Free Caleb by Sarah McCarty Page B

jerked as she snapped up
her knee. He trapped it between his thighs, grunting when it grazed his balls.
She bucked beneath him. She was no match for his strength. Within seconds he
had her pinned. “I’m sorry. There wasn’t any choice.”
    “You
had a choice. Probably a hundred of them. All better than that.” Allie turned
her head and sank those small white teeth into his wrist. The bite burned
through him like fire, a combination of heaven and hell. Blood scented the air.
His vampire rose to the call. He threaded his free fingers into the soft silk
of her hair and yanked her off.
    “God
damn it, Allie, think.” A shake punctuated the statement. “There’s no
explaining the unexplainable.”
    The
starkness of his night vision turned the glitter of her tears to a silver sheen.
    “You
don’t know my family.”
    “Are
they the open-minded type that can accept the thought of their daughter sucking
their blood?”
    She
gasped and cringed into the mattress. “I would never touch them!”
    “But
they would always wonder if you would, would always speculate if you could.”
    “We’d
work it out.”
    “About
all you’d work out is mass hysteria when people found out vampires really do
exist.”
    “You
don’t know that.”
    “Yes,
I do.” He let her struggle until exhaustion forced her to drop back against the
mattress.
    “Damn
you.”
    He
already was. “There’s no going back. Just forward.”
    “Without
my family?”
    “Yes.”
    Waves
of grief radiated off her. Every shudder in her breath rubbed salt into the
open wound of his guilt. “I hate you.”
    “I’m
sorry.”
    She
took another breath, held it, and then her eyes narrowed and her chin came up.
“If this wasn’t a dream, I’d kill you for putting them through that hell.”
    They
both knew this wasn’t a dream, but if enabling her to pretend for a bit longer
spared her pain, he wasn’t going to stop any sooner than he had to. The reality
was hard to take in small doses, let alone all at once. “Then I guess I’ll be
giving thanks to dreams.”
    He
held her, absorbing her grief and tension as she wrestled with the loss. Silent
tears slid down her cheeks into her hair, dripping onto the inside of his arm
where they lay in a pool of hot accusation. Snippets of scenes with her
brothers and her father raced through her mind along with the love she had for
them. One by one, he muted the memories, creating a buffer to tuck the pain
behind. Gradually, Allie relaxed. Her fingers unclenched and spread over his
shoulders. Her chin came down and in a small, very un-Allie-like voice she
asked, “So, I’m really not dead?”
    “Not
by a long shot.”
    He
brushed his mind over hers again. He felt her hidden determination to reunite
with her family along with the bundle of tension behind her eyes that indicated
her headache worsening. He pushed it back out of her conscious reach and fed
her belief that this was a dream. It wasn’t as easy as it had been before. The
woman’s mind was going crazy muddling what had once been a clear path. He
braced himself as she took a breath. Allie on a tear could lead to anything.
    “When
someone spots me drifting around at night, how are you going to explain that?
Call me a ghost?”
    She
was still working on how to get past her immortality, using logic to make sense
of the illogical. “No.”
    Her
nails dug into his forearms. “My brothers won’t stop looking for me.”
    He
stroked her hair. He could understand that. He wouldn’t either. “They won’t
find you.”
    “Why
not?”
    “I
figured on changing your appearance.”
    “With
plastic surgery?”
    “No.
Illusion.”
    “Welcome
to the witness protection program for vamps,” she muttered under her breath.
    Her
resilience made him smile. “Pretty much, though it was easier in my day. More
space, less technology.” In the last seventy years, hiding in plain sight had
become more difficult; in the last twenty, almost impossible with people’s love
of