Destined to Die (The Briar Creek Vampires, #3) by Jayme Morse & Jody Morse (4 page)

“I thought you guys didn’t get along,” Lexi
said accusingly.

“Me and Gabe had to pretend that we didn’t get
along. We made up a fake fight so that my parents would never
suspect that Gabe had any involvement in this.”

“Gabe, why didn’t you tell me?” Lexi felt
herself becoming angry again. “When I asked you about the vial of
blood of Austin’s that I found, you told me he wasn’t a
vampire.”

Gabe looked down at his feet. “I’m sorry, Lexi.
I couldn’t tell you. We agreed that it would be best if you didn’t
know anything about Austin being alive or being a vampire . . . or
anything, for that matter. There were so many things that I wanted
to tell you to try to help you, but we decided that it was best to
let you find out on your own or through Austin’s letters.” He
sighed, a guilty look crossing his face. "It didn’t seem likely
that you would have told Violet or Tommy, but Mrs. Lawrence can
read minds.”

Lexi gulped. Mrs. Lawrence really hated her,
which freaked Lexi out. She couldn’t remember what she had thought
while she was in the woman’s presence, but she probably had thought
about something that she wouldn’t have wanted Mary-Kate’s mom to
hear. It would have been nice to have had some type of warning
ahead of time, but it was too late now. Whatever Mrs. Lawrence had
heard, she had heard.

Lexi glanced around the cottage. “So, you’ve
been living here all this time? Both of you?”

Gabe shook his head. “No, not the whole time.
Austin was hiding out at my house for awhile in the
beginning.”

“It’s true,” Austin nodded in agreement. “I
thought you were going to catch me one of those times I peeked out
at you through the blinds.”

“That was
you
?” Lexi asked, surprised.
For some reason, she had thought that Gabe had been the creeper
looking out at her. Actually, at the time, she hadn’t really
thought it was that creepy because she was so busy crushing on him.
It had been almost flattering. Now that she knew it had been
Austin, she felt really vain for thinking that Gabe had been that
obsessed with her, when it hadn’t been him at all.

If Lexi had known at the time that it hadn’t
been Gabe at the window all those times, his mom would have been
her second guess. Even though Lexi had never really had a
conversation with Mrs. Marshall, she hadn’t seemed to like her from
the very beginning for some reason. Lexi was pretty sure that there
was no way she would ever like her now after she had banged on her
car window like a crazy person, demanding to know where Gabe was.
It also probably didn’t help matters that Gabe was here hiding out
with her right now.

Austin nodded. “Yup, it was me.”

“Eventually, we figured that it was way too
risky for Austin to be living across the street from his parents.
If something happened and they realized that he was there . . . we
would have been screwed. So, we came here on the night of the car
accident. The night that I tried to kill you.” Gabe had a genuinely
apologetic tone in his voice and a sad look in his eyes.

“And don’t even get me started on that,” Austin
cut in, an annoyed tone in his voice. “That wasn’t part of the
plan. I had nothing to do with that. The plan was for him to pick
you up and then call me to meet him so that the three of us could
come to this house together. When he called me, he told me that he
killed you and to meet him in the graveyard. I was livid. He should
be relieved that you lived through that accident because if you
hadn’t, I probably would have killed him myself.”

Gabe scowled. “I already told you my
reasoning.”

He had told Lexi, too. Gabe had a vision of
what was going to happen to her if they did run away together . . .
and it wasn’t pretty. He didn’t want Lexi to be sacrificed Salem
witch hanging style like the town was planning, so he thought that
killing her would be a kinder, less painful death. Lexi had mostly
forgiven Gabe for it, but at first, it was only because her mom had
told her to. Lexi didn’t know much about what happened to a person
after they died, but she assumed that ghosts had a good grasp of
what was really going on in the human world, and if her mom could
forgive him, Lexi should be able to forgive him, too. Over time,
she had really forgiven him.

Trying not to think about the painful memories
of that night and the weeks that followed, Lexi glanced around the
cottage. “So, is this your house Gabe?” Normally, a teenager
probably wouldn’t be able to afford their own house (unless he was
Justin Bieber or something), but Gabe wasn’t just an ordinary
teenager. He was a vampire who was over one hundred years old, so
it would make sense if he did own his own home after all this
time.

“No,” Gabe replied. He glanced over at Austin.
“Should we tell her?”

“Yes, you should,” Lexi answered for him. They
both looked at her, annoyed.

Austin sighed. “We might as well. If we don’t,
she’ll bug us all night about it, and I am not in the mood to deal
with that. Lexi, this house belongs to Benjamin Hunter.”

****

Chapter
3

Lexi froze at the mention of her father’s name.
She found herself, for some reason, laughing at the thought that
she could possibly be sitting on the couch in her father’s house.
“What? This can’t be my dad’s house.”

“It’s his,” Austin nodded.

Lexi’s eyes widened. “Where is he? Will he be
home soon?” She tried to hide the excitement that was bubbling
inside of her at the possibility of being reunited with her father.
She had dreamt about this since she had first realized that he had
gone missing, but sometime after she began high school, Lexi had
given up hope of ever finding him. It made it even more difficult
for her when her mom had refused to talk about it all of these
years.

“Well, that’s the thing, Lexi,” Gabe replied
quietly. “We don’t actually know where Ben is. We haven’t seen him
or heard from him in about a month.”

“He let you use his house without telling you
where he was even going?” Lexi asked in disbelief. “Or what, did
you just come to his house because you knew it would be
empty?”

Austin shook his head violently. “No, it’s not
like that at all. He said that we could stay here, rent-free and
everything. It might be hard for you to believe it right now, but
Ben said that he wanted his little girl to be taken care
of.”

Lexi gulped and tried to hold back the tears
that she felt building up behind her eyes. She hadn’t seen her
father since he had abandoned her and her mom before they had left
Briar Creek when she was just a child. When things had started to
get crazy after her mom died and she was stuck living at her aunt’s
house, Lexi had found her dad’s name and phone number online. She
had left him a voicemail practically begging to speak to him, in
the off chance that he would come get her and save her from living
at her aunt and uncle’s house, but she never got a response back.
Of course, that could also be because her aunt had taken her cell
phone away from her and likely would have intercepted the
call.

Since then, Lexi had found out that Mary-Kate
was her half-sister and that she had other half-siblings who were
younger than her. No one would be able to tell her who those
siblings were, except for her father, since even no one in Briar
Creek knew who they were. Lexi assumed that he was trying to
protect their identity so that nobody would be after their blood,
too.

Lexi had known Mary-Kate, though. Finding out
that they were related was really weird. As it turned out, her dad
had been involved with Mrs. Lawrence until he had left her for
Lexi’s mom. Being half-sisters not only added a weird twist to
Mary-Kate and Lexi’s already confusing relationship, but it made
her question whether or not her dad had really loved Lexi and her
mom in the first place. A thought that hadn’t occurred to her
before crossed her mind. She wondered if the fact that father had
left Mrs. Lawrence for her and her mom had anything to do with why
the woman hated her so much.

“Anyway, Ben said he’ll be back whenever he’s
back,” Austin said, interrupting the awkward silence that was
lingering in the room. “There’s no telling how long that will be.
It’s already been months since the last time we’ve seen him . . .
long before you even came here. He called about a month ago, but we
missed his call and there had been a long period of time before
that since we talked to him on the phone.”

Lexi had felt hurt and angry that her father
hadn’t returned her phone call, but it had never occurred to her
until now that he might not have gotten it in the first place or
that she had missed his call back. She’d assumed that he just
wanted nothing to do with her, which didn’t seem like a huge
stretch since he’d never tried to have her in his life before. “How
did you even find him? Or have you always kept in touch?” she
asked, looking up at Austin. As far as she knew, her mom and dad
hadn’t kept in touch. That didn’t mean that her dad hadn’t kept in
touch with her aunt and uncle after all of those years,
though.

“No, the last time you heard from him was the
last time I heard from him until recently,” Austin replied. “I
found him through Mary-Kate. She had his address, which helped me
find his phone number.”

“Mary-Kate has his address?” Lexi squeaked. She
couldn’t help but feel jealous that her father had been keeping in
touch with her half-sister and not her, but that wasn’t the
important thing right now. “You realize what that means, don’t you?
They’ll know to look for us here! They’ll find his address and
figure it out.”

“We’ve already thought of that. Actually, Ben
did. That’s why he suggested that we use his summer home instead,”
Gabe interceded. “Mrs. Lawrence doesn’t have this address.
Mary-Kate knows where we are, though, Lexi. She actually came here
with us right after the accident.”

Lexi turned to Austin as all of the pieces
began fitting together. “You’re the one who she ran away with!”
Aunt Violet had said that Mary-Kate ran away with a boyfriend
immediately following the accident. Lexi had assumed that it was
Craig Lindstrom, her cute gym teacher who had at one point
suggested that they go on a vacation together. She’d caught the two
of them having an intimate moment in the school hallway. Come to
think of it . . . that probably hadn’t even been an intimate
moment. Craig had probably just been drinking Mary-Kate’s blood.
Lexi felt silly that she hadn’t figured it out before
now.

“Yeah, we brought her along with us. It was the
plan . . . until her dad threatened to start an investigation if
she didn’t come back home,” Austin replied. “We decided that it
would be better for her to stay in Briar Creek, anyway.”

“She’s sort of like our spy,” Gabe told her.
“She lets us know what is going on with everyone over there so we
can act accordingly.”

“So, Mary-Kate knows we’re here right now,
then?” Lexi asked. “How do you know that she won’t tell
anyone?”

Gabe shook his head. “She won’t do that.
Mary-Kate’s on our side, whether you want to believe it or not. I
know you’ve always been so suspicious of her.”

Lexi thought that she picked up on a tone of
accusation in Gabe’s voice, but who could blame him? Ever since
Lexi had found a message in Austin’s Facebook inbox from Mary-Kate
that was sent on the night he had died, Lexi couldn’t help but
wonder about her involvement in his death. All of the signs seemed
to point to Mary-Kate having something to do with it. Lexi had
mentioned it to Gabe and had asked loads of questions about her and
Dan, but now she felt silly. She had spent so much time questioning
whether Mary-Kate, her
half-sister
, had been involved in
Austin’s death, when really he wasn’t even dead at all (at least
not the type of dead that Lexi had been thinking).

“I’m suspicious of everyone, not just
Mary-Kate,” Lexi replied quietly, feeling slightly guilty that she
had even asked. Mary-Kate was one of the few people who had been
nice to her – which should mean something because it didn’t feel
like she had been able to trust many people since she’d come to
Briar Creek. “Speaking of which, why should I even trust
you
right now? I saw you talking to Violet and Tommy earlier tonight.
You were helping them look for me. Why would you do
that?”

Gabe looked up at her with his piercing steel
blue eyes. “I had to distract them so that they wouldn’t find you.
We also had to dress in the same Halloween costume so that it would
throw them off if they did happen to see Austin. They would have
assumed it was me bringing you to them instead of Austin leaving
with you. Pretending to be on their side was probably the only way
we could have gotten you out of Briar Creek alive
today.”

“And it was pretty easy, if I do say so
myself.” Austin shot her toothy grin.

“Okay, that makes sense,” Lexi exhaled. She
owed her life to Gabe and Austin. Lexi wasn’t sure how, but she was
going to find a way to repay them both for it
eventually.

Austin stretched and yawned. “Well, I don’t
know about you guys, but it’s been a long, crazy, and exhausting
night. I think I’m gonna turn in.”

“I thought that vampires didn’t sleep,” Lexi
pointed out.

“You’re right, we don’t. We do relax, though.
Which is exactly what I’m going to do right now.”