Destined to Die (The Briar Creek Vampires, #3) by Jayme Morse & Jody Morse Page 2

  Gabe pulled a key ring out of his pocket and opened the front door. Once he walked inside, he turned around and motioned for her to follow him. Hesitantly, Lexi stepped inside and looked around.

  From the outside, the cottage seemed like the type of home that would belong to an old woman with twenty cats who spent most of her time knitting itchy Christmas-themed sweaters and baking chocolate chip cookies for her grandchildren. Lexi was expecting to see old wooden furniture and perhaps a fireplace burning. What she found instead surprised her.

  A huge widescreen TV sat against one of the walls in the living room. Nintendo Wii controllers and games were scattered on the floor in front of it. There were black leather couches off to the side in front of a mahogany coffee table that was stacked with piles of dirty plates and soda cans. There were dark footprints that were very visible on the white carpet, which obviously hadn’t been cleaned in awhile.

  “This place is a mess! Do the seven dwarfs live here?” Lexi asked jokingly.

  Gabe turned and looked at her. “No. We do,” he said in a very serious tone.

  Lexi raised an eyebrow. “You live all the way out here? What about all of those times you came to see me at Violet’s house?”

  Since Gabe was a vampire, he (along with almost everyone else in Briar Creek) could turn into a bat at will. When Lexi wanted to see him, all she had to do was think about him and moments later, he would fly into her bedroom window. It usually only took him minutes to get there, though. How had that been possible when he was this far away? It had taken them hours to get to this house, after all.

  “I’m just really fast at flying,” Gabe replied, shrugging. “Sometimes I was already on my way before you thought of me, though. Like I told you before, I have these daydreams that always come true. I also get feelings . . . premonitions, I guess you can call them. I could usually predict when you wanted to see me before I actually heard you in my mind, calling out to me.”

  “That makes sense,” Lexi replied, though she wasn’t completely sure if it did. None of this really made sense. She reluctantly sat down on one of the couches. The leather clung to the back of her bare legs, which were covered in sweat.

  “You had a long day. You should rest up and then we can discuss everything in the morning,” Gabe told her.

  Still somewhat wary of Gabe, she turned to Austin. “Um, I have a little bit of a problem. I don’t have anything here to wear besides this clown suit.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ve already thought of that. Well, I did,” Austin credited himself with a grin on his face. “Why don’t you go wash up? I’ll go find you some clothes to change into.”

  Lexi almost forgot that she was still wearing the clown makeup that Austin had made her apply in the parking lot – or the remainder of it at least, since she was pretty sure that she had sweat most of it off. That must be why her face felt sort of itchy and stiff, like it was covered in dried clay. Getting up, she walked down the long hallway that led to the bathroom.

  She began scrubbing off the makeup with a washcloth that she found laying on the bathroom sink, trying not to laugh at the way she had unevenly applied her lipstick in the dark. The washcloth was navy blue, which matched the color of the walls and the rest of the bathroom décor. Lexi found herself wondering why Austin hadn’t decorated the house a bit less drab. It was beginning to make her feel depressed. How could they have possibly used it for however long they had been here?

  Moments later, there was a loud knock at the door. When Lexi opened it, she found Austin staring back at her with a pile of clothes in hand. “Thanks,” she muttered as she took them from him, thinking about how awkward it was for her guy cousin who she hadn’t seen in years and who she had thought up until tonight was dead to be handing her a lacy black bra. It was even stranger to think that he had somehow rummaged through her underwear drawer without her knowing. Just the thought made her feel uncomfortable, even though she knew it had been necessary.

  Once she had changed into the clean pair of Victoria’s Secret purple sweat pants and the white t-shirt that Austin had given her, Lexi went back into the living room, where she found Gabe and Austin talking in low whispery voices. As soon as they saw her come into the room, they stopped talking. Gabe folded his hands, as though he was trying to hide that they had even been talking.

  “Okay, look,” Lexi said, taking a seat on one of the couches, “I can’t wait until tomorrow . . . especially not if you’re going to be talking about everything behind my back all night. I think both of you owe me some answers right now. What the hell is going on?”

  There was a long silence before either of them said anything; both of them stared off into the distance, without meeting her eyes. “You tell her,” Gabe said finally, looking down at the floor.

  Austin took a deep breath. “Alright, it’s sort of a long and crazy story. You probably won’t even believe it all … but bear with me here, okay?”

  Lexi nodded. Ever since she had found out that she came from a special bloodline that could save an entire town of vampires from the curse that a bitter witch had placed on them, she was willing to believe pretty much anything. Everything in her life lately was far-fetched, but it was definitely true.

  “Well, for starters, let me just tell you that my mom and dad don’t even know that I’m still alive. They can’t find out now or they’d be furious at me. I’ve been hiding from them.” Austin sat forward and clasped his hands together. “My parents were planning to kill me.”

  “What? Why would they kill you?” Lexi asked, shocked. It had always seemed like her Aunt Violet had cared so much about Austin. He was her son, after all. Lexi had even figured that Violet was trying to replace Austin with Dan Nichols, his best friend, because she missed having her son around so much.

  Then again, thinking back to when Lexi had first arrived in Briar Creek for Austin’s funeral, Violet had seemed a little bit less sad than a mother who had just unexpectedly lost her only child.

  Lexi half-wondered if Austin was a closer relation to her then she had realized. “Are you a Hunter, too? Are you here to tell me that you’re really my brother or something?” It wouldn’t be all that far-fetched. She had found out since she’d arrived in Briar Creek that she had a half-sister. If Austin did share the Hunter bloodline, it would make more sense why Violet and Tommy wanted to kill him.

  Austin shook his head and laughed. “No, I’m not your brother . . . or a Hunter.”

  “Then why would your parents want to kill you?”

  “This is the crazy part,” Austin said slowly, looking up at her. “They were going to kill me to get to you.”

  “What do you mean ‘to get to me’?” Lexi asked. She felt completely confused about why she would have anything to do with Violet and Tommy wanting to kill Austin.

  “My mom has been trying to get your mom to come here for the past few years, and she never would. My mom knew that your mom would break down and rush to Briar Creek when she found out that I was dead. Killing me was the only way that they could get you here.”

  “Wow,” Lexi whispered, trying to wrap her head around the idea. “Why didn’t they just say they wanted us to have a family reunion or something, like a normal family?”

  Austin shook his head. “They tried a few times over the past few years. Your mom said that she was too busy working to come, but I always thought she just didn’t want to come because she and my dad didn’t get along. They needed something major to get her to come here and to bring you with her.”

  Lexi nodded. Her mom had been a physician, so there was a good chance that her work schedule would have conflicted with coming to visit Briar Creek. Deep down though, Lexi had a feeling that Austin was right. She knew that her mom had definitely missed Violet over the years. She had kept a photo of them as teens on her nightstand, and Lexi occasionally caught her crying in phases of depression that she had always thought was related to Briar Creek. There had to be some other reason why she hadn’t wanted to come back to Briar
Creek, her hometown, to reunite with her family, whether it was because she didn’t get along with Tommy or something else. Lexi’s gut told her that it was the latter.

  “I knew that Violet was a bitch and a half, but I didn’t think she would ever sink this low,” Lexi muttered out loud. Since Lexi had been living in Briar Creek, her aunt had really shown her true colors. The truth was that she had acted like a psychopath throughout Lexi’s stay in Briar Creek. She had been super controlling of Lexi’s whereabouts and even tried to force her to date Dan, but Lexi never would have thought that her aunt would have tried to kill her one and only son just so they could get to Lexi’s blood. It seemed really extreme and kind of crazy, but then, everything that had happened since she’d arrived in Briar Creek was crazy. “So, what happened then? Why are you still alive if they were trying to kill you?”

  “Well, they would have killed me but they didn’t get the chance to because I outsmarted them,” Austin said with a smug grin. Lexi could tell that he was proud of himself.

  “Did you run away? Is that why there was no death file for you at the morgue?” Lexi asked, thinking back to when she had done some snooping around the hospital morgue when she was a patient after Gabe had tried to kill her in a car accident. She’d found her mom’s death certificate, which didn’t cite a specific cause of death, but there hadn’t been any file at all for Austin. Lexi’s uncertainty about Austin was beginning to come back to shore. Had Violet and everyone else only lied and pretended that Austin was dead so that Lexi and her mom would come back to Briar Creek? It didn’t seem possible. His funeral had been real . . . very real.

  Austin raised his thick strawberry blonde eyebrows. “I don’t know why there’s not a death certificate for me, but I’m guessing that it has something to do with covering up for Violet and Tom. It’s weird to call them that, but the truth is . . . I don’t consider them my parents anymore. I’m just in the habit of calling them ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ still. Anyway, as usual, the whole entire town was in on their plan. And no, I didn’t run away. I had a better plan than running away . . . a plan that would trick them into believing I was really dead.

  “You see, a few years ago, before my parents began plotting to kill me,” Austin went on, “this was back before they knew that Wilkins’ syndrome was affecting them—”

  “Wow, I thought that Tommy was the only sick one,” Lexi interrupted. “Violet seems like she’s fine.” Wilkins’ Syndrome was the name of the illness that the witch had cast on Zachary Wilkins, a vampire who had attacked the love of her life, Albert Hunter. Since Albert was from the Hunter bloodline, like Lexi, his blood was much stronger and more powerful for vampires than other human blood. It had drawn Zachary to him, but apparently, Zachary had gone too far. The witch was able to find another vampire to save Albert, but their relationship was never the same again because new vampires have a tendency to be out of control. Albert tried to attack the witch, but she managed to save herself by stabbing him through the heart.

  Zachary Wilkins and the other two hundred vampires who were living in Briar Creek were exiled and were sent to an abandoned town called Briar Creek, which did not have any other people for the vampires to feed from. As a punishment for what Zachary Wilkins had done to the love of her life, the witch put a curse on the vampires of Briar Creek. It said that if the vampires fed from each other, they would develop an untreatable illness that would kill them within one hundred years unless they drank from the Hunter bloodline. Even Hunter blood was only strong enough to cure the disease until the person turned eighteen.

  This was why Lexi was so important to her aunt, uncle, and most of the people in Briar Creek; she was the only Hunter under eighteen, and they needed her blood to survive. It was the whole reason they had been planning to sacrifice her tonight. They needed to save themselves, and Lexi’s blood was the only way they could possibly do that.

  “Violet might seem fine, but she’s really not,” Austin continued, interrupting Lexi’s thoughts. “The disease hasn’t progressed as much for her as it has for him, so she has much more time to live. I’m not sure how much you know about the disease, but it’s possible to slow down the illness if you don’t drink blood from another vampire again. My dad . . . err, Tom . . . never stopped, though. He couldn’t stop. It’s like he’s an addict. He drinks from Violet all of the time.”

  Lexi didn’t bother to ask why Tommy would continue to drink from Violet, knowing what it would do to him. She knew from her own experience that it was a very intimate experience when a vampire drank from a human. When Lexi had let Gabe drink from her, it had been like they were the only two people in the world at the time.

  Lexi was thankful when Austin interrupted her thoughts of her uncle drinking her aunt’s blood. The idea kind of grossed her out.

  “Anyway, before they knew that they had the disease, my parents had been trying really hard to convince me to become a vampire, too. They wanted me to be like them and like all of the other people in Briar Creek. I told them I didn’t want to and they didn’t like it. It was a constant argument between us. I never let them win.”

  Lexi’s mind flashed back to the mysterious entries that she had found in Austin’s journal. She was pretty sure that he had made a reference to this in there somewhere. But that still didn’t explain what he had meant when he said his girlfriend, Mary-Kate Lawrence, was trying to pressure him into doing something that he was really against. Lexi sort of wanted to ask, but she didn’t want Austin to know that she had been snooping . . . assuming that Gabe hadn’t already told him (which seemed likely now that she knew that they were working together).

  “Well, I still was against becoming a vampire, but once I found out that my parents were plotting to kill me, I knew that I had to make the change,” Austin continued. “If I ran away, there was always that chance that they would track me down eventually. Becoming a vampire was the only way for me to trick them and still be able to live. Vampires can’t die unless you light them on fire or put a stake through their hearts. So, I came up with this plan to become a vampire and to play along when the time came for them to kill me. I would go through the motions when they killed me without struggling, and I would really make it seem like I had died so that they would buy it.”

  “You were at your own funeral. I saw you laying there in the coffin. How could you let all of those people believe you were really dead? Wait, how is it even possible that you got away with that?” Lexi asked incredulously. “I mean, can’t vampires smell when someone’s a human? Couldn’t they smell that you weren’t one anymore after you changed into a vampire? And wouldn’t they know that you were still breathing?”

  Austin shook his head. “No. We – I mean, vampires – are technically dead already. I didn’t have to worry about anyone noticing my chest moving or holding my breath or anything like that because we don’t breathe, just like we don’t have a pulse. As for smell, that would be true under normal circumstances, but my mom and dad and most of the people who were at the funeral . . . except for you and your mom . . . have Wilkins’ Syndrome. It’s affected their sense of smell. Plus, I only had to fake dead for a little while. The plan was for me to play dead through the funeral and until after they buried me so it really seemed like I was gone. Except somebody left me in my grave longer than they were supposed to,” he said, glaring at Gabe.

  “Hey, I already apologized for that,” Gabe replied, holding his hands up in defense. “I got held up with some things. It’s not like I was going to just leave you in there forever.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t you worry. I will remember that if you ever get stuck six feet below and need a hand,” Austin said, rolling her eyes.

  Lexi attempted to stifle her giggles as the two of them continued to bicker.

  A thought occurred to her. “Austin! What’s going to happen if your mom finds out you’re still alive? Wouldn’t it have been easier for you to just tell your parents that you decided to become a vampire? Then, they wouldn’t have killed you.”


  “No,” Austin replied. “Their plan still would have been to kill me, and if they knew that I was a vampire, they would have actually succeeded at it. All they would have had to do was set me on fire or put a stake through my heart, and their problem would have been solved. Besides, pretending to go along with their plan was really the only way I could figure out to get you here . . . and I needed for you to come here.”

  Lexi felt the anger rising to her cheeks. “You needed me to come here? Why? So because of this, because of you, my life pretty much sucks right now.”

  “I didn’t know my mom and dad were going to kill Aunt Eileen, Lexi,” Austin replied, as though he were reading her mind. He looked down at his hands. Lexi noted the sincerity in his voice and the look of honesty on his face. “If I had known that was part of their plan, I would have found another way.”

  “Wait, so you know for sure that they killed her?” Lexi asked, her voice accidentally squeaking. She knew that her mom hadn’t died from E. Coli poisoning from consuming beef like she had been told because her mom was a vegetarian. This was the first time Lexi had heard anyone mention that her aunt and uncle had something to do with her mom’s death, even though it had always been in the back of her mind that they had played some role in it.

  Austin shrugged. “I wasn’t there, so I don’t have any proof of it, if that’s what you’re asking. But you and I both know that your mom didn’t just coincidentally die while she was with Greg Lawrence. Something had to have happened that night.”

  It made her feel relieved that someone was finally on her side. Violet and Tommy had claimed that Lexi’s mom was with Greg Lawrence, the town mayor, the night she had died. When Lexi talked to her mom during one of the times that she came to visit her as a ghost, her mom had told her that Mayor Lawrence had been asking for a favor that night: Lexi’s blood. She had told him that he couldn’t have it.