Page 39 of Off the Grid
“So I take it Beau was a good boy?”
“Yes. He was a very good boy.”
As her eyes glazed over with a memory he wasn’t privy to, her expression transformed. He’d never seen McKenzie so overtaken with love. Everything about her softened. An inner glow brightened her skin. A silly smile pinched her cheeks. Her eyes twinkled like brilliant sapphires. For a moment, he wondered what it might be like to be the subject of that affection, rather than a secondhand witness. Would he melt under the heat? Would he mind?
Another bout of thunder rattled the sky.
Leo glanced up as an ominous feeling scratched down his spine, but he forced his mind to clear. There was nowhere to go but ahead, so he put one foot in front of the other and kept his gaze level, silently praying they’d find shelter in time.
- 14 -
McKenzie
Over the next few hours, the forest transformed. The cloud coverage thickened, shifting to a sinister gray that cast the woods in shadow. Without the sun filtering through the leaves, the forest lost its color. The trees were a muddy brown, no longer glittering with honey highlights. The dirt, sticks, and leaves littering the floor blended to form a deep umber. The lively green canopy overhead shifted to dark evergreen. That had been dour enough… Then the rain came. It was slow at first, a few drops here and there, enough to annoy but not to bother. Fog crept through the trees, eerie and haunting, growing denser with each passing minute. The calm broke instantaneously. A bright stroke of lightning sliced through the sky, thunder tore the world in two, and the floodgates opened. Just like that, it was a torrential downpour.
McKenzie kept one hand on Leo’s back as a guide and used the other as a visor to shield her eyes. Every time she blinked one raindrop away, ten more came, turning her into a human waterfall. She couldn’t see. Her limbs were going numb from the wet and the cold. Trembles racked through her. The ground turned slippery and each step became ten times more difficult. Their progress slowed.
Divine intervention, my ass. We are never getting out of this alive.
“Keep an eye out for anything we can use as shelter!” Leo shouted above the din of the storm.
She could hardly see a foot in front of her nose. It was as though the clouds had decided to fall right along with the rain. Even the trees were nothing more than dark shadow.
“Okay!” she yelled back anyway.
“We need to find a place to wait this out. It’s getting bad!”
“Ok—”
McKenzie broke off with a scream as a fiery bolt of lightning sizzled through the fog, exploding like a bomb against a tree. Acracksplit the air as a branch crashed to the ground. The trunk splintered and flames erupted from the center. She stumbled back in fear. Her foot tangled in something, and she went down with a cry as pain flared in her ankle.
“McKenzie!”
Ow. Ow. Ow!
She reached down, trying to free her foot from the object she’d stumbled into. A slick, wet tube wriggled against her fingers, and a hissing sound filled the air.
“Oh my God, it’s a snake!”
He dropped to the ground anyway.
“Leo, be careful, it’s a snake!”
“No,” he muttered, glancing up with a joyous glint in his eyes that she couldn’t for the life of her understand. “It’s a hose.”
“Like, a garden hose?” McKenzie frowned. The hissing noise had disappeared—she realized it must’ve been the sizzle of rain dampening the fire. The implication of his words hit full force. “A hose! We must be near a house. There’s got to be a house close by!”
“Exactly.” He grinned as he unwound the tube from her leg. “Can you stand?”
Leo offered his hand and McKenzie grabbed it. As soon as she put weight on her foot, she cringed, biting her lip to keep from making a sound. He must’ve noticed. Before she had time to say a word, Leo’s arm wrapped around her legs and he swooped her into his arms.
“You don’t—”
“Just be quiet and hold on.”
“You know,” she couldn’t help but quip, spirits lifted at the mere prospect of shelter, “the last time you told me tohold on, we went catapulting off the road and over what seemed like the side of a cliff. So…”
“Hold tighter this time.”
