Destined to Die (The Briar Creek Vampires, #3) by Jayme Morse & Jody Morse (7 page)

“As someone who’s known Dan for almost my whole
life,” Austin began, climbing out of the car, “I can vouch for him.
He’s a good guy. He’s on our side. Don’t worry. Now, let’s drop
it.”

As Lexi opened her own car door, she opened her
mouth to say something, but quickly shut it, deciding to keep her
opinion to herself. There was no way Austin was going to let her
win this fight right now. She was just going to have to find a way
to prove to him that Dan couldn’t be trusted. If Lexi knew Dan as
well as she thought she did, he was going to make it really easy
for her.

When she was standing on the pavement, Lexi
glanced around. On the night of the festival, she had tossed her
tote bag into the bushes somewhere around here, but she couldn’t
remember exactly where. It was important for them to find her tote
bag because it held all of Austin’s belongings that had been given
to Lexi by his friend Anna. She’d assumed that everything in the
bag was really important, so they really needed to find
it.

“Question,” Lexi said to Austin, as she
crouched down to look under the bushes. “Why did you give this
stuff to Anna to give to me, anyway? I mean, you were alive the
whole time. You could have just held onto the stuff until you could
give it to me on your own.”

Austin took a deep breath. “I just wanted to
make sure that you would be able to get it . . . if I wasn’t able
to get it to you. I didn’t really know what was going to happen to
me when my mom and dad tried to kill me. I thought my plan would
work, but I couldn’t be too sure. I couldn’t get the stuff back
from Anna at that point because I needed as many people as possible
to believe that I was really dead. I didn’t want to involve
everyone in this. Then, I planted my journal when I knew you would
find it and read it.”

“You knew that I read your journal?” Lexi
asked, somewhat embarrassed. Though she wasn’t sure why she would
be, he had obviously
wanted
her to read it, just as she had
suspected. It was just strange hearing him admit it out loud, but
it also made her feel happy. She wouldn’t have to feel so guilty
about snooping through it from now on; she was supposed
to.

“I didn’t know at first, but I had hoped you
would. The only reason I put the coded messages in there was to
help you. You always liked playing detective when we were kids, so
I knew you would try to figure it out. Or at least, I hoped you
would. Then Gabe came back one day, telling me that you had been
reading it.”

As she continued looking through the bushes,
she thought of one of the questions that had been running through
her mind. “Austin, I’ve been wondering . . . how did Violet and
Tommy try to kill you?” Lexi asked hesitantly. Austin hadn’t
mentioned how they had tried to kill him, so she wasn’t really sure
if he wanted to talk about it. He didn’t seem overly sad when he
talked about his parents attempted murder on him, but she knew that
it had to hurt. She couldn’t even imagine what he was going
through. Lexi also thought that the way in which her aunt and uncle
had tried to kill him would reveal a lot about them. She wondered
if they had chosen to give him a really horrendous death or a
smooth, easy one.

“They had someone attack me as I walking home
from school one day,” Austin answered. “I’m not actually sure who
it was because I couldn’t look at them after they had already
supposedly killed me. Once I was on a ground, they injected me with
a lethal injection. I’d found the injection in our bathroom closet
when I was getting sunscreen a few days before, so I knew it was
going to happen that way.” Austin paused. “I guess they at least
tried to give me a relatively painless death.”

“I doubt any death is painless. Not that I’ll
ever know what a
real
death feels like,” Gabe
shrugged.

Lexi sighed. She really hated thinking about
the fact that Gabe was going to live forever, and she wasn’t.
Checking under a bush, she gasped.

“This is where I put it,” Lexi whispered
slowly. “But it’s gone.”

****

Chapter 5

“What do you mean ‘it’s gone’?” Austin shouted.
“It couldn’t have just disappeared.”

“Dude, keep your voice down or someone’s gonna
catch us out here,” Gabe snapped at him.

“I – I don’t know! I put it here.” She pointed
at the bush, which had bent branches and fresh green leaves that
had fallen to the ground on top of the damp, old-looking autumn
leaves. “See, it was obviously thrown up against this bush . . .
but it’s gone now. Someone must have taken it.”

Austin exhaled, a cloud forming as his breath
hit the cold air. “Who could have taken it? Did anyone see you that
night?”

Lexi shook her head. “I don’t know. No one was
around when I put it here.” She paused, trying to remember that
night but her memory was foggy. “At least, I didn’t see anyone near
me.”

“You should have been more careful,” Austin
snapped at her.

“It was a stressful night,” Lexi replied. “And
it was a last minute thought. I didn’t even think about what I was
going to do with it until I got here, but I knew Violet and Tommy
would have been able to spot me in the crowd if I had been carrying
my tote bag with me. Besides, I wanted to go back for it that night
so that something like this wouldn’t happen, and you said
no.”

“Going back for it that night would have been
dangerous,” Gabe intercepted, his voice calm. “There’s not much we
can do about it now except hope that we’ll figure out who took it,
if anyone did. What exactly was in the bag, anyway?”

“Umm, mostly stuff that Austin gave me.” She
tried to recall everything she had been carrying in the bag the
night of the festival. “I know I had his journal, the code to
figure out what he had written in his journal . . . and some old
book.”

“A very important book,” Austin said through
gritted teeth. “But you’re right. There’s nothing that we can do
about it right now. We need to figure out who has it first. Let’s
get out of here before someone sees us.” He led them back to the
car and climbed in.

As Lexi struggled to buckle her seatbelt,
Austin pulled off the back road and onto Main Street. The Briar
Creek Halloween festival had been held on the street days ago, but
candy wrappers still covered the sidewalks and the smashed
Jack-o-lanterns hadn’t been cleaned up yet. Lexi guessed that it
all had to do with her; by disappearing the way she had, Lexi had
changed the lives of the people in Briar Creek. Some of them were
going to die soon if they didn’t get her blood, so they had
probably been too panicked to bother making the town look pretty.
Some of them might not even live to see it another day.

Lexi would almost feel guilty. Almost. But she
couldn’t bring herself to feel any guilt knowing what they had in
store for her.

Austin brought the car to a slow halt at a
traffic light, and Lexi felt a weird feeling form in the pit of her
stomach. When she glanced out the front windshield, she immediately
knew why.

The red truck that was stopped in front of them
looked familiar . . . really familiar. It belonged to Greg
Lawrence.

Lexi felt her heart freeze in her chest as it
skipped a few beats. “Austin?” she could barely hear herself
whisper, keeping her voice quiet as though Mayor Lawrence could
hear her from inside the truck in front of them. Then again, he was
a vampire, so for all Lexi knew, his sense of hearing could be
heightened and he really
could
hear her. Lexi still had a
lot of learning to do about vampires and the powers that they
possessed.

“I know,” Austin whispered back, obviously
aware of what she was going to say next. “Shit.”

“I knew Dan was a little weasel,” Gabe muttered
under his breath.

Austin turned and looked at him. “We don’t know
this has anything to do with Dan.”

“This has everything to do with Dan,” Gabe shot
back. “If he were doing his job, Greg would still be at Violet’s
house right now so that we had time to get the back instead of
sitting in front of us.”

“Something must have happened . . . something
out of his control. We’re jumping to conclusions. Let’s just hope
that Greg doesn’t see us,” Austin replied.

“I told you we should have gotten the
windshield tinted,” Gabe said. Lexi noticed that his voice sounded
less calm than usual. It was obvious that he was
panicking.

“Well, it’s too late now,” Austin replied
coolly. “Besides, like I told you, it would have drawn more
attention to us. No cars in Briar Creek are fully tinted. The back
window being tinted is distracting enough. Just act
natural.”

“Look, just stop arguing,” Lexi chimed in,
sinking further down in her seat. “We don’t need to fight right
now. We need to focus on not getting seen.” She kept her eyes glued
to the truck in front of them. It felt like the red light had
lasted forever.

When the light finally flashed to its bright
shade of green and the Mayor’s truck began to pull forward, Lexi
held her breath as she watched him glance into his rearview mirror.
When he continued to drive and his facial expression didn’t seem to
register that he knew they were in the car behind him, Lexi
breathed a sigh of relief. They didn’t get caught. They were safe .
. . for now.

*

After they got back to her father’s house, Lexi
found herself feeling disappointed. She was glad to be away from
Briar Creek and all of the crazy people who were out for her blood,
but she didn’t really want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere.
She even missed being able to go to school at a normal high school,
like the one she had gone to in New Jersey. And Lexi still really,
really missed her mom.

“Do you want to play Wii?” Austin asked
unenthusiastically, an obvious attempt to take away some of her
boredom. Or maybe he was bored himself. Gabe was taking a shower,
and there wasn’t really anything for them to do besides talk, watch
TV, or play games. As far as Lexi knew, there wasn’t even a working
computer in her dad’s house.

Lexi shook her head. “No. Austin, how are we
going to afford this? I mean, none of us are working and we’re sort
of living out here in the middle of nowhere. I know my dad isn’t
charging us rent or anything, but we still need to eat and stuff.
What are we going to do?”

Austin smiled at her. “Don’t worry, Lexi. We’ve
been doing this for awhile now. Your dad gave me a debit card that
gives me access to millions of dollars. Your dad’s rich.” Before
Lexi had the chance to ask any questions, Austin went on. “He’s
been around for a long time. He’s done a lot of saving over the
years. You also might not know it, but he’s owned many businesses
over the years.”

“Businesses?” Lexi asked, raising her eyebrows.
She remembered asking her mother what her dad had done, hoping that
it would give her some clue as to what she should do when she got
to college. If she couldn’t be a part of his life, maybe she could
at least devote her life to doing what he had done. Maybe he had
been a successful painter or songwriter, or had some talent that
she could have inherited and didn’t know about. As much as she had
tried to get her mom to talk about Benjamin Hunter, she’d never
spilled anything about him or his endeavors.

“Ben has owned a few restaurants in his
lifetime, along with a company that produced coffee pots. He’s also
dabbled in the stock market a lot. Right now, he owns and runs a
bed and breakfast in Long Island.”

Lexi had never pictured him as the coffee
pot-making, bed and breakfast-owning type. Then again, she hadn’t
really had much to go on, since she hadn’t seen her father in
years. “I always wonder if . . . Ben and my mom ever kept in touch
with each other. You know, after I left.”

“They did,” Austin replied. “At least, that’s
what he told me. He said that your mom used to send him pictures of
you. You’ll find some of them around the house,
actually.”

Lexi bit her lip. Why hadn’t her mom told her
all these years that she had kept in touch with her dad? All of
this time, Lexi had been asking her mom questions about Benjamin
Hunter, only to provoke an argument or get no response from her at
all, and her mom had kept an open line of communication with him
that whole entire time.

For the first time in her life, Lexi felt like
her mom had really kept a secret from her.

A loud scream from the back of the house filled
the awkward silence that had crept over the room as Lexi let the
truth sink in.

“Gabe,” Austin muttered. Jumping up from the
couch, he raced down the hallway. Lexi followed him. When they
reached the bathroom, she could hear that the shower was still
running. Austin knocked on the bathroom door. “Gabe? Is everything
okay?”

There was no answer.

Austin slammed his body into the bathroom door,
breaking it opening in one try. Lexi was surprised at how strong
Austin was.

Lexi stepped into the bathroom and pulled the
blue shower curtain open, afraid of what she may find. Gabe stood
in front of the stream of water that flowed from the faucet and
onto his pale skin.

“Gabe?” Lexi asked. “Are you okay?”