Sweet, luscious blood, blood with salt, blood with all that blood is meant to be, and his mind broke open like the golden meat of a peach in the old days when I was alive and loving the summer fruit, the intoxicating sweetness of the fresh fruit from the trees in the village, right here, this village, me and Nicki lying on a haystack, eating fresh fruit till our lips were sore.

I saw a firmament of stars and a great war of vaporous beings faceless and howling and battling one another, with broken phrases and taunts and cries of pain, and then the earth below with its great expanses of black water shining in the light of Heaven and the land planted with a thousand clusters of man-made lights and shimmering roofs and thin spidery roads, and the wind roared in my ears, and we were Gremt, both of us, Gremt walking on one of those roads, walking with palpable steps, and when we turned, out of the great dark woods around us came a stinging torrent of freezing air and dead leaves that hit us full force like a rain of nails. Anger, anger everywhere we turned, the anger of the spirits, and then he was standing before me and he had his arms out, and he asked, Am I flesh and blood? Am I? What am I? The image wavered, weakened, dimmed. Dear God, was he dying? It took all my strength to draw back. Amel cried out and hissed and there came the pain again, the pain in my hands as he tried to force me to hold on and the pain shooting up the back of my neck. Gremt fell down into the snow.

Stop it, damn you, stop it, or I swear it, I will surrender you to the prison of a vessel from which you cannot hurt us!

It was finished. Nothing vanishes quite like pain—when pain does vanish, that is. Because most of the time pain never does.

I knelt down beside Gremt. He was drawn and almost as white as the snow, and his eyes were half-mast and gleaming the way the eyes of an animal can gleam when the animal’s dead.

“Gremt!” I turned his head towards me with both hands. Warm, warm with life, warm with the will to live.

Slowly his eyes grew wide and clear.

For an endless moment we were together in silence. Snow fell. Light soundless snow.

“Was it good, the blood?” he whispered.

I nodded. “It was good,” I said.

“What have I done?” he whispered. He appeared to be looking past me, at the stars. Did he see spirits up there? Did he hear them in some way that I could not?

“Are they watching us?” I asked.