Page 7 of The Vipers and Their Vendetta

Then he turns and races past me, back to his car. He returns a moment later with two flashlights, handing one to me.

“Don’t I get one?” Saint asks.

Zane signs.Use your phone.

Saint sighs and flicks his phone light on. He goes straight to the bike and trains the light on the ground around it. Even in the light, I can see that he’s paled.

“What is it?” I demand.

He swallows hard, his throat rolling. “Blood.”

“Fuck.”

I glance over at Zane. The muscles in his jaw flex and unflex as he’s trying to control himself.

“Let’s sweep up and down the road,” I direct them, knowing they need to do something productive before they both lose their shit. “Take a side each and check as far as the light will let us into the woods beyond.” I point down the road. “She might have crawled into the undergrowth and be lying there hurt.”

The other two nod their agreement, and we start out. What I don’t say to them is that if she’s crawled away and bleeding, why is there no sign of any blood trail farther down the road? Did she patch herself up? If she was that with it, why wouldn’t she have used her phone to call for help?

Or maybe she did? Maybe someone else came to help her, and that’s why we can’t find her? The only problem with that is the timing. There’s no way she could have called for help, and someone else came to rescue her before we did.

Plus, why wouldn’t they have moved her bike farther off the road? Vani loves that fucking bike. She wouldn’t have willingly abandoned it to be crushed by the next passing truck. She’d have at least gotten someone to move it to the side of the road.

It also kills me that if she was capable of calling for help, it wasn’t one of us she’d phoned.

I push my whirlwind of thoughts to one side and try to focus on finding her. We walk up and down the road, then into the woods, searching, but finding nothing. Not a single fucking trace.

“Fuck,” Saint shouts. “She can’t have disappeared into nowhere.”

Dread expands in my chest, making it hard to breathe. I finally have no choice but to give voice to what’s been worrying me.

“I think someone has her,” I say. “They must have found her, on the road, and taken her.”

“Who?” Saint demands, spinning to face me, his feet rasping against the ground.

“No fucking idea.” I bite the inside of my mouth. “Could be lucky and it might be a local do-gooder.”

Zane laughs silently and shakes his head. He holds the flashlight between his thighs and signs,Do-gooders are outnumbered by freaks out here.

He’s not wrong, but I don’t even want to think about that.God, where is she?

“Vani?” I shout again, feeling helpless.

Saint joins me, and soon we’re shouting her name until we’re hoarse.

Still, there’s no reply and there’s no sign of her.

Saint turns to me. “She can’t be far, right? There’s no other tire tracks on this road, only hers. It’s wet and muddy, which means we’d see them. So they must be on foot.”

He’s right. It’s one thing we have going for us. “Who else lives around here, other than Verona Falls residents?”

Saint plants his hands on his hips. “We’re too far from the town for anyone there to have walked out here.”

I draw in a long breath of the chilled air. “So maybe someone from Verona Falls has found her. We need to get back to the college, anyway. We can’t see shit in the dark. We’ll tell the dean she’s gone, and he’ll hopefully get a search party together. They might have dogs and stuff. She can’t be too far, like you say.”

Zane shakes his head, his face angry and tense. He writes on his phone notepad.No, the dean will stop us seeing her, or even kick her out of school. He warned us off her.

Saint stares at Zane as if he’s grown a second head.

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