Something Rising (Light and Swift) Read Online Free Page A

couldn’t abide people who talked too much, and under normal conditions she might have gone ahead and whaledon him. But something in him raised up a loneliness that settled over Cassie like a cloud. “At the Granger School,” he continued, holding Cassie’s eye, “I was assaulted on a regular basis by ruffians. You remind me of them. When I start at your school in the fall, I’m going to be perfectly silent, in class and everywhere else, so I just thought I’d tell you some things now, that my mom is an aide at the nursing home, and about my dad and whatnot. I don’t like sports, I’ve never gone hunting, I prefer comic books and snacks.”
    â€œPuck? Cassie? Want some frog legs?” Emmy called from the shore.
    Puck rose, brushed some dried mud from his knees, then bowed to Cassie. “Ladies first,” he said, gesturing toward the stairs with a sweeping motion, like the hands of a clock.
    She was back home and on the steps by three o’clock. The day had grown hot, and hours to go yet, so she took off her swampy tennis shoes and wet socks and let her feet dry in the sun. Her gray T-shirt said NOTRE DAME WRESTLING TEAM , it was her favorite shirt. Poppy had found it at the dump, back when he used to be a dump crawler, before Laura put her foot down. Cassie missed those days, the great things he’d come home with: a miniature guitar with no strings, a set of rusty golf clubs, a plastic cereal bowl with an astronaut in the bottom. The astronaut was floating outside of and appeared to be larger than his spaceship. All such things Laura dubbed A Crime. But then Poppy came home with a Memphis Minnie album, and when he handed it to Laura, her eyes filled with tears and she turned around and went up to her room and no one saw her for a whole day, and Belle said Poppyshouldn’t have told her it came from the dump, and Poppy said, confused,Was I to lie?
    Cassie’s eyes were closed and the world behind her eyelids had gone red when she heard the dogs, not Poppy’s dogs, who never ran free, but a pack that had been born that winter to a stray down the road. Born in the Taylors’ toolshed. The Taylors had no intention of keeping the puppies or of killing them or of having anything to do with them whatsoever, those were Willie Taylor’s words to Poppy exactly. Anything whatsoever. A stray who picked us out, we didn’t pick her. There were four pups, a brown, a red, a black and white, a black, and they were all hard-muscled, with coats so short they looked like leather, and heads like pigs. Cassie thought of them as the Pig Dogs. They weren’t much bigger than young pigs, either. All day long they killed. They killed chickens, ducks, cats, who knew. Once they had run up to Cassie as she walked down the road, and the head of the brown one was completely covered in blood, all the way back to his shoulder blades, still red and wet. No one could touch them. Now they ran toward Cassie with great joy, nearly bouncing, except for the black and white, who was carrying a dead groundhog in his mouth, an animal more than half his size. They were going to leave it in her yard, she could just feel it. Her opinion was that they’d started killing more than they could eat, so they were spreading the carcasses around for fun. The King’s Crossing was their game board, and they’d left something on every corner. Cassie stood up and took a menacing step toward them, and they all backed up, tails wagging. They had smart eyes, the Pig Dogs, this was one of their worst features. Cassie stomped, waved her arms, yelled Go on! Git! and the dogs turned one at a time, still sneaky and joyous, and started to run back down the road, exceptfor the black and white, who trotted a few steps farther in and dropped the groundhog, then turned and streaked off after his brothers.
    â€œCassie, you still out here?”
    The groundhog had barely hit the earth, and there was