Teskhamen and Magnus rose from their chairs to greet me, and I braced myself for the encounter with Magnus, for looking into the eyes of this one who’d made me, and died on a pyre less than an hour after doing that, leaving me his powerful blood, his fortune, his home, and nothing else. Maybe our splendid vampire doctors, Seth and Fareed, could tell whether my blood had a discernible mixture that undeniably connected me to Magnus. Fareed was working on that. Fareed was working on everything.

I sensed a great unease on the part of all three of these creatures.

“Don’t be their plaything,” Amel said inside me. “Magnus is nothing as solid as he looks. He’s a pathetic ghost. Notice that his monkly robes are part of the illusion. He isn’t solid enough to risk real clothing or real shoes like Gremt.”

I noted this. And I was certain that the last time I’d seen Magnus, he’d been the image of a living creature with real clothes. I wondered why the change.

“Can they hear you?” I asked Amel without moving my lips.

“How do I know?” he said. “Teskhamen can scour your mind as well as any of the old blood drinkers if you let him. He can’t shut me out any more than the others. But ghosts? Spirits? Who the Hell knows what they sense or hear? Get on with it. I don’t like it.” This was disingenuous. He was excited. I knew it.

“Patience,” I responded telepathically. “I’ve waited too long in coming.”

He made a soft disgusted fuming sound, but went still.

Magnus gestured for me to take the chair on the far left, closest to the fire. I saw none of that doting affection in his eyes that I’d seen last time we met in New York.

Nobody extended a hand. I didn’t extend my hand.

I sat down and folded my hands over the wooden arms of the chair, liking the feel of the carving. It was a new piece of furniture but a splendid imitation of something fashioned in the time of Shakespeare. And above the fireplace I spied a great intricate tapestry that was also new, full of vibrant new dyes and chemical threads, but exquisitely rendered—with medieval saints clustered about the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus on a golden throne. I loved the thickets of trees surrounding them, and the birds in the branches, and the tiny creeping things amid leaves and flowers. I wondered if mortal hands had made this, or had it been done by manically focused blood drinker weavers with preternatural patience and eye for detail.