Thicker Than Water (The Briar Creek Vampires Book #2) by Jayme Morse & Jody Morse (15 page)

Assuming that her mom had known about all of
this, why had she chosen to bring Lexi to Briar Creek in the first
place? Wouldn’t she have realized that it was a dangerous place for
a human to be? None of it made sense.

Lexi couldn’t believe how much her priorities
had changed since when she first came to Briar Creek. Months ago,
she had been playing detective to see who had left Austin his last
Facebook message. Now, even though she still wanted to know what
had happened to Austin and her mom, she had to figure out a way to
stay alive. Gabe had said that he was going to come up with a plan,
but Lexi had no idea what they could do to fight off a pack of
vampires.

Her alarm went off at the same time she heard
footsteps outside her bedroom door. Violet fumbled with the lock
and opened the door. “Good morning, Lexi!”

Lexi bit down on her tongue. She didn’t want to
let her aunt know that she remembered anything about the night of
the accident still, but she was also having a difficult time being
nice to her. She decided that the best thing that she could
possibly do was to stop talking (not that she said that much lately
to begin with).

By the time she had gathered her homework and
school books, Dan was already sitting on the couch waiting for her.
“Hey, Lexi,” he said with a big grin.

“Hi,” she replied, forcing a smile and
pretending that she was happy to see him. Lexi couldn’t let Dan
know that she didn’t trust him yet or everyone would think that her
memory had been restored. “Ready to leave?”

Dan nodded and stood up. “See ya after school,
Tom.”

“Bye, have a good day kids,” Tommy
said.

Lexi looked at her uncle closely. Dark circles
had formed on the ghostly white skin under his eyes, which had a
glazed over look to them. He looked fatigued. There were bald
patches on his scalp that she had always attributed to wearing a
baseball hat or bad genes. She had heard Dr. Stevens tell Tommy
that he was going to die in the near future.

Lexi wasn’t a doctor, but she could figure out
the diagnosis on her own. Tommy had Wilkins’ Syndrome.

*

When they got to the parking lot, she bolted
from Dan’s car and into the school. He hadn’t been as pushy as she
would have normally expected him to be, but being in the car with
him was just awkward, especially considering that the last time she
had been in the car with another guy was when Gabe had rescued her
from Dan and then crashed the car. No matter what, being around him
would always make her feel uncomfortable.

Lexi couldn’t help but feel like Dan was just
eyeing her up, the same way a wolf would hungrily stare at a baby
rabbit that was unfortunate enough to cross its path. She wondered
if Dan had always looked at her this way or if she was just being
paranoid now that she knew he was a vampire.

Once she had entered her locker combination,
Lexi found it difficult to pull the door open. It felt as though
something was jammed in between the cracks of the locker. Pulling
the door more forcefully, she finally managed to get the locker
open.

Someone had stuffed a thick envelope into her
locker.

Lexi picked up the envelope and, sure enough,
found that the handwriting on the front of the envelope matched the
handwriting on the other notes that she had been
getting.

She opened the envelope and pulled out the note
that was tucked neatly inside.

Lexi, the best way for you to escape
all of this is to come up with an escape plan. I already have a
plan to help you get out of here, but first you need to follow my
instructions.

1. Don’t tell your aunt and uncle
you’re planning to escape.

2. Get a Halloween costume that
hides your face.

3. Go to the Briar Creek Halloween
festival.

Lexi pulled out the next piece of paper that
had been folded up more messily and stuffed into the envelope. It
was a flyer for the annual Briar Creek Halloween festival, with the
date, address, and time.

The festival was on October thirty-first. Was
it a good idea for her to go to an event where probably hundreds of
Briar Creek residents would be, on the day when the whole town was
planning to kill her? That was probably why the person said that
she needed a Halloween costume that would hide her face,
though.

As much as it sounded like a bad idea,
something told Lexi that she had to trust this person. She just
wished that she knew who they were.

During gym class, Lexi looked for Gabe. She had
wanted to talk to him about the notes she had been getting and
wanted his opinion on the most recent note, but he wasn’t there.
She wished that he would have let her know that he wasn’t going to
be in school today. Lexi worried that Violet and Tommy were going
to do something horrible to him because they were so angry about
him trying to run away with her in the first place. When he wasn’t
in school, Lexi couldn’t guarantee his safety.

*

At the end of the day, Mary-Kate was standing
next to Lexi’s locker, waiting to talk to her. When Lexi got there,
Mary-Kate looked up and smiled brightly.“Hey! Do you want to come
with me to the corn maze tonight? A bunch of us are going. It’s
going to be a lot of fun.”

“Umm, sure. Is your dad going to care, though?
Violet told me that he doesn’t want you hanging out with me
anymore,” Lexi said, turning the combination on her
lock.

Mary-Kate shrugged and waved her hand. “He
can’t really say much about you coming to an event with a group of
people. No one can prove that I’m the one who invited you or
anything. It will be fine! So will you come?”

Lexi smiled. Ever since she had found out that
she and Mary-Kate were half-sisters, she was beginning to see more
and more similarities between the two of them. Her sister’s begging
reminded her of the way she used to beg her mom to take her to the
zoo when she was little and to the mall when she was a preteen. How
could anyone ever say no either of them? They were so convincing.
“Count me in,” Lexi replied.

Dan walked over to her locker and stood with
his arms crossed. “Are you ready for me to take you
home?”

“I guess,” Lexi groaned. Car rides with Dan
were going to be her most dreaded time of day. Maybe she could find
a way to get back on Mayor Lawrence’s good graces so that Mary-Kate
could drive her to school instead. She knew there was no way Violet
would ever allow her to walk to school, even though Austin always
had. Her aunt was probably afraid that she would try to run away
again.

“We’ll pick you up at seven,” Mary-Kate said.
“See you then!”

Lexi reluctantly followed Dan out the door and
into the student parking lot. When he unlocked her car door, she
settled herself into the leather seat.

“So, you’re planning on going to the corn maze
with Mary-Kate and her friends tonight?” Dan asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t really think that’s any of
your business,” Lexi replied.

“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop or
anything like that. It’s just…Michelle Longhorn invited me to go
with them tonight. It’s sort of like a date, I guess. I wanted to
make sure you don’t mind if I come. If you do, I guess we can find
alternate plans.”

Lexi shook her head. “No, it’s fine.” If Dan
was going to be preoccupied with Michelle, that meant that his
attention wasn’t going to be on her, which was a good thing. Plus,
telling him that he couldn’t go meant that he would probably tell
Violet about it, and Lexi had been planning to sneak out of the
house without her aunt knowing since she was still
grounded.

“Okay, cool,” Dan said, turning his head
towards her and flashing a huge smile. “I’m glad that we’ve gotten
be such great friends. You really don’t know how much it means to
me. I felt like I had no friends since Austin died, but it’s great
to have you.”

“Don’t you have football practice on weekdays?”
Lexi asked, remembering that Dan and Austin had played on the same
football team together.

Dan shook his head. “Nah. Coach kicked me off
the team when I got into a fight with Gabe over the summer when I
took you out on a date. I’m not really sure if you remember that,
what with your memory loss and all.” Dan eyed her up and down in a
way that seemed to indicate that he knew she still had her
memory.

“Vaguely,” Lexi replied quietly, making sure to
keep up with her lie. She knew she couldn’t trust him one bit,
especially now that she knew he was a vampire. She wondered if he
was one of the vampires who had Wilkins’ Syndrome. Brushing it off,
she asked, “Dan, why do you and Gabe hate each other so much? I
don’t really get it.”

Dan shrugged, keeping his eyes steady on the
road ahead of him. “I don’t know. We just never got along. We have
different priorities. Honestly, I also think that Gabe had
something to do with Austin dying.”

“Why would you say that?” Lexi asked,
dumbfounded. This was the first time anyone had ever suggested that
Gabe may have had a role in Austin’s death. The idea seemed crazy,
but then again, he had tried to kill Lexi. Maybe she had been
putting more trust in him than she should be.

“Austin was killed on his way home from
school,” Dan replied. “The only other people I know who walk home
in the direction of the Graham’s house are Brandon McCray, the guy
who works at Splish ‘N Splash with you, and Gabe. Even though
anyone could have been the one to kill him, I saw Gabe and Austin
shouting at each other the day before he died. I don’t know what
they were arguing about, but it got pretty heated. I just have a
weird feeling about it.”

“I see,” Lexi replied. She made a mental note
to ask Gabe what he and Austin had been arguing about the next time
she saw him. It was also probably a good idea to let him know that
Dan suspected him. As far as Lexi knew, there wasn’t an ongoing
investigation, but if there were, Lexi could see Dan and her aunt
and uncle trying to frame Gabe for murdering Austin. With how shady
Mayor Lawrence was, she wouldn’t even be surprised if he planted
artificial evidence or made a deal with the Briar Creek Police to
arrest Gabe for it.

Lexi couldn’t help but think that Mary-Kate had
a greater role in Austin’s death than Gabe had. Could it be
physically possible, though? Was Mary-Kate’s short, petite body
capable of mangling Austin to death? Gabe seemed like a more likely
suspect, but Lexi didn’t want to believe that he could be involved.
If he was, that meant that she shouldn’t trust him and her mom had
said that she could. That was the only thing that was making it
easier to put her faith in him this time around.

A suspect that Lexi had never thought of before
occurred to her. Perhaps Mayor Lawrence had something to do with
Austin’s death. In Lexi’s book, he was still the main suspect for
her mom’s death. Actually, now that she thought about it, it would
make a lot of sense that Mayor Lawrence would be responsible for
Austin’s murder.

Maybe Mayor Lawrence had seen one of the
messages that his daughter had sent Austin. If it had been anything
like what Lexi had seen, he would have probably perceived it as a
sexual message. He might have decided that he was going to take
matters into his own hands and ended up killing Austin when he
wasn’t agreeable. Or maybe he even had planned on killing Austin to
make sure he would never be involved with Mary-Kate again. On the
other hand, it didn’t really make sense why he would want to cut
his own football team’s throat by eliminating their star
quarterback.

Just as she realized that she was probably
never going to know what had happened to her mom or Austin when
they died, Dan pulled into Violet’s driveway. “I guess I’ll see you
later tonight, then?”

Lexi nodded and opened the door. “Yup, see you
then.”

She watched as Dan backed out of the driveway
and pulled away. If it weren’t for the night of his attack, Lexi
almost would have thought that Dan was a really nice guy. She
wondered if he was in the high school drama club because he
certainly would make a good actor.

*

Around seven o’clock, Lexi heard a horn honk.
She breathed a sigh of relief. Violet had gone out with one of her
coworkers from school and Tommy was lying in bed sick. It was
really easy for Lexi to slip out the front door without anyone
noticing her. Lexi wondered for a split second if maybe she should
have stayed home in case if Tommy needed anything. She quickly
pushed the thought from her head went she remembered what Gabe had
told her; Tommy and Violet were vampires too, and Tommy had
Wilkins’ Syndrome. Being home alone with him really wasn’t on her
to-do list.

The one thing that Lexi had to admit was that
they were pretty good at pulling off being humans. She never would
have suspected that her aunt and uncle weren’t the same species as
her. All this time, she had thought that Violet was just a control
freak and needed to be in charge of every aspect of Lexi’s life
–including who she dated. The real reason Violet was so
controlling, and why Dan had went along with it, was because they
both needed her blood.

Listening to Gabe talking the other night about
the whole town needing her blood put things into a clearer
perspective for her. When Dan had attacked her the night of the car
accident, a beer bottle had fallen from the kitchen table. The
glass had shattered, and Lexi realized at the time that the
iron-like scent of the crimson puddle on the floor belonged to
blood. What she hadn’t thought about as she was being attacked was
who had been drinking from the beer bottle that night, before it
had been smashed. She’d always thought that Tommy and Violet were
alcoholics, but really, every time she had seen them drinking
anything, they were feeding. The idea kind of grossed her out, but
it would have been way less gross if she hadn’t drank one of their
“beers” herself.