“Well, that’s good,” I muttered.
“Yeah.” He grinned. “And I hesitate to wake the wildcat in you that tells her tale through your green eyes, but it’s also bad. Somethin’ happens in my mouth when I feed, so if I’m doin’ something else at the same time, means I can numb things.”
I was confused. “Numb things?”
“Numb…” He paused and leaned slightly into me. “Things. Things you don’t want numbed say I take a break from drawing to do other shit with my mouth.”
I felt my eyes get big as I whispered, “Oh.”
“Yeah.” His eyes went to my mouth. “Oh.”
I swallowed.
He lifted his gaze to mine.
“I eat real food,” he stated, kindly taking the conversation out of the hot zone. “I do not fly. Nothing like that. Don’t turn into a bat, just a wolf. But as you know, I’m a fuckuva lot faster and stronger than your average man. I hear better, see better, smell better, all that shit.”
“That’s cool, you know,” I told him softly, mostly because, it not being fresh and flipping me out, it absolutely was.
He was back to the bacon. “It’s a burden and a boon.”
I was again confused. “How is it a burden?”
He looked back to me and I held my breath at what was in his eyes.
“You live your whole life being different from everyone, Lilah, things can get shitty. They can also get ugly. People are assholes. The good ones are hard to find. There’s no one who knows what I am except Jian-Li, Xun, Wei, Chen, and now you.”
“But…what about the women you…well, used to feed from?”
His lips quirked at my emphasis on “used to” before he turned away and lifted a hand to grab a plate off the shelf. I lifted my own to grab the roll of paper towels and pulled some off to line the plate.
All this was done while he spoke.
He just didn’t say enough.
“I take care of that.”
I finished lining the plate and looked to him. “How?”
He flipped the bacon again, he just didn’t speak.
Uh-oh.
“How, Abel?” I pressed.
I should have known it was coming when he turned off the burner.
Then again, I hadn’t known him for even a day so I really couldn’t have known.
But one thing I could say for him, he gave it to me straight.
“I can control minds.”
I blinked, stared, then took a step away.
Only then did I breathe, “What?”
“I can control minds,” he repeated.
“Oh my God.”
“Don’t do it to Jian-Li or my brothers. Never. And won’t do it to you.”
“But you can…you can…glamor people?”
His brows shot together. “What?”
“Glamor,” I snapped. “Like, you know, on True Blood.”
His jaw got tight before he relaxed it and replied, “Told you, Lilah, nothin’ you think you know about vampires or werewolves is true.”
“But you said you can control minds,” I shot back, sounding like I was getting panicked, probably because I was.
“What’s this thing from this show?”
That surprised me. “You haven’t seen True Blood?”
“Fuck no.”
“Why not?” I asked. “I mean, if I were you, I’d at least be curious.”
“Lilah, focus. What’s this thing you’re talkin’ about from this show?”
I nodded, took in a breath, and explained, “See, the vamps look into their vic…um…well, the person’s eyes, kinda mesmerize them, and tell them what to think or say or do, or maybe tell them to forget something. Then they think or say or do that, or, you know”—I threw out a hand—“forget it.”
He looked unsettled when his gaze went back to the bacon and he muttered, “Fuck.”
“Oh my God, you can do that,” I whispered.
He looked back to me. “No and yes. I can do that, all of that, but I don’t have to be lookin’ in their eyes. Don’t even have to be in the same room with them. Just gotta have laid eyes on them at one point, be able to remember what they look like, and I have to be relatively close. Then I can do it.”
“Oh my God!” I cried, not knowing if this was awesome or terrifying. “How close do you have to be?”
“Within a block.”
My mouth dropped open.
He looked to my mouth, then back to my eyes. “It will never happen with you,” he stated.
I closed my mouth only to open it to ask, “Would I know if it did?”
There was a brief hesitation before his “Not really, no.”
Not really, no?
I did not like that.
I took another step back.
He turned fully to me and his face got hard. “You have my word.”
Suddenly, I glanced around frantically. “Could this…is all of this…?”
I snapped my mouth shut and took two more steps back.
“Fuck, Lilah,” he bit out. “I did not control your mind to be here.”
“Dude, this, all of it…” I waved both of my hands in the air. “It’s super-sized weird.”
“It’s also real.”
“How do I know that?”
“You trust me.”
My voice pitched higher. “How do I do that?”
“What would you never do?” he asked suddenly.
“What?”
“What would you never do?”
I took another step back, fairly shouting, “I’m not going to tell you that!”