We were in the south tower, which was wholly new, and contained some of the most splendid rooms, reserved in theory for the most honored guests, and this meant we had a bedchamber parlor to ourselves, and it was a fine comfortable place to talk.

I’d had this apartment done all in shades of gold, magenta, and rose, with nineteenth-century flowered wallpaper and a nineteenth-century walnut bed and armoire and chests of drawers and chairs. It made me think of our flat in New Orleans and I found it comforting after all the brilliantly lighted baroque splendor of so many other rooms.

We sat at the small round table before the arched window, with the two leaded-glass sashes open wide to the night air. No need of a light as the moon was full. There were two decks of cards there, and I’d thought I might deal out a game of solitaire just to do something, anything, but I hadn’t touched the cards. I love shiny new cards.

“For two nights now, Amel hasn’t been with me,” I said. “I don’t know whether or not you can tell.”

Louis was leaning on his elbows and looking at me.

He had taken off his black wool jacket and was dressed only in a gray cashmere sweater over his white shirt and black pants. He would never have done that on such a freezing night as this before he’d received all the powerful blood. I wonder if he ever thought of Merrick anymore, the unearthly sorceress who’d seduced him and spellbound him and pushed him, unwittingly, to expose his fragile vampiric body to the sun. Merrick had left us early of her own will. She’d been one of those powerful souls utterly convinced of an afterlife more interesting than this world. Maybe she was thriving in that afterlife, or lost in the upper air with the other spirits and ghosts in the confusing realm that Gremt had fled.

I’d been observing many small changes in Louis over the years due to the powerful blood. His eyes were certainly more iridescent and it irritated me that he would never wear sunglasses, even in the brightest rooms or on the brightest streets. But nothing changed the wall of telepathic silence that fell between master and fledgling. Yet I felt closer to him than to any other visible being in the world.

“What happens if you call to Amel and ask him to come back?” Louis asked.

“What would be the point?” I asked.

I was wearing my usual court finery, because I knew it comforted almost everyone. But it wasn’t in keeping with my mood to be dressed in steel-blue brocade and linen frills, and for the first time, I envied Louis his simpler clothes.