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.”

Amel was goading me. My thirst was unbearable. And once more he spoke of innocent blood.

What’s so delicious about innocent blood? What makes it like spring blossoms falling apart in your hands, or a bird fluttering in the prison of your fingers, or baby skin, or women’s breasts?

Behind us, the music and light contrived to pull a golden veil over the ballroom. The raw impassioned voice of a violin broke loose from the desperate currents of the waltz and sang, as violins always do, of loneliness. Was that Arjun or had Antoine taken up his fiddle?

I moved Gremt off across the hard crush of the snow until we were swallowed by the shadows of a corner. The village was not in view because we were too far from the edge, and the night above was so clear that the stars seemed a thousand times their usual number. The snow shone as white as the moon. I could see it streaked and gleaming on the forested mountains all around us, and see it trimming the battlements and see the flecks of it in Gremt’s hair.

This body was as beautiful to me as any I’d ever embraced and Amel was singing with the waltz so low I could scarcely hear him. I moved Gremt’s soft black hair back from his neck, my left hand taking hold of his strong right arm, and then I went in, wondering just what might happen to this contrived body under such an assault. Had he ever let anyone else do this? Certainly Teskhamen, his partner in the Talamasca, had done this. No. Never. The blood gushed so fast and so hard I felt it wet on my lips and on my face as never happens, but I couldn’t turn back, it was coming too fast, and the heart was sounding with the regularity of a fire bell.