Kitchen sounds from the room below gently clattered in his mind. He turned over to let the tired flesh he’d been lying on for the last several hours receive some badly needed fresh blood and rolled up against a soft, warm body – definitely female. An unfamiliar but erotic scent drifted gently across the bed.

For a moment, he thought he’d been dreaming again. Béla was still gone forever and he’d only dreamed her back into his life. In the last hundred years, he’d awakened many mornings with those exact thoughts roaming through his mind – destroying any possibility that today would turn out all right.

He opened his eyes and gazed into a pair of dark, almond eyes almost identical to his beloved’s own.

“I trust you slept well,” Annalisa whispered, smiling at him.

Jake sat up, feeling unusually disturbed. “Did we…” Then he realized that, although she was naked, he was still dressed, though his shirt was open. What was her name? God, I can’t remember!

“Relax, will you?” Annalisa said, grinning at his obvious discomfort. “Nothing happened. Not yet, anyway…”

“I must have fallen asleep,” Jake mused, running his hand through his mussed hair.

“Right in the middle of a sentence,” Annalisa replied. “You were telling me about the wild night life in the mass of boss’ town. Something about a dead stick where people gathered for sacrificial orgies.”

“Boston, Mass.,” Jake corrected her, smiling, now. “The place was called ‘Club Dead’, but you got the last part right.”

“The two women you were telling me about,” Annalisa said, reminding him of their earlier conversation. “They actually had a ‘gun’ fight? You were going to explain that, but you fell asleep.”

Jake grinned. Here was another totally innocent immortal who knew nothing about the efficient ways mankind had dreamed up to slaughter each other.

“Oh, I’ve done my share of killing,” Annalisa said, answering his unspoken thoughts. “And I’m really not all that innocent.”

“I don’t remember,” Jake said, ignoring that last part – it was rough enough trying to pretend that it was perfectly normal to talk to a beautiful, naked body lying right in front of him absently running her fingers along her thigh like she didn’t know it was driving him to distraction.

“I don’t remember,” he began again, “if I explained exactly what a ‘gun’ is.”

Annalisa shook her lovely head of long, dark hair, still staring raptly and leaning on his every word.

“For almost a thousand years before there were guns,” Jake began, “there was black powder than burned.”

“Yes!” Annalisa replied, suddenly brightening up. “I remember that! We used to make little ‘houkas’ and shoot them up into the sky during special celebrations. We have those here! They’re called fire rockets!”

“Yes,” Jake said, almost laughing at her girlish enthusiasm. “Well, we call that black substance ‘gun’ powder. If you make a little metal ball, and put it into a long metal tube…”

“Uh-huh,” Annalisa interrupted. “That’s a rifle. We use them for hunting, sometimes.”

“So you have guns here,” Jake said, knowing he sounded lame, now.

“A rifle is a gun?” she asked. “And you use it for fighting? What do you fight with it?”

“It can be used like any other weapon,” Jake explained. “You can kill people with it.”

Annalisa didn’t reply as she thought about what he said. Jake could tell, though, that the thought of using a rifle to shoot a person upset her – her languid body, which had been relaxed and alluring, was now more controlled; almost tense.

“These women,” Annalisa said, finally. “They fought with rifles? How? It would be a very short battle.”

“It was,” Jake admitted. “But there is a smaller weapon only about this long,” he held out his hands in front of him. “You can carry it in a leather pouch strapped to you leg.”

“Like a knife?” she asked. She knew about knife fights.

“Yes, exactly,” Jake replied. “The rules are: when you begin the fight, both guns have to be in their holsters – pouches, I mean. The one who can grab their gun and shoot the other one first, wins the match.”

“One killed the other,” Annalisa said thoughtfully, “by shooting her.”

“They killed each other,” Jake told her.

“Why?”

“I have no fucking idea!” Jake replied, falling back on the bed.