“Oh, it won’t end,” she said with a shrug. “Not if we all act together again as we did last time, if we put away our differences as the world is always saying and unite. We can defeat this thing, this raging spirit who thinks his every emotion is unique and momentous as if consciousness itself had just been discovered for his benefit and for his personal use!”

Ah, so she knew all about it. She hadn’t been holed up in some North American forest watching the snow fall. She’d been with us all along. And what she’d just said had meaning.

“He does behave that way, doesn’t he?” I said. “You put that exactly right.”

She leaned against the mantel nearest me, her elbow just able to manage it, and succeeded in looking like a thin graceful boy in that posture, her eyes positively glowing as she smiled at me.

“I love you, you know.”

“You could have fooled me on that one,” I said. “Hmmm. Well.” I shrugged. “Seems lots of people love me, mortal and immortal. Can’t help it. I’m just the most dazzling vampire on the planet, though why I’ll never know. Weren’t you lucky to have me for a son, the wolf killer who stumbled onto the stage in Paris and caught the fancy of a monster.” This was dishonest too. Why did I feel I had to keep her at a remove?

“Seriously, you look splendid,” she said. “Your hair’s whiter. Why is that?”

“Apparently it comes from having been burned. Repeatedly burned. But it’s yellow enough still to keep me happy. You look rather splendid yourself. What do you know about all this, what’s happening?”

She was silent for a moment. Then she spoke. “Never think they really love you, or love you for yourself,” she said.

“Thanks, Mother.”

“Seriously. I mean it. Don’t ever think … Love doesn’t really ever function like that. You’re the only name and face they all know.”

I regarded this thoughtfully, then replied, “I know.”

“Let’s talk of the Voice,” she said, leaping right into the subject without preamble. “It can’t manipulate the physical. Apparently it can only incite the minds of those it visits. He can’t possess the bodies at all. And I suspect it cannot do anything with the host body, but then I have seen the host body less often than you have, and for much less time.”

The host body was Mekare. I did not think of Mekare in those terms, but that is what she was.