"How old are you?" he grated, opening his eyes.

"Physiologically, I'm twenty-five. Chronologically, I'm…not."

"So you are an immortal?"

An amused smile played about her lips. "I am." She pulled on one of his shirts though it fell far off one shoulder and well down her legs.

"Why did you stop aging at twenty-five?"

"When I was strongest. Not for the same reason you were frozen at…"—she trailed off, eyeing him—"thirty-four?"

"Thirty-five. And why do you think I stopped aging then?"

She ignored him to continue digging. After a few moments, she plucked out an old bejeweled cross from his bag. She pinched the relic, holding it away from her, keeping her gaze from it. "You're Catholic?"

"Yes. It was a gift from my father." To help keep him alive in wartime. Wroth shook his head at the irony of just how well it had worked. "I thought I was the one who should be repelled by it."

"Only a turned human would say that. Besides I'm in no way repelled. With jewels like that? If I look at it, I'll want it."

"So you wouldn't want it because you're Catholic, I take it?"

"My family was very orthodox pagan. Can I have?" She held it forward, still not looking at it. "Can I, can I, Wroth?"

"Put it back," he said, fighting the unfamiliar urge to grin. With a pouty expression, she returned it, mumbling something about tightfisted vampires, then dipped her feet into his boots. When she turned to him with her hands on her hips, his lips almost curled at the sight of her, a mad pagan immortal swallowed by his boots.

"What did your mother feed you?" she teased. "Renaissance anabolics?"

His urge to smile faded. "My mother died young."

"So did mine." He thought he heard her murmur, "The first time."

"And I was born after the Renaissance."