Page 16 of Roaring Heat
The truth I don’t voice sits hot on my tongue. If I say it out loud, it becomes real. And if it’s real, then so is the danger she’s in.
What if the lines aren’t just reacting to her, but feeding off her? What if they’re pulling her into something she can’t understand, something I can’t protect her from? My gut knots at the thought, and I rub a hand over my jaw, trying to scrub the image from my mind. Anabeth has no idea what she’s walking into. Hell, I don’t even know what it means. But the land feels it. I feel it. And that connection might cost her more than she’s ready to give. Worse, it might cost me everything if I can’t keep her safe.
I felt it when she touched the stones. The pulse that arced through the ground wasn’t wild or aimless. It was recognition. The land was reacting to her, not me. Not Sawyer. Her.
We hike toward the creek where the energy runs the strongest. The forest closes in around us, dense with shadows and the hush of held breath. Ferns brush our legs, damp from an unseen spring, and moss-laden branches hang low overhead. Each step feels weighted, like the air itself thickens the deeper we go. Twigs snap underfoot, brittle as bones, and the chirp of birds fades into an eerie quiet. My boots scuff rock, then soil, then damp leaf mold as the path narrows into a deer trail more than a footpath.
The tension in my shoulders coils tighter with every yard we gain. I can feel Sawyer beside me, steady but alert, and the silence between us says more than words. We’re not just walking into the woods. We’re stepping into whatever the land wants to show us.
And I don’t know if I’m ready for what we’ll find. The water cuts a jagged path through the woods, loud enough to drown out smaller sounds, yet my attention locks onto the sharp crack of branches breaking deeper in the undergrowth. Three deerstep into view, their eyes glassy, movements too smooth, too deliberate. They don’t bolt when they see us. They don’t even twitch. Their eyes fix on us, unblinking, with a strange glint that feels too aware. Breath clouds in front of their noses in shallow, synchronized puffs.
The silence stretches, strained and unnatural, as if even the trees are waiting for something to snap. My pulse pounds louder than the creek, a drumbeat against the quiet. It’s not fear in their eyes. It’s something older. Something watching us from behind them. They just stand there, staring like they’ve been pulled here by a tether we can’t see.
Sawyer stiffens. “That’s not right.”
“No,” I murmur, hand brushing the hilt of the blade at my hip. “It’s not.”
The current under the ground surges again, sudden and sharp. It hums up through my boots, rattles my bones, makes the deer shiver in unison. Then they break, scattering back into the trees, as if released from an invisible grip.
Sawyer swears low. “What the hell is going on?”
I don’t answer right away. My breath catches, and a storm of emotions crashes through me. Protectiveness sharp as a blade slices through my chest, fear gnaws at my gut, and a stunned awe lingers, impossible to shake. I want to deny it, pretend she’s just a woman who stumbled into something she doesn’t understand. But the land doesn’t lie.
The pulse in the ground, the animals' eyes, the sharp thrum of the lines all converge on one source: her. I stare into the woods, jaw tight, and feel the weight of something ancient turning toward us. Toward her. And I know. Or at least, I’m starting to. The lines are unstable, yes, but they’re not just lashing out at random. They’re responding to Anabeth. The timing is too exact. The surge last night. The recorder spike. Theway the stones pulsed under her touch like they’d been waiting for it.
We set the last marker and stand in silence, listening to the woods hold its breath. My skin prickles with awareness, the memory of her mouth on mine still hot, tangled with the undeniable truth settling in my chest.
She isn’t just here by chance. The thought claws at me, stirring a mix of fear and fierce protectiveness. What if her presence is the reason the ley lines are restless? What if they are pulling her into something that could break her? My gut twists at the idea, torn between wanting to shield her from it and knowing I might not be able to.
The awe of it lingers too, an unsettling recognition that she belongs to this land in a way I don’t yet understand. She’s a catalyst. The land knows her, calls to her like it’s been waiting. My pulse slows, even as everything inside me kicks harder, bracing for what that means. If she’s the spark lighting up the ley lines, then every unstable pulse, each fracture in the grounding stones, and all the eerie stares from the animals trace straight back to her. That thought chills me, not because I blame her, but because it changes everything.
I can’t treat her like she’s just another newcomer in town. She’s woven into the rhythm of this place in a way even I don’t fully understand. And if the land is waking up because of her, I need to figure out why before something ancient, something darker than either of us can name, answers the call first. And the ley lines know it.
Which means everything is about to change.
CHAPTER 8
ANABETH
The silence after Beau walks away is louder than the crash of the waves outside my cottage. It presses in from all sides, heavy and suffocating, making the familiar sounds of the ocean seem impossibly far away. It reminds me of the day my mother left without saying goodbye, the moment I realized silence can hurt more than words. That same ache rises now, not just in my chest, but deeper, settling in places I didn’t know could bruise. I shouldn’t feel this way about a man I barely know. Yet everything about Beau unsettles me. The intensity in his eyes, the restraint in his words, and the truths he refuses to admit pull me closer, until I feel as if I am standing on the edge of something I cannot turn away from.
It settles over me like a weighted blanket, smothering and still, dragging up a swell of emotion I don’t want to name. Part of me wants to scream after him, demand answers, throw something at the wall just to hear it shatter. Another part aches for him to turn back around, to come storming in and kiss me like he did last night, like the world outside us didn’t exist. I hate how badly I want both. I hate how much I don’t understand what’s happening. With him. With me. With this entire place.The not-knowing claws at my insides, a slow, aching unraveling I can’t stop no matter how hard I try.
And beneath it all, there’s a glimmer of something fierce and defiant, a sliver of steel threading through the ache. If he thinks he can shut me out and I’ll just slink away, he doesn’t know me at all. The silence outside my cottage fills every corner of the room like fog off the sea, thick and damp and hard to breathe through. I stare at the door for a long minute, then back at the recorder still lying on the counter. It blinked red once before dying entirely. Whatever it picked up last night, it burned the battery clean out.
My fingers itch for data, for something measurable. I grab my notebook, swipe the half-charged solar sensor from the windowsill, and head out before I can talk myself into waiting. If I stay in this house any longer, I’ll go insane imagining the heat of his mouth on mine, the feel of his hands wrapped around my hips, the storm behind his eyes that looked like it was ready to devour me.
The sky hangs low, overcast but not threatening rain yet. I follow the narrow trail that winds between my cottage and the edge of town. It’s early, but I’m not alone. A man leans against the café’s porch rail, broom frozen mid-sweep, his eyes lock on me like I’ve sprouted fangs. Inside, the conversation drops off the second I step within view.
I lift my chin and keep walking. I didn’t move across the country to be intimidated by nosy neighbors with secrets tucked behind their polite smiles. Still, my boots hit the pavement faster than usual, and I don’t breathe normally again until I reach the treeline.
The forest receives me differently today. The hush feels more like a warning than a welcome. Still, I press forward. I want answers. My body hums with leftover adrenaline, my thoughts pulled in too many directions. I stop just past the grove wherethe energy readings spiked last night, drop my bag, and set up the solar sensors first, followed by the EM field monitor.
The needles quiver almost the instant I power the device, delicate metal arms jerking toward one side before falling back. I hold my breath, watching as they twitch again, this time more sharply, like they’ve sensed something beneath the surface that I haven’t yet named. It’s not random. There’s a cadence to it, a pulse just out of sync with the earth’s usual rhythms. My chest tightens as I lean closer, heart thudding in time with the subtle, restless dance of the instruments.
"No way," I mutter.
I tap the monitor again and watch as the needle flicks, a small shiver in the metal arm that shouldn’t be happening. Not constant. Not predictable. Just a strange, rhythmic pulse rising and falling like breath. I flip open my field journal, jot down the readings with quick, practiced strokes, then pause.
