It had been a strange meeting. And she hadn’t seen him again till she was much better, and she’d been certain then that he was no more human than Uncle Lestan was human, and she’d known by then too that Fareed wasn’t human and Dr. Gilman wasn’t human either, and that Viktor knew all this with a far greater understanding than she could possibly have. She’d been wrestling with it, pacing the floor of her room in the desert hospital, interrogating her own senses, her own sense of normality, and Seth had appeared and said: “Don’t let us drive you mad.” He’d moved out of the shadows and taken her hands in his. “I am just what you think and what you fear,” he’d told her. “Why shouldn’t you know? Why shouldn’t you understand?”

The effect of those nighttime conversations had been incalculable, and the first time that she and Viktor had been intimate, she’d said in his ear, “Don’t be afraid for me. I do know what they are. I know all about it. I understand.”

“Thank Heaven,” Viktor had replied. They had snuggled together spoon fashion and he had kissed her hair. “Because I can’t lie about it anymore. I can keep secrets. But I can’t tell lies.”

She looked at him now, looked at the manner in which he sat there in the chair, looking at the far glass wall and the vibrant cityscape beyond it. And she felt such love for him, such love and trust.

She looked at Louis, Louis who was watching her again as if reading her thoughts.

“You’ve been more than kind,” she said, “but if we’re cast out of all this, if that’s what ultimately happens, I don’t know what future there can be for us.”

She looked at Viktor. His expression told her nothing, except that he loved her, and that he had a patience with this that she didn’t have.

She tried to imagine it, them together, married, with children, their very own rosy-cheeked children, little children, drifting through the world on the magic carpet of the wealth bequeathed to them by beings of a secret and unknown realm. She couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t.

But surely somehow it would never come to that. This would not all be consigned to miraculous memory meant to fade with every passing year.

She looked at Louis.

And he gave her one of those rare bright smiles. He seemed warm and human suddenly and too grand to be mortal all at the same time.

“It really is a gift, isn’t it?” asked Rose.