With that, the valkyrie sauntered back up Bourbon, drawing slack-jawed stares from more men than he could bare his fangs at.

Murdoch followed, dimly aware that this might be the longest conversation he'd ever had with a woman.

The steady stream of them in his mortal life meant that he'd never had to spend a lot of time talking to any single female. In fact, he'd long felt as if he spoke two languages: one he used with men and the other with women.

The former was direct, used to convey information. The latter was laden with innuendo and flirtation, and consisted of little more than compliments.

With Daniela, he seemed to have forgotten the woman language. Maybe he was just out of practice. Didn't matter anyway, since she was having none of it, probably didn't even speak it.

When he caught up with her, he said, "Now we go to the store?"

She nodded. "It's back up Bourbon for a few wild and woolly blocks, then west a couple more."

Up ahead, the crowd had burgeoned as the night wore on. Each bar they passed had begun blaring its own style of music. "Then we have some time to kill. You might as well tell me what a swimbo is. And who's Nix?"

"Might I?" she said, and that was all she said.

He took another tack. "Deshazior called you 'ice maiden.'"

"That's one of my names. Along with 'ice queen.' Which you like calling me when you're being unpleasant."

"You aren't... are you a virgin?"

She gazed away. "Why do you sound so dismayed by this?"

Because you were a virgin in my dream. "Because you've lived a long time. Surely in all those years, you've found one of your own species to be with."

"Species, Murdoch Suave? Really?"

He could have phrased that better. But he was a shade shocked that he could be walking next to a two-thousand-year-old virgin. "Answer me. Has no man ever claimed you?"

"Only another within my own kind can touch me without hurting me. And yet they've been trying to kill me since I first left Valhalla," she said. "You put it together."

God, she's never known a man.

Whatever she saw in his expression made her glare. "Don't you dare pity me, Murdoch."

"Have you sought help for this... coldness?" he asked, squiring her well away from a performing fire breather.

"You make it sound like a condition! But, yes, for your information, I've gone to the House of Witches, to wizards, and even to the patron goddess of impossible things. So far, the best I've been offered were incomplete spells - like a hex that would prevent me from feeling pain, even though my skin would still burn, or vice versa."

"And the goddess?"

"She gave me a pair of bowling shoes."

"Bowling shoes?"

Suddenly plastic beads rained down on them, tossed by topless - male and female - tourists on a balcony to their left. Without missing a beat, Daniela cast the strands to another group on a balcony directly to their right. "Yes, bowling couture. Don't ask me why."

"There's got to be a way, some other power in the Lore - "

"I've been to all the reliable, vetted mystical sources I know of. Unreliable sources would extract too high a penalty."

"What does that mean?"

"I could go to a Lore bazaar where magics are peddled, but would probably end up worse than I am."

"Worse off?"

"Magic dispensed by the wrong hands begs for cosmic justice, and it's usually in the form of a paradox. So if I hired some random practitioner for this, I might become touchable - by, for instance, growing scales. And then no one would want to touch me."

"I see." Fables held the same. Like the dying man who journeyed to a mystic for a cure, but perished in a freak accident on the way home.

"This is just something I have to live with," she finished with a shrug, as if she'd long since accepted this reality, but he sensed that nothing could be further from the truth. "I'm the one virgin you won't be adding to your collection."

"I've never had one before." But he longed to now. To claim Daniela... to show her what sex can be like.

To see that vulnerability in her eyes just as he entered her.

This plainly surprised her. "Am I supposed to believe that?"

"In my time, taking a virgin meant one risked a sword-point wedding." Beget no bastards, deflower no maids. As long as he'd followed those two simple rules, he'd always gotten to do as he pleased.

"I thought guys like you were forever on the hunt for the next rascally cherry to subdue."

"Women always think men bed virgins because of the conquest."

"You're saying that has nothing to do with it?"

"No. The conquest is definitely a part. But I believe the truth runs deeper: Men like virgins because women always remember their first lover. Men want to be remembered sexually."

"So if you didn't enjoy any virgins, did you not want to be remembered?"

He closed in on her, backing her up against the wall of a closed bistro. Resting his hand beside her head, he murmured, "I had no such fears or desires. I always knew I'd be remembered - not as the first, but as the best."

In a clear attempt to disguise how curious she was, Daniela said, "And how does one get to be the best? I mean, aside from the obvious answer of practice."

In his mortal life, he'd been considerate in bed. He'd made sure he brought great pleasure to every woman he'd been with. This wasn't out of selflessness. Quite the opposite. At an early age, he'd learned that the more word got around that he was a skilled lover, the more women dallied with him.

He'd had an agenda going into each encounter. He'd been painstaking, his actions measured - and he'd never, never lost control.

Now he inched closer to the Valkyrie. "I was generous with my attentions. And I was always in complete control of myself, able to go as long as I needed to go..."

"In order to be generous," she finished for him in a breathy voice. "You must have been devoted to women."

"I was." To women, yes, though never to one. "But that's not all. I - " He stopped.

"What? What were you going to say?"

"I don't want you to think..." He trailed off, running his fingers through his dark hair. "Damn it, I fought just as hard as my brothers in the war."

"Murdoch, sometimes history isn't kind - "

"I don't want you to believe that I shirked my duties. I dug in just as doggedly to protect our people. And I always came through when it counted. The only difference between me and my brothers is what we did in the downtime between conflicts. Sebastian spent his time reading, Conrad disappeared for reasons unknown, Nikolai paced his tent with the weight of the world on his shoulders. I was carefree... "

"And you enjoyed women," she said. "Why do you care what I think about you?"

Why? He had no good answer for that. Because the blooding tells me to. Everything he'd been thinking and feeling tonight was dictated by it.

That had to be what was happening to him. Or else he was a masochist about to get attached to a woman he could never touch.

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