"I understand," she murmured, quiet and still once he mentioned looking for Quynh again; Andy had looked for fifty years, getting more and more desperate to find her, and nothing had come of it.

"Did Nicky and Joe ever tell you how long we looked for her?" Andy asked, voice soft. It wasn't a conversation she had often, because even after five hundred years it was still painful. Quynh had been her lodestone, her lover, her everything: she'd dreamed of her for near a thousand years before ever meeting her, and she was like an angel to Andy, the closest she'd ever come to believing in the divine. "Fifty years, and we--I had to stop. I couldn't... All I could see when I closed my eyes was her being dragged into that coffin. She screamed for me the whole time, and I couldn't get to her."