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concerned as she lost all track of their quest and asked after the girl who was looking at her with such venom. Fazire wanted to grab Lily back but he stayed where he was in order to let her do what she needed to do.
    “No, I’m not all right,” the girl snapped. “What are you doing here, Lily?”
    Fazire found himself thinking these people who lived here weren’t very kind and caring at all.
    Lily hesitated, somehow not surprised at this reaction from the woman, then she went on. “This is a little embarrassing but I had to leave town unexpectedly and now that I’m back, I went to Nate’s and his doorman says he doesn’t live there anymore. I was just –”
    The woman didn’t allow her to finish, her face changed to what looked somewhat sly and scheming to Fazire but he lost those thoughts at the next words she said.
    “Nate’s dead,” Danielle informed them coldly.
    Then, without further ado, she slammed the door right in Lily’s face.
    Lily stood staring at the door, frozen to the spot.
    Fazire stood behind her, just as frozen.
    And then, after what seemed like an age (and Fazire had lived many of them so he knew exactly how they felt), slowly she turned and stopped and simply stared down at him, every bit of colour had drained from her face.
    Two years ago she’d lost her beloved grandmother. Barely two months ago she’d lost her parents. Now her new beloved boyfriend, the romantic hero that was supposed to sweep her off her feet and at the sound of their meeting and courtship he certainly did that, and love her more than the earth was dead.
    She was twenty-two years old, pregnant with only a genie to call family.
    And the expression on her face showed every bit of that pain and agony.
    Fazire ascended the two last steps and carefully put his arm around her fragile, tense shoulders.
    “Let’s get home,” he murmured to his Lily-child.
    She didn’t move. In fact she seemed rooted to the spot.
    Then she whispered, “But Fazire, where’s home?”
    He had no answer for that, for he didn’t know.
    Then it came to him.
    “Wherever we make it, my lovely.”
     
     

PART TWO

Chapter Four
    Nathaniel
     
    There were no genies in Nathaniel McAllister’s life.
    Nathaniel’s father died before he was born. A knife fight in a pub brawl that had started because of his father’s bad temper and penchant for fisticuffs and ended with him in a pool of his own blood.
    Not that Nathaniel’s mother, Deirdre, would have known that was his father. It could have been one of three, maybe even four, candidates. She did figure it out in a hazy way as he grew older and she’d look at her son and had some recollection of that drunken, drug-fuelled night with his tall, lean, muscular, good-looking father.
    Without genies or a parent who wasn’t inebriated or incapacitated due to drugs all the time, Nathaniel learned early how to take care of himself. His mother was usually sleeping it off when she should have been getting him up and getting him cleaned and fed. Instinct and survival taught him to do the most basic tasks and he could never remember a time that he didn’t do all of those things for himself. Indeed a great deal of the time he had to steal from his mother’s purse or, somewhat more dangerously, one of her lover’s wallets, to go to the news agent and get himself some milk and food. If his mother didn’t have any money or there wasn’t a lover around, which was often in the case of the former, but luckily, depending on how you looked at it, not the latter, sometimes he had to steal the milk and food from the news agent. However, he learned quickly to pick ones further away from home.
    Nathaniel McAllister learned everything quickly.
    His mother got him into school though and he liked it there. He was smart, very smart. He knew this because the teachers told him so. Even the headmaster brought him into his office to have what the head called “a chat”. They tried to tell his mother. Nathaniel, they