“With the needle. Comme ?a.” He gestured at his forehead.
I laughed in spite of myself. “No. I heal too fast.” He looked a question. “The one and only time I tried earrings, I had to tear them out of my flesh after it grew over them. It took about an hour.” I really didn’t want to know what ripping off half my eyebrow felt like.
“You heal faster than a human, but slower than a vampire, yes?”
I stared at him suspiciously. I hoped he wasn’t asking for future reference. “Depends on the vamp.”
“Then your kind gains in power over the centuries, as we do?”
I didn’t feel like doing Dhampir 101. Especially since the answer in my case was no. “Depends on the dhampir.”
To my surprise, Louis-Cesare took the hint and backed off. “There are other types of jewelry,” he commented, as if that thought had never occurred to me.
“Bracelets and necklaces rattle at inconvenient times and are hazards in a fight,” I told him shortly. I’d found that out the hard way, when a vamp almost succeeded in strangling me with my own choker.
“You do not have to fight every day.”
“I don’t have to eat every day, either, but I get really cranky when I don’t.”
“Comment?”
“Never mind.” I could live without rehashing my physical inconveniences. “Hair color is the only ornamentation both my body and my profession can handle,” I added, to forestall more questions.
“Ah.” He looked like something I’d said had finally made sense. “That explains the purple.”
“Aubergine.”
Louis-Cesare looked like he was going to argue the point, but thought better of it. “Who is Claire?” he asked after a moment.
I narrowed my eyes. What was with the twenty questions all of a sudden? Was he trying to psychoanalyze me, find some sort of weakness, by asking about my life, my friends? Had he forgotten already who Daddy was? If any form of mind games worked on me, Mircea would have had me fetching his slippers long ago. I gave him a flat look and munched bagel.
“If we are to work together, we should know something about each other,” he noted calmly. He probably thought he was hiding it, but the lazy regard held cool, critical assessment. Apparently, my new partner wasn’t convinced that Mircea hadn’t saddled him with a liability. That made two of us.
I returned the appraisal, looking him up and down in a deliberately brazen way. A sunbeam was dancing on his hair like a captured flame, highlighting a few shorter strands that curled just below the strong line of his jaw. The color went well with the creamy cashmere and the eyes, which, at the moment, were a guileless, angelic blue. I concluded my own assessment: sophisticated, dangerous and sexy as hell.
Something must have shown on my face, because he smirked slightly. Smug. Good looks aside, I decided furiously, Louis-Cesare really didn’t have much to offer. He was a judgmental, condescending, self-important son of a bitch. Like every vamp I’d ever known, come to think of it.
I leaned back in my chair, stretching luxuriantly, deliberately letting my jacket fall open. Predictably, his eyes moved down my body—some things outlast even the change. I grinned and he looked away, a rueful smile twitching at his lips. I finished breakfast in peace.
When I’d polished off the last, calorie-laden bite, I pulled out my pathetic excuse for a cell phone. As expected, it had gone belly-up yet again. Portals play hell with anything magnetic, not to mention that the evil thing had come with a couple of built-in quirks. On Drac’s trail, the last thing I could afford was faulty equipment, but my nerves were in no shape for fine-tuning anything. I went through the usual routine, and when it still wouldn’t come on, I slammed it down on the table and glared at it.
Louis-Cesare picked it up. He looked it over, then quirked an eyebrow at me. “If I can repair this…”
“Yeah?”
“Then I choose the topic of conversation.”
I gave him a look. Most centuries-old vamps didn’t even know what a cell phone was, much less how to fix one. Technological troglodytes, almost every one. “You think you’re up to it?”
“Are we agreed?”
“Sure. Go for it.”
He regarded the small white devil for a moment, then turned it over in his hands. He pressed, poked and fiddled with the quiet assurance of a man who thinks he knows what he’s doing. I watched him, secure in the knowledge that there was no way he’d be able to—
The LED display flickered to life. Louis-Cesare held up the phone. “Fixed,” he said unnecessarily.
“My hero,” I replied drily. Like hell it was fixed. I hadn’t spent months tinkering with the damn thing without learning its vicious little tricks.
“Who is Claire?”