“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.”