Thicker Than Water (The Briar Creek Vampires Book #2) by Jayme Morse & Jody Morse (17 page)

Mary-Kate must have heard Lexi’s sneakers
crunching against the hay and corn husks that had been trampled on
by people who had already done the maze because she turned around
just as she came up to them. “Lexi! Where have you
been?”

“Looking everywhere for you,” Lexi replied
breathlessly. “There was a guy in a skeleton costume following me.”
She didn’t know for sure if the person in the costume had been a
guy, but she had assumed so. There weren’t many details she could
go off of—except for his height, and maybe his build, assuming his
costume hadn’t disfigured his shape. He was tall though—too tall
for Lexi to assume it had been a woman.

Mary-Kate raised an eyebrow. “Okay, Lexi, no
more apple wine for you!” she jokingly scolded her. “You’re such a
lightweight. There’s no guy in a skeleton costume in the corn
maze.”

“Yes, there is! Come on, I’ll show you.” She
tugged on Mary-Kate’s arm and started to pull her in the direction
she had just run from. Shannen followed closely behind
them.

To her dismay, it took her a few minutes longer
than she expected to navigate through the paths of the corn maze;
she hadn’t realized that she had taken so many turns when she was
looking for Mary-Kate. When they reached the black cat statue, Lexi
looked behind it and through the area of corn stalks that were now
squashed and bent in random directions.

There was no one there.

“This is where he was. I swear,” Lexi said,
beginning to feel the tears begin to build up in her eyes. “I went
through there when I was running away from him,” she pointed at the
opening she had made in the corn stalks.

“Lexi, it’s okay,” Mary-Kate replied, putting a
hand on her shoulder. “It’s easy to get confused when you’re lost,
especially when you’ve been drinking. I totally
understand.”

Lexi nodded in agreement and fought
back the tears that were stinging her eyes, but she knew that her
voice would betray her if she said anything. She allowed Mary-Kate
to think that she had been hallucinating, but she knew the skeleton
guy had been there. She’d seen him with her own eyes…hadn’t
she?

*

Lexi left her window open that night and
thought about Gabe, just like her mom had told her to do. It hadn’t
worked the first time, but she figured that it was definitely worth
another try.

As she lay in her bed waiting, Lexi listened to
the sound of the owls hooting into the darkness of the
yard.

A flutter of wings was followed by the sound of
a clunk. “Oof,” Lexi grunted as Gabe’s body fell on top of hers,
knocking the wind out of her.

“Sorry,” Gabe whispered, running a hand through
Lexi’s damp blonde hair. “I thought the bed would make for a
quieter landing.”

“It’s okay,” Lexi replied, grinning up at him.
The moonlight reflected in his steel blue eyes, adding an extra
sparkle to them. “How did you know that I wanted you to
come?”

“When people talk about me or think about me, I
can just sense it.” Gabe got up and closed the window. “You have to
be careful, Lexi. Someone might try to follow me in
sometime.”

“Who would follow you?”

“Any of the vampires that are out at this time
of night. Who knows how many people know where you live? If they
see that your bedroom window is open, they might come in and drink
from you.”

“I thought the whole town is in agreement about
drinking from me on Halloween,” Lexi replied.

“There are people who might not make it until
Halloween, unless they drink your blood,” Gabe replied. “You also
have the greedy ones…and the rebels who will purposefully try to
drink from you just because they’ve been instructed not to do
so.”

“How do they even know that my blood is
powerful enough to save them?” Lexi asked. “Aren’t I the first
person who they’ve done this to?”

Gabe shook his head. “No, Mary-Kate was able to
save a few of us, but there were only a few months left before her
eighteenth birthday when we found out that she was a part of your
father’s bloodline. We actually didn’t know that there was an age
limit until after she turned eighteen.”

“How did you find out?” Lexi asked.

“Dr. Stevens had a theory that it would happen
that way, but no one knew for sure. When she tried to heal a few
people after her birthday, it didn’t work.”

“So, why didn’t everyone plan to drink from her
the way that they have planned to drink from me? Why didn’t they
sacrifice her?”

“Mayor Lawrence only allowed a few people to
have access to her blood,” Gabe replied. “Only a select few. He
didn’t want anyone drinking from his precious daughter. Basically,
only the family’s closest friends were allowed to drink from her.
There was no way he ever would have let the town sacrifice her the
way they are planning for you.”

“I see,” Lexi replied. “It’s weird that he
would be okay with having a human daughter. Gabe…shouldn’t
Mary-Kate and I be half-vampires or something like that if our
father was a vampire? You said that before.”

“That would be true in most cases,” Gabe
replied. “When a vampire man has a child with a human woman, the
child will be born a half vampire, which our kind calls dhampir’s.
When a vampire man has a child with another vampire or if a vampire
woman has a child with a human man, the child will be a
full-blooded vampire. The thing is, you and Mary-Kate both have a
vampire father and your mothers were both humans at the time of
conception, but you are not dhampir’s. You’re special
case.”

Lexi frowned in confusion. “Why are we special?
I don’t get it.”

“That’s where something that I haven’t told you
about yet comes into play,” Gabe replied, staring at her
intently.

She wasn’t sure if she could handle anymore
secrets. “Are you going to tell me?” Lexi pressed when he didn’t
say anything else.

“Yes. We have been trying to keep it from you
for as long as we could, but…you’ll know everything by Halloween
anyway, so I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t tell
you.”

“We? Who has been trying to keep it from me?”
Lexi asked, confused.

“Tom and Violet…Mary-Kate and Mayor Lawrence.
Oh, and Dan’s in on it, too. What the vampires are going through in
Briar Creek isn’t normal for us, Lexi,” Gabe went on.

“Only a stake to the heart or being outside in
the sun for too long should be able to kill us; we shouldn’t be
able to get a virus that will kill us. We don’t know for sure, but
as far as we know, Zachary Wilkins, the first person who caught the
disease, was cursed by a witch.

“That pendant that you’re wearing right now, we
assume has descended from the bloodline of the witch who cursed
Zachary Wilkins. There is an identical pendant, but no one knows
where it is.”

“I do,” Lexi said quietly.

Gabe’s eyes widened. “You do?”

Lexi nodded. She pulled the box that Austin had
left her out of her duffle bag and removed the pendant. “Yeah,
Austin left me this box of his things. The second bat pendant was
in it. See, I got my bat pendant when I was a kid from my dad.
Tommy didn’t want me wearing it. He ripped it off my neck once.
Actually, he still doesn’t want me to wear it actually,” Lexi said,
thinking back to the beginning of summer when he had been really
angry when she had began wearing the pendant again after she’d
found it in her mother’s things after she had died.

“And there’s a reason he doesn’t want you to
wear it,” Gabe replied. “As long as you are wearing it, a vampire
won’t be able to smell that you are from your father’s bloodline.
The blood that is inside of the pendant acts as a cloak, so to say.
When you’re wearing that necklace, you don’t have the scent of a
human at all. A vampire won’t be able to smell you, and as long as
that necklace is clasped around your neck, they won’t be able to
bite you. That’s why it is so important that you never take it
off.”

The way Gabe had just explained the necklace to
her reminded her of the text she had received from Justin’s phone.
Before she could interrupt him to ask if he was the one who had
sent it, he went on to explain, “The legend goes that a powerful
witch was in love with a human from your bloodline named Albert
Hunter. Zachary Wilkins was an old vampire who was out hunting one
night when he came across Albert, who had been outside of the tiny
shack that he and the witch lived in together along the river. Your
bloodline was like a drug to vampires as it was because it makes us
stronger and more powerful than other any other human’s bloodline
and he had already drained someone from your bloodline the night
before: Albert’s brother.

“But this time, the human, Albert, didn’t die.
The witch was able to find a vampire to save him. Their
relationship was never the same again, though. New vampires are
heartless and hard to control. They’ll drain any human who crosses
their path, and they’ll do it without thinking twice. The witch and
Albert made it work for awhile, but the love that she had for
Albert was never enough to bring his love for her back to
life.

“One night, when the witch came home from
picking wild flowers for one of her spells, she was attacked by
Albert. She managed to stab him through the heart with the end of a
broken broomstick, and sent their house up in flames with his body
still inside of it. Seeking revenge on the vampire who had turned
Albert, the witch got him exiled from their town. Do you know where
he ended up?”

“Here?” Lexi whispered.

“Yup. Zachary Wilkins was exiled to an
abandoned town, Briar Creek, along with about two hundred other
vampires that the town also exiled. Each vampire had been cursed
individually by the witch herself before they were brought here.
She was smart; she knew that there weren’t any humans for miles
around and after going without any human blood for awhile, they
would be too weak to fly. They became desperate, feeding off of
deer, bear, and even rabbits, to find the right type of blood that
would replenish their bodies. Nothing worked, as you know that
vampires cannot survive by drinking animal blood alone, and many of
them perished during this time. The ones who were left were
starving and running out of options, so they tried to feed from
each other.

“This is where the witch’s curse becomes
important. She knew that without an adequate supply of blood or
humans to feed from, the vampires would eventually be forced to
drink each other’s blood. The witch put a curse on all of the
vampires in Briar Creek which said that vampires who fed from each
other would suffer from a horrible, incurable illness that would
ultimately kill them within one hundred years unless they fed from
the Hunter bloodline –”

“Which is why everyone needs my blood,” Lexi
said, putting the pieces together. “Without it, they won’t survive
if they have the disease.”

“Exactly. That last stipulation was put on the
curse because the chances of finding someone from the Hunter
bloodline, which only consisted of humans at that point, was so low
that the witch didn’t even think that it was possible.”

“Why would she make it a Hunter, though? If her
lover was a Hunter, wouldn’t she want to protect his descendants or
as she spiteful towards them because their powerful blood was what
had ruined their relationship?” Lexi asked.

Gabe shook his head. “No one really knows why.
It probably has to do with the fact that Hunter’s were rare when
she casted the spell. There are documents citing the witch’s curse,
though, and she made it very clear that this was the only way to
cure the illness.”

“If the Hunter’s were humans, then why is my
father a vampire?” Lexi asked, feeling even more confused at this
new revelation.

“Your father, Benjamin Hunter, was born to a
human family. He fell in love with a vampire named Sara Gregory,
however, and allowed her to drain his blood and turn him into a
vampire as well. What you may don’t know is that your father was
born in the 1800’s, Lexi. There was a second part of the curse, but
it did not affect your father because he was already a vampire when
the witch cast her spell. The second part of the curse was that no
Hunter could ever become a vampire.”

“So, that’s why
me and Mary-Kate aren’
t half
vampires like other children born to a vampire father and a human
mother,” Lexi realized. “The witch’s curse prevents
it.”

Gabe nodded.
“Yup, t
hat’s exactly
why.”

“Wow,” Lexi replied,
leaning back on her bed. “This is all so much to take in. I wonder
how Mary-Kate feels about all of this. I wonder how her father
feels about all of this, too.”

Gabe shrugged. “Despite
the fact that Mary-Kate isn’t like Mayor Lawrence, they’re still
very close. I think that Mary-Kate definitely looks at him as her
true father since, like you, she never really knew Benjamin Hunter
so she didn’t get the chance to develop a close father-daughter
relationship with him.”

“Speaking of
closeness, why weren’t you and Austin close?” Lexi asked, pleased
that she finally had an opportunity to s
lyly bring up the conversation.