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The overhead speaker fell silent.

A few seconds later, the door opened, and Malek walked in, looking strangely uncomfortable. It struck Nick that he’d embarrassed the young seer.

“I was only giving you shit, you know,” Nick muttered, apologetic, and now embarrassed himself that he’d been harassing an adolescent seer, simply because he’d felt self-conscious. “You can do whatever you want. I don’t mind if you’d rather stay in there.”

Malek shrugged.

He walked over with his long, lanky limbs.

He looked like a young colt.

He stopped when he stood right next to where his sister sat.

After looking around for a moment, he walked away again, found another fluffy cushion against the wall, this one dark red, brought it back over to his sister, tossed it to the carpet, then sank into a cross-legged position next to her.

His lean forearms landed on either side of his lap.

The left arm, which Nick hadn’t thought to look at in some time, was decorated in colorful, detailed tattoos of bird feathers and bones. The other arm had mostly seer symbols, including a few Nick recognized in such a personal way, they were difficult to look at.

The sword and sun. Earth balanced on the back of a turtle. A dragon. Markings in Prexci he somehow now remembered came from seer religious texts.

He saw another image then, one he hadn’t noticed before. It was also seer, but Nick vaguely remembered it had something to do with a bird.

Was it a phoenix? A seer equivalent, perhaps?”

The bones and feathers were generally what drew people’s eyes.

Jack Bird.

Nick had nearly forgotten the kid who used to go by that, back when Malek and Tai primarily lived in the Cauldron, and Malek had been highly suspicious of Nick.

Talk about someone who’d been forced to grow up way too fast.

Malek was practically the poster boy for kids burdened with adulthood too soon.

The lanky seer smiled, tossed his head to get a chunk of his long, black hair out of his eyes, and smiled wider. That disarming, boyish grin still managed to catch Nick off guard, every time he saw it.

“It’s okay, Nick,” Malek assured the vampire. “I was embarrassed, but it’s not a big deal. I should have just worked from in here, like you said. I thought maybe it would be weird to have both of us staring at you. And I know my eyes can be… disquieting.”

Nick scoffed at that, hiding his relief badly.

“They’re not ‘disquieting,’ whatever the fuck that means,” he said.

“You know precisely what it means,” Malek responded evenly. “And they unnerve some people. You know they do.”

Nick focused on the young man’s eyes.

One of those eyes shone a pale turquoise; the other was so dark, it nearly swallowed the pupil, and shone an opaque black. In color, the darker eye matched his long hair, which had grown out from where he used to shave it on the sides. His hair was a wild mane now, thick and dark and far less straight than his sister’s. It had a bit of curl to it, and accented his high cheekbones. He was shockingly handsome, and growing more so as he aged.

Still, despite the seer’s near jaw-dropping features, and Nick’s uncomfortable awareness that Malek was currently having sex with Kit every chance he got, the overwhelming feeling he got as he looked at the lanky seer, was just how damnedyounghe looked.

Nick forgot sometimes, that Tai wasn’t the only child between the two of them. If Malek were human, Nick would have pegged him at roughly eighteen, twenty-two or three at most, and only depending on the day and how he happened to be dressed.

For a seer, Malek was still obscenely young, whatever Lara St. Maarten wanted to believe. Even if Malek was closer to thirty than twenty in actual, solar years, he was still extremely young for one of his race.

Anyway, the year thing was deceptive too, from what Nick knew.

Dalejem had told him, long ago, that seers matured emotionally much closer to how they looked, which made Malek evenmoreyoung to Nick’s jaded eyes. It was strange to think that, to most humans, he and Mal looked relatively close in age.