his stupid book out loud, and I couldn't escape.
     "Ha ha," I said wittily, to cover the fact that I'd thought he'd meant something else.
     The Jesse held up a copy of Cosmo he'd hidden between the pages of Critical Theory Since Plato. While I stared at him in astonishment, he said, "I borrowed it from your mother's room. She won't miss it for awhile." Then he tossed the magazine onto my bed.
     I nearly choked. I mean, it was the nicest--the nicest--thing anyone had done for me in ages.

Haunted, p. 163-164

Favorite Quotes from Book Six