Viper (Second Wave Book 1) Read Free

to buy her a tent and would spend most good nights sleeping beneath
the stars. It had taken a while for her parents to realize that she was moving
her tent farther away from the house, closer to the edge of the forest. By then
the strained relationship between them made the new arrangement almost a relief
to them all.
    It wasn’t that her parents didn’t
love her, or that she didn’t love them. On the contrary, they loved her very
much and she them. They just had no idea how to relate to or communicate with
one another. They seemed to have absolutely nothing in common, no bond at all.
It was like living with kind and wonderful strangers.
    The older she got, the more obvious
it became to all of them that she didn’t belong there. With them. On the
weekends or school holidays, she would spend most of her time outside, in the
woods surrounding their home, in the mountains and sleeping in the tent at
night. She’d go for days without seeing them.
    Her father had taught her how to
shoot when she was ten, when he realized that she may need to protect herself
from animals at night in the tent. Every few days she would bring something else
out to the tent that made it more like a home. Her parents, seeing how happy
she was, would help by buying her things to make her more comfortable.
    It wasn’t until Lara was sixteen
that she had convinced them to let her spend spring break at the cabin by
herself. She had bought one of those personal locator beacons and promised that
she would use it if she needed to.
    Her mother had fought the idea at
first, saying it was one thing to camp out a few hundred feet in the woods from
the house and another to go tens of miles into a national forest alone.
    She had finally relented when her
father had gotten Lara a satellite phone that allowed her to send them text
messages and could also send emergency texts as well. From then on, she spent every
weekend, school holiday and summer at the cabin or somewhere in the forest.
    Lara pulled herself out of her
memories when she heard the low warning call of a hawk in the distance. The
sound causing her to stop and just listen to the forest sounds around her.
There was nothing, she thought. That was a problem.  
    Standing completely still, Lara
closed her eyes and breathed deeply, calming her mind and opening her other
senses to the familiar area around her.
    It wasn’t what she heard that
bothered her, it was what she didn’t hear. The scratching of the rabbits and
other rodents into their burrows, the rustling of the leaves in the trees as
the squirrels and birds settled down for the night, the quiet padding of the
night predators through the undergrowth looking for their evening meal. It was
all missing.
    There was the problem, she thought,
turning her head to the sudden sound of voices off to her left. They were too
far away from her to understand the words. Judging by the sound and location
she was a good ten minutes away from where the voices were coming from.
    With a heavy sigh, Lara quickly
made up her mind and pulled off both of her packs. Finding a heavy patch of
undergrowth, she hid both packs before checking her weapons and standard gear
that she kept on her at all times in the forest.
    She’d lived here long enough to
know that those who were unfamiliar with the forest could easily get injured or
killed if they strayed too far in without being properly prepared.
    Lara headed towards the sound of
the voices before she could change her mind. No matter how much she wanted to
get to the cabin; she couldn’t leave knowing someone may be injured and in need
of help.  
    Lara
decided to check out the situation and if all was well, she’d be back on her
way with no real time lost. They would never even know she was there; she thought
as she silently, but quickly, headed towards the direction the voices had come
from.

Chapter Two
    Viper stopped fighting the ropes
and held his breath while he listened. Closing his eyes, he fought the waves