“Cursed are you among all blood drinkers for what you’ve done. Abomination on the face of the earth! Blessed be the blood drinker who slays you.”

I saw my old master rising in the air, rising as if to meet the stars tumbling in their purple mist, his eyes full of wonder. It is mine. It is in my veins. I am among the immortals.

And now he cried. He cried as miserably as I’d cried when as a boy blood drinker I’d seen him burned on the pyre. He swallowed and sought to muffle his cries, but the sound was all the worse for it.

Pain like this is unendurable.

Was that why Amel said nothing? Is that why he did not even seem to breathe inside me? Did he feel it because we felt it?

Somewhere near, a soft singing penetrated the swoon.

The blood drinker who had come in and was now, here in this great cavernous room, singing a hymn I knew with German words, the masterpiece of Bach, “Wake up…the voice summons…of the watchmen on the battlements, wake…you city of Jerusalem! This is the hour of midnight….” And beneath the voice, the marching of the harpsichord. This tender-yet-piercing boy soprano voice of one of Notker’s choristers.

The ghost who embraced me sighed, and slowly its limbs took form, its body solid once more and its head resting on my shoulder, the hair so fine to the touch, and the hands clasping my arms.

Love you, yes, always and forever….

I’d be dead forever now beneath the earth were it not for you, or a ghost wandering without ever having glimpsed what you gave me….

The music went on, the boy soprano blood drinker singing just above the volume of the keyboard, drifting into variations of his own on Bach’s theme, as Bach himself might have done for pure amusement, taking the lyrics into uncharted places, “Wake, wake, the blood calls us from eternal sleep….”

We stood together, and it was the music now that enfolded both of us.

Finally the music grew softer, and found its subtle finish.

A radiant silence gripped the room in which it seemed the walls gave back the ghostly echo of the cantata. Then the ghost turned and kissed me on the mouth. Magnus again, fully. Not the made-up ideal Magnus, but a strong powerful Magnus who’d brought me over, no longer the wraith, but robust, and clothed in simple black robes, his long dark glossy silver-streaked hair combed, and his gaunt face calm and etched with the fine lines that had become as pen strokes when he was made.