Boy Made of Sky (Love on the Ley Lines #1)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Above us, the sky is gray and cloudy. Twigs break underfoot as my sister, Mackenzie, follows me through the dense woods.

“You know, of all the bad ideas you've ever had, this might actually be the worst one,” she grumbles.

She's been grumbling since we left the house.

“You didn't have to come,” I tell her, consulting my paper map. I stop at an intersection of two paths, look up at the sky, look back down at my map, glance around.

“Are we lost?” Mackenzie asks.

“No, we're not lost.”

“Remind me exactly what we're looking for.”

“I’m not entirely sure,” I say, distracted. “It’s not something you’re going to physically be able to see. It’s a spike. A hot spot. A waypoint. I don’t know how to explain it.”

I know she doesn't actually care. She's just with me because she was bored. She's always like this. She thinks I'm weird and ridiculous and do stupid things, but then she follows along behind me because she doesn’t have anything better to do.

“A waypoint?” she asks. She's stopped between two trees, hands in her pockets. She tilts her head back and looks up at the sky, and it’s in this moment that I realize she’s wearing my beanie. She must have stolen it from my truck when I wasn’t looking.

I glare at her. “Look, you know that we live right on the intersection of two ley lines.”

“I know that you think we live on ley lines and that people on the internet think ley lines are real,” she says.

“They are real,” I bark. “Anyway, there has to be a point on the intersection where the energy is at its highest, and a lot of people think it's here, in these woods.”

“So, what happens if you find it?”

My arms fall, the paper map crumpling against my denim-clad legs. I consider her question. I guess, in some weird way, I figure if I find the exact spot that I'll see something magical.

Weird things have been occurring in this town since long before we moved here, and everybody knows why, but nobody wants to admit it except for me and a handful of others.

Folks in town see things, they hear things. They want to pretend it's not happening. And somehow, I'm the crazy one.

Before I can come up with some kind of answer, lightning flashes overhead.

“Shit,” Mackenzie hisses. “Are you kidding? You didn't check the weather report before planning this?”

I scowl up at the sky. “I did check the weather report,” I tell her.

It's something I noticed when we walked into the woods but haven't said anything about. It was a perfect, sunshiny morning when we left my house on the outskirts of Black Forest. There was no storm in the forecast.

Things can always change, but it wasn't supposed to rain. And even now, it's not. It's just lightning. I watch it splinter across the sky ominously.

“I don't think we should be out here,” she says. A cold wind has gusted in through the trees and she shivers and rubs her arms. “We definitely shouldn’t be here.”

“Calm down,” I tell her as gently as I can.

Am I a little freaked out? Sure. But it's more anticipation than anything else. Mackenzie is just plain terrified.

And she has every right to be. Being caught in a storm up in the Colorado mountains is not anyone's idea of a good time. The first snowfall has been threatening for weeks, and it's cold enough that it could be on its way to us.

“We should probably head back,” she says, this time with a little more bravado in her voice.

“We can’t,” I tell her. “We're so close.” I shouldn’t have brought her.

“Who cares? You can come back some other day. You know exactly where it is.”

“I don't know exactly where it is,” I tell her. “Plus, I'm busy. I can't just run out into the mountains any chance I get. That’s why I've waited this long. Plus, you know once winter moves in, this is going to be way harder. Can you fucking chill for two minutes?”

Her jaw tightens. “Two minutes? Because as soon as we find this waypoint thing, you're going to turn around and go home?”

She has a point. Ideally, I would have liked to camp. Set up a tent for a day or two to really see what's going on.

She's rubbing her arms again. And then her hair, the strands of it that haven't faded into her ponytail, stands straight up.

I reach for her just as lightning strikes.

I see it strike a tree beside us. And then we fall, and my head hits something hard.