Page 86

He was the paranoid one. He was more prone to bouts of insecurity.

Jem was usually the calm one, the less explosive one, the less reactive one, the one who felt utterly confident about who they were to one another. He had his days, sure, but his were fewer and Jem was usually more self-aware. And he never held onto his anger for long. Jem didn’t hold grudges, or seethe with resentment, or keep score.

But this… whatever the fuckthiswas… seemed to contain elements of all those things.

Nick’s more paranoid and self-absorbed thoughts made it about him, about them, about something the seer could no longer stomach about Nick being a vampire.

But the reality was, Nick didn’t knowwhatthe fuck was wrong.

He had no idea what changed, what he’d done, why Jem seemed so angry and short-tempered with him all of a sudden. He didn’t know what was making Jem act differently, or even what that difference consisted of exactly.

He’d tried to make sense of it, in his own, logic-based way.

His mind struggled to put words around it.

Volatile.

No… changing.

Hewouldn’tbe volatile.

Hewouldn’tbe strange.

And then he would be.

He’d be the regular Jem, the, at times, maddeningly Zen, weirdly accepting fucker Nick first got to know in Russia. Then he wouldchangesuddenly, out of nowhere, and with no specific trigger Nick could work out.

Once it happened while they were in the middle of sex.

Nick had been on the verge of a damned orgasm, when Jem abruptly stopped what he was doing, and without a fucking word, he’d gotten up from the bed, got dressed, and just… walked out. He’d disappeared for hours. He fuckingwalked right out of the house.

Nick never did get an explanation out of him, or any information about where Jem had gone after that. Weirder still, Jem seemed confused by the question. He’d told Nick he was crazy, that he hadn’t gone anywhere, that he must have been in the next room… which was not only bullshit, it was intenselyweirdbullshit.

Their house across from Ocean Beach, while huge compared to any other place Nick had ever lived, including when he was a kid, wasn’t that big. Not only that, Nick could smell him. He could smell him intensely, unmistakably, even compared to most seers.

Another time, they’d been at Jem’s favorite brunch place in the Lower Haight. Again, Jem had simply gotten up andleft,no explanation.

Nick thought he’d gone to the bathroom at first, and waited.

And waited.

And fucking waited.

He sat there for nearly two hours before he realized his mate wasn’t coming back.

When Jem got home, somesix hourslater, he again acted like he’d done nothing at all strange, or fucked up, or wrong… or even mildly rude.

The one that really tipped Nick over the edge, however, had been when they’d been night surfing, something they both liked to do. Not only had Jem gotten out of the water without telling Nick what he was doing, he’d fuckingleftNick there, all the way down at the Santa Cruz Lighthouse, some ninety minutes from their place in San Francisco.

When Jem returned to their house that afternoon, it was like every other time.

No explanation. No apology for fucking leaving him there, and with all of their gear, including both surfboards and the wetsuit Jem apparently just shucked off in the lot and left on the asphalt by their car. It was fucking unbelievable.

Nick ended up having to call Kiko.

He hadn’t wanted to. He’d wanted to handle it privately, just with Jem.

But when he walked to the nearest big hotel he could find in town, and tried to get them to call a rental car company to come get him at two in the morning, they’d basically laughed in his face. So in the end, he’d beenforcedto call Kiko, or risk the rest of the California Street building knowing what had happened, including Miri and Black.