by Jayme Morse
Grabbing a piece of toast from the pile, Lexi turned to Gabe. “What was your vision?”
Gabe gave Austin a look that said you-just-had-to-open-your-mouth. “I can’t tell you everything right now because I don’t want to freak you out, but it was sometime in winter or possibly early spring. I only know because there was snow on the ground. I actually didn’t see what year it was, but I assume that it was this year. I could be wrong, though.” He paused. “You looked the same as you do right now, but it might have been next year. Anyway, we were all at the courtyard in front of Briar Creek High School. The whole town was there.” He paused. “Everyone took sides. I can’t really remember who else was on our side, but some of them were. There were actually more people on our side than I would have guessed, but there were still a lot of people, err, vampires, against us. It was really chaotic. Basically, we just all fought each other.”
“And what happened? Did we win? Did people die?” Lexi asked.
Gabe shrugged. “I don’t know what happens. I didn’t get to that point in my vision yet. I keep hoping that I’ll have another vision so that I can find out what happens next. It stopped as everyone lunged at each other and began attacking.”
“Was I there?” Lexi asked quietly.
Gabe nodded. “Yes, you were there, front and center.”
Lexi looked down at her paper plate and began picking at the scrambled eggs with her fork. She didn’t want Austin and Gabe to know that she was scared. In fact, scared was an understatement for how she felt. Lexi was petrified.
Even if she had to be there, why did she need to be in the front? She expected herself to be hovering somewhere in the back so that no one could hurt her.
The entire town of Briar Creek was filled with vampires – and not just normal vampires. These were vampires who wanted her blood – who needed her blood so that they wouldn’t die. If she was going to be surrounded by them and fighting against them during the attack that Gabe had envisioned, how was she going to survive? It didn’t make any sense. Unless she could be a match for them . . .
“Gabe, can you turn me into a vampire?” she asked quietly, looking over at him.
Gabe shook his head. “No. I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Well, that’s not fair. Here you make fun of Edward Cullen and Twilight, but you’re acting just like him. It’s not fair for you to tell me that I can’t become a vampire just because you don’t want me to be one. I think I should be the one who gets to decide if I can be a vampire or not. Right, Austin? You were able to decide for yourself!”
“Unfortunately, you don’t have the same choice I had,” Austin replied. “It’s not that Gabe doesn’t want to change you into a vampire. Well, I don’t know if he wants to or not . . . but he can’t because of the curse.”
Lexi had completely forgotten about that stipulation. The witch who had put the curse on the vampires of Briar Creek had also added another part to the curse; no one from the Hunter bloodline would ever be able to become a vampire again.
It really didn’t seem fair. Knowing that she would never be able to become a vampire, even if she wanted to be one, made Lexi feel empty inside. In seventy or eighty years from now, Gabe would still be here . . . without her.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I forgot,” Lexi replied, sadly poking at her scrambled eggs. She didn’t know how Gabe and Austin were able to eat at a time like this. She knew her own stomach couldn’t handle even the idea of food. It made her feel bad because Austin had gone through the effort of cooking them for her. Then again, he probably mostly cooked breakfast for himself. He was scarfing down more bacon than Lexi realized a vampire could eat, even if they wanted to.
A thought popped into her mind. “Austin, I’m really confused about something,” Lexi said. “Shouldn’t you have already been a vampire or a half vampire? Since Tommy and Violet were both vampires, too, doesn’t it run in your genes or whatever?” Gabe had explained the logistics of vampire children to Lexi when she found out that her own father was a vampire. Children who were born to vampire fathers and human mothers were half-vampires, or dhampir. If a child had two vampire parents, they would be a full-blooded vampire. Lexi realized that the whole entire concept was similar to that of Harry Potter and wizards and Muggles and mudbloods.
Austin shook his head. “No. You will only be a dhampir if your father was a vampire when you were conceived. My father wasn’t a vampire then. Actually, my mom wasn’t either. Both of my parents became vampires long after I was already born.”
Lexi felt her forehead wrinkling in confusion. “I thought that everyone who lived in Briar Creek was a vampire. Why weren’t your parents or my mom vampires?”
“Our family wasn’t originally from Briar Creek,” Austin replied. “Grandma didn’t move there until after Grandpa already died.”
Neither Lexi nor Austin had the chance to meet their grandfather. He had died when Lexi’s mom was just a child. As far as Lexi had known, her mom had grown up in the house that Violet and Tommy still lived in. It made Lexi wonder if her grandmother had ever found out that Briar Creek was filled with vampires . . . or that her own daughter became one. Lexi wasn’t sure if her grandma was still alive when that had happened. “So, how did Aunt Violet and Uncle Tommy become vampires then?”
“Well, you do know that my dad cheated on my mom, right?” Austin asked.
“No,” Lexi replied, shaking her head. It really didn’t surprise her, though. Tommy wasn’t a good person, and it had always seemed like Violet was almost too attached to him. Maybe that was why she had done the things she had done and was completely crazy ; Violet had lost Tommy once already, and she didn’t want it to happen again – even if that meant she had to sacrifice her own son’s life in the process. It was scary to think that Violet knew and accepted the fact that she was responsible for her own son’s death.
“My dad had an affair with this woman named Linda Kerensky,” Austin began. “They met while he and my mom were having . . . problems. Linda was the sister of one of his co-workers at the time, and he was completely smitten with her beauty. I don’t know if you know this, but vampire women are very beautiful. It makes them very powerful creatures because it makes harder for both vampires and humans to resist them.”
Lexi thought about all of the vampire girls and women who she had met since she had come to Briar Creek. She knew that beauty was in the eye of the beholder, but none of the people who she knew were vampires seemed strikingly beautiful. “Why isn’t your mom that pretty then, if she’s a vampire?” Lexi blurted before she could stop herself.
“It’s the disease,” Austin replied. “The further it progresses, the more it diminishes their beauty. Anyway, back to the story. My dad’s relationship with Linda didn’t work out. After a few months, he decided that he still wanted to be with my mom. He didn’t love Linda the way he loved my mom. So, he ended the relationship, hoping that it would be the last that he would ever hear from her. Linda wasn’t about to let it go that easy, though. I’m not sure if she was in love with him, or if she was just obsessed with him. She vowed to find a way to make him choose her instead of my mom.
“Months passed, and my dad didn’t hear a word from Linda. He and my mom began working on their problems and were at a point in their relationship where they were happy again. He never told my mom about the affair until one day when Linda showed up at their house, accompanied by three vampire men. Using her beauty as a weapon, Linda lured my dad out of the house. She had the vampire guys who she brought with her pin him down, and she turned him into a vampire without his consent.”
Lexi stared at Austin, unsure of what to say. She figured that some vampires probably had interesting stories about how they were changed, but she hadn’t expected anything like this. It made her feel a twinge of resentment towards Tommy, though. If it weren’t for him, she might not be involved in this mess as she was. Or, she would at least have her own family on her side. Finally, Lexi managed to ask, “Why didn’t Tommy end up with L
inda, if she was a vampire and Violet wasn’t?”
“Why wouldn’t a vampire want to stay with a human?” Austin smirked. “It’s the easiest way to find a willing blood donor.”
Lexi laughed. As she glanced at Gabe, she found herself blushing. Just thinking about the way he had drank her blood two nights ago made her heart flutter and her insides feel warm. “You know what I mean. Why didn’t Linda get her way?”
“At first, my dad wasn’t even sure what Linda had done to him,” Austin replied. “He knew something had made him different, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Young vampires can be feisty, and he ended up leaving for awhile. I guess his senses hadn’t developed enough yet, because eventually, he ended up attacking a woman in a parking lot for her blood – only to find out that she, too, was a vampire. That was when he began to develop Wilkins’ Syndrome, but he didn’t know it yet.
“When he came home, my mom was in the process of packing her bags, ready to leave him and take me with her. The first thing that he did was drink from her. That’s when she found out that vampires were real. She had heard the rumors that they existed, but she didn’t really believe them until then, not that I blame her. But my mom made a decision that night: she wanted to be a vampire, too.”
“So, Tommy turned her into a vampire?” Lexi asked.
Austin shook his head. “He didn’t know how. That’s when Greg Lawrence reached out to them. He could smell that Tommy was no longer a human, and Mrs. Lawrence heard my mom thinking about it in person once at some party or something. They told Tommy how to change my mom into a vampire: he had to drain all the blood from her body, and let her drink his own blood. So, he changed her into a vamp after that.
“They were so very grateful to the Lawrence’s, which is probably why they formed an alliance with them. They seem his as a saving grace, in a way. Thanks to the Greg and his wife, my parents could be together for the rest of their lives thanks to him. But he saw things differently. Ever since that day, Greg Lawrence has made it pretty obvious that my parents were to be forever in his debt.”
****
Chapter 4
That night, Lexi crawled into the soft bed and pulled the big down comforter over herself. She wasn’t tired. It was too difficult to be tired when she had so much on her mind.
Flipping over to her stomach, Lexi inhaled the scent of her pillow. She smelled something that was sweet, perfect, and mysterious at the same time. Gabe.
His scent filled her nostrils, and it took her back to the night he had drunk from her. He had only agreed to do it because there was no way for them to tell whether she’d live that night and despite that uncertainty, it had been one of the most sensual nights of her life. She wondered if Gabe had thought about it at all since then . . . and if he wanted to drink from her again eventually.
There was a knock at her door, which she had left open. Lexi glanced up.
Gabe’s eyes sparkled in the dim light of the hallway.
“Hi,” Lexi whispered, sitting up in bed.
“Hey,” Gabe smiled. He shut the door and sat down at the foot of her bed. “I heard you call for me.”
Lexi felt her cheeks redden in embarrassment. It made her glad that the lights were turned off. “Oh, no, I didn’t call for you. I was just . . . thinking about you,” she admitted bashfully.
“Oh, yeah? What about me?”
“Just . . . stuff,” Lexi replied. She quickly changed the subject so she didn’t have to go into details. “Gabe, how long are we going to stay here?”
Gabe grunted and shrugged his shoulders in the darkness. “We haven’t really figured that out yet. Not forever, obviously. We need to fight the vampires. It’s the only way.”
“I’m afraid,” Lexi admitted out loud for the first time. “I don’t know how I’m going to survive this fight.”
Gabe took her hand, sandwiching it between both of his. Lexi shivered at his touch. His skin felt icy cold against the warmth of her own. “I won’t let anything happen to you. You know that, right?”
Lexi sighed. “I believe that you’ll try, but . . . you’re only one person, Gabe. What if something happens to you while we’re out there?” She felt her eyes getting teary just thinking about what could happen to Gabe. “There’s no way you can be my protector if you’re trying to defend yourself, too.”
Gabe shrugged. “We’ll work out the details later, Lexi. I just want you to know that I will protect you. I’ll protect you before I defend myself.”
Lexi sighed. “Still . . . there are hundreds of vampires in Briar Creek who want my blood. Even if I don’t die the night of the fight, it’s going to be hard for us to beat them.”
Gabe leaned back onto the bed and pulled her close to him, kissing her forehead. “I’m hoping that I’ll have another vision soon . . . one that will tell me what we need to do to beat them before they even have the chance to act. Don’t worry. We’re going to get through this.”
Lexi smiled. She knew that Gabe was being genuine, and he was probably right. They were going to get through this, somehow.
*
When Lexi woke up early the next morning, she was shivering. Her head was rested against Gabe’s bare chest. She didn’t even remember falling asleep, but it wasn’t surprising; Lexi loved to sleep when it was cold. Her mom always got upset when she was younger because she would open the window during the middle of a snow storm to help her fall asleep and ended up catching a cold. Her physician mother never bought into the whole idea that the cold and going outside with a wet head doesn’t make you sick.
Lexi heard the sound of the television on in the living room. She glanced at Gabe, who had his eyes closed, before climbing out of bed.
Austin was sitting on the couch, a mug of coffee in hand. Lexi looked at the TV. “The news?” she asked. Lexi could watch as much reality TV, cartoons, or Lifetime movies as the next girl. Even Western movies didn’t bother her that much. She couldn’t get into the news, though. It was just too depressing – which was the last thing she needed to feel right now.
Austin looked up at her from his place on the couch and shrugged. “It’s the only way we can really keep in touch with the real world right now. We’re kind of in the middle of nowhere.”
“Except for Mary-Kate,” Lexi pointed out. When Austin didn’t say anything, she asked, “Austin, umm . . . Mary-Kate got really into character, I guess you could say, when she was pretending that you were still dead. Were the two of you okay before . . . all of this?”
Austin kept his eyes on the TV. “We were having our differences.”
“What type of differences?” Lexi asked, trying to make her voice more conversational than nosy or pushy. She had been dying to know what was going on between Austin and Mary-Kate before he had allegedly died, though. Now that he was alive, she might be able to get some answers out of him . . . like what Mary-Kate had been pressuring him to do.
“Just differences,” Austin replied. Lexi held in a sigh. Her cousin obviously didn’t want to talk about it. She was half-tempted to tell him that she had read everything in his journal, but she knew that he probably wouldn’t be happy about that. Then again, he had left it here with code words written throughout so that she could find them, so he must have wanted her to read it. “Gabe’s still asleep?”
“Guess so,” Lexi replied. “I’m a little confused by that, actually. You even told me yourself that vampires can’t sleep.”
“How did you know about that, anyway?” Austin asked, looking up at her.
Lexi shrugged. “Sleeping just seems like something that only humans would do. How can you sleep if you’re dead?”
Austin chuckled. “Well, you’re right. Vampires can’t really sleep. I’m just so used to calling it sleep. We get into a sleeping position just to relax, like I said I was doing last night. Gabe’s different, though. When he gets into a sleep position and zones out, he’s more likely to have a vision. And then there’s no disturbing him.”
“Oh, I didn’t
know that,” Lexi said. “So, when do you think my dad – I mean, Ben – will be back?” It felt weird calling Benjamin Hunter her dad. It had been years since she had last seen him. She had a hard time remembering what he even looked like without a picture in front of her. Once she did finally get to see him in person, Lexi was sure that she still wouldn’t call him ‘dad’. She would just call him Ben or, more likely, she would find a way to avoid addressing him at all so that it wouldn’t be an issue.
“I couldn’t tell you,” Austin shrugged. “I’m no psychic. Maybe Gabe will have a vision about it.”
“Something kind of confuses me,” Lexi said slowly. “Did my dad know that Hunter blood was powerful?”
Austin nodded. “Yeah, he knew. It was passed down over the years from family member to family member.”
“What confuses me about that though is why my dad chose to move to Briar Creek,” Lexi said. “If he knew that his blood was sought after, it seems sort of dumb to move to a town where his blood is in high demand.”
Austin sighed. “I’ve wondered about that myself. I don’t know the answer.”
Of course, Lexi thought. It seemed like no one ever had any of the answers to the most important questions.
Lexi somehow convinced Austin to play video games with her while they ate grilled cheese sandwiches instead of watching the news. Hours passed and they were deeply involved in Mario Kart when Gabe groggily stumbled into the living room. “Morning,” he muttered.
“It’s afternoon,” Austin replied. “You slept most of the day away.”
Lexi glanced at the clock on the wall. It was three o’clock. The day had gone by so quickly. It felt good to be around her cousin again. Even though they hadn’t seen each other in years and it wouldn’t seem like they had much in common (he was a high school quarter back, and she was basically a loner), not that much really seemed to change between them. Thy still got along really well with each other, just like they had when they were kids. It felt comforting to her to feel like she had a family again, no matter how small it might be right now.
