Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) by Sarah Woodbury

slowed
down.”
    “ One, I can’t see a thing,”
Meg said.
    “ Maybe we can get you some
glasses while we’re here.” Anna suddenly giggled. “When we do get
back, we can say that we went to Avalon to do our Christmas
shopping because we’d grown tired of the selection at the local
mall.”
    Meg laughed too, though Anna was right about
the glasses. Not being able to see properly was painful—like a sore
toe that wouldn’t heal. It nagged at Meg every moment of every
day.
    Lights flared ahead of them. After a few
seconds, the single glare coalesced into two points of light, which
meant they were headlights on a vehicle. The car was moving fast on
a road that ran along the bottom of the slope. Within fifteen
seconds it had passed them by, moving from left to right in front
of them.
    Anna broke into a run. “Thank God!”
    The powerful smell of burning gasoline was
overlaid by the scent of smoke. “Is that a woodstove?” Meg sniffed
the air.
    They were still fifty yards from where Meg
thought the road should be, though they’d been plunged into
darkness again, made worse by the flare of the headlights that had
ruined what little night vision she’d had.
    Anna spun around to look at her mother.
“Even if all we run into is a log cabin next door to the middle of
nowhere, we’ll have heat.”
    “ And the possibility of a
phone,” Meg said.
    The two women went a little farther. One
instant there was nothing, and then there was a road, a dark strip
of black against the gray of the trees that lined it on either
side. Meg wanted to hurry in case another car was coming along the
road even now, but her vision hadn’t improved in the last two
minutes, and the ground was very slippery. She and Anna were wet
and cold enough that they didn’t want to add to their misery by
having one of them step in a hole and go down with a sprained
ankle. Given how remote this location appeared to be, it might be a
while before they saw another car.
    They stumbled into a ditch that was
fortunately no wetter than the surrounding grass and leaves, and
clambered up the other side onto the road, which had been cleared
of trees for twenty feet on either side. The blacktop had been laid
in a narrow strip, without the yellow line to delineate the two
lanes of the road.
    “ Wow.” Anna bent and
touched the blacktop with one hand.
    “ Don’t kiss it,” Meg said.
“It’ll be dirty.”
    Anna laughed, bouncing up and down on her
toes. “Who’d have thought a paved road could be such a beautiful
thing.”
    “ Not to rain on your
parade, but we should start walking.” Meg looked up at the sky,
which was now clear of all but a few clouds. It was colder than
before too, with a brisk wind blowing down the road towards them.
“Can you see the north star? My eyes are so bad I can barely tell
there are stars up there.”
    “ I see the Little Dipper.”
Anna pointed.
    “ So we head this way.” Meg
turned into the wind and set off. If Anna had pointed to the
correct star, it meant they’d come from the south, so now they were
going west, which also happened to mean continuing
downhill.
    “ Why west?” Anna hurried to
catch up. “Do you know where we are?”
    “ If we’re in Wales, west
will eventually get us to the Irish Sea, right?” Meg said. “And if
we’re not in Wales …”
    “ The whole United States is
to the west of Pennsylvania,” Anna said.
    “ I’m thinking the trees are
wrong for Pennsylvania,” Meg said. “These are
evergreens.”
    Anna’s step faltered. “Do you think we’re in
Oregon?” She looked stricken. In the years following Meg’s and
Anna’s initial return to the modern world when Anna was three years
old, Anna had forgotten her time in Wales, along with everything
before David’s birth. This included the existence of both her
fathers, Trevor and Llywelyn. She’d blocked the memories so
completely, she even told people that she’d been born in Oregon, as
if her life had started the day they’d