Why did that not surprise me? “I bet your parents were very proud of you.”
His eyes shone with affection. “They were; they still are.”
“You said you were in Russia until you were sixteen and then your family moved to England. Why did you move if you all loved the compound in Russia?”
He looked surprised that I had remembered that detail, which he had shared with me back in Maine. “My sire was asked to assume leadership of a key military compound outside London when its leader was killed in a raid. We lived there for eight years before my parents were asked to help establish several new strongholds in North America. By then, I was a full warrior and I found the wildness of this continent appealing, so I tagged along.”
“Where are your parents now?”
“They went back to Russia about fifty years ago. My sire is the leader of Miroslav Fortress now. My mother was offered leadership of another stronghold, but she did not want to be separated from him. I see them at least once a year.”
“So, um, what do you do for fun besides killing vampires and bossing people around?”
His eyebrows rose, and I gave him what I thought was my most innocent look. “Come on, you have to do something for fun. Do you read? Watch TV? Knit?”
“I read sometimes.” He named a few books by Hemmingway, Vonnegut, and Scott, and it was no surprise they were all about war. He did not care for television or movies, and according to him the best decade for music was the sixties. I laughed when he admitted that he and Chris had been at Woodstock and I tried to imagine them in the bohemian clothes popular at the time. He said he was there because the event attracted a lot of vampires, and most of the attendees were too stoned or drunk or high on love to pay attention to them. I found it impossible to believe that Nikolas or Chris could go anywhere unnoticed, but I kept that observation to myself.
“By the way, why didn’t you tell me Chris was my cousin? What if I’d started crushing on him like every other girl back home?” Ugh.
The look he shot me was indecipherable. “You were spooked when you learned what you were, and I thought it was too soon to introduce you to your Mohiri family. If it makes you feel better, Chris didn’t know at first either.”
“Just promise, no more keeping things from me.”
“Ask me anything and I’ll give you an honest answer,” he said after a short pause, and it made me feel like there were important questions I didn’t know to ask.
“You ready to try something different?” he asked after we had been sitting for twenty minutes.
“Like what?”
He turned more toward me. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me yesterday about your power getting stronger. You were worried it might hurt your demon or another Mohiri, but I don’t think it will, at least not intentionally. The bazerats and lamprey demons were in their true form, which made them more vulnerable to your power.” He reached over and took my hand in his. “Our demons live inside us and are shielded by our bodies. I think that, and the fact that you also have a Mori inside you, is why your power is not flaring up right now.”
I held my breath as the truth of his words sank in. He was right; my power was not reacting to him at all. The only thing stirring in me were the tiny butterflies in my stomach from him holding my hand. Tugging my hand from his, I tucked it into my pocket. “Was that what you wanted to try?”
One corner of his mouth quirked. “Not quite. We know your power doesn’t react instinctively toward me, but I want to find out if you can use it against me consciously.”
“What?” I jumped to my feet and backed away from him. “Are you crazy? I could kill you.”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that!” An image surfaced of what had been left of the lamprey demon, and I shook my head. “You didn’t see what I did to that demon in Boise. If you had, you wouldn’t even suggest this.”
He stood but didn’t move toward me. “I saw the pictures our guys took before they cleaned it up.”
I took another step back. “Then why the hell would you ask me to try to do that to you?”
“I’m not asking you to do that.” He held up his hands. “Listen to me. I think your power reacts when you are frightened or in danger, and you don’t believe it, but you can control it. You were in mortal danger when the lamprey demon attacked you and you knew you had to kill or be killed, so you did what you had to do to survive. You may have been afraid when you were in here with the bazerats, but you never really felt like you were in real danger, did you? Not with everyone outside.”