Hidden in a toolbox, in the rafters of his four-car garage, was an envelope full of pictures taken by a private detective...They were pictures of a scrawny, boyish looking nine year old with a wide mouth and a tangle of brown hair...Her eyes were oblong and deep set, their color hidden from the camera by the slant of the sun. The angles and planes of her face were oddly beautiful just then, in that moment, frozen on Kodak paper. A hint of the woman she would someday become.

Depression is evil. Before you know it, it takes over and there's no escaping it.

...evil fascinates and repels us - it's a terrible beauty that enthralls us the more we stare into it...

World is beautiful but it is dangerous place to live, there is so much evil behind a normal person.

I remembered those frantic seconds when I__ thought all I loved and knew, all that was Sydney Sage, would be lost from this world. My battered friends and I had just had a brush with death, dancing with this evil. We__ destroyed it, but it was terrifying how touch and go it all had been. At any moment, the Strigoi could have gained the advantage and killed one or all of us. Life and death were inextricably bound together, and we wavered between them. But we__ triumphed over death tonight. We were alive, and the world was beautiful. Life was beautiful, and I refused to waste mine.

My entire life, I saw myself as the beautiful damsel or the graceful maiden. I was the princess searching for her knight. But with my newfound abilities, I finally discovered that, after all this time, I was the powerful witch.