He slapped himself a couple times to dislodge his own hang-ups and reached for her again, settling his hands on her shoulders.
She’s just another mortal, he told himself.She might be cute, but they’re a dime a dozen with lifespans like mayflies. Do your job and move on.
He leaned in even closer this time, practically touching her nose with his own. Ensnaring her gaze once more, he whispered, “Forget.”
A second of silence passed, and he held his breath in anticipation.
“Why do you keep saying ‘forget’?” Cora asked, her eyes as clear as a placid spring lake.
Son of a bitch, he cursed internally.
Frowning, he dropped his hands. “It’s a framing word. Once I capture your psyche with my own, I am able to form the compulsion around all the things I need you to forget. If I used a different framing word, it would go in a different direction.”
Cora tapped her finger to her chin, seemingly intrigued by his statement. “So, if you said ‘laugh’ then you could start listing all the things I would laugh at from then on?”
“Something like that,” he deflected and began stalking around the room. His mind sifted through all the things he knew about compulsion. There was usually only one reason a vampire couldn’t compel a human, but that was simply impossible. He would have known ifthatwas the case.
Just to be certain, he took another deep inhale of her scent. Delicious, no doubt, but not quite the perfect complement to his own. Too much of that medicinal stink. And he had felt nothing when he touched her skin.
He had touched her skin, hadn’t he? He was pretty sure he had to have grazed it at some point with all the times he grabbed her. She did have that bulky sweater on, though…
A scuffling noise pulled his attention back to the present, and he whirled around to see Cora edging slowly toward the back door. He couldn’t help but smile at her attempt to escape. He had to give the girl props. She had moxie.
“You can’t outrun me, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he insisted, crossing the space between them in the blink of an eye.
She lifted her chin defiantly. “I wasn’t trying to. I just… wanted some fresh air.”
He almost laughed at her pathetic attempt to deceive him, but she did have a point. The factory was damp and musty, and he suspected its original purpose had been the manufacturing of petrochemicalsbased on the lingering odor. Perhaps some fresh air would help him figure out a plan. The sun should be close to fully set by now, so it wouldn’t tax him much, if at all, to be outside.
“Fine,” he said, stepping aside and gesturing to the door. “After you. Just don’t bother running. We both know you’ll never get anywhere, and it’s a tad insulting at this point.”
They emerged from the building, and the soft glow of sunset settled over them. He took in a deep inhale, gagged, then debated heading back into the factory. He forgot how badly Los Angeles stank when you could smell all the layers of filth beneath the fresh ocean breeze the humans raved about.
Striding over to Cora’s Mazda, he settled onto the vehicle’s partially dented hood.
Cora crossed her arms and glared at him. “You’re going to scratch the paint. Go lean on your own car.”
He raised an eyebrow at her then flicked his eyes over to the pristine McLaren GTS.
“Fine,” she conceded with an exaggerated huff, sliding up next to him on the hood of her beat up Mazda. “What now? You can’t compel me?”
“Seems like,” he grumbled, racking his brain for possible options.
“If you’re having performance issues we can always try again later,” she offered pleasantly. “Or never. Never is good for me.”
He shot her a scathing look that might have wilted a lesser woman. “There are no issues with my performance.”
She rolled her eyes, and he almost volunteered to prove right then and there just how good his ‘performance’ could be. But he was getting sidetracked. She had that effect on him, and it was becoming increasingly aggravating.
Beside him, Cora jolted upright. “You aren’t going to kill me now,are you? I know how these things work. You can’t leave any witnesses, can you?”
Before he could say a word to assuage her fears, Cora leapt from the hood of the car and took off down the dirt road that led back toward the main street. The fact that she held her auditions in such a secluded place really made him question her self-preservation instincts. Although, she was pumping her little legs faster than he would have thought her capable of, so maybe she had some semblance of a will to survive.
He took a deep breath despite the unpleasant odor and counted to ten to calm his swirling thoughts. Then he stood, dashed over to where she had made it perhaps two hundred feet away, and snatched her up. Slinging her over his shoulder like a sack of rice, he marched back to the parking lot. Her little fists pounding against his ass felt a bit like a massage, and he had to suppress a chuckle that she was even trying to fight him. She didn’t have moxie, he decided. She had reckless determination.
Cora didn’t cease her kicking and screaming until he deposited her roughly onto the hood of the Miata. He winced a bit at the new dent he’d just added, but given the state of her car he doubted it harmed the value that much.
“Stop,” he growled as she scrambled to get down. “What did I say about running?” When she just glared back at him, he added, “I don’t kill humans. I told you I wasn’t going to harm you, and I meant it. Now would you just give me a second to think?”
