On this dreary, cold night I’d been thirsty; more thirsty than I can bear. Oh, I don’t technically need the blood anymore. I have so much blood from Akasha in my veins, the primal blood of the Old Mother that I can exist forever without feeding… but I was thirsting and I had to have it to staunch the misery, or so I told myself on a little late night rampage in the city of Amsterdam, feeding off of every reprobate and killer I could find. I’d hidden the bodies, I’d been careful, but it had been grim: That hot, delicious blood, pumping into me and all the visions along with it from filthy and degenerate minds – all that intimacy with the emotions I deplore. Oh the same old, same old. I was sick at heart. In moods like this I’m a menace to the innocent and I know it only too well. At four in the morning it had me so bad. I was in a little public park, sitting on an iron bench, in the damp, doubled over in a bad, seedy part of the city, the late night lights looking garish and sooty through the mist. I was cold all over and fearing now that I simply wasn’t going to endure: I wasn’t going to be a true immortal like the great Marius or Mekare, or Maharet or Khayman or even Armand. This wasn’t living what I was doing, at one point the pain was so great it was like a blade, turning in my heart and in my brain. I doubled over on the bench; I had my hands clasped on the back of my neck and I wanted nothing so much as to die – to simply close my eyes on all of life and die.

And the voice came, and the voice said, “But I love you.”