Change of Fate (The Briar Creek Vampires, #4) by Jayme Morse & Jody Morse Read Free Page A

and stomping way. That was it. She had tried to
be nice to Dan so far, but this obviously wasn’t going to work if
he seriously blamed her for this. He made it seem like she had
planned to get stuck in the early nineteenth century . . . with
him, of all people.
    Lexi didn’t need Dan to help her figure a way
to get out of here. She was going to be fine on her own, just the
way she had been before Gabe had come back to her after she thought
he had died after the car accident that he had tried to kill her
in.
    Gabe. As much as Lexi was trying to stay
strong, she couldn’t help but feel pain when she realized that she
couldn’t just call him the same way she would have been able to do
if she was back in present time. And to think that Lexi had refused
to say goodbye to him the last time she had seen him because he had
cheated on her with Veronica. No, actually, she hadn’t. All she saw
was Veronica taking her clothes off in front of Gabe. That didn’t
mean that anything actually happened between the two of them. Maybe
Gabe was just as upset with Lexi for jumping to conclusions.
    Lexi loved Gabe, and she was going to find a
way to get back into his arms as soon as she could – without the
help of Dan.
     
    *
     
    Lexi turned the corner and saw a small
rectangular building which featured a bell on its roof. Since she
had read all of the Little House on the Prairie books for her
fourth grade book reports, she immediately recognized it as a one
room schoolhouse.
    Just then, the door opened and a few girls
came down the front steps. All of them were tall and slender, and
they all wore dark dresses that hit just above their ankles.
    Lexi was about to cross the street and leave,
not wanting to draw attention to herself, when she realized that
the girls had already spotted her from across the road. Actually,
they hadn’t just spotted her; they were all staring at her and
whispering to each other.
    Their whispering reminded Lexi of what her
first day of school at Briar Creek High had been like. Everyone had
seemed so interested in her – so intrigued by her – that it had
been uncomfortable. She’d been asked tons of questions about the
car accident and Gabe, which she hadn’t wanted to talk about. Of
course she hadn’t known at the time that all of the questions were
because everyone knew that she was a Hunter and that the
townspeople were in dire need of her blood.
    “Hey, you,” one of the girls called. When
Lexi looked up, the dark-haired girl in the center of the group
nodded. “Yeah, you. Come here.”
    Lexi felt the heat rise to her cheeks. Why
would this girl possibly want to talk to her? Reluctantly, she
crossed the dirt road. She searched for the right words to sound
polite. “Can I help you?”
    “Do you attend school here?” the girl
asked.
    Lexi shook her head. “No, I don’t.”
    The girl folded her hands in front of her
skirt and stared at Lexi curiously. “Your outfit. There’s something
funny about it. It’s very . . . different. I’ve never seen anything
like it before.”
    Lexi didn’t have to look down at her denim
jeans and hoodie to understand what the girl was talking about.
“It’s a new style from Paris,” Lexi lied. “My father got it for me
when he was stationed overseas.”
    The girl stared back at her quizzically for a
few minutes before she seemed to accept her answer as the
truth.
    “We also haven’t ever seen you around,” one
of the girls next to her, this time a blonde, spoke up. “Are you
new here?”
    “We’re just passing through town,” Lexi
replied. “I should really go see if I can find my mother and father
now. They’re probably looking for me. It was a pleasure meeting you girls,” she said, adding a sarcastic emphasis. She
forced a tight smile before turning in the other direction.
    If Lexi was going to be sticking around this
town for any period of time, she knew one thing was for sure: she
was going to have to find some new clothes to change into so