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

“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.

Her mom wasn’t allowed to tell her any specific
details about how she had died, though. It was against the “rules”
for a ghost to tell a living person details about things like that
if they wanted to be able to visit again anyone in the human world
again. Go figure.

Shrugging thoughts of her mom away, Lexi asked,
“Why did you even want me here? I don’t understand. It’s not like
I’m going to let all of the people in Briar Creek feed from me. I
have no intentions in saving all the people in that town . . . not
after they all planned to sacrifice me.”

“He wanted you here because of me,” Gabe chimed
in.

Lexi turned and looked at him. He had been so
quiet that she had somehow forgotten that he was still in the room.
“What do you mean because of you?”

“I had a vision,” Gabe explained, looking into
her eyes. “I saw what’s going to happen in the future and … and you
were there. The only way we can stop the evil vampires in Briar
Creek is with your help.”

“Why me?” Lexi asked, trying not to sound as
angry as she felt. “And stop them from what? I’m the only thing
they want. If it wasn’t for me being here, wouldn’t everything be
normal? Well, as normal as it could be considering.” She couldn’t
kid herself; nothing in Briar Creek would ever be completely normal
since the entire town was made up of cursed vampires.

“We’ll discuss all of that later,” Austin
interrupted. “But I knew at the time that I had to trust Gabe since
his visions are always right. He saw you there and the rest of the
town lying dead on the ground . . .” Austin drifted off. “Gabe’s
actually the one who helped me change into a vampire.”