She turned to me. For a moment I thought she was angry. I’m still not quite sure what the expression on her face meant, but all she said was, “It’s never over, Bobby darling. Hell doesn’t work that way.”

I climbed in next to her and put my arms around her, and she turned until her rear was against my groin. I did my best to ignore the distracting nearness of her, her warmth against me, the feeling of her breasts moving against my forearms as she breathed.

“I can’t get over how pale your hair is,” I said as I kissed the back of her neck. I spent a lot of our night together doing that. “It’s amazing—nearly white. Do you have Vikings in your family history?” I guess it could have been dyed, although it matched the rest of her coloring, but I had learned enough in my years on Earth to know that, “Do you dye your hair?” is only a marginally more acceptable thing to ask a woman than “When are you expecting?”

She shrugged in my arms. “Vikings? Possibly. But my people were a mixture of so many things: Slav, German, Goth, even Mongols.” She slid back against me, pressing firmly, not in a sexual way but like someone seeking comfort. “There’s an old story about where the golden-haired people come from. A Gypsy story.”

“Gypsy? You have Gypsies in your blood, too?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Her voice had slowed a little; I wondered if she was getting sleepy again. “They had only been in the kingdom for a few generations. But we had a Gypsy servant when I was a girl, and she would sometimes tell me stories while she worked.”

I waited. “And the story? About the people with golden hair?”

It took Caz a moment to get started again. “Yes. She said that once upon a time, a tribe of Gypsies had camped at the base of a mountain. They didn’t go up it, because it was always misty and cold, and at night they could hear voices howling in the wind. The only man who was brave enough to climb it at all was a fellow named Korkoro the Lonely, a young man who had no family of his own. But even he wasn’t foolish enough to climb too high, because he would have been trapped there when the sun went down.

“Then one night there was a terrible, terrible storm, with thunder and lightning. The whole top of the mountain was covered in mist, so that the peak was invisible. A woman appeared near the Gypsy camp—a beautiful but very strange young woman with white hair and blue eyes—”

“Like you,” I said.