Ashes, Ashes Read Online Free

lay far beyond her reach, as smooth as glass. Her fishing lines were marked by twists of bark. Lucy pulled them up, and, finding the hooks empty, tossed them back into the shallow water. All around her was the plopping sound of frogs, as they woke to her presence and alerted one another. The splashes they made sounded like a string of tiny firecrackers going off. She needed her spear to catch frogs. They were too quick, too alert.
    The dogs had stopped barking. The night was silent again except for the small animal noises. Lucy crouched and submerged her water bottles to fill them. The flow of water gurgled gently. Her eyes darted around, her head lifted. She pushed her hood back so that she could see better. The quiet was unnerving after the cacophony of howls and barks. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She was being watched. Slowly, she got to her feet, capped the jugs, and hung them from her neck, easing the rope into position so it lay across her shoulders. Then she loosened the knife in its sheath. She strained her ears, listening hard. Suddenly there were small, ominous noises coming from all around. A rat snake rustled past, its heavy black body as thick around as her wrist. There was the squeal of something just caught.
    Lucy pulled her hood back over her face, trying to blend into the inadequate shadows. She froze. Directly across from her, at the edge of a pool of fresh rainwater, belly flat to the ground, was a cougar. So close she could see the pink tongue lap. They locked eyes. Lucy barely breathed. She tried to remember if the manual said she should play dead or make a racket. The cougar didn’t move. Lucy’s fingers fumbled at the hilt of the knife, trying to prepare herself for an attack if it came; quietly telling herself to slash a volley of cuts; reminding herself that the blade was broken, that stabbing would have no effect. But behind that voice, the knowledge that she’d be helpless against two hundred pounds of lithe muscle and bone, a natural killer, and the hope that death would be quick and the pain numbed by fear and shock. Maybe she shouldn’t be making eye contact? Perhaps that was a threat? She closed her eyes and murmured a quick prayer. Her thigh muscles quivered. She ducked down, trying to move smoothly. Her feet slid awkwardly in the mud. She slipped and fell backward, the weight of the water bottles pulling her off balance. Quickly she was back up on her feet, knife in her hand. Her jeans were so coated in mud, they looked like a statue’s legs. The cougar was gone, soundlessly, no movement of grasses even to mark its passing. And now Lucy realized that the dogs were yelping again, an excited chorus of barks, much closer, and she heard the crash and thud of many paws trampling the earth.
    There was an ominous rumble overhead. Immediately, as if the sky had ripped open, the rain began, a torrent drenching her to the skin and plastering her hood to her skull. The ground was instantly hammered into sogginess. Lucy looked to her right. She saw hillocks of flattened grass too low to conceal a ground squirrel, and the tossing sea beyond. To her left was a series of muddy pools fast expanding and the shifting sludge that would slow her down, sucking at her boots, and beyond it the rain-shattered lake. She could make out the silhouette of the statue. The rainwater had already pushed the level up above the top of the toadstool, much higher already, she thought, than at this time last year. Directly in front of her, past a patch of soggy scrubland and up a slight rise, was a thick stand of trees, shadowed and dark. Behind her, she saw the first dog loping in her direction. Its muzzle grazed the ground, plumed tail up, fur raised in a spiky ridge over its back. Through the sheets of rain it looked like an illustration from a children’s fairy tale cut out of black construction paper. Wolflike.
    Without hesitation she sprang forward toward the grove, dodging around the hummocks of slick,