Page 7 of Roaring Heat (Shifters of Redwood Rise #2)

ANABETH

T he woods behind me lapse into a held breath after Beau and I return from the clearing.

He gives a single nod and slips through the dense treeline, the branches parting for him as if they know him.

I watch his outline dissolve into the thick undergrowth, swallowed by the woods as if the forest itself had claimed him.

The place where he vanished stays etched in my mind, a hole cut clean from the moment.

My breath catches in a way I don’t expect.

A strange weight tugs at my chest, not panic, not grief—something quieter, something like loss dressed in uncertainty.

I climb the porch steps with my recorder gripped in my palm, trying not to watch the exact place where he vanished.

The hush that follows is not relief. It is a pressure that settles over the yard, the cottage and my skin, an invisible hand that tests for weaknesses I would rather not admit I have.

I tell myself I wanted this. Space to think. Room to breathe without his presence rewiring every thought I’m trying to hold steady. But now that he's gone, the quiet feels like a hollow echo, and neither the space nor I seem to know what to do.

I unlock the door, enter and push it shut behind me, already inside by the time the latch clicks into place.

The cottage meets me with small domestic sounds.

The low tick of the wall clock near the kitchen.

The soft settling of the wood in the fireplace as embers lose their glow.

The compressor on the split unit hums once and goes still.

The room is the same as it was this morning, but the scale feels off; it is as if a picture frame has been hung a fraction of an inch crooked, and the eye cannot stop noticing.

And yet, the walls seem farther apart, the ceiling higher, like the space has grown too big for one person.

Even so, I pretend that space was what I needed.

Air that belongs to me alone. The words sound practical in my head, but still it tastes thin, as if someone opened a window and let something necessary escape.

I try to catalog what changed. My heart finds a slower rhythm, yet my body hums with alertness.

The contradiction feels like standing on a dock while a powerful tide pulls beneath the pilings.

I had not realized how easily I had begun to time myself to his pace, how quickly I had leaned into a steadiness I did not have to earn.

Now that steady center has gone quiet, and the quiet draws attention to itself.

For one reckless heartbeat, I wish he had stayed. Not to talk. Not to touch. Just to occupy the space and keep the quiet from sounding like an accusation.

I move through the main room because movement feels like control.

The antique brass bed sits beside the window.

The kitchen is along the far wall with the narrow island and two barstools separating it from the rest of the room.

There's a leather couch facing the fireplace with a pair of sturdy chairs angled toward it.

A painted and distressed coffee table speaks of extensive use and not neglect.

A small bathroom with clean towels folded in neat stacks.

The furniture is eclectic and welcoming, as it was built to last and be useful.

Heat lingers, then thins. I trail my fingers over the back of the chair, surprised by the soft residual heat still clinging to the worn leather.

The fire may have gone dark, but its warmth lingers, subtle and fading, like a memory reluctant to let go.

I wish I could keep it. I wish I could bottle whatever Beau carries that makes rooms feel more anchored than they were an hour before.

The recorder sits in my palm like a responsibility.

I set it on the island and open my journal beside it, the leather bending easily, the spine softened by years of fieldwork.

The pen feels heavier than it should. Words do not want to come in a tidy line, so I start with facts.

Time of return. Weather. Notes on the clearing.

Names of locations, distances, landmarks, anything that can be measured.

The act has always helped. Numbers do not care if your hands shake.

Redwood Rise is supposed to be a study, not a test. The statement looks firm on the page, yet memory disagrees.

I can still see Beau cross the schoolyard earlier, a clean cut through chaos.

The turn of his shoulders. The economy of his steps.

The way his gaze broke a situation into parts and solved the right part first. There had been no hesitation.

He didn’t doubt for even a breath. The precision of instinct, trained repeatedly, made it seem inevitable.

I return to the bench by the door and peel off my boots, setting them side by side on the mat.

My soft wool socks find the rug, and the rough weave surprises me with its comfort.

There is something bracing about the scrape of texture across tired feet.

I roll my toes to wake feeling in them, and the old ache in my arches answers in a familiar voice.

The slight pain is honest, and honesty steadies me.

The cottage holds the day in subtle traces that do not lean on scent. A faint warmth on the iron grate. The smallest drift of heat rising from the hearth. The air carries the memory of the fire, without smoke. I tell myself that that’s enough.

I fill a glass at the sink and stand at the window while I drink.

The marine air from the ocean has moved higher into the trees.

It gathers in the hollows and blurs the edges of trunks and limbs so that the redwoods become shapes and then suggestions and then nothing certain at all.

The world tightens to what exists inside these four walls, plus the few feet of porch that still shows itself.

I set the glass down and write a reminder to call my sister when I am in town tomorrow and can use my personal cell phone.

Her laughter has a way of pulling me back to myself, of anchoring me when everything feels adrift.

I try to bring a sense of control back into the space.

I stack a small pile of field guides on the coffee table so tomorrow’s work will be less heavy at the start.

I straighten the throw on the end of the couch.

I fold a map and slide it back into the side pocket of my pack. The discipline helps until it doesn't.

The first sound is so faint it brushes the edge of perception, like a ripple in still water.

My breath hitches, and a tight coil forms low in my stomach as my ears strain for repetition.

Did I imagine it? The uncertainty lands sharp in my chest, the way tension sometimes does just before a storm breaks.

Then it comes again, unmistakable this time—a subtle scrape, deliberate and slow, like weight dragging across gravel outside.

My spine stiffens, and every muscle along my back tightens with instinct.

I set the pen down and rise, the room suddenly too quiet, too still, every sense reaching toward the dark beyond the windows.

A scrape. Not fast. Not careless. A weight that lifts and drags rather than lifts clean.

The second sound proves the first. A slow step over gravel near the porch.

My hand goes to the lamp, and the room shifts from gentle yellow to the deeper blue of evening.

I move to the window to the left of the fireplace and take the curtain between my fingers.

The fabric is old and sturdy and cool. I keep my body to the side, angle my head, and look through a thin triangle of glass.

Fog rides low across the yard. It moves like breath in a sleeping chest. It thickens, thins, and thickens again. The porch rail is only a darker band through the pale. I hold my breath and listen past the thud of my heart for other hearts that should not be there.

A board on the porch squeaks—not with the sharp pop of an old nail, but the low groan of wood under strain.

The sound travels through the windowsill and into my bones, flipping my stomach in a queasy roll.

The floor shivers with a faint tremor that has nothing to do with the wind.

It’s the same wrongness I sensed once before, when I saw Beau near the strange, invisible ley lines the locals whisper about.

I glimpsed them only in the clearing and still don’t know if they were real or just the product of exhaustion.

But in that moment, the world tilted askew, like a compass needle knocked off true north.

That same imbalance prickles against my skin now, gathering behind my ribs and fluttering beneath my sternum.

The tension swells in the quiet like thunder that refuses to break—charged, restless, and stronger than before.

Frayed at the edges, it feels like a pulse of chaos disturbing the air, a presence just out of reach, nameless and unexplainable.

“What the hell,” I whisper, and the glass takes my breath and cools it.

The air holds. The pressure spikes. My head throbs in a slow drumbeat that syncs with the floor under my feet.

I open the curtain another inch and let my eyes adjust to the gray.

The Jeep sits where I left it, in all its turquoise glory.

The nearest trees are ghosts drawn with a careful hand and then smudged.

The fog looks like something alive that has not decided what it wants to be yet.

A shadow thickens, separates, and moves.

I cannot say where it came from because fog makes liars of edges.

It stops just beyond the line of the porch and waits.

I think of Beau’s way of waiting, the taut stillness that has a purpose, and I know at once this is not that.

This is patience that tastes of choosing rather than deciding.

I do not breathe for three counts, and suddenly I see eyes in the fog.