“You are my finest work, my finest miracle,” he said to me. Once again he kissed me, and I opened my lips to receive the kiss and give it back. I bit into my lower lip, and offered the blood on my tongue. He took it, though how and what he felt, I couldn’t know. He stroked my hair, my face.

“And now you are the Prince of the tribe, and old Rhoshamandes wanders with the mark of Cain on him, that winsome, capricious, heartless blood drinker, with the mark of Cain, so that no one will put him out of his anguish for what he did to the gentle witch, and you are the ruler.”

He drew back, just as any living being might at this moment, and wiped the tears from his eyes, staring for a moment at his own hands. This was a creature I had never really seen—the true Magnus restored: the long thin nose and long mouth, the high domed forehead and white hands made of knots, and shoulders squared but misshapen—what he must have looked like in those early nights when the Blood had done all it could to make him near perfect. And who was to say this wasn’t beauty?

“Aye, but I was never beautiful,” he said with a sigh. “What is it that has made you see beauty here when others only ever saw ugliness and imperfection, and the ravages of disease?”

“My maker,” I said. “Who gave me the power to see all things as beautiful.”

Not one sound came from Amel inside me. Not one quiver. But he was there.

Magnus turned as if looking for the chair, reaching for it, in fact, yet unable to find it. I escorted him to the chair and held his hand as he sat down slowly, as though his phantom bones were actually aching.

Does a ghost become the full expression of the mortal and the immortal? Does a ghost embrace the entire past of the being?

“Forgive me,” he said looking up at me. He sat back, relaxing, putting his hands on the arms of the chair as we are wont to do with these old wooden chairs with their knobby carvings, and he looked at me calmly. “You came here seeking Gremt, and I’ve distracted you, caught you up in my griefs and madness. I was always mad, or so I was told, when I said things of the world that common men and women say today; I was thought mad, when I spoke of loving and how one had to learn to love; mad Magnus the thief of the Blood. I should leave you now to your talk with Gremt. But I am whole and firm again, and don’t want to give it up.”

“I understand.”