Snakes of St. Augustine by Ginger Pinholster

Author:Ginger Pinholster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

18

Serena

Surrounded by the raucous beach party, Serena didn’t hear her phone pinging, but she felt it buzz inside her pocket. Reading the first three words of a message from Jazz—I found him—she dropped to her knees in the sand, blinking hard. The rest of the message described a pet shop many blocks northwest of her location. Will wait for you, Jazz wrote.

Stealing a bicycle, even one that had been tossed onto a sand dune like rusty garbage, would have shocked Serena’s father. Fat fingers of dune grass had a grip on the bike’s crumbling frame, suggesting it had long since been forgotten by its owner. Still, her dad would have been disappointed to see Serena yank the bike out of the sand, hop aboard, and start pedaling hell-for-leather in case anyone tried to stop her. Sergeant Jacobs had raised a good soldier and an athlete—a daughter who followed the rules and kept her promises. She had promised, above all else, to take care of her brother. Jazz had found Gethin. Serena’s car was miles back up the beach. She had no time to waste.

The tires on the old bike were nearly flat, which didn’t make riding it through sand any easier, but all of Serena’s strength training paid off and her adrenaline was pumping so hard, she had to spit the metallic taste out of her mouth. Her hat was gone—lost when she ran away from Jazz. Her upper lip and scalp felt scorched from milling around the music festival for an hour, scanning the crowd for Gethin. All she saw were boys playing beer pong with red plastic cups and girls with tattoos on their backsides wearing bikinis that looked like American flags. Kids with no self-discipline, going nowhere, making nothing of themselves. Was Gethin the same way? Serena had tried to show him how to live by their father’s mantra—Perseverance, Patience, and Pluck.

She had failed.

Standing on the pedals with sweat singeing her eyes and clouding her vision, Serena barreled up a ramp full of people and onto the street, shouting a few lame apologies over her shoulder. A guy with a large silver eyebrow piercing said, “Hey!” and jumped off the sidewalk. Serena pushed harder, thighs flexing, six blocks north and three blocks east until she saw the pet shop sign with a lopsided drawing of an alligator, exactly as Jazz had described it. He hadn’t said whether Gethin was high, injured, or alone—only that they would wait for her.

With the shop in sight, Serena poured on the speed, so close to ending the nightmare of her brother’s latest disappearance. Her greatest fear—being alone for the rest of her life, without her parents or even her brother—would stop rearing its desperate head every night if only she could get Gethin back to her tiny house in their rundown neighborhood, safe in his own bed. Through the open door of the pet shop, Jazz was shouting, “Stop!” and “No.”

Gethin rose up in front of Serena’s handlebars a split-second before she recognized him, before she could hit the brakes or swerve.

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