At first I did strain to hear him in spite of the antics of the Voice. But within minutes, the Voice grew bored or had simply run out of invective and begun to mumble almost sleepily and was easy to ignore. Or maybe the Voice began to listen, because the Voice did indeed remain.

Viktor told me all about his life, but I still couldn’t absorb it, this child reared by blood drinkers, knowing from the earliest age that I was his father, looking at rock videos of me revealing our history in images and song. Viktor knew all those songs I’d written. When he was ten years old, his mother had gone into the Blood. This had been agony for him, to see her transformed, but he’d tried to hide it from her and from Seth and Fareed but there was no hiding things from parents who could read your mind. And they were his parents, the three of them, and now he had a fourth parent. He said he was blessed. He’d always known his destiny was the Blood, that with every passing year he came ever closer to being with his mother and with Seth and Fareed.

I nodded to all this. I wanted more than anything to listen. He had a simple straightforward manner, but he sounded like a much older man than he was. He’d had very little time as a small child, really, with human beings, being educated directly by his mother and by Fareed. Sometime around the age of twelve, he’d started to have lessons on history and art from Seth, who tended to speak of the entire sweep of time in these matters, and often confessed what he himself was seeking to understand. Then had come painful years in England at Oxford where he’d gone as a prodigy and tried to mingle with other mortals, tried to love them and understand what they were and to learn.

“I was never frightened by any blood drinker ever in any way,” he explained, “until this Rhoshamandes came, until he crashed through that wall. I knew he wasn’t going to kill me, not immediately, that was obvious, and as for Benedict, Benedict was as kind as Seth or Fareed.”

The Voice remained silent. I felt keenly that the Voice was hanging on Viktor’s every word.