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“Better than the reverse,” Claire muttered, and tried to take Stinky, probably to leave my hands free in case I wanted to choke a certain vampire.
But I held on. Stinky’s less-than-perfect social skills were keeping Louis-Cesare at arm’s length. And right now, that was where I wanted him.
“But now I am forced to conclude that perhaps I was right in the beginning,” he said stiffly. “Despite not objecting to physical intimacy—”
“Shut. Up,” I begged, but of course he didn’t. Vampires didn’t have the same concept of privacy that humans did, and Louis-Cesare had obviously kept things bottled up as long as he was going to.
“—you do not wish anything more substantive than that. Or am I wrong?”
He stood there, arms crossed, blue eyes flashing. Completely oblivious to the audience, not one of whom was looking away or even pretending to mind his own business. Radu even looked like he might be taking mental notes.
“We’re not talking about this now,” I said, suppressing an impulse to grind my teeth.
“Then when?”
“Some other time! Right now we’re talking about you picking something out of my brain that you shouldn’t have been able to hear.”
“I naturally assumed it was because you had recently ingested fey wine,” Louis-Cesare said. His expression made it clear that this wasn’t over.
“She doesn’t do that anymore,” Claire sai
d, glaring at him. Somehow she and I had ended up on one side of the room and the vampires on the other, a fact that was not lost on Louis-Cesare.
The frown tipped into a scowl. “Of course she does. Although I see no reason why it should concern you.”
“It concerns me because I’m her friend! And it’s dangerous!”
“And that has stopped Dorina when?” he demanded.
“Can we get back to the part about you reading my mind?” I asked, because this was veering into dangerous territory. “You say you can’t, but a week ago you heard me all the way from Chinatown, and you were in Brooklyn.”
I’d gotten involved in a dustup courtesy of Ray, and Louis-Cesare had come to help out. At the time, I’d been grateful. Of course, at the time I’d also been drunk off my ass, which didn’t lead to great decision making.
“Which is my point,” he said impatiently. “You had imbibed a large amount of fey wine that evening, which increased your mental abilities—”
“And that’s my point, because I hadn’t had any last night!”
“If you cannot recall last night, how do you know?”
Because I knew what the level had been in the bottle this morning. I didn’t say, not needing that kind of hell. “Like Claire said, I don’t do that anymore,” I said sweetly.
He narrowed his eyes at me, but before he could say anything, Marlowe, of all people, came to my rescue.
“I have a squad of dead agents,” he said harshly. “And a live dhampir. And I have yet to hear why.”
“It is apparent why,” Louis-Cesare said, his eyes on mine. “We have been pressing the smugglers harder of late, and they have decided to strike back. The more operatives they deprive us of, the longer it will take—”
“Then why leave her? In the right circumstances, she’s as dangerous as another master. In some even more so, as she has abilities we lack!”
And that, I thought, was likely the closest thing to a compliment I would ever get from Marlowe.
Not that I was all that flattered when the next thing out of his mouth was: “They should have spilled her guts all over the pier, right beside Lawrence’s!”
“Typical!” Claire said, looking disgusted. Louis-Cesare apparently didn’t like the comment any better, because his face flushed and he rounded on the chief spy. But then Radu intervened.
“They may not have known what she is,” he pointed out. “She scents as human, and the other telltale signs are difficult to spot. And why would they have been looking for them? There are so few dhampirs; they simply aren’t what anyone expects—”
“It makes no difference!” Marlowe said, brushing that aside. “Whether they believed her to be human or mage or some mutant type of fey—”
