Wild and Free (The Three #3)(18)

“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!”

Then, suddenly, I started barking like a dog.

I got three barks out before I heard his voice in my head saying, Stop.

I stopped, lifted my hands, and clamped them over my mouth, retreating three more steps.

“That’s what it feels like,” he said carefully, moving slowly my way. “I had to do it once, just this once, so you’d know how it felt and you’d know what’s happening right now isn’t that.”

I took my hands away from my mouth and said, “But I didn’t feel anything.”

I started barking like a dog again, two barks this time before his voice was again in my head, telling me to stop.

“Again?” he asked.

Was he sadistic?

“No!” I shouted.

Then barked.

Then stopped.

“Do you feel it, Lilah?”

I hit bed, stopped moving, and lifted my hand his way. “Stay away from me.”

“Pay attention, close attention, to everything,” he ordered.

“Please stay away from me,” I whispered.

Then I barked.

And stopped.

But I heard it then. Felt it. His voice in my head, whispering what to do, and the barely perceptible frisson it sent along the back of my neck, both of these beginning and ending in less than a heartbeat.

He stopped two feet in front of me and spoke quietly. “The women I fed from, they know me, they remember me, they remember what we do together. They remember everything except me feeding. I free them from that block when it happens so they’ll want it, ask for it, get into it, but I put that block back up when I’m done with them. When I was younger, I did shit all the time, stupid shit, and I’ll admit, sometimes mean shit. But I learned from that. It can bite you in the ass and it isn’t nearly as satisfying as you’d think it’d be, even if they deserve it.”

He took a step closer.

I leaned back over the bed.

He stopped moving but kept at me.

“The stupid shit I did, the people I did it to, they didn’t know why they were doing what they were doing, or that I did it to them. They knew it wasn’t them, but they still did it. It was f*cked what I made them do, but it was more f*cked watching them react to doin’ something they knew wasn’t in them to do. The women, I erase my bite from their minds. They know they miss it, and when they get it back they think they forgot it, want it, have it, before I take it away again. They just don’t know I’m the one doing it.”