Gray (Book 2) Read Online Free Page A

made the broth richer-tasting. She could have eaten twice what she did but, without discussing it, they stopped halfway through the pot.
    Benjamin left at dawn, taking the cooked fish with him to eat while he was hunting.
    She felt a twinge as he disappeared. She’d come to a point where she’d rather not have him out of her sight for long. Whatever hesitation she’d felt about him back at his house, when they’d argued over her rifle, had entirely disappeared since the incident at the Walmart. He was her partner, something akin to her wolf pack, now. They might skirmish over alpha position now and again, but they had become a good team.
    It made her nervous when he took the rifle away, too. She didn’t want to have to confront an aggressive group of survivors without one close at hand. Never bring a novice’s homemade bow and arrow to a gunfight, as they said—or someone should have said at some point in history. But that was the situation she was in whenever Benjamin left her to hunt.
    Coral was left with cold rabbit stew for the day’s eating. The weather was cold enough that thick ice had formed on its surface overnight.
    She cracked the ice and had a few spoonfuls of cold stew. Setting up water bottles to clear was next. The weather continued to get colder daily, and if it dropped much more, the water bottles would freeze before the ash could precipitate out. She’d have to sit with the bottles between her thighs, she supposed, while she fished.
    She started her work day by tipping arrows with screws she had grabbed at the Walmart. Soon she realized that she should have gotten tiny nails instead; those, she could have pushed through the wood. The screws were as thick as the arrows and needed to be tied on. She couldn’t afford any monofilament for the job. Her paracord would be too thick. Finally, she sliced through the thread at the hem of her jeans and worked out the length of it.
    After she had four arrows tipped, she set up a snowman target and practiced her marksmanship with both sorts of arrows: plain wood and metal-tipped. After watching the new arrows’ wobbly flight, she took off the tips and reattached them. Another round of target practice, and they still weren’t right. She tried again.
    Finally, she put two together with screw tips, balanced so that they worked okay. The flight still had a wobble she didn’t like, but they did fly further than the wood-only arrows. It must be the extra weight. After another half-hour of practice with them, she leaned her bow and arrows against the snowman and sat down to start the day’s fishing.
    Not much later, Coral’s animal sense told her something was wrong, but not what. Hair rose on the back of her neck.
    Though there wasn’t any sound, somehow she knew that someone was watching her.

Chapter 2
    She spun around on her butt. There was a pair of animals, digging at the place the organ meats and fish heads were buried. Those scraps were going to be a much-needed meal for her and Benjamin. She scrambled over to the snowman, picked up her bow and stood to face the animals.
    She fit an arrow to the string and inched forward, toward the digging…coyotes? No, dogs. Regular house pets, one maybe part German Shepherd, his looks not far from a coyote’s, and the other smaller and not an identifiable breed. Both were terribly thin. They didn’t look up, but their growling intensified as she took a half dozen paces toward them.
    She whistled and said something cooing and gentle, the way she’d talk to any dog, pre-Event.
    The Shepherd mix whirled away from the other and showed its teeth at her, growling fiercely. The other continued digging, found food, threw its head back, and swallowed.
    The growling dog feinted a charge at her, then turned around and snapped at its partner, who lifted its head for a second and growled, too—not at Coral, but at the other dog.
    These weren’t nice puppies, but hungry animals. Dangerous animals. Predators. Desperate