Caleb

by McCarty, Sarah

  We’re vampires.

  Jared’s previous statement reverberated in her head, growing from a small black speck of knowledge to an ominous dark cloud of incomprehensible certainty that blocked all hope. With a calm slash of his thumb, Jared laid her wrist open. Blood sprayed over Caleb’s mouth and face. Her horror exploded into terror. He’d severed her artery. She needed to clamp off the wound, but she couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything but watch as Caleb’s eyes sprang open in his bloodstained face, the swirling golden light consuming his pupils, a vivid contrast to the crimson stain of her blood.

  Everything in her recoiled. This wasn’t her Caleb. She’d never buy a fancy bra to tempt something like this.

  Could they really be vampires? Even witnessing what she was witnessing, she couldn’t accept it. Vampires did not exist.

  Feed Caleb. Take from me.

  The thought welled in her mind, in her voice, and projected outward. But she wasn’t thinking it. Would never think it.

  She could feel the resistance in Caleb. She encouraged it. The presence in her mind doubled in strength and urgency. Her silent cries of Don’t do it were snuffed out as easily as one extinguished a candle flame.

  Her blood continued to gush, and Caleb continued to resist for precious seconds. The voice echoed in her mind again.

  Feed. For me. Please.

  Allie felt a moment of relief. Caleb would know it wasn’t her by the pleading tone in the request. She wasn’t one to beg.

  Her relief evaporated to horror when Caleb’s mouth opened and, with the speed of a striking snake, he sank his fangs into her wrist.

  As the agony exploded through her body, she dropped to her knees, a chorus of yeses ringing in her head, three of them heavy with relief, one filled with a euphoric jubilation that scared her witless.

  Every movie she’d ever seen, every book she’d ever read projected a vampire’s bite as something seductive, but this wasn’t seductive, this was pain. Pure white-hot agony. It felt like Caleb was devouring her arm whole, his teeth working harder in a constant demand for more, greedily sucking the blood from her body until all she could wonder was how long she had to endure before she passed out.

  She glanced at his brothers, desperate for help. Her eyes met a wall of implacable resolve. They were playing a game in which only they knew the rules and in which her role was clearly one of sacrifice. They could block the pain if they wanted to. Common sense told her that. If they could hold her prisoner in her own mind, they could block her pain, but they wanted her to suffer for their own perverted reasons. Sick bastards.

  She gathered every bit of energy she had left in her rapidly weakening body and met Jared’s cold hazel gaze with her own. Fuck you.

  Surprise flickered in his eyes, whether from her choice of words or the fact that she managed to communicate them telepathically, she didn’t have the strength to debate. She laid her cheek on the side of the bed and followed the trail of weakness out of her body and sighed, “Caleb.”

  CALEB struggled with the lassitude holding him prisoner. Struggled against the weakness dragging him into the sweet, welcoming dark he didn’t want to come back from.

  Caleb.

  The whisper echoed in his mind. Allie’s voice, filled with an unbearable pain and hopelessness. His Allie, of the irrepressible optimism and incredible bravery. Someone had dared to hurt her.

  He crashed into awareness on a surge of primitive rage and endless hunger. Immediately, he knew his brothers were in the room. He could feel their elation mixing with a wariness he didn’t understand until he registered the other presence. Allie. Close and hurting.

  He opened his eyes. She was slumped against the side of the bed, her hair a waterfall of silken brown on the white sheets, her arm stretched toward him, pale and insubstantial. Her body lifeless as the sweet taste of her blood filled his mouth.

  Horror joined his rage. Jesus H. Christ, he was feeding on her. The woman he’d never meant to taint. He broke his brothers’ mental hold on him, now strong enough to do so thanks to the infusion of her blood. He pushed up to his side. The wound on her wrist was a gaping testament to his hunger.

  “Goddamn you,” he swore at Jared, knowing who was behind this. “Did you even have the decency to block the pain?”

  “You were leaving us, Caleb,” Slade stated calmly. “We did what we had to.”

  As if anything gave them the right to use her. Hurt her. His Allie. His woman. The one he’d never intended to claim. He stroked his tongue over the wound, sealing off the sluggish spew of blood. He brushed the hair off her deathly white face, all that bursting life gone, leaving a waxen impression of her true self.

  “She didn’t ask for this.”

  “None of us did, but it didn’t make a difference to you before,” Jared inserted, his bitterness undiminished.

  And it wasn’t going to make a difference now, Caleb knew. Two hundred and fifty years ago he couldn’t face eternity without his brothers, and today he couldn’t face this. He slid down to the floor beside Allie, pulling her into his arms. She flopped like a rag doll against him.

  “Goddamn you all to hell.”

  “We’re already there.”

  The rage swirled again, primitive and nearly out of control as Caleb tilted Allie’s head back. She was almost gone, the flicker of life in her barely detectable. All he had to do to let her pass over was to delay just a little longer, let the lack of blood starve her body of the oxygen it needed and she’d pass cleanly to the other side, untainted. The vampire in him howled at the thought, raged at the concept of losing his mate—primitive as always, thinking in terms of possession—while the human part of him, the part he struggled to keep alive, knew it was the right thing to do.

  He positioned her body, placing her mouth against his chest. He whispered into her mind, to that small, terrified, huddled bundle of light that harbored her soul, “It’ll be all right, Allie girl. I’ll make it all right.”

  Slade came forward, reaching for her, “We’ll feed her, Caleb. You’re too weak.”

  For the first time in centuries, Caleb bared his fangs at his middle brother, ready to rip his throat out if he came an inch closer. “Don’t touch her.”

  Jace caught Slade’s arm and pulled him back. “Leave him be, Slade.”

  Slade jerked his arm free. “He can’t afford the blood loss.”

  “We’ll replace it,” Jared said, as calmly confident as always.

  “What if he refuses to take from us, like before? Caleb can be a damn stubborn bastard when he gets the bit between his teeth.”

  “Before he was protecting her.”

  “And now?”

  “He’ll feed.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  Jared’s gaze stroked over Allie with something akin to satisfaction. “He won’t leave her.”

  Jared was right, Caleb knew. As long as Allie lived, he’d stay in this world, doing what he had to in order to insure her happiness.

  He elongated his pinkie nail to a razor sharp talon and slashed his chest. Blood gushed. He pressed Allie’s mouth to it, blending his mind with hers, soothing her horror with calm, changing the scenario to one of a first date, changing the taste of blood to the effervescent bubble of champagne, ignoring the clenching in his body as her soft mouth moved erotically on him, each brush of her lips whipping through his body on a swelling wave of white-hot pleasure.

  He looked at his brothers across the room as Allie fed, loving them, understanding their motivation. It had always been the Johnson brothers against the world. But no more. It had been their choice to change things. He stroked Allie’s soft hair, better positioning her mouth against him, quelling her struggle for control with another touch of his mind to hers, biting back a moan as her lush hips shifted on his hungry cock. She was everything to him now. Joined to him forevermore. His hope and his reason for being.

  He locked his mind to theirs and spoke very clearly so there would be no misunderstandin
g of Allie’s importance to him. “If you ever endanger her again, brothers or not, I’ll rip your throats out and leave you in the sun to burn.”

  4

  ALLIE awoke to darkness, a scream tearing from her throat. One certainty beating at her mind. She had to get away. Now. Before they got her.

  She couldn’t remember who they were, but she knew they were bad. Very, very bad. She didn’t need to know any more than that. She worked her elbows beneath her, trying to find up in the inky darkness.

  A heavy weight settled over her, rupturing her scream into a gasp. She pushed off the mattress, twisting with the wild cadence inside her, but there was no moving the heavy mass. Pressure countered her every move. She was trapped. In a nightmare. This had to be a nightmare. Only nightmares left a person with this level of unsubstantiated panic.

  “Easy, Allie girl. I’ve got you.”

  The murmur filtered out of the darkness, extending a thread of hope through her hysteria. Caleb. She was lying beneath Caleb. She tentatively reached up and bumped her knuckles on the flat of his chest. She opened her hand and slid it up over the hair-roughened surface until she found the solid curve of his shoulder. A naked Caleb?

  Okay. Maybe this wasn’t a nightmare. Maybe it was more of a fantasy. The heat of his skin seared her breasts, her stomach, and her legs. She wished she felt good enough to enjoy the intimacy, but the mother of all headaches was beating behind her eyes.

  Caleb’s sigh stirred the hair at her temple. She brushed the annoying tendril off her forehead, a tangled strand caught on her first knuckle. She closed her eyes briefly and worked at the knot. The damn thing held.

  It figured. She finally had Caleb naked and horizontal and her hair was a tangled mass of knots, she felt like she’d been run over by a Mack truck, and instead of smelling like the expensive body powder she’d bought just for the occasion, she smelled distinctly unexotic and overworked. Allie put a question at the top of what she suspected was going to be a long list. How in heck had she managed to screw up landing naked with the man of her dreams so badly? There was only one way to find out.

  “If you slipped me a roofie and had your way with my unconscious body,” she warned him, “I’m going to geld you with a rusty knife.”

  “Why a rusty one?”

  Nothing in Caleb’s drawl indicated what he was thinking. She wished she could see his face. “Because that would hurt more and maybe lead to a life-altering infection, which you would so deserve for having fun without me.”

  Another pause and then his chuckle ruffled her hair. The mattress beneath her dipped as he shifted his weight. The fingers of his right hand worked between her skull and the mattress, cupping her head with infinite care as if she’d break with too much movement. The sheets rustled as he braced himself on his elbow. “You can rest easy. Neither of us has had a good time.”

  A shiver took her from head to toe, a faint prelude to the more violent one that followed. Her head ached, her stomach roiled, and she knew, just knew, she wasn’t going to like the answers to the frantic questions humming in her mind.

  “Should I be treating that as good news or bad news?”

  His thumb rubbed her temple. She closed her eyes as the sickening panic receded. “You tell me.”

  “I asked first.” It was very hard to lift her lids. “I need a bath.”

  Caleb’s fingers pushed hers aside. “As soon as you feel up to it, you can have one.”

  Which probably meant no time soon, considering that working the snarl had tested the limits of her strength.

  He demonstrated far more patience with the snarl than she did, untangling it with a few painless tugs. In her current state of mind that was more of an irritation than a plus. She didn’t need anything making her feel more inferior. She batted his hand away. “How did I get here, Caleb?”

  His hand dropped to her shoulder.

  “I brought you.”

  “Why?” She jumped when his fingers touched her upper arm.

  “Easy.” Instead of withdrawing, his fingertips began slow distracting circles on her skin. “You were hurt.”

  “By what?”

  “Something you weren’t expecting.”

  No shit. She tried to remember and couldn’t. “And what exactly was that something?”

  “Me.”

  The answer lay between them like a living thing, writhing under the enormity of all it implied. She tried to shrug off his touch. All she succeeded in doing was stilling the movement of his fingers, but moving or not, Caleb’s touch was deeply disturbing, creating a sense of connection between them, enhancing the certainty of the rightness of lying together like this. Which was crazy. It had to be. She couldn’t have slept through the first time she’d had sex in the last two years.

  Was she dreaming? A dream would explain everything. The blankness in her memory, the surreal feel to the encounter, that overwhelming sense that something important hovered just out of her conscious reach. Those were all classic symptoms of a dream state. She dug her nails into Caleb’s skin. He felt darned real for a figment of her imagination, all tough muscle stretched over hard bone. And warm. Blessedly warm.

  Vampire. The warning whispered in her head. Images of fangs and blood sprinted across her mind in an indistinct blur, followed quickly by a flash of pain and betrayal. Her breath caught as she chased the illusion. Or reality. She couldn’t tell.

  The heavy darkness shifted as Caleb pulled her completely beneath him, the heat from his body settling over her like an electric blanket, alerting her to the fact that she was getting cold. In the dark. Naked. With a man she was in lust with but didn’t really know. Allie braced her hands against his chest, taking in his warmth even as she attempted to hold him at bay. This was weird. Too weird. Figment of her imagination weird. “Are you real?”

  “Don’t I feel real?”

  Lord help her, even her figments were contrary. She slapped at the fingers stroking her arm. “If I could tell that, I wouldn’t be asking.”

  “I’m as real as you can take.”

  “Uh-huh.” Like that told her anything. Allie wished she could see Caleb’s face, but no matter how hard she squinted, she met that wall of darkness and the absolute certainty that she must be dreaming. Vampires didn’t exist. And even if they did, they came with huge honking fangs, decaying flesh, and an accent that sounded more like Hungary in winter than Texas in the heat of summer. She felt with her leg over the side of the bed. Her toe didn’t meet the pile of her clothes that she searched for. It didn’t even meet the floor. She scooted over a little more, stretching farther.

  “You’re gonna fall off the bed.”

  “No I’m not.” Dream or not, instinct said this was a good time to be making an exit.

  Failing to touch the floor with her foot, she wiggled some more and let gravity aid her cause. Her curse followed in her wake as she dropped. Except the floor wasn’t where she thought it should be. It was a good bit lower and landing on it hurt her butt almost as much as it hurt her insides.

  “Shit!”

  There was a rustle and a disturbance in the air around her. Caleb settled beside her with what could only be described as a long-suffering sigh.

  “You don’t listen well, do you?”

  “I listen fine when people say something I want to hear.”

  She felt around the floor. There had to be clothes somewhere. Her hand caught on the trailing end of the sheet. She grabbed it and yanked it toward her. “You just haven’t been saying what I want to hear.”

  The sheet only came so far. Had he nailed the thing to the bed? She used the resistance to pull herself more vertical. She got halfway there before blinding pain in her head dropped her back to the floor. Strong arms came around her. It was disgusting, the ease with which Caleb pulled her against him. Almost as disgusting as her natural relaxation into the hard planes of his chest. She was an independent woman, for heaven’s sake! “As grateful as I am for your sparing my butt, I really need you to let me go.”


  “If I let you go, you’ll fall.”

  She tightened her grip on the sheet. “Let’s just give it a spin and see how I do.”

  From the little dots streaking behind her eyes, she didn’t think she was going to do that well, but she had to try. Her gut said so. Caleb muttered something under his breath. She was reasonably sure it was another curse. Allie scooted to the side. His hand dropped, brushing her hip. She gave the sheet a big yank.

  The damn thing gave as if it hadn’t stood solid as a rock against her a minute before. She lurched sideways, hitting the wall with her shoulder and then her head. She fell to her knees. The two seconds it took to wrap the sheet around her were all her stomach gave her before it rebelled. Nausea rolled over her in a violent wave. Never, ever, had she thrown up this hard. It felt like her guts were turning inside out, but nothing came out. The next spasm sent her tumbling forward. Caleb caught her, his hand a welcome support against the violent heaves.

  “I told you to stay put.”

  If she could have spared the energy to turn, and actually had something to throw up, she would have vomited on his toes. “Shut up.”

  “You need to lie down.”

  She knotted her fist into the sheet and pressed it against her stomach. “I just need a minute.”

  Dear God, please let this be a dream and do not let me be vomiting in front of the stud muffin of my dreams.

  “A minute isn’t going to do it.”

  If this was a dream, it was an annoying one. Not to mention embarrassing. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen this before.”

  She caught his hand before he could move it off her hip. “What exactly is ‘this’?”

  “Your body’s just getting shed of the poison in it.”