I choked on my French Double-O-Seven. “I beg your pardon?”
Jean’s smile widened into a full-out grin. “One should not wear such clothing if one does not wish to receive such invitations, my pet.”
Huh? I looked down at my sweatshirt for the first time. I’d grabbed the first thing I saw in the gift shop and hadn’t even pulled the price tags off. A line of gold crawfish claws danced across the front, with lines of enormous purple type above and below that said “SUCK DAT HEAD” and “PINCH DAT TAIL.”
Gah. “It’s talking about crawfish, not sex. If either of you had been alive in the last twenty years, you’d know that.” Damn it. This was almost as humiliating as hibernating in public. I jerked the sweatshirt over my head and tossed it on the floor. The one beneath it was identical, so I pulled it off as well. I was inside now; my black sweater would be fine.
“If someone hadn’t thrown my coat away and then set a fire I had to run outside to investigate, I wouldn’t have been forced to wear suggestive sweatshirts,” I hissed at Jean.
“Ah, yes, this awakens my memory.” He leaned over and reached beneath the table, bringing out a large plastic bag. “Your eyes will look like jewels wearing this, Jolie.”
Bribes would get him nowhere, but I opened the bag anyway. Holy crap. I pulled out a coat of buttery soft lambskin dyed to a rich teal. I surreptitiously held it up so I could see the size was a six and should fit. It was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t possibly take it. If he thought giving me a … I glanced at the sales receipt that had fallen out on the table, and almost choked. If he thought giving me a $4,000 coat would get him off the hook for today’s behavior he was not only dead but dead wrong.
“This is beautiful, but I can’t take it, Jean.”
“Bah. I chose it for you, so you must have it.” He looked over my shoulder. “And here is Christof.”
I turned and stared. The green eyes still twinkled with good humor; the stylish dark trousers and white shirt were the same. But nothing else. His face had lengthened, cheekbones grown more pronounced, and his hair was not only stylishly short but a sun-streaked blond. “You’re like a shapeshifter, only you change human appearance?”
Christof sat down and sipped from the glass of wine he’d left behind. “Not a bad analogy, Sentinel Jaco. May I call you DJ?”
That would be a welcome relief, since Jean refused to use my “alphabet letters” and Rand insisted on calling me Dru. “Of course. Is this an ability unique to the Winter Prince or to all of the fae? Can you change gender as well?”
“Every one of us who is of pure faery blood can change our appearance at will,” he said. “Of mixed-species fae, it varies. But no, we do not possess the ability to change genders, although that would be … illuminating. Perhaps then I would understand women.”
Somehow, I doubted it. I really had to find time between fires and babies and political crises to do my faery research. “You and Jean and Mr. Capote are friends?”
“Why, yes, indeed.” Christof looked at both of his companions with a bemused expression, and something that had been niggling at the back of my mind finally came to the fore. Gerry had once told me that faeries couldn’t lie, but were masters of obfuscation.
I needed to be very specific and very literal. “How long have you been friends?”
Christof cocked his head and fixed his bright gaze on me. It was probably my lack of sweatshirts, but the temperature around us seemed to drop. “How does one measure friendship in such mundane things as hours or days or years?”
Exactly what I thought. “Have you known Mr. Capote more than six hours?”
It wasn’t my imagination; the room grew colder. People at the next table looked around for the waiter and tugged on their coats. “No,” Christof said.
“Did you know I was born here at the Monteleone?” Capote asked, pulling his suit coat more snugly around him. “Well, that’s what I always claimed back in the day.”
I’d be polite, but my radar wasn’t getting deflected that easily. “I’d heard that, actually. So it wasn’t true?”
“No,” Capote said, laughing. “I was born down the street at Charity Hospital, or where Charity was before Hurricane Katrina destroyed it. Fine old hospital.” He sipped his cocktail and stared into the ether of time. “My mother lived here while she was pregnant with me, though, and a member of the hotel staff drove her to the hospital when labor started.”
“Did she live in the rooms of Eudora Welty?” Jean asked, sending the whole insane conversation into Wonderland territory.