Chapter 17
The dream came for her again, as it had every night for the past two weeks.
Lightning split the sky above Baldridge Manor’s gardens.
Rain lashed her gossamer gown, plastered the silk flowers to her skin, turned her ridiculous faerie wings into sodden weights dragging at her shoulders.
The necklace burned against her throat—fire opals and emeralds blazing with heat, and when the lightning struck the earth, she felt herself falling, not down but through, as if the world had opened beneath her like a trapdoor and swallowed her whole.
She woke gasping, her hand pressed to her collarbone where the necklace had rested. Nothing. Just the linen of her shift, the wild flutter of her pulse, and the grey light of early morning seeping through the narrow window of her chamber.
It was the beginning of August. She’d been here three months now, trapped in the past, living a life that shouldn’t be possible, falling for a man who shouldn’t—
Elodie pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until she saw stars.
Stop it. Just stop.
She’d made a life here. A good life, even.
Teaching sign language to everyone at the castle willing to learn, helping Bertram organize the castle’s meager library, tending herbs in the kitchen garden with Old Wynne, who’d stopped calling her “the faerie woman” and started calling her “the lass with clever hands.” She ate meals in the great hall surrounded by people who no longer flinched when she passed, who smiled when she entered a room, who signed good morning with varying degrees of accuracy but unfailing enthusiasm.
The moors had surrendered to high summer, heather blooming purple across the hills in waves that reminded her, painfully, of the lavender fields in Provence she’d visited during her gap year.
The bracken stood tall and lush, and sheep grazed fat and content in the distant pastures, their spring lambs now nearly grown.
The days had begun their slow retreat toward autumn, though the air remained thick and warm, heavy with the scent of sun-baked grass and something sweeter—wildflowers, perhaps, or the honeysuckle that had claimed the south-facing wall of the kitchen garden.
And Gareth.
Gareth.
He occupied her thoughts in ways that felt dangerous.
The quiet intensity of his gaze across the hall.
The brush of his fingers against hers when he handed her a cup.
The way his mouth softened—just slightly, barely perceptible—when she made him almost smile.
She’d caught him watching her yesterday while she taught young Thomas to sign bloody hell, and something in his expression had made her stomach flip like a startled fish.
She’d fallen in love with him. She knew it with the same certainty she knew the sun would rise, and the knowledge terrified her more than the lightning ever had.
Because she didn’t belong here. She had a life—a real life, with obligations and responsibilities and a flat that probably still had her houseplants dying on the windowsill.
There were conferences to present at, colleagues to prove wrong, and a career to salvage from the wreckage of the Fae Paper.
She had people depending on her, even if those people were mostly her mother, who’d remarried and moved to Cornwall and barely remembered to text on holidays.
She had to go back. She had to. If she could.
Who knew what kind of ripples in time she might be causing by remaining in the past?
The thought had gnawed at her for weeks, growing sharper even as the days grew hotter. What if she were truly trapped? What if the magic that had brought her here was a one-way door, slammed shut behind her with no key to unlock it?
What if she never saw electric lights again?
Never tasted coffee or heard music streaming through earbuds or complained about the tube being delayed?
What if she lived the rest of her life in a castle that had running water only in the literal sense of the stream that ran beneath the walls, and died in a world where her existence would become nothing more than a footnote in some historian’s research—curious report of a woman appearing during a storm, 1192, likely apocryphal—if anyone remembered her at all?
A distant rumble of thunder made her sit up straight.
Through the window, she watched clouds gathering on the horizon. Dark clouds. Angry clouds. The kind of clouds that had filled the sky above Baldridge Manor’s gardens when everything changed.
Her heart began to pound.
The storm. The necklace, and she’d sworn that skinning her knee, that the blood was a component. After all, all rituals called for blood.
She didn’t have the necklace. It had vanished when she arrived, evaporated into nothing, leaving only the phantom warmth against her skin.
But maybe—maybe—if she went to the clearing where she’d appeared, if she stood in the same spot during another storm, pricked her finger, if she wished hard enough—
It was ridiculous, desperate, and it was the sort of magical thinking that had earned her the Fae Paper and five years of professional ridicule.
She’d avoided the clearing, had walked past the treeline and not let herself look too closely. She’d felt its pull—of course she had—but she’d refused to give in to it. Going there felt like tempting fate. Like admitting she might need an escape route.
Or admitting she wasn’t sure she wanted to stay. But tonight, with the storm screaming toward the castle and lightning splitting the sky, she couldn’t stay away.
“Cheese and crackers,” she muttered to herself. “This is insane.”
But she was already throwing off her blankets.
The castle stirred around her as she dressed with trembling fingers, but no one stopped her as she slipped through the kitchens and out the small door that led to the stable yard.
The sky had darkened to the colour of bruises, purple-black and swollen with the promise of violence.
The wind whipped her hair across her face and sent dry leaves skittering across the flagstones—summer debris from the great oak in the courtyard, torn loose by the gusting wind.
“My lady?”
She spun to find Marian emerging from the kitchens, arms full of kindling. The girl’s eyes were wide with concern.
“Just getting some air,” Elodie lied, her voice too bright. “The storm’s fascinating. Weather patterns, you know. Very—very scholarly interest.”
Marian’s brow furrowed. “’Tis nigh on to rain, my lady. You’ll be soaked through.”
“Fine. I’m fine. Perfectly fine.”
She wasn’t fooling anyone. She bolted before Marian could respond, ignoring the girl’s startled cry, racing across the yard and through the gate and onto the moor path before her courage could fail her.
The clearing wasn’t far. She’d known exactly where it was since the beginning—had felt its location like a splinter under her skin, impossible to ignore even when she refused to look.
A rough circle of grass surrounded by gorse and heather, a few stunted trees bent by the constant wind.
The place where she’d first opened her eyes in this time, soaked and terrified and utterly alone.
She’d never gone back. Not once. Not even when the homesickness grew so sharp she could barely breathe.
Until now.
Thunder cracked overhead, close enough to rattle her teeth. The first fat drops of rain splattered against her face—warm rain, summer rain, carrying the electric charge of the storm.
Yes. Yes, this is it. This has to be it.
Elodie stumbled into the centre of the clearing and turned her face to the sky.
Rain streamed down her cheeks, soaked through her gown, plastered her hair to her skull.
Lightning forked across the clouds once, twice, three times in rapid succession, and the air smelled of ozone and wet earth and something else, something almost like—
“Take me back!” she screamed into the storm, holding her bloody palm up. She’d scraped it on a tree as she stepped into the clearing. “I want to go home!”
The wind howled. The rain fell harder. Lightning struck a tree at the edge of the clearing with a crack like the world splitting open, and Elodie threw her arms wide, waiting for the magic to catch her, waiting for the pull, waiting for the falling sensation that would mean she was going home—
Nothing.
The storm raged around her, but she remained exactly where she was. Solid. Earthbound. Trapped.
She had no necklace. No blood on the object, because there was no object. The magic wasn’t coming, and she wasn’t going anywhere.
The realisation crashed over her like a wave, and her knees buckled. She hit the sodden ground hard, mud squelching beneath her palms, and the sound that tore from her throat was barely human—a wail of grief and frustration and terror that the storm swallowed without a trace.
She screamed until her voice gave out. Sobbed until her chest ached. Pounded her fists against the earth until her hands throbbed with the impact. And still the storm raged, indifferent to her suffering, offering no magic, no escape, no hope.
Elodie didn’t know how long she knelt there.
The rain soaked through every layer of clothing, warm against her skin but somehow still leaving her shivering—the cold coming from somewhere deeper, somewhere inside.
Her life was gone. Her world was gone. Everything she’d worked for, everyone she’d known—
A cloak settled around her shoulders.
She jerked her head up to find Gareth crouching before her, his dark hair plastered to his skull, his eyes fixed on her face with an intensity that made something crack open in her chest. Rain ran down his scarred throat and dripped from his jaw, and he didn’t seem to notice or care.