Expecting to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Heart drumming, she’d yanked back her arm and spun away from him, then taken off, cutting up the north-face path that she’d hiked as a kid with her father.

“Hey! Wait. I got you!”

She’d ignored his outrage.

She was fast and sly and had quickly eluded him, but if that jackass caught up with her and tried to scare her again, she planned to nail him good by kicking him hard, right in the nuts. She only wished she had a pair of steel-toed boots to make it worth her while instead of her pink Nike running shoes. Shoes with a reflective strip near the soles. Shoes that would give her away if anyone shined the tiniest bit of light in her direction.

Gulping in lungfuls of air, she forced her heart rate to slow as she listened for any sounds from the others. No voices. No excited screeches of a girl being found. No laughter. No running footsteps. Not one damned sound other than her own breathing.

Weird.

And wrong. Very wrong.

Aside from the hoot of an owl or the occasional riffle of air as a bat passed, the woods were silent. And dark.

What the hell was going on?

She considered the fact that this whole “game” might have been a setup. That she was being pranked, or hazed or whatever, that while she was running and trying to elude the boys, everyone had let her go off in the woods alone and now were partying somewhere else.

Great.

Despite the heat rising from the forest floor, a chill slid down her spine.

Don’t let your own paranoia get the better of you. Maddie would never set you up like this. Right? And you’re a nobody, not anyone that the others would target. More likely, aside from Maddie, they don’t even know you’re out here.

Truth to tell, she wasn’t sure what to believe.

A darker voice inside her mind reminded her that she could be a target, that as a cop’s daughter she was looked upon with suspicion. Hadn’t her mother arrested Kywin’s old man just a few months ago for some kind of domestic violence?

It would be just like that jerk-wad to turn this on her. Hadn’t he called her a “cop-kid-bitch”? Damn. And Reece, he was just bad news, the only son of a rich lawyer. Smart, surly, and smug all rolled into one Princeton-bound golden boy. Ugh.

Of course there were others, too. Donald Justison, the son of the town’s mayor, back from college. He was a douche bag if there ever was one. And Bryant Tophman? The preacher’s son who was all innocent and godly to his family? What a two-face! Far from the angel he portrayed himself to be, he might be the worst of the lot, what her mother called “a devil in disguise.” Tophman wasn’t the ring leader—that honor was reserved for Austin Reece—but Toph was an instigator.

Once again, she decided, she should never have come. Why had she listened to Maddie?

Because you’re an idiot!

Even though she was sweating from her exertion and the heat, Bianca shivered, rubbed her arms, and considered heading back down the hill. What was she afraid of? They were just boys, after all. Boys she knew. So she didn’t like them. Big deal. She’d almost convinced herself to turn back when she heard it. A rustling sound, like dry leaves turning in the wind, or a snake slithering through summer-bleached grass.

Her heart jerked.

Everything went quiet.

Eerily so.

Goose bumps rose on her flesh.

She eyed the undergrowth, the surrounding trees knifing upward into the dark sky.

Nothing.

Not even a breath of wind.

So what had the noise been?

She heard it again.

Closer.