Free Thrall (A Vampire Romance) by Abigail Graham Page A

plane. I worked myself up about how horrible the trip was going to be and now I was having a bad dream on the airplane and any minute Andi would shake me awake and tell me we were landing and I would make sure it wasn’t real. I’d find something for us to do, keep us together until we could go home and be safe and I could put this horrible dream in the past and be safe with… with him.
    For a moment I could feel him, but I didn’t know his name.
    Andi lay on the floor, dead, her eyes locked on nothing. She didn’t look scared, she looked deeply confused, confronted with something she did not understand. I looked away from the ruin of her throat.
    Then Vincent grabbed the back of my head and turned me to look.
    “Eyes open, or I’ll peel your eyelids off. They grow back.”
    I looked.
    “That is what you are now.”
    He pulled me up onto my feet and pushed me into a bathroom as big as a small apartment, and there he tore off what was left of my bloodstained, ripped, scorched clothes and shoved me under the spray. The water was steaming, scalding, but it was just water. All feeling on my skin was dying. The whole world felt like paper.
    I killed my best friend. I worse than killed her.

Chapter Seven

    “I tried to stop,” I burst out, sobbing. “I tried and I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop. I tried so hard,” I plunge my face into my hands. “You son of a bitch, why did you make me remember that?”
    “Christine,” he says, rising.
    “Get away from me ,” I hiss, crawling to the other side of the bed.
    I grab something, a vase, and hurl it at him. He plucks it from the air and drops it on the bed where it lands with a soft thump as he comes around the other side.
    “Christine, I can’t let you hurt yourself.”
    “I can’t do this anymore,” I wail. “Just put me out in the sun or drive a stake through my heart. I can’t. I can’t .”
    “Andi wouldn’t want you to-“
    I grit my teeth and snarl at him. “How would you know? You didn’t know her.”
    He stops, and his hands fall to his sides. The look of utter despair clouding his features shocks me into stillness. He puts his hands on my shoulders, and his touch is soft and warm. There’s something in me and my head swims. I can feel it moving around, like there’s something soft and weak crawling in my chest, but the other feeling is there too.
    It’s like when Vincent bit me, that scratchy, insect-ish feeling that moved down my throat now crawling around in my chest, scratching at soft places with hard sharp limbs like blades. My legs begin to tremble.
    He looks at his watch.
    “Come with me.”
    He takes my arm and pulls me into the bathroom, and wipes my cheeks clean. I didn’t even feel the blood leaking from my eyes. There’s a cold pit in my belly, the thirst taking shape, but all I can see is him. He’s so alive. He’s pale but there’s still blood under his skin, he has stubble, I can feel his breath on my cheek as he cleans around my eyes until I pressed them shut and let him wipe away the blood before it dries.
    “Put on some clothes. Don’t think about anything, just get dressed for me. Then, step out into the hall.”
    “The hall?”
    I think about the collar squeezing my neck.
    “You can pass the door.”
    I quickly change out of my sleeping clothes, into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and those sneakers. My fingers tremble when I touch the doorknob. I can feel the collar move, like it’s thinking , but nothing happens. I step out the door and he’s waiting, standing in the hall wearing a jacket and a wool hat, his dirty blond hair tucked up under it and poking out around the fringes. He offers me a hand.
    After a moment’s hesitation, I take it.
    “Where are we going?”
    “Outside for a walk. Here.”
    He hands me a blood pack. I want to throw it away, feeling the cold softness of it in my hands, but I rip the cap off and drink it anyway.
    “Don’t watch me.”
    “Okay.”
    He turns away until I’ve drained