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  Murdoch watched as Daniela’s friendly demeanor turned cold in a flash. “Because I’ll turn your blood to slush if you do,” she said, raising her palm to her lips.

  She was so small compared to the hulking demon, but Deshazior held up his hands in surrender.

  “Now, now, beauty. No need to be freezin’ an ole demon like me. It hurts.” When she dropped her hand, he added in a mutter, “Ladies goin’ with vampires? City’s gone to hell whilst I’ve been away.”

  “I’m not going with him. We’re in an unlikely alliance on a dangerous mission to help Lorekind. An alliance with an expy date of… oh, dawn.”

  “This one’s lookin’ at ye like yer together,” the demon said. “All possessive-like.”

  That noticeable?

  “And how am I looking at him?” Daniela asked in an innocent tone.

  “Like ye’d be well rid o’ him,” Deshazior said with a chuckle. “So what can I do for ye, luv?”

  “Have you seen Nïx?”

  Who was that? And why was Daniela seeking her?

  One of the demons with Deshazior said, “Nïx is out tonight?” He anxiously smoothed a palm over each of his horns and straightened his collar.

  “I guess that answers that question,” Daniela said with a sigh. “I’m also looking for Ivo the Cruel.”

  A flicker arose in Deshazior’s eyes as he said, “Aside from the one loomin’ over ye just now, I haven’t seen any vamps.”

  He’s lying.

  “That’s a shame.” Daniela pouted, traipsing closer to him. “I thought I could count on you for information.” She reached up and ran the back of one claw along his right horn. At once, Deshazior’s muscles tensed. The other demons gasped and groaned.

  Murdoch didn’t see why her behavior would elicit a response like that, but their eyes were spellbound by her stroking claw.

  Deshazior had begun quaking. “Givin’ me fits, Valkyrie!”

  “A word alone,” Daniela purred. “Outside.”

  With a defeated exhalation, the demon followed them out, mumbling about teasing Valkyries and “horn jobs.”

  Once the three were out on the street, Deshazior glowered at Murdoch. Then, after an uneasy glance back at his crew inside, he muttered to Danii, “Ivo’s here in the city. I don’t know where, but watch yerself. He’s got some on his side that even I wouldn’t tangle with.”

  “How do you mean?” Murdoch said.

  Deshazior ignored him. “And if ye’ve need of a partnership to save Lorekind, I’m yer demon.” He thumped his colossal chest. “No need to sully yerself with the likes of him.”

  Murdoch eased his lips back from his fangs.

  “I appreciate the offer,” Daniela said. “But I can make it a night. Will you leave word at the coven if you spot them?”

  “Aye—” Suddenly the demon began disappearing, as if he were involuntarily tracing. “Damn it! A swimbo calls.”

  “What the hell is a swimbo?” Murdoch asked; they both ignored him.

  The demon gazed down at Daniela as he began to fade. “Remember, ice maiden,” he murmured intently, “my other offer still stands as well.”

  The vampire was in front of Desh in an instant. “Whatever you offered, she’s not interested.” But the demon was already gone.

  Murdoch turned to her. “What was that?”

  “I told you I might have to flirt to get some information. Now will you admit you’re jealous, vampire?”

  He surprised her by answering, “Yes.” Just when she felt a flare of pleasure, he doused it by adding, “Though I’ll be damned if I know why.”

  “You truly just said that?” She glared at the sky, imploring it for patience before facing him again. “Maybe because I’m cute and intelligent and I was in your bed last night, and because—oh, I don’t know—I’m your Bride.”

  “What was the demon’s offer?”

  “That’s between me and him.”

  “Is he your type, then? Really? You like behorned demons who growl yar! after every bloody sentence? I thought you’d be more discerning.”

  “And I thought you were supposed to be seductive and charming. You’re just insulting, gruff, and brooding.”

  “With you.” He took a step closer, frustration in his expression.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been jealous before. And I’ve never been clumsy with words around women.” At that moment, a pair of name-tagged conventioneers ogled her, earning a killing look from Murdoch. When they hurried on, he said, “This is not my typical behavior.” He exhaled. “And I can’t control it.”

  He looked defeated, like he couldn’t reason out this situation and might just stop trying to. “Valkyrie, I’ve never been more at odds with myself in my entire existence.”

  She almost felt sorry for him, and gentled her tone. “Maybe I’m getting under your skin.”

  He muttered, “Like a thorn.”

  Danii was just contrary enough to be pleased by this. “Every thorn has its rose, vampire.”

  CHAPTER 18

  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 Nïx?”

  “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 Suavé? 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 fema
le—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.

  CHAPTER 19

  “I’ll tell you why if you reveal the demon’s offer to you,” Murdoch said.

  “No, thanks, vampire, I gave you a surplus of information last night,” Danii said tersely, still annoyed that he’d interrogated her.

  “You did tell me much,” he said. “But I believe little of it.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You said you didn’t eat.”

  She raised her brows.

  “Can you?”

  She shrugged. Valkyries could, but since they took nourishment from the electrical energy of the earth, they didn’t need to. Besides, refraining from eating was a sort of inherent birth control. Her kind had no courses and were infertile unless they “ate of the earth.”

  “You told me you were two thousand years old,” he said, keeping his gloved hand on her lower back—and keeping pedestrians away. Since he’d learned about the threat of thermal shock, he seemed to be continually checking on how warm she’d become, monitoring her to see if her breaths were smoking.

  His attention was flattering, softening some of her anger. “Two thousand is roughly my age.”

  “And two of your three parents are gods?”

  She gave him a pointedly blank expression, which she could tell irritated him.

  “Then why would they let you get hurt?”

  “Because they’re asleep.”

  “Gods… sleep?”

  “To conserve power. They derive strength from worshippers. And when was the last time you passed a temple dedicated to Freya?”

  He deftly drew her out of the way when a full go-cup dropped from a balcony above, then said, “The one thing I believed without question? You told me that if you started kissing me”—his shoulders went back, cocky grin in place—”you didn’t think you’d be able to stop.”

  Could he be any more handsome? Though her attraction to the vampire was wrong on so many levels, it remained as fierce as ever.

  All night, Danii had been drawn to him. Not surprisingly. Every time she regarded those broad shoulders and steely gray eyes, she recalled their time in his bed. Whenever that lock of hair fell over his forehead, she’d just stopped herself from sighing.

  Though she was an ice queen, acting coldly uninterested with him was becoming more difficult. And coldly uninterested was her shtick!

  When he’d said he’d been the best lover…? Gods help her, she’d believed him.

  But she’d also been anxious about him possibly biting her. She didn’t think she’d ever forget the look in his eyes this morning. “We’ll never find out about the kissing, will we?”

  His brows drew together, as if she’d uttered something monumental. “No. We won’t, then. Ever.” They walked on in awkward silence until she directed him off Bourbon.

  “What’s this store like?” he asked.

  “It’s owned by a purported voodoo priestess named Loa.” Her very name meant voodoo spirit.

  “Loa is a female shop owner?”

  When Danii nodded, he perked up. And considering what Loa looked like, Danii mused that this might be a bad idea.

  But Nïx often dropped by there, and even if Loa knew nothing— doubtful—any of her patrons might have information.

  “Does she have powers?” he asked.

  Just as they reached the shop, Danii drawled, “You have no idea.”

  On the door hung a sign with the universal symbol of the Lore, recognized by all Lorekind—except for the Forbearers. Beside it was a sticker with the word Vampires overlaid with a cross bar. Beneath that were the lines, “No shirt, no soul, no service. We use UV protection.�
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  Murdoch frowned. “UV protection? Is that a joke?”

  She shook her head. “It’s candlelit inside, but along the ceiling are UV lights that can be turned on with a panic button—a fail-safe vampire security system.” The Valkyries had wanted a similar setup for Val Hall, but their shrieks would just have shattered the bulbs.

  As unabashed as ever, Murdoch shrugged and opened the door for Danii.

  “Are you sure you want to go in?”

  “You said the owner of this place is a woman? Well, I have a way with women. No panic buttons will be pushed tonight.”

  She rolled her eyes, then entered, with him closely following.

  The front of the shop was a typical tacky tourist haunt, with preserved gator heads and fake gris-gris bags made in China.

  But, like many of the Loreans in the Big Easy, Danii knew there was a back room. Inside those walls was everything from demon-size condoms and non-acetone horn polish to intoxispell hangover relief and ghoul blood remover.

  As expected, candles lit the darkened shop, the bulbs above unused. For now. A lazy, old-fashioned fan buzzed softly, making the candle flames dance.

  “Does that UV really work?” he asked with a glance at the ceiling.

  “Oh, yeah. I was going to swap out the overhead light in your Porsche with one before I left town.”

  “Left New Orleans? Where are you going?”

  Loa sauntered out from the back room, saving Danii from answering. As usual, the sight of Loa made Danii scowl. Gifted with flawless café-au-lait skin and a brick-house body, she spoke with a lilting island accent that men found sexy as hell.

  Would Murdoch?

  Tonight she was wearing an impeccably fitted red silk dress that highlighted her every abundant curve.

  Murdoch gave Loa an appreciative glance, but so far he hadn’t looked like a slavering cartoon wolf in a zoot suit.

  Loa was an enigma. She’d come here—to a town filled with immortals at the most tumultuous time in the Lore—as if she wanted to be first in line for the unrest and war of the Accession.