Chapter 5
For several long seconds, I stared at Vivienne. My brain locked up, and all I could do was breathe—try to breathe, as my chest got tighter and tighter.
This wasn’t real.
This wasn’t possible.
But she didn’t move. And, from a distance, she didn’t appear to be breathing. Black dots swelled and shrank in my vision. But slowly, they cleared. And Vivienne was still there.
It was a trap. That was the only thing I could think. The last time I had found her, the situation had been almost the same. She had looked injured, maybe even dead. And then she’d pulled a gun on me. She would have killed me, too, if my friends hadn’t saved me.
In the shadows, the blood was black.
Okay, what had I learned from the previous two years?
Number one, take pictures. So, I snapped a few photos on my phone.
Then I switched to video and recorded a short video, panning to capture as much of the scene as I could while narrating.
“My name is Dashiell Dawson Dane. I got to this grotto thing on Arcadia College’s campus, and I just found Vivienne Carver. ”
Lesson number two? Call the cops.
I ended the recording. I tried Bobby first, but it went to voicemail, so I left a quick message explaining what had happened—leaving out the part where I was a colossal idiot. I tried dispatch next and got Jaklin Ruiz.
“I’m sending a car,” she told me. “Can you tell if she’s still alive?”
“I don’t know. Give me a sec.”
“Dash, we always tell people that they need to keep themselves safe first. If you think you’re in danger, you need to get out of there.”
I nodded—which Jaklin couldn’t see, I realized—and then I said, “Okay. Stay on the phone, and if I scream, try to record my dying words for posterity.”
“This is all being recorded,” Jaklin said. “Get yourself somewhere safe—”
But I didn’t hear the rest because I lowered the phone to my side and took a few more deep breaths.
Vivienne still hadn’t moved. I gave the grotto another glance, but as far as I could tell, Vivienne and I were alone.
Great.
I put Jaklin on speakerphone and said, “Here we go.”
“Dash—”
She kept talking, but the sound of the blood in my ears made it impossible for me to decipher the words.
I forced myself to start walking. The grotto’s lights were behind Vivienne, and they filtered through her hair, turning it platinum and outlining (it seemed to me, anyway) each individual strand.
A breeze generated by the waterfall brushed my face, shockingly cool against hot, sweaty skin.
She still hadn’t moved. There was enough ambient light in the grotto that I could make out one of those piercingly blue eyes—blank now, and empty.
That, more than anything, convinced me. I’d seen dead people before. (Too many of them, if anyone’s asking.) She was dead; I knew she was dead.
But I had to be sure.
I crouched next to where she floated in the pool. She didn’t jump up. She didn’t scream. She didn’t whip out a gun. Her neck was still warm when I searched for a pulse. The flesh and muscle underneath were too soft and slack.
I tried for almost a full minute. And then I scooted away from her as fast as I could and said into the phone, “She’s dead.”