Elias is still affectionate. Still curious. Still warm. But there’s a restraint now, subtle enough that I might have missed it if I didn’t know him as I do. A hesitation before certain questions. A thought he starts to voice and then reroutes. His mind is busy—always busy—but now it circles particular paths more often, returning to the same points like a tongue worrying at a loose tooth.
Time. Choice. Possibility.
I don’t blame him.
Seeing Christopher—reallyseeing him—would have done that to anyone with a thinking brain. A human who has lived nearly a century and still laughs like time has not claimed him. A human who chose and was chosen in return.
Elias’s mind is built to interrogate the world. To askhowandwhyuntil answers appear. But there are some things—some truths—that do not submit easily to dissection.
Like mates.
The word sits heavy in my thoughts, one I’ve been carefully avoiding even as my instincts circle it like a starved thing.
Mates, for my kind, are not about fate. There’s no thunderclap, no binding spell, no moment where the universe declaresthis one and no other. We are not limited in love, nor bound by it in that way.
But when it happens—when a mate is chosen—it feels… inevitable anyway.
Compatibility, first. Scent that calls to instincts older than memory. Touch that soothes as much as it ignites. A shared rhythm, a sense that the other beingfitsinto your life, your territory, your long view of time. It’s not exclusive in theory.
In practice? It almost always is.
Because once you find someone who calms your storms and stirs your heat in equal measure, why would you ever look elsewhere?
There’s no ritual. No ceremony. No magic words spoken over blood or fire.
Just choice.
Again and again.
Everything in me—everything—screams that Elias would make the perfect mate.
Not despite his humanity butbecauseof it.
His questions. His warmth. His stubborn compassion. The way his presence settles my instincts instead of provoking them. The way his scent wraps around me like it’s meant to be there.
The problem is not whether I feel this. The problem is whether Elias would want it.
Whether he would hear the wordmateand thinktrap. Orobligation. Ortoo much, too soon. Whether he would look at the shape of a life bound not by magic but by choice and recoil from its weight.
And then there’s the other truth, the one that makes my chest tighten every time I think it too clearly.
Yes, it is possible to extend his life if we stay together.
Possible—not guaranteed, not automatic. Gaining is a slow thing. It happens over years, not weeks. It’s as much about proximity and consent as it is about magic or biology. But the possibility exists.
I have no idea how Elias would react to that. A scientist, faced with the chance to change how time treats him. A man, faced with a future that stretches further than he ever planned.
I don’t know whether that would feel like a gift… or a burden.
So I say nothing.
For now.
We’re walkingwhen the land changes. I feel it before I see it, a subtle shift that crawls up my spine and settles there like a warning. The air grows too still. The birds quiet, not suddenly, but one by one until the silence presses in.
My pace slows without conscious thought.
Elias notices immediately. “Boone?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”