Gremt wasn’t trying to avoid me. Rather, as he glanced over his shoulder, he appeared to be asking me to follow him outside.

The air was freezing and the terrace was covered in the snow, but the sky was remarkably clear and clean, and the snow crunched and crackled under my feet because it was frozen.

Gremt stood at the railing, and looked out over the village below. This terrace had not existed in my time, but had been added to the Château by my workers, and it gave the finest view of the village with its winding street and dimly lighted tavern and townhouses. Curfew was in effect for the humans of the village, but going from and coming to the tavern was allowed, and I could see furtive figures down there on the fresh-swept pavers, and some lingering against the wall like dark ghosts gazing up at the Château, and perhaps at us as we stood side by side, though mortal eyes couldn’t have seen me clasp Gremt’s hand.

Kapetria and her kindred Replimoids waited in the inn down there for word on Roland and Rhoshamandes—the re-creation of the inn in which, centuries ago, I’d drunk myself sick with my lover Nicolas and first confronted my mortality and gone out of my head.

Gremt’s hand. So warm, so human. He was the picture of dignity gazing out, silken hair as well groomed as that of a Greek statue, his tall formidable body clothed in the long black clerical-looking thawb, a garment he apparently liked very much. And what were his thoughts tonight? Why couldn’t I read his mind or the minds of the Replimoids? So be it. He’d tell me when he was ready just what Kapetria’s revelations had meant to him. They must have shaken him to the root.

I caught the scent of blood as if it were something Gremt could release at will, and I heard the tripping of his mysterious heart beneath it, and felt the pulse in his wrist.

Innocent blood, there came that suggestion again, that whisper from Amel in a voice that didn’t need words. His blood, yes, now. My mouth was tasting blood. I want it, I want it, his blood.

“Is this what you want?” I asked Gremt. “You want me to do what I did with her?”

“I want to know what you taste and what you see when you drink the blood of this body,” he said in a muted and anguished voice. “What do you think this Replimoid woman might tell me about what I’ve done—how I’ve incarnated?” So that meant far more to him now than the revelations about Amel.

“Maybe she can tell us all plenty,” I said. “And maybe she can tell us things we don’t want to know. But she’s going soon, that’s the word, and nobody can persuade her to remain. She and her kindred will go—just as soon as they know that Roland and Rhoshamandes are no longer a threat.”