Page 4

Some part of him never stopped looking.

Some part of him never stopped hoping he might stumble upon them here, after all.

It’s why he never left theCote d’Azur,even as they traveled up and down the length of it and back again, moving homes while always staying in the same rough region of the civilized world. Some part of Nick continued to wait, to leave the door open for the rest of his friends and family to appear.

They never did, though.

He and Jem lived in beauty and simplicity anyway, despite that.

They even took in children here and there over their years, finding faces that touched them among the orphans and the abandoned, the neglected and unloved.

They fed them and taught them what they could, until it was time to send them out into the world, to make their own fortunes with the lives and resources they’d been given.

Some went on to become important people in their own right.

Nick and Dalejem never wanted for resources, and they were generous with the few souls they could manage to bring in and raise.

Some of them came back.

Some came back even as old men and women, and didn’t say too much about Nick still looking exactly as he had when they were children, like he still hadn’t reached the age of thirty, and Jem looking older, but never as old as he should.

Jem was aging now, though.

For a while their story was older and younger brothers.

Then father and son.

Now Dalejem sometimes told humans he was Nick’s great uncle.

Nick had winced at that, but he hadn’t contradicted him.

Jem’s aging seemed to be accelerating the last few years, especially this previous year. It likely would get less and less likely that Nick could even be his son. Jem had joked that he’d be calling himself Nick’s grandfather soon.

Nick pushed it from his mind.

He kissed his husband’s face, and smiled at him, a hint of fang showing.

“Want to go surfing?” he teased the seer.

Jem smiled back, but Nick saw the answer there, in the wariness of his gaze.

“Not sure my knees or hips would thank me for that, brother,” Jem chided.

“I’ll carry you,” Nick offered.

Jem laughed, then smacked him, and both of them laughed, staring up at the dazzling stars, still shockingly clear despite the creeping smog of the early Industrial Revolution, but without satellites still, without planes, without helicopters or drones.

Where they were, the smoke from local fires were all that dotted the sky, and the ocean breeze sucked most of that out to sea.

“Do you remember anything at all, when he let go of you?” Jem asked Nick then.

He’d askedthatquestion a few hundred times over the years, as well.

In the beginning there’d been in-depth discussions, long, meandering theories about where the others in their group could have gone, what might have happened to them, what place or time may have claimed them.

But Nick had no answers now, just like he’d had none then.

“No,” he said truthfully, as per their ritual. “Nothing useful. Nothing specific.”