“No,” he said, holding my hands between his. “It’s an incredible gift, especially to someone like me.”
“Why?”
“My special ability involves a sort of mental possession. I can travel into other people’s heads, read their thoughts, see what they’ve done, what they plan to do. Occasionally, if the person I’m occupying is highly suggestible, I can move them around, physically, a little bit like a puppet.”
“Have you ever done that to me?” I demanded.
“I try not to invade my hosts’ privacy.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
Still not responding, he said, “My ability has become more unpredictable lately. I’m not sure why. It’s becoming . . . more. The door is swinging both ways. For months, when I’ve gone into other people’s heads, some of them have made their way back into mine. I’m losing consciousness in the middle of conversations while my mind goes on walkabout and I drag people in. I am walking around my apartment during the day, copying the morning routines of my neighbors. The day before I turned you, I woke up in my hallway, inches away from walking into a beam of sunlight.”
“How is that possible?” I asked.
“Our talents change over time. They grow and mutate. Your friend Jane couldn’t read the minds of vampires when she first rose, but now she’s able to read our thoughts easily, unless there’s some complication like your gift. My talent is just changing faster than I can control it.”
“And how does my gift work? How am I helping you?”
“Because you are suppressing my power. You’re stabilizing me.”
“How?”
“Without even trying, which is the best sort of gift,” he said. “Think about it. You’re one of the most stable people I’ve ever met. You’re nurturing and solid. It only makes sense that you would provide an anchor for the people around you.”
“But how did you even know that this would be my completely passive and useless-to-me gift? How did you know to turn me?”
“I was in the Hollow, months ago. You were sitting at a coffee shop at the hospital. I was visiting a human acquaintance who had gotten into a, let’s say, disagreement with a business associate.”
“So many of your stories involve violent disagreements.”
He poked my side, continuing as if I hadn’t said anything. “I passed by the coffee shop, and I saw you there. And you looked so very miserable. I don’t think I’d ever seen a human look so hopeless in all my life. I felt something for you. And I hadn’t felt anything for anyone, besides myself, in a long, long time. I couldn’t help but slip into your head, to see what was making you so unhappy.”
“So you have been in my head.”
Still no acknowledgment that I’d spoken. “I could sense it, that latent power, bubbling under the surface of your blood, the ability to suppress the abilities of the vampires around you,” he said. “You were my salvation, my solution, and you didn’t even know it. I settled into your memories, learning more about you. I saw you fighting with your husband, just before he died. I saw you sitting in the doctor’s office, receiving news about your test results. I saw your little boy sleeping and your terror at never being able to see him grow up. And before it even fully formed, I could see the birth of the inspiration for your plan to become a vampire. I knew you were going to follow through with it. And if you weren’t careful, you would either find some brutish vampire who would take advantage of you—or, worse, a human who would take advantage of you. So I stayed close to you. I dipped into your mind a few more times and made sure I was the first to answer your ad.”
“So you’ve been in my head multiple times?”
“And . . . I may have hired someone to hack the Web site to disable your ad so you wouldn’t get any other answers,” he admitted.
“That is the least disturbing thing you’ve told me so far,” I groused, rubbing my hands over my face. “So you only turned me to save your own ass?”
“It’s not that different from you seeking someone to turn you so you would have more time with your son.”
Damned if he didn’t have a point there. I couldn’t help but feel deceived, though. I’d thought that he’d done something for me for the sake of doing something good, but he’d done it because it benefited him. It felt like that episode in high school when Hal Morrow asked me to Homecoming only to ask me to do his math homework the next day. He’d made me feel special only to yank it out from under me. Finn was an enigma wrapped in a riddle coated in misdirection. He was a burrito of dishonesty.