Change of Fate (The Briar Creek Vampires, #4) by Jayme Morse & Jody Morse (12 page)

The only time she had ever seen a vampire shake like
this before was when Gabe had a vision. A vision that had depleted
his nutrients, which Lexi knew would have killed him if he hadn’t
been able to replenish himself with her blood.

“Dan?” Lexi whispered. When he didn’t respond, she
shook him. “Dan, focus on me. You have to drink from me, okay?” She
leaned down next to him, so close to his lips that she could feel
his labored breath against her skin. It sent shivers down her
spine.

“It wouldn’t be right,” Dan mumbled. “Gabe.”

Gabe. Lexi knew that allowing Dan to drink from her
was going to hurt Gabe, but she didn’t care. Dan’s
life
was
in danger and that was more important than anything. She would deal
with Gabe – and Craig, for that matter – when (and
if
) they
ever got back to the 21st century.

“It doesn’t matter,” Lexi told Dan. “What wouldn’t
be right would be for me to let you die when you already saved my
life twice. And I don’t know if I can get home without you. I’m not
brave enough. Now, drink.” She pushed her neck closer to Dan’s
lips.

Hesitantly, Dan bit down and pierced her skin. He
drank from her slowly, softly. It was different from the times Gabe
drank from her. He felt less greedy – and less desperate. It still
felt good, though, and at one point, Lexi was sure that a moan
escaped her throat as she lost herself in the movements of Dan’s
tongue as he drank her blood.

Dan pulled away from her. “Are you okay? You’ve lost
a lot of blood. I shouldn’t have drunk anything from you.”

“I’m fine,” Lexi replied, but even as she said the
words, she could feel her own body growing weaker. “Do you feel any
better now?” She had noticed that he had stopped shivering, and his
eyes seemed to be back to normal.

Dan gave her a weak smile. “A little bit. I’ll be
okay. Don’t worry.”

“Your skin is going back to its natural color. Why
is
your skin tanner than other vampires?” Lexi blurted.

Dan looked up at her and, running a hand through her
hair, laughed. “I had a darker skin tone before I was changed. Our
skin gets paler over time. That’s why Gabe is paler than
Austin.”

“Austin’s paler than you, though,” Lexi pointed
out.

“Austin had very fair skin even before we changed
him,” Dan said, sitting up.

“Who changed you?” Lexi asked. She realized, for the
first time, that she didn’t know how Dan had become a vampire. For
some reason, she had always assumed that he was born that way.

“It happened when I was working at the grocery
store,” Dan replied, a distant look in his eyes, as though he were
thinking back to that night. “It was my second night on the job,
and I was working in the meat department. I guess that’s not the
best place to work when you’re serving vampire customers only. A
customer ordered a steak, and I didn’t get it to him in time and .
. . he said he couldn’t wait anymore.” Dan shrugged. “He jumped
over the counter and attacked me. I don’t remember him draining my
blood, but the next thing I knew . . . I was a vampire.”

“Gabe always says that he wishes he didn’t become a
vampire,” Lexi said, hoping that it wouldn’t be weird for her to
mention Gabe. “Do you feel that way?”

Dan shook his head. “No, I don’t. The alternative
would have been for me to die . . . and then I never would have met
you.”

Lexi turned away from him to hide her blushing. And
then it dawned on her. There was only one thing she wanted right
now – and it would change everything about her entire fate.
Suddenly, her mom’s voice filled her head.
You must ask the
witch if she can change the part of the curse that won’t allow a
Hunter to become a vampire.

Chapter 16

****

Rhonda sat on the bed in the dark hotel room,
seething. She had done it again; she’d lured a guy who had appeared
weak to leave the bar with her so that she could drink his blood.
Just thinking about what she had just done made her feel disgusted
with herself.

Were things going to be this way for as long
as she lived? Would she have this constant thirst that she would
need to replenish every few days . . . even if it meant picking up
random strangers and killing people if she had to?

Speaking of her whole life, how long was it
going to last? Were vampires really immortals, or was she going to
die eventually? These were all some of the questions that Rhonda
wished she could ask Gabe. In fact, she should have asked him them
already, but she hadn’t thought about them until now.

Rhonda wasn’t sure how to feel about Gabe.
She wanted to be angry with him. After all, he had ruined her life.
But . . . somehow, Rhonda couldn’t find it in herself to be mad at
him. There was something about Gabe that just made her stomach do
twists and turns, like she was on a never-ending Tilt-a-Whirl ride
that she didn’t want to get off of.

Rhonda wasn’t sure if she had felt this way
about Gabe on the first night she had met him. There was no denying
that she thought he was cute, and he had given her butterflies
then, too, but now . . . she felt a sort of connection to him – one
that she was sure wasn’t just because they now shared common
ground. It was like he was a part of her . . . or was it that she
was a part of him, since he had changed her? Either way, it made
her feel happy they were bonded in this special way. It was sort of
romantic, and Rhonda had never been one to believe in romance.

She’d been planning to seek revenge on Gabe,
but maybe that wasn’t what she really wanted. Maybe she just wanted
for them to be together. Didn’t he at least owe her that much?
Since he had ruined her life, he should have to spend the rest of
his life with her. It seemed like a fair enough deal to Rhonda.

That’s what Rhonda was going to do. She was
going to give Gabe an option: either he would be with her or she
would get back at him . . . even if that meant she had to kill him.
If he was smart, which she liked to think he was, he would choose
the option that benefited him the most.

Next to her, the guy – what was his name?
Kevis or Kevin – who she had brought back to her hotel room
stirred. His eyes cracked open and he looked up at her. A look of
shock crossed his face – almost as though he didn’t remember that
he had gone home with her. “Hi,” Rhonda whispered, leaning down and
planting a kiss on his lips.

“Hi,” he muttered, the confusion still
evident on his face. “Did you give me some kind of drug or
something? I don’t remember anything. . . .”

Rhonda shook her head. “No? You wanted to
come here, so we did.” Thinking back to the bar, Rhonda remembered
something, though. She
had
had to work a little bit harder
with this guy than Dennis. It almost felt like she had to beg him
to get him to go home with her. Was it really begging that had
worked, though, or something else?

Rhonda had found that, ever since she became
a vampire, people did whatever she wanted – just like that guy,
Manny, at the bed and breakfast. Waiters seemed to know her order
even before she asked for it. Guys did whatever she wanted – which
could have to do with the fact that ever since she had become a
vampire, her appearance had slightly improved and she definitely
had a more confident attitude, but it was most likely because she
had this newfound power over people in general. They did whatever
she wanted. Rhonda had forgotten to ask Gabe if this was part of
being a vampire because she had somehow been so shocked by what he
had told her, even though it was what she had been expecting him to
say.

“No,” the guy said from next to her. “I
definitely don’t remember coming here with you.” He stood up and
walked over to the pile of clothes that he had left on the floor
and began changing into them.

Rhonda felt the anger build up inside of her.
This wasn’t the way the way she had been planning for things to go.
Last night, Rhonda had been able to drink a little bit from the
guy, whatever his name was, without him even knowing. It wasn’t
enough to quench her thirst for the rest of the day, though. No.
Rhonda wanted more than that. She
needed
more than that.

“No,” Rhonda commanded. “You’re not going
anywhere.” She took a step toward the door, blocking the guy from
leaving. “Not until I’m done with you.”

The guy glanced over at her. The look of
surprise in his eyes told Rhonda that he hadn’t been expecting for
her to be so bold and aggressive, but that he didn’t really mind
it. The guy pulled off his pants and laid down on the bed, waiting
for her.

Rhonda climbed on top of him, peeling off her
shirt to make him believe that she was going where he thought she
was going with this. She leaned over and kissed him. He kissed
back, forcefully, running his fingers through her hair.

In one quick move, Rhonda cupped her hand
over his mouth and sunk her teeth into his neck. “What are you
doing?” the guy asked in a muffled voice. Rhonda guessed that his
eyes were probably filled with horror, but there was no way she
could look at him right now – not when her mouth was being filled
with the bittersweet blood that poured from his veins and onto her
tongue.

The guy gave into Rhonda’s needs quickly. He
was soon moaning and breathing heavily as she drank from him. When
she was done, Rhonda climbed off of him. His eyes were closed, and
it looked like he was dead.

Rhonda reached over and grabbed the guy’s
wrist. There was a pulse. He was alive, but probably in a sleepy
state from all of the blood that she had just drained his body of.
Now was the perfect time for her to leave without having to explain
anything to him. Maybe the guy wouldn’t even remember her when he
woke up from the state he was in.

As Rhonda pulled her shirt back over her head
and went into the hallway, softly closing the door of the hotel
room behind her, she felt her cell phone vibrating from inside her
pocket. She glanced down at the name on the caller ID. It was her
mom.

Rhonda debated not answering it. There was so
much going on in her life that she really didn’t even have time to
deal with her mother, too. Something, in the back of her mind, told
her that she couldn’t just ignore her mom, though. Vampire or not,
it was still her mother.

When Rhonda picked up the phone, her mom’s
cheerful voice filled her ear. “Hi, honey! I’m in Long Island right
now. Let’s meet up for lunch at the Brewer’s Inn. Is fifteen
minutes good for you?”

Rhonda had barely been able to mumble yes
into the phone before her mom had already hung up.

*

“So, anyway, Kat and I are planning on taking
a weekend trip to Atlantic City in April. It should be around the
same time as your spring break. Do you think you’d be interested in
coming along?” Rhonda’s mom, Colette, asked from across the
table.

Kat was Colette’s girlfriend. Colette had
announced that she was bisexual when Rhonda was a high school
senior, only six months after Rhonda’s father had died. Things had
gotten really tense between Rhonda and her mom since then. Rhonda
didn’t care that her mom was a lesbian; she was actually glad that
her mom
had
found someone who could make her happy again.
She hated the fact that her mom had gotten involved with someone so
quick. It made Rhonda wonder if her mom had ever loved her dad at
all.

The tensions with her mom were why she
couldn’t wait to get out of her mother’s house. Living at the
college dorms had been such an easy transition because it was way
less awkward than living at home with her mom and Kat, who
practically lived there, too. Going to Atlantic City with them was
the last thing that Rhonda wanted to do – especially now, with so
much other craziness going on in her life.

Rhonda shrugged. “I guess it just depends on
how much homework I have.” She wasn’t about to tell her mom that
she had decided to drop out of college for now. There was no way
she could go back to live in those awful dorm rooms. Rhonda was
afraid that she would do the same thing she had done to Michelle to
someone else. Just the idea that she was capable of something so
disturbing, something so deadly, sent shivers down her spine.

“Is everything okay?” Colette asked.

“I’m fine,” Rhonda replied, hoping that her
mom wouldn’t catch her lie. Colette was always able to see through
her daughter’s lies. Rhonda had always attributed it to the fact
that her mom was one of the biggest liars she knew; liars could
always detect a lie from a mile away.

Colette shook her head. “Something seems . .
. off about you.”

“It does?” Rhonda asked, taking a big gulp of
her raspberry tea.

Colette nodded, studying her face. When she
realized that Rhonda wasn’t going to tell her anything and that she
wasn’t going to figure it out on her own, she went on. “Anyway, did
you hear about the murder at your school? I hear it was pretty
brutal.”

Rhonda looked up, trying to hide the widened
look in her eyes. News about the murder had already gotten out?
Even though Rhonda knew that someone was going to realize what had
happened to Michelle eventually, she had figured that it wasn’t
going to happen right away. “I haven’t heard about it,” Rhonda
lied, biting into a breadstick and trying to make herself seem as
natural as possible.

“Apparently, she was murdered in her dorm
shower. I can’t believe how dangerous this world is becoming. A
girl can’t even shower in peace anymore,” Colette said, shaking her
head. “Please be careful at night at that college, Rhonda. I’m sure
that this incident involved drugs or something, but I don’t want
you getting yourself caught up in a bad situation.”

“I’ll be careful,” Rhonda said, feeling a bit
of remorse. If only her mom knew that the ‘incident’ she was
speaking of didn’t involve drug deals – that it involved her own
daughter, who was turning out to be nothing more than a vicious
monster. Rhonda didn’t know Michelle that well since they’d only
been sharing a dorm room since the beginning of the semester, but
she knew that Michelle called her own mom every night before
bedtime. Rhonda could only imagine what it had been like for
Michelle’s mother on the night that she didn’t call. Her mom had
probably been the one to tip off the police that something was
wrong with her daughter.