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Looking at the woman who had been his best friend, Nick found himself remembering how he’d once thought Wynter looked like her. He’d even wondered if Miriam and Black could be Wynter’s real parents. He’d wondered that and felt weird about it for at least the first few months he knew Wynter Cara James.

He glanced around the cave, and memory slammed into him like a cascade of falling rocks. Where he was, when this was, what had happened, all of it was suddenly, disturbingly clear.

I think only a few minutes have gone by in this world,he told Wynter, feeling dizzy from the shock of it, even as he sent it to her.I think, from their point of view, I only left here with Brick a few minutes ago. I think, to them, I haven’t been gone for any time at all.

There was a silence in Nick’s mind while Wynter absorbed this.

How is that possible?she asked.

Nick looked around the cave, then around at the friends he’d left behind, all those hundreds of years ago, and didn’t have an answer.

He knew he was right, though.

The longer he stood there, the stronger and more clear the memories grew. He remembered all of it now, exactly how he’d fallen through that portal.

He remembered what everyone had been wearing.

He remembered how their hair had been cut, how they’d smelled.

There’s no way they could have replicated all of this somehow.

It had to be the same time and place.

It had to be.

Nick remembered his struggle with Brick, who’d attacked Dalejem, mostly for the crime of loving someone Brick thought of as his. He remembered his own careless kick against the rock, which he’d meant to slam Brick into the wall, and get his sire to let go.

Instead, he’d miscalculated where he was, his own strength, the strength of Brick…

…and he’d vanished through that opening in the wall.

All of those hundreds of years, of lives good and bad, wars and enslavement and finding Wynter and living on another’s world…

It had all started so simply, so stupidly, really, and all from a misplaced foot.

Nick looked down at Wynter, and squeezed her against his side.

It was difficult to regret any of it, even now.

Then his eyes returned to Miriam’s face.

Gaos,how would he explain any of this? Could any of it really be real?

Miriam’s blue-green eyes studied him back, and now her confusion had tipped into something closer to alarm. She still looked relieved to see him, but as she looked through the faces behind where Nick and Wynter stood, that alarm grew as it widened her eyes.

“Where’s Jem?” she asked next.

Nick felt more than saw Wynter scowl.

Something about it made him want to laugh.

The fact that he was now one hundred percent certain he’d found and lost and found Jem again in that alien land, and had dragged his soul back through the portal with him, only made him want to laugh more. He knew this, as absolute fact… yet the two women in the world he’d loved more than any others, apart from maybe Angel and his mother and his sisters, were the two women utterly unable to see it.

It didn’t matter, though.

It didn’t fucking matter.

He was home.