Vampires of El Norte
"The impossibly sweet, impossibly soft scent of her skin, the one smell on earth he would drown in if he could. That place was now a wound."
"It was weeping. It burst from him with the crack of a whip, then it was a torrent."
"He had been foolish enough to make his home another person once before. He would not do it again."
"Because without work and a distant goal, he did not know what else he was living for."
"memories hung around her like kitchen smoke, clinging to her hair and clothing."
"Its presence hovered over his shoulder with the unwelcome intimacy of a lover, whispering in his ear. I am here, it hummed. Remember me?"
"It wasn't that his heart stopped beating, no -- it hurt too much to have simply stopped. It buckled in surprise. It collapsed in on itself. It pinned him to where he stood, for he was certain -- deliriously certain -- that he looked into the face of a ghost."
"The fundamental truth on which he had built every one of those years was wrong."
"How could she not care? She was a tree with its roots yanked violently from the soil. She was a bird without its flock, a colt cut off from the herd and lost to the chaparral. The world could not make sense without heaven overhead and earth beneath; so, too, did the world make no sense without Néstor."
"She was a ghost haunting his nights and his days; her mist thickened and faded with the setting and rising of the sun, but it never left. No matter how hard or far he rode, she clung to his skin like the smell of sheep. His soul bore her brand, the wound deep and blackened and scarred over. From the day he left Lost Ojuelos, a part of him knew that his life was now a game of second bests. Of good-enoughs. A meager harvest grown in the long shadow of her absence."
"The night has no mistress but her."
"a bolt of yearning as wide as the sky."
"Sleep flitted mockingly over the crown of Nena's head, close enough that she could almost touch it. It would remain there, both close and maddeningly distant..."
"Sleep eventually took her. Its embrace was ill-fitting, itchy as wool, never settling with ease."
"The only purpose of tomorrow was to survive it and to reach her on the other side. And nothing -- not Don Félix, not Don Feliciano, not his own cowardice -- would stand in his way."
"'Stay with me.'...'Stay with me.'...'Stay with me.'...She knew then that she would. Whatever awaited them, she would stay with him."
"Broad and unguarded and sweetly dimpled, her teeth flashing like a loaded pistol in the sun. He would happily be shot dead by it any day of the week."
"Now she felt distance between her and the safety of the building like a phantom limb -- long, exposed, and naked."
"his whole soul was her price."
"He could force out speech if he tried, but reaching for the words was like trying to grasp a fish in the water. Slippery. He ended up with empty hands more often than not."
"He loved looking at her. He wanted her to be the last thing he ever saw, the first thing he ever saw, his heavens and his earth."
"He should feel sheepish by how easy it was for her to seduce him, how even in a moment like that she could drug him into compliance with nothing but her hands and her voice. He should even feel frightened by it. Never had a woman shown she had so much power over him with so little effort."
"His breath came in shards, but he could not stop it. He could not catch it, no more than he could slow a bolting horse, no more than he could stop rain when it had begun to pour."
"She rode impulse like a half-broken horse until it threw her to the first. Now she lay there, curled into a ball, the flood of competing emotions washing over her honing into a single current, a single note."
"The sounds of metal chains clanging against one another and more voices rose from the riverbank. They were agitated. Brassy, in the way only English was. Demanding."
"Anglos have never met anything they couldn't turn into a means to take what they want."
"'There is no home anymore, when the people you love are gone.'"
"'I am yours. Command me.'"
"She was overcome by the sensation that she stood on the lip of a cliff, a broad arroyo dividing what came before and what came next. Against her will, and without warning, something would push her. A sweep of vertigo would rush through her ears; the stomach-flip of a sudden fall. And that would be it. The rest of her life would unspool before her. There would be no going back to how it was before."
"His body moved as if commanded by another force, by the brute power of his anger. His hurt."
"Don't alienate the strength that is already here, with the people who are already here."