Burn Like Fire (9 page)

Dan smiled at her. “Of course not.”

“I heard about this place, and I just figured it would be better to come here and be a blood donor than to just find any old vampire off the street,” Gertie explained. “I know there’s old Ronnie and old Gilbert who would drink from me in a heartbeat, but those men have reputations as ladies’ men! Coming here was just the classier thing to do.”

“How did you hear about this place?” Lexi questioned, realizing, for the first time, that it was sort of strange that Gertie knew that Westbrooke even existed. In all of the time she had spent in Briar Creek, no one had ever mentioned Westbrooke. It made her wonder if any of the vampires from Briar Creek had ever come to this training facility before.

“Oh, I . . . I don’t quite remember, actually,” Gertie replied, tapping her chin in thought. “I think it might have been one of the Brewer boys who mentioned this place.” She shrugged, glancing over at Lexi. “Beats me, but I really need to get going. I hope this isn’t the last I’ll see of y’all. Will ya be comin’ back to Briar Creek eventually?”

Lexi hesitated. She hadn’t actually considered recently whether or not she’d ever go back to Briar Creek. There were so many haunting memories there . . . memories of a time when she had been so alone and so afraid, memories of the mystery (at the time) surrounding her mom’s death, memories of Justin’s death. There were also memories of Mary-Kate, the sister who she had always wished for but who had turned out to be nothing but just another enemy. Mary-Kate was gone now—as far as Lexi knew, she was never coming back—so there wasn’t much for her in Briar Creek.

Or was there? “Actually, I did promise Uncle Tommy that we would go to visit him eventually. Or that Austin would, at least,” Lexi replied, glancing over in her cousin’s direction.

Austin darted his eyes away from her and down at the ground. Lexi had mentioned to him that Uncle Tommy was expecting a visit from them over the next month or so once everything settled down, but her cousin hadn’t seemed too enthusiastic about the idea. Lexi had a feeling that it was because he still harbored a lot of anger towards his father.

“Well, I hope y’all will come down to the diner when ya come into town,” Gertie said with a small smile. She narrowed her eyes at Lexi. “You do still need to eat food, don’t ya?”

Lexi laughed, knowing exactly what the woman was really asking her. “Yes, Gertie, I still need to eat. I’m not a vampire.” She was actually surprised to find out that she still needed to eat when she first became an immortal. She had assumed that since she couldn’t die, she wouldn’t need to actually eat, like a vampire. But as it turned out, when she didn’t eat, her body felt weak. That’s when she reminded herself that vampires
did
have to eat; it’s just that they refueled with blood rather than with food.

“Good. I’d hate to never get to serve ya yer breakfast special again,” Gertie replied with a grin, referring to the scrambled eggs with salsa breakfast that Lexi had always ordered as a child. It was still one of her breakfast favorites.

Lexi laughed. “I’ll come back for it.”

“Well, I’ll see y’all another time then,” Gertie said.

As the old woman was about to walk away, Lexi stopped her. “Wait, Gertie? I just want to say, ‘thank you’. I know you tried to help me a long time ago when I was in the hospital and you came to visit me, but you were turned away,” she said. “It means a lot to me. I’ll never forget it.”

Gertie’s lips tilted upwards and she waved her hand at Lexi. “Awe, shucks. That wasn’t a big deal. I was always trying to watch out for ya, though. I would have done more if I knew you had stuck around for so long, but that aunt of yours told me that you went back home at one point when I tried to see you.”

Lexi cringed at the word
aunt
. She had such a hard time now thinking of Violet as her aunt after everything the woman had put her through. “Violet told you I left town?”

Gertie nodded. “She did. Otherwise, I woulda tried to do more to help ya. I’m sorry things escalated to what they did. It’s a damn shame.” She shook her head in disgust. “Goodbye, Lexi.”

“Bye, Gertie.” Lexi watched as Gertie walked down the hallway and pressed the button to call
the elevator. Once the doors dinged open, she stepped inside and the elevator closed behind her.

“Does anyone else think that was weird?” Dan asked quietly.

“Did we think what was weird?” Austin questioned, sounding confused.

“Well, I mean, Anna said her tip came from Briar Creek, right? What are the chances that we see Gertie here the same day we come?” Dan glanced over at Lexi. “It doesn’t seem like much of a coincidence to me.”

“Are you saying you think Gertie is the one who sent the letter?” Lexi questioned. “Because I thought Anna already knew that Darius was the one who sent it. And even if he hadn’t, why would
Gertie
send it? She’s just a little old lady. All she’s ever been is nice to me.”

Dan shrugged his shoulders. “I really don’t know what to think. It just seems weird to me is all.”

Lexi sighed. “I don’t think Gertie has anything to do with this. I’m sure she doesn’t know this Geoff guy.”

Austin met her gaze. There was a nervous look behind his turquoise blue eyes. “Lexi, why do you keep telling people that I’m going to visit Tommy?” When he said the words, his eyes flashed with anger, but it quickly passed.

Taken back by the question, Lexi replied defensively, “I haven’t told
that
many people! I only told Tommy and Gertie.”

Austin sighed. “Well, I hate that you’re lying to everyone. I’m not going to see my dad. I can’t.”

“Oh, Austin, get over it. Tommy already apologized for what they did. If I can forgive him, you should be able to forgive him, too,” Lexi pointed out.

“It’s not that,” Austin replied quietly. He lowered his eyes to the floor nervously.

“Then what is it?” Lexi asked softly.

Austin glanced over at her. “I killed my mom . . . or the woman who used to be my mom. My father has to live for the rest of his eternal life without the woman who he once loved, and it’s because of me.” He shook his head in frustration. “What type of person kills their own mother?”

“What type of mother plots to kill her own kid?” Lexi shot back at him. “Look, if you don’t want to see Tommy because you’re still angry with him, then fine. But if it’s just because you feel guilty—or whatever it is that you’re feeling—about killing your mom, you need to suck it up. Tommy’s already forgiven you for what you did. Now you just need to forgive yourself.” She
looked away from him and rolled her eyes in frustration. She didn’t feel any sympathy for Austin—especially not when she knew, deep down, that he had done the right thing by killing Violet.

Chapter 16

When Anna left Westbrooke, she wanted to burst into tears. It felt like her whole life—her whole entire childhood and maybe even her own existence—had changed. Anna’s mother was still her mother, but she was no longer the mother that Anna once knew. This mother was one who did things behind her family’s back—a mother who had secretly loved someone besides her father, even while Anna believed that her parents had a happy marriage all of those years.

Now that Anna knew the truth about her mother, she wanted to vomit. Nothing had ever made her feel sicker to her stomach in her life.

And then there was Darius. Anna wasn’t sure what to make of him. On the one hand, she wanted to hate him. After all, her mother had lied to Anna and her father; she had betrayed them in order to continue this love affair that she’d had with Darius. But on the other hand, Anna could tell just by looking in his eyes that Darius really had loved her mother. He
still
loved her mother . . . and that made Anna angry. Not because he had loved her but because he hadn’t protected her.

Why hadn’t Darius kept her mom safe if he loved her so much? That was the million dollar question that burnt through Anna’s mind. It was the only thing that she truly despised about Darius—that he could have done something to stop Geoff from killing her mom and hadn’t.

“Is everything okay?” Austin asked her, as he hit the button to unlock the doors of Anna’s Ford Escalade.

Deciding that she was too distraught to drive herself, Anna decided to let Austin drive again. She shrugged at him. “Everything’s fine.”

Once she climbed into the car and buckled her seatbelt, Anna sunk down in the seat of the car and wrapped her arms around her waist. She sighed.

Lexi and Dan all kept quiet, not saying a word as Austin pulled out of the parking lot and onto the main road.

Anna blew her breath against the window, clouding it up. She used her finger to draw a tiny sad face.

Was she really sad, though? Anna was sad to find out that her mom was a different person than
she’d originally thought. But she had always thought that she would be relieved to find out who might have killed her mother, but now that she knew, the only thing she felt was anger. Aside from that, Anna still didn’t have very much to go on; Geoff had left Westbrooke over a year ago. No one actually knew his whereabouts. Maybe she would feel better if she actually knew how to locate Geoff, but as it stood right now, she didn’t have anything to go on.

Unfortunately, since she wasn’t a biological vampire hunter like some of the other students at Huntington, Anna couldn’t just find Geoff through tracking. It didn’t work that way. And from what she understood from her Vampire Geography and Tracking class, there were only two ways vampire hunters could track down a vampire. The first was if they sensed that there was a vampire nearby; this generally applied to vampires who were within a one-hundred mile radius. The second was if there was a certain vampire who they felt very passionate about finding. If Anna were to ask a biological vampire hunter to help her find Geoff, the only way it would actually happen was if she could somehow convince them to be angry enough at him for what had happened to her mother.

“Are you sure your mom really had a relationship with this Darius guy?” Austin questioned, as he turned onto a side street. “I’m not sure I would trust everything he has to say.”

Even though Anna could feel Austin’s eyes flit over at her, she kept her own eyes focused on the road ahead of them. “He’s not lying. He showed me pictures.” In fact, Darius had showed her one too many pictures of him and Anna’s mother. Her mom had been smiling and appeared to be happy in all of them—happier than she’d ever looked with Anna’s father. It was hard to believe that her mom had been able to spend all this time with Darius without even tipping her family off in the slightest that she was having an affair.

“Are you going to tell your dad?” Austin asked, glancing over at Anna.

“I don’t know, Austin. I haven’t had time to process this yet,” Anna snapped at him. The truth was, she actually had thought about whether or not she was going to tell her dad. Even though she hated keeping secrets from him, she had already decided that she wasn’t going to tell him about this. Anna felt like she needed to keep this one secret of her mom’s; if her mom had wanted Anna’s father to know about the affair, she would have told him herself.

That wasn’t the only reason Anna had decided it would be better to keep the truth from her father, though. It was more for his sake than it was for her mother’s. Anna didn’t want to destroy the image that her father had of Anna’s mother—the same image that, up until today, Anna had also had of her mom. She’d been an amazing cook, a great saleswoman, and she loved to travel.

How could that woman have been all of those things, all while being a secret blood donor at Westbrooke and having an affair with Darius? It really didn’t make any sense.

“Hey, is that car following us?” Dan asked, peering out of the back windshield.

“I doubt it,” Anna replied, sniffling. “No one around here knows us. Well, not exactly. I’m sure it’s nothing, though.”

Dan shrugged. “Okay, if you say so.”

“We saw Gertie in there,” Lexi said aloud.

Anna turned to look at her with a confused expression on her face.
“Who’s Gertie?”

“She’s this old woman. She’s a waitress in Briar Creek.” Lexi shrugged. “Dan thinks it’s weird that we saw her here. I don’t think it’s that weird, personally.”

“Hmm,” Anna murmured.

“Dan wondered if she wrote that letter to you . . . you know, the one tipping you off about this place?”

“No, that’s not possible. It was definitely Darius who wrote it.”

“That’s what I thought,” Lexi replied.

Anna turned back around and looked out the front windshield, just as Austin pulled into the parking lot at the motel. She glanced out her window in time to see the car that had been following them whizz past their car. As the driver passed by, Anna could have sworn she thought the driver looked like Rhonda.

Anna shook her head, realizing just how crazy the idea seemed. There was no way Rhonda would have been able to find them here. She was really starting to lose it.

Chapter 17

As Rhonda drove past Lexi and her friends in the motel parking lot, she tried to cover her face with her scarf because out of the corner of her eye, she could see Anna staring in her direction. Shit.

The only reason she hadn’t pulled into the motel parking lot behind them was because she’d had a feeling they’d spotted her following them. Dan had kept looking back, as though he knew she was riding their tail.

Rhonda sighed with relief as she whizzed past the motel and turned to Gabe, who was staring at her with a confused expression on his face. “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to my father’s house,” Rhonda replied, offering him the first excuse that came to mind. Obviously, they weren’t going to her father’s house since her father was dead. But Gabe didn’t need to know that. All he needed to know was why she had driven past the motel.

Gabe seemed to accept her excuse, but he sighed loudly. “I always thought Boston would be much more crowded than this. I thought it was a city.”

Rhonda eyed him curiously. “You’ve been alive for over a hundred years, and you’ve never been to Boston?”

Gabe shook his head. “No, I haven’t.”

“Why not?” Rhonda questioned. She wasn’t sure why, but she had expected Gabe to travel all over the country and even the world. What else would a one-hundred-something-year-old stuck in a teenager’s body do with his life?

“I just never got there.” Gabe shrugged. “I’ve been to a lot of places—New York City, Miami,
Detroit, San Francisco. But I’ve never been to Boston.”

“I’ve always wanted to see San Francisco,” Rhonda admitted.

“It isn’t that nice,” Gabe replied. “If it wasn’t for my brother, I probably never would have gone there.”

Rhonda glanced over at him again, this time really taking him in. All she knew of Gabe was his outward appearance; his dark hair and his gorgeous blue eyes that seemed to penetrate her own whenever he looked into them. But how much did she really know about what was on his inside? It felt like she didn’t know much about him at all; she didn’t know his favorite color, what bands or musicians he listened to, or anything about his family. “You have a brother?”

“Oh, um . . . no. I don’t have a brother actually.” Gabe’s eyes darted away from Rhonda’s and down at the ground.

“You just said you wouldn’t have gone to San Francisco if it wasn’t for your brother,” Rhonda said, accusingly. She couldn’t figure out why Gabe would lie to her about his family, but she had a feeling it was because they were pretty dysfunctional. The last thing she’d heard, his own mother had left Huntington without saying a word to him about where she was going. What type of mother would do that with everything that was going on in Briar Creek?

A mother who obviously didn’t care that much about her son, Rhonda thought.

Well, it didn’t matter now. Gabe’s family may have been dysfunctional and, who knows, maybe his mom really
didn’t
care about him. But Gabe had a new family now. He had Rhonda, and that was all that mattered. At least, that’s all Rhonda thought should matter because Gabe was the only family she had now, too.

Rhonda spotted a house that was dark and had an empty driveway. It appeared to be abandoned or, at best, no one appeared to be home. Deciding this was the perfect house to pretend her father lived in, Rhonda pulled into the narrow driveway and stopped the car. She turned to Gabe. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Gabe shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, if that’s what you want.”

As Rhonda swung her car door open and climbed out, she could feel Gabe’s eyes on her, watching her every move. When she got up to the front step, she rang the doorbell. There were no sounds inside the house; she didn’t hear any dogs barking or the sound of someone calling that they were coming to the door.

Relieved when no one actually answered and that she had gotten the desired effect, she went back to the car and climbed back inside.

“Well?” Gabe asked, pointing his chin at the house. “Is he not home or what?”

“No, he’s not home,” Rhonda replied quietly, glancing down at the chipped nail polish on her fingernails. She glanced up at Gabe. “It looks like the house is abandoned. I think my dad stood me up.” For an added effect, she sniffled a little and forced herself to keep her eyes open long enough without blinking to provoke a tear that slid down her cheek.

“Man, I’m sorry, Rhonda,” Gabe replied, a sympathetic tone in his voice. “Families really suck sometimes.”

“That they do,” she agreed. Blurting out the first thing that came to mind, she said, “It doesn’t matter, though. You’re my family now.”

Gabe glanced over at her and then quickly glanced away. He didn’t say anything right away, and Rhonda got the feeling that he was pondering what she’d said.

“Right?” Rhonda pressed. She decided something, for the first time ever. She needed to let Gabe make his own decision in regards to this. If he had feelings for her—true feelings, like the type Dan had for Lexi and Austin had for Anna—he would find a way to let her know he did right
now. Rhonda wanted to see, if it was possible, for him to admit that he had feelings for her without her trying to control his mind.

If he said that she wasn’t his family—that he didn’t really care about her—Rhonda wasn’t sure what she was going to do. There was no way Rhonda could just let Gabe go, not after what he had done to her. But maybe she would try to change her course of action. Maybe she would try to find a way to make him
really
fall in love with her, rather than just convincing him that he cared about her when he was vulnerable to her mind-control.

Or maybe she would let him go. Maybe she would take it as a sign that that this was all for nothing. Yes, if Gabe said that she wasn’t his family now, Rhonda would give up and allow him to be free again. She would go on to find someone who
really
loved her. But if he did say she was his family, she’d take it as a sign that he was the only one for her.

Rhonda waited anxiously for him to answer her.

Gabe shot a small smile at her. “Yeah, I guess you are my family now.”