Purely alone. I took a deep breath of the bracing air and looked up through the whiteness and gradually I penetrated the layers of lowering clouds and I picked out the stars.

Alone. No warm hand on the back of the neck, nothing living and breathing inside me that wasn’t me. No voice that could speak to me or hear me if I spoke. Just alone.

Just the way I’d been over two hundred years ago when Richelieu’s statue of Louis XIII on horseback had been in the middle of this vast place, and these mansions had been down at heel, no longer fashionable, and I had walked through here briskly after the coming of the vampiric Blood, fierce and strong and able to roam all Paris, it seemed, driven by my thirst.

Innocent blood. That was my thought. It hadn’t come from someone else.

Still alive.

A mortal woman stopped just a few paces from me. Her coat went down to the tops of her boots, and a scarf was wrapped entirely around her face and neck. She spoke to me in rapid French telling me I would catch my death of cold if I didn’t go inside somewhere, get a coat to wear. I nodded and thanked her and she rushed on across the dim lawns of snow.

Well, it’s as good a time as ever, I thought, to find out what had been lost, if anything. I went up, fast enough that no mortal eye would catch it, and was soon crossing the sky over Paris and headed infallibly as ever for home.

It was eight o’clock when I walked into the ballroom. I had heard the cheers and screaming before I ever reached the doors. And the sounds of people rushing through the many corridors and salons.

“Where is the orchestra?” I asked. I made my way into an open space beside the harpsichord. Marius took me in his arms. The musicians flooded into the little congregation of gilded chairs, and Antoine stepped up on the small black podium. Some lusty triumphal music soon swelled behind me.

I held still to Marius. “These have been the worst hours of my whole existence,” he whispered in my ear. “Then they said you were alive, that you’d been seen in Paris. And I didn’t believe it.”

The crowd around us was getting thicker and thicker, with blood drinkers pushing here and there to diminish the space in which we stood.

All the faces were soon there, except for Louis and Rose and Viktor. But how could that be? I turned around. They stood only two feet away from me, huddled together, and down the pure whiteness of Louis’s face were two thin lines of blood tears.

It must have been an hour of individual embraces, of reassuring myself and each person that I was whole and complete. I was thirsting, but I didn’t care.