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

moved there. Eventually, Meg
had stopped correcting her. Oregon had been home to Anna. Home to
Meg too.
    Meg cleared her throat. “We’ll see. We could
be in Colorado, though I can’t imagine why we’d end up there.”
    “ We end up where we’re
supposed to,” Anna said. “That’s what you and David always
say.”
    “ And we’ll keep saying it
until we don’t,” Meg said unhelpfully. She was getting that
hysterical panicky feeling again and needed to keep moving to
control it.
    They walked for ten minutes, leaving the
smell of smoke behind them. Meg had chosen to follow the road
rather than find a house. She wasn’t completely sure why. Maybe it
was the awkwardness of appearing at someone’s door in medieval garb
and asking for help. If they flagged down a car, the driver would
have already been moving, so picking them up would be less of an
imposition.
    The sound of an engine reverberated from
behind them, saving Meg from having to analyze her own actions any
further. The vehicle was coming from the east and heading in their
direction. Anna and Meg stepped off the road so they wouldn’t get
hit if the driver decided not to slow down or couldn’t see them in
their dark dresses and cloaks. Committed at least to the attempt to
find help, Meg stepped in front of Anna and waved both arms in a
big sweeping motion to see if the driver would stop.
    “ What d’you think?” Anna
said as she eyed the oncoming vehicle. The size of the headlights
and their distance from the ground suggested they belonged to a
truck. “Serial killer?”
    “ Let’s hope not.” But Meg
didn’t think so, and she was a lot less concerned about being in
the middle of nowhere with Anna in the modern world than if they’d
found themselves stranded somewhere remote in the Middle Ages.
Rural areas in the United States were safer places for lost women
than cities.
    In the Middle Ages, the
opposite was true. Rural areas were home to lawless men, who
were very unsafe
for women. Even though, relatively speaking, a village was a big
place in the Middle Ages and a tiny place in the modern world,
their characteristics were much the same. In both cases—rural
America and urban Middle Ages—the key was the extent to which
everybody knew everybody else and kept an eye on their
neighbors.
    Meg really did think she knew where they
were too, a fact which was confirmed a moment later as the truck
slowed down and the headlights revealed the license plate on the
front of the truck. Oregon.
    The truck had a king-cab, and was bright
red, clean, and new. When the driver stopped and rolled down the
automatic passenger side window, the seats inside proved to be
leather. He could be a well-off serial killer, but somehow Meg
doubted it, especially when a girl of nine or ten with a mane of
black hair (the same color as her father’s) peered at her from the
back seat.
    “ Can I help you?” In his
early forties, the man was clean-cut and handsome, with short hair
and dark eyes. He was dressed well for any event on the west coast:
dark khaki pants, a buttoned down shirt, and a black leather
jacket. Meg couldn’t see his feet, but he wouldn’t be wearing
tennis shoes.
    “ We were hoping for a
ride,” Meg said.
    “ Did your car break down?”
the man said.
    “ Not exactly,” Meg said,
avoiding the question as best she could. “Are you headed into
town?”
    “ I wasn’t going all the way
into Pendleton,” he said. “We’re having Thanksgiving near
Helix.”
    “ My grandmother lives
there,” the man’s daughter put in.
    Meg repeated the word ‘Thanksgiving’ to
herself at the same moment that Anna breathed the name of the town.
Pendleton was a small town in eastern Oregon. Meg didn’t know it
well, but she’d been here for the rodeo once and several times more
for conferences. She’d visited the cultural center on the
reservation, where they now were, and knew something of the
geography of the area.
    Meg glanced at Anna again, seeing how