Secret Secrets

Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Limp.

Lifeless.

Covered in his own blood.

Half of the victim's neck seemed to be torn off, which could only mean one thing: vampire.

Or vampires. My brow furrowed as I looked up to my friends. "Did you two do this?" I snapped.

Maxwell held his hands up in defense. "No! Absolutely not! We were feeding on some rabbits quite far away from here."

My head shot back down to the body. His hands, blooded and broken, were crossed over his chest. "Della." I murmured.

Gabriel's nose twiched. "The blood is fresh." He said. "That means she's close by." As he said that, a cool breeze whipped by me. But it was too quick to be a breeze, too harsh. It had to be something else. Someone...running.

"Della!" I exclaimed. She materialized in front of me, standing calmly with a hand on her hip. There was still a bit of blood smeared on her lips. "No one likes a messy eater." I said cooly, trying not to sound afraid.

Della cackled, and then wiped her mouth clean with a bit of her long sleeved shirt. "Very funny." Gabriel and Maxwell were on ether side of her now, breathing down her neck. "Boys, boys." She said, patting them with her hands. "There's plenty of me to go around."

Gabriel's jaw tensed. "I don't want you, Della."

Della snapped her head, so that she was just facing Maxwell. "You still want me, don't you, Maxy?" Max swallowed, hard. I could tell he wanted to give in. Della wrapped her hands around his waist. "I do love you, Max."

Gabriel looked at Maxwell, shaking his head. "Maxwell..."

Maxwell didn't seem to hear him. "You really love me?" He asked her.

Della nodded, she did seem pretty convincing, and leaned in to peck him on the cheek. "I love you."

"Maxwell..." Gabriel warned again. But again, Maxwell appeared deaf. He suddenly pressed his lips against Della's. Della kissed him back, and then used her strength to push him up against a tree. Gabriel and I didn't know what was happening until we saw the sharp tree branch in Della's fist. "Della no!" Gabriel cried. But he couldn't reach her in time. Before Gabriel had even finished saying her name, she had plunged the branch through Maxwell's heart.

He fell to the ground, turning a color of grey that I had never seen before. A terrible cracking sound came from inside of him, and he cried out with one last moan before just...disappearing. As if he hadn't even existed. I fell to the ground crying, not even noticing that Della had left. Why had she killed my friend?

Gabriel rushed over to me and gently patted my back. "It's okay," He told me. "everything will be fine."

As I stood up, still soaking my skin with tears, Gabriel hugged me close, repeating to me his words about everything being fine. "How do you know?" I asked him through my tears.

"I know because of you." He answered, kissing the top of my head.

I was confused. "I don't follow."

"I see all this bad stuff happen," He explained. "and then I realize I still have you. And when I have you, no matter what's going on, part of it is still okay because you're there."

I looked up at his face, which I could barely make out in the moonlight. "I love you." I told him.

Without hesitation he said, "I love you, too." And leaned down to kiss me.

The next day, we had a math test. Gabriel and I finished it around the same time and we both knew that we had to tell Dax of the events of the night before. So Gabriel and I went up to Dax's desk and both asked for hall passes to go to the bathroom.

Without looking up from his grading, he handed us the passes to fill out. I wrote: "Meet us by the bathrooms!" On mine and handed it back to Dax for him to sign. He read it and then signed mine and then signed Gabriel's. Gabriel and I went to the bathroom entrances to wait for our teacher.

When Dax came walking towards us, I felt a strange shock of deja vu. Last time I had dropped a bomb on Dax things had gone down alot like this. Minus Gabriel, of course. "What's going on?" Dax asked, his eyes full of question.

Gabriel cleared his throat. "Last night, Maxwell and I went out to feed. We took Venice with us."

Dax's eyebrows flew up in shock. "You took Venice with you to feed? Why in the hell would you do that?"

I put my hand on his arm to calm him down. "I didn't want to be alone."

"Anyway," Gabriel carried on with the story. "once we were done feeding, we were making our way back to the Lennonwood campus. Venice tripped over something and we discovered that she had stumbled over a dead body. One that had been killed by a vampire."

"Della." Dax inferred.

"Correct." Gabriel confirmed. "She showed up not long after that and seduced Maxwell. He thought she was still in love with him and all that and then she drove a branch through his heart."

"Maxwell is dead?" Dax asked, astonished.

I nodded. "It was a terrible thing to watch. That and having to burn the victim's body afterward so no one would find it."

Dax tapped his chin. "Is she thinking up a plan of her own? Maybe she's trying to kill us all off."

"That's what I was thinking." Gabriel said. "She does know that we want to kill her."

"Well for now let's just play it safe and keep our eyes open for any other sort of suspicious things." Dax suggested as we began to walk back to class. But before opening the door to return again he turned to me. "And Venice? Try not to get killed."