Chapter Nine
Just because you can read a map
doesn’t mean you know where you’re going.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
Elodie woke to magic. It pressed warm against her body, softening her pulse with its starlit dreams, and she smiled, cuddling closer to it despite the inherent danger of doing so, in the same way she threw herself out of hot air balloons and ran straight toward thaumaturgic bombs, wild-hearted woman that she was.
Unfortunately, despite also being a well-educated woman, her brain took a while to catch up.
And then, abruptly, it did. Making a rapid assessment of the situation, it noted the scent of quality soap and the feel of a strong arm curved over her body, and it flung her eyes open even before she could fully process its report. She thus had half a second to realize she was snuggling with Gabriel before his eyes also flung open. The expression in them suggested he’d just received an equally alarming report from his own brain.
They stared at each other across a distance that Elodie professionally estimated to be really bloody close . And for the first time since she’d known him, she saw fear in Gabriel’s eyes.
Or perhaps it was her own fear, reflected in that heavy darkness.
“Sorry,” she said, pulling herself up out of his embrace.
“Sorry,” he said in the same moment, also sitting up.
Crack . Her forehead met his chin.
“Damn it,” they swore in unison.
“I’ll just…” Elodie said, and practically threw herself off the bed. Bright, rosy light filled the room, indicating that they had outslept their intention to rise with dawn. Fairly certain that her face shone with the same hue, Elodie fled to the bathroom.
“You are your own personal disaster zone,” she whispered furiously to her reflection in the old, mottled mirror. Shadow-rimmed eyes looked back at her with weary agreement.
Completing the usual ablutions, she bundled as much of her long, tameless hair as she could manage into a knot at the back of her head, secured with Gabriel’s elastic band, which was by now entwined with snarls. At once, the coiffure, such as it was, drooped lopsidedly. Elodie tried without success to convince herself this was charming, then decided that the heroines of mythology never fretted about their hair, and that she too was a heroine, professionally speaking, and had better things to do with her day.
Thus consoled, and daydreaming about Atalanta, and about the princess Ariadne being met by Bacchus “in his chariot, wreathed with vines,” she returned to the bedroom to find Gabriel having just arrived back from visiting the downstairs bathroom. His own hair was faultless of course, his jaw shaven, a cool, fresh scent surrounding him. Elodie promptly discarded the vision of wild Bacchus in favor of this man in all his Apollonian precision.
“Good morning,” she said a little shyly.
“Morning,” he replied, and if there was any shyness behind the word, his tone bashed it into two crisp, sharp-edged syllables. He took his kit and moved to one side of the room, where the dressing table stood, even as Elodie took hers and moved to the other side, near the window.
“Keep your back turned, please,” he said, sounding as prim as a maiden aunt, “so I can get changed.”
Elodie bristled. “I have no intention of peeking at you. Keep your back turned, please, while I can get changed also.”
“Naturally,” Gabriel replied.
“Good.”
“Perfect.”
Elodie clenched her teeth to prevent herself from responding. Let him have the last word. She would rather have her self-respect. As she began unfastening her dress, she scowled determinedly out the window.
Which reflected the room with perfect clarity.
She watched in the glass as Gabriel removed his vest and undid all the buttons of his shirt before her conscience finally stirred. Stop peeking! it demanded.
Absolutely, of course, Elodie agreed, looking down.
Then Gabriel took off the shirt, and her eyes suffered mild whiplash as they rose again to the view.
Morning light glossed his bare skin, turning it to gold. He angled slightly, revealing an abdomen so well-defined it was practically an entire dictionary on masculine strength. Elodie’s nerves trilled with the memory of that abdomen pressed against her body, and she rubbed a hand restively across her midriff, trying to calm the sensations and bring herself more firmly back into the present, in which her husband’s abdomen was off-limits and indeed not even for peeking at. All she managed, however, was to stoke a warmth that threatened to spread through her entire body.
Oblivious to her suffering, Gabriel bent to his kit, withdrawing a black henley. Elodie had previously observed this species of tightly fitting, long-sleeved vest on male students during the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race, but never paid it much attention. After all, what are men to rocks and mountains? But as Gabriel pulled on the henley, muscles rippling with the movement, Elodie had to admit, he was an Everest.
Leaning forward, she rested her forehead on the windowpane. I hate him, hate him, she silently chanted. A shadow moved across the glass as Gabriel’s reflection shifted again, and her attention automatically followed it.
He was removing his trousers.
This is it, she thought. This is the moment I die. (Which was not quite as hyperbolic a statement as it seemed, considering she’d forgotten to inhale.) Swallowing heavily, she turned aside from the window and attacked the buttons of her dress, determined to make no further notice of her altogether disturbing husband.
—
Hell, Gabriel cursed silently, then added a preposition for good measure: I am in hell . For although he’d turned his back to Elodie like a decent gentleman, he’d not counted on the dressing table’s mirror giving him a clear view of his damned disturbing wife as she slipped off her dress. The sight of her upper body covered only by the flimsiest camisole, not even a corset to protect a man’s sensibilities, set his nerves aflame. Hastily he looked away.
Dressing in khaki field pants, tucking them into sturdy tramping boots, he folded up the vest’s sleeves (then refolded one until it was precisely even with the other), and set his ER kit on his back. Then, donning his spectacles, he reached across the dressing table for his portable weather station.
The movement caused him to accidentally see Elodie’s reflection in the mirror once again. She was now safely attired in a white, lace-collared shirtwaist, plaid skirt, and the scratchy brown cardigan. The skirt was salaciously short, just four inches below her knees, and tall boots only superficially protected her legs from the scandal of visibility.
Mind you, had someone interviewed Gabriel on the matter, he’d have said she ought to wear trousers, for safety’s sake. Any man ruffled by the female form lacked mental discipline.
Just then Elodie noticed a crease on the front of her shirtwaist. She brushed her hand down over her breast—
—
Elodie glanced over with mild alarm as Gabriel appeared to choke on his own breath. Immediately, her own breath threatened to implode. He was wearing his spectacles.
More specifically, he was wearing a tight-fitting henley with the sleeves folded up, trousers made for action, hardy boots, and his spectacles.
Just kill me now and be done with it, she thought with a heavy sigh.
“Is something wrong?” Gabriel asked, gruff.
“Nngghghnnh,” she replied. Thankfully, due to long experience of giving morning lectures while still half-asleep, this came out with serene coherence: “No, nothing wrong. Nothing at all. Absolutely fine. And you?”
“Fine,” he said, and scowled so fiercely at the weather station in his hand that it was a wonder the glass covers of its brass-ringed gauges did not shatter.
“Bad readings?” she asked as she turned to her ER kit and began removing nonessential items.
“No, they’re all normal. The storm has passed. We should be able to make good headway today. If we…”
As his voice faded, Elodie glanced over and found him staring at the pile of clothes and toiletries strewn about at her feet.
“Don’t worry, I’ll clean it up later,” she assured him. Closing her lightened kit, she set it on her back. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yes.” Gabriel hauled his attention away from the floor with obvious difficulty. Really, it’s not that much mess, Elodie grumped, glancing at it herself—
And saw the silk and lace drawers draped lasciviously over a telescope.
Her heart gave a little wail and hid itself under a blanket of embarrassment. Her brain reminded her that she’d spent much of yesterday walking around in almost identical drawers for all the world to see, but this oddly did not help. Somehow, the garments seemed more salacious off her body. The pink bows at either side of the lace trim appeared to wink at her.
Oh God, I need coffee, she thought. Black, black coffee. Coffee so black it would make midnight seem like noon. Coffee that was actually vodka. She strode for the door at the same time Gabriel did. They very, very carefully did not collide. Gabriel gestured for her to precede him, and Elodie clicked her tongue.
“Really, ‘ladies first’ isn’t always the kindness you think it is,” she told him as she exited. “A burglar could have been lurking out here and I’d have walked directly into his clutches.”
“Hm,” he said in a manner that fired her up more than several cups of coffee would have done.
“However, it seems a burglar has already been, and has stolen your vocabulary,” she commented snarkily.
“I’m flattered you think what I say is valuable.”
“I don’t think about you at all.”
“Whereas I think about you constantly.”
Elodie’s heart stammered at this pronouncement, but before it could get too excited, he continued: “Such hypervigilance is not good for one’s mental well-being but has proven necessary. I can only be thankful I have a doctorate in disaster studies.”
“I wish my own doctorate was in medicine,” Elodie muttered, “considering you give me a headache.”
“How fortunate then that you never think of me.”
Elodie glanced back at Algernon’s bedroom door, which they had passed while preoccupied with each other. “I suppose we should wake the redoubtable Mr. Jennings.”
“Redoubtable?” Gabriel said disbelievingly.
“As in, I have doubts about him repeatedly.”
Gabriel’s expression suspended between disapproval for this shocking mutilation of language and amusement over its cleverness. Elodie smirked at him, and the expression immediately crashed into a frown. “We should wake him,” he agreed. “After all, we might need something to throw into the mine shaft to test the magic.”
Algernon was not in his bedroom, however. They found him instead in the inn’s lobby, pacing back and forth. Huddled in a Mackintosh coat and woolen cap despite the fine weather, he held a cloth-covered basket in one hand, his suitcase in the other. Seeing them, he jumped with fright.
“Is everything all right?” Elodie asked.
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no, of course it is,” he said, and gave a tremulous laugh.
“That’s an awful lot of ‘no’s for a ‘yes’ answer,” Elodie commented wryly.
“Ha ha. I’m just waiting for you so we can go out to the trove site, that’s all.”
Elodie frowned with mild confusion. “You’re taking your suitcase with you?”
“Oh, no, I just brought it downstairs because…if…This is our breakfast.” He held out the basket. “Shall we go? Hurry, now.”
He turned to the door, and behind his back Elodie and Gabriel exchanged a glance of approval (Elodie) and mild disapprobation (guess who). Perhaps Algernon Jennings wasn’t such a cowardly wretch after all. He pulled open the door—
“Eee!” he squeaked, dropping his suitcase.
Tegan Parry was standing on the doorstep, surrounded by a nimbus of fresh morning sunlight. “Ah, there you are, Mr. Jennings,” she said, smiling. “I’ve spoken to Mrs. Jones. She’s about to leave for Aberystwyth and is happy to take you in her carriage.”
Algernon shook his head with such vehemence there appeared some danger of his mustache falling off. “No, no, I, you, oh dear, such a, um, misunderstanding, ha ha.”
“ Fortes fortuna juvat , Mr. Jennings,” Gabriel said sternly. And when he received a blank look in response: “Fortune favors the brave. At the very least, dare a proper sentence.”
“If you want to go home, you should,” Elodie said with gentle sympathy. “We won’t mind.”
Algernon turned to her, his expression lifting into delight. “What, really?” Then he glanced at Gabriel, and it plummeted again. “I mean, no! In the middle of a disaster? Good God, woman, are you insane?”
Abruptly, Gabriel took a step forward. “Don’t speak to my wife like that.”
Algernon flushed, but it was a mere watercolor wash compared to the crimson brightness that lit Elodie’s face. Indeed, she could have been propped against a headland to warn ships about sunken reefs.
“S-sorry,” Algernon stammered, throat bobbing.
It’s fine, Elodie wanted to assure him, but all her words had dissolved into stars.
Gabriel flicked a finger at the doorway. “Time to go.”
“Go?” Algernon repeated, the word freighted with hope, fear, uncertainty.
“To move from one place to another,” Gabriel said. “In this instance, from the inn to the trove on the fey line. We may need your assistance, Mr. Jennings, therefore you are staying. Or rather, you are going. With us. Now .”
“Can I come too?”
They all turned to find one of the tourists, Mr. Mumbers, standing behind them. “Do say yes!” he begged enthusiastically. “My phrenologist has advised me to get more excitement in life, for the sake of my health, and you people are the most exciting thing I’ve encountered in a long while. I ‘could not but be gay, in such a jocund company.’?” He directed a beguiling grin at Elodie, and she laughed.
“You need to broaden your horizons,” she advised the young man dryly. Beside her, Gabriel muttered something under his breath about him also needing to learn the definition of “jocund,” but Mr. Mumbers ignored this.
“Then I can come?” the young man asked, bouncing a little on his heels. “I’m all prepared!” He patted the small, gold-plated pair of binoculars that hung about his neck, and that were so elegantly dainty, they probably wouldn’t see a tree five feet in front of them.
Gabriel’s irritation, however, was impossible to miss. “N—”
“Sure,” Elodie said, shrugging. “The more the merrier.”
“May I remind Dr. Tarrant that we will be entering a classified location?” Gabriel intoned.
“You may,” Elodie answered, then gestured for Mumbers to precede her. She would have handed over the key to Queen Victoria’s bedroom if it meant yet another person between her and Gabriel. ( He said “my wife,” her heart whispered, its hands clasped together and its eyes raised dreamily. Her brain, however, was busy erecting a barricade. It wasn’t that she expected Gabriel to hurt her; rather, she hurt herself with her hopelessly unrequited feelings toward him. Really, feeling attracted to one’s husband was not safe. Best that, as much as possible, they not be alone.)
“Hurrah!” Mumbers enthused. “What fun!”
“This is geography,” Gabriel grumbled as he pushed past everyone and out onto the street. “ Fun has nothing to do with it.”
—
Alas, no one heeded this statement of fact. The thaumaturgic trove was a mere twenty minutes’ distance from D?lylleuad—but when at the three-quarter mark Gabriel looked at his wristwatch yet again, he noted they had been walking for thirty-two minutes. Thirty. Two. He could not repress a loud tsk .
“Must you inspect those flowers?” he demanded as Elodie bent rapturously over a tangle of briar roses at the roadside. This was after she had stopped to chat with locals, stopped to greet no fewer than three dogs, stopped to admire what could only be described by reasonable people as a plain blue sky, and actually wandered off the road completely at one point to gather harebells—“magical fairy bells,” she’d called them as she tucked a few into the ramshackle bundle of her hair. As a result, she looked more like a dryad than a scientist, and Gabriel managed to keep his irritation going only with a reminder that the woman presented a hazard to anyone with hay fever. She certainly made it hard for him to breathe.
“Time doesn’t only go forward, it goes deep too,” she answered him now. “I don’t want to just walk down a road, I want to experience it. That’s geography for you, Dr. Tarrant.”
Then she tossed him a blithe, sun-spangled grin that had him forgiving her in an instant—at least, until the very next instant, when she stopped to watch a skylark dancing above the long grasses.
Not helping matters was Algernon’s trudging attitude and continual complaints about the road’s sodden condition. While Elodie was gazing birdward, and Mumbers was declaiming, “?‘Ethereal minstrel! Pilgrim of the sky! Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?’?” the accountant cursed autumn and rubbed his muddy boots against a tuft of weeds. While Elodie veered off for roses and Mumbers followed close behind her, soliloquizing about the sweet prick of thorns, Algernon halted in the middle of the road to pluck raisins out of the last remaining scone from their breakfast. And just when Gabriel felt himself at the verge of madness, they all turned to look back at D?lylleuad.
“Such a bucolic vista,” Elodie said, sighing dreamily as she slid a rose behind one ear.
“It is beautiful indeed,” Mumbers agreed.
“I wish I was back in bed,” Algernon grumbled, flicking a raisin into a mud puddle.
Gabriel never wasted mental energy on regrets, but now found himself wishing quite fervently that he’d snuck out at dawn before anyone else was awake, as he’d originally planned.
And yet…had he done that, he’d have missed the rare experience of waking to comfort. At first, he’d supposed it to be a dream, such as he’d had often enough over the past year; the kind of poignant but beloved dream of cuddling with Elodie in all her violet-scented warmth, making him linger, eyes closed and heart sighing contentedly, before he surrendered at last to the cold morning emptiness of his bed. He’d imagined kissing her sweet face, and perhaps even doing more (e.g., jointly composing a scientific paper that described spatiotemporal pattern analysis of thaumaturgic mineral degradation’s effects on ombrotrophic vegetation in Scottish peat bogs)…
And then he’d woken fully, abruptly, to realize it was no dream at all.
Except that she was a living kind of dream, this wife of his. Glancing at her now, almost forgetting to frown as he took in the generous curve of her smile, and her heavenly eyes glittering with joy, and even the tangled, dirt-speckled flowers in her alabaster hair, he could only think that she looked too ethereally beautiful for corporeal reality.
Which was a problem, since he was a geographer. His entire existence focused on interpreting the world in ordinary, systematic, prosaic terms. The last thing he needed was someone in his life turning what ought to be a straightforward journey into a wonder-filled ramble.
Gabriel concluded that there was only one thing he could do under the circumstances: he marched on, leaving the incorrigible woman behind. (Algernon did not rate an inclusion in this decision, and Gabriel had already forgotten the tourist’s name.) He worried not even slightly that Elodie might be upset by this. His elevated pulse rate was due to the physical exercise alone.
Within five brisk, efficient minutes he had reached the abandoned mine site beneath which lay the thaumaturgic reservoir. When Elodie and the others wandered in three minutes later, they discovered him standing among the remnants of broken buildings and rusted equipment in the shadow of a small wooded hill, scowling at the gauges and levels on his handheld thaumometer.
“What is it?” Elodie asked, instantly professional despite the petals drifting from her hair.
“Nothing,” he said.
“It looks like something, judging by your expression,” she insisted.
“It is. Nothing . No thaumaturgical energy signal whatsoever.”
She frowned. “That’s impossible.” Bringing out her own thaumometer from a skirt pocket, she consulted its readings, and her eyebrows rose at least as much as the gauges’ needles ought to have been doing. “Huh. Nothing. Quantity—pressure—velocity—all flat. The well appears to have gone dry.”
“Aren’t we at a mine shaft, not a well?” the tourist asked as he tried to peer over Elodie’s shoulder at the thaumometer. He was so close, his breath stirred the fine threads of hair that had slipped down about her face.
Mumbers, Gabriel remembered. The man with pleurisy. Gabriel knew a cure for that: I’ll rip out your lungs if you don’t fucking step away from my wife .
“The shaft contains a subterranean pool of magic-charged water,” Elodie said, slipping adroitly from Mumbers’s shadow. The sunlight embraced her at once like a lover, gilding her body. (Gabriel had never before been jealous of the sun, and he wasn’t now either, of course; he merely noted the phenomenon.) “Most such places lie dormant,” she continued to explain, “unless weather or human activity impinge upon them, or the land collapses, or there’s been activity farther along the fey line, causing a cascade—”
“Fey line?” Mumbers asked, the words rolling on his tongue and igniting wonder in his gaze, as if he was internally composing a poem on the subject. Gabriel found his own eyes narrowing as he watched.
“An imaginary line that runs between deposits of magic beneath the land,” Elodie explained. She sounded enthused, and Gabriel couldn’t really fault her for that. A young person’s interest in learning was like manna for teachers.
“For example,” she continued, “the 5-SEQ—Britain’s fifth southeast quadrant line, which is the line this reservoir sits on—travels southeast across Britain from the Welsh coast and through London before it peters out. It’s quite weighted, by which I mean there are many deposits of significant size along it. That’s rare, and makes it a powerful line. But this particular deposit was only discovered by miners eighty years ago, after they were transformed briefly into mice, and it hasn’t been especially active until now.”
“So, if this is a pool, then magic is in water?” Mumbers ventured. “Or is it an elfin grot, wherein dwells a fair lady with wild wild eyes?”
Elodie laughed, delighted at this odd notion, her own eyes shining bright. Sudden pain snapped through Gabriel, startling him. He realized he was smacking his weather station against his thigh. “May I speak to you for a moment, Dr. Tarrant?” he said in a clipped voice.
“Mm hm,” Elodie answered, but then went right on talking, like a pebble caught in a flow of—of—(Gabriel’s brain twisted, attempting a melodic metaphor)—grotty elfin water. “No, magic exists within certain minerals, under certain conditions,” she told Mumbers patiently. “You’ll have to ask a geologist for a detailed explanation, but I can tell you that some of these minerals are dissolved in water or soil, others embedded in rocks. Early scientists recognized dispersal patterns and connections between deposits, and maps of those were created, hence the fey lines. Because they generally form radiant seams through the earth’s crust, we call them lines, although a few are more like wiggles—”
“Wiggles,” Gabriel muttered disbelievingly.
Elodie glanced at him, all flashing fairy eyes and tilted-up chin; all flowery and kissable, and damn he wished something in the vicinity would explode before he injured his brain permanently, trying to come up with poetic descriptions for the woman. Poetic! As if he’d been educated at a community college!
“A simple vocabulary helps people feel less daunted,” Elodie said in an arch tone.
Gabriel was willing to accept that pedagogical theory, although he didn’t subscribe to it himself. But he knew it wasn’t the true reason why she spoke so casually. He knew her . She simply, unselfconsciously brought the same ebullience to her lectures that she did to everything else in life. And she was clearly more at ease talking with the rhapsodical Mr. Mumbers than with him.
She was never at ease with him.
The thought was like a punch beneath his heart. Mortified, he turned on a heel and strode purposefully across the mine site. Not running away. Just departing with precipitous intent to be gone.
—
Elodie stared at Gabriel’s retreating back, frustrated and hurt. Did he have to make his dislike of her quite so evident? And did she have to care about it so much?
Please, she begged her heart. Stop feeling.
To which her heart responded by sending up a mist of tears, turning the world silvery and vague, as if it were drowning in unhappiness. But Elodie never cried in front of people (apart from that one time when she was lecturing about Mount Vesuvius’s eruption) (and also when Mr. Durbent explained he was late handing in his essay because his beloved grandmother had died) (and when her students gave her a cake for her birthday) (and at the end of each term). So she blinked furiously, pulled the flowers from her hair, and marched after Gabriel. After all, she truly was a professional, whatever he might think, she had a job to do, and she couldn’t accidentally whack him in the face with her weather station from a distance.
He was standing before the padlocked double doors of a hut that sheltered the mine shaft, and as Elodie came alongside him, he kicked one of them. This had no effect besides rattling the padlock and making Elodie’s nerves leap.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
“There’s no damage,” Elodie said.
“Except to my toes,” Gabriel answered sardonically. He shoved a hand through his hair, looking like a man on the verge of doing something wild and furious, such as dog-earing the page of an atlas.
“I meant the site,” Elodie said, cool and businesslike. “There’s no storm damage. The initial report said bad weather triggered the magical events plaguing D?lylleuad, but where is the evidence? None here—and none along the road to here,” she added with a pointed look. Gabriel returned it silently, his own expression barricaded. “No magical char either, no liquefaction, no buildings turned into trees,” she plowed on. “Considering the degree of thaumaturgic activity reported, I’d expect to see consequences in the primary zone. But there’s nothing here, as you said.”
“Good heavens, you agree with something I said?” Gabriel remarked dryly. “Yet I know that music has a far more pleasing—uh—noise.”
Elodie blinked at him. “What?”
The barricade seemed to develop spikes. And cauldrons of burning tar in his eyes. “What?” he echoed defensively.
She blinked again, astonished. “Did you just try to quote Shakespeare?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gabriel snapped, flushing.
Her heart, which had been lifting at the thought of her professional curmudgeon of a husband attempting poetry, now came down with a resounding thud. She half turned away from him, glaring at the dusty weeds and empty buildings. “Not the smallest spark of magic,” she declared.
Gabriel tipped his gaze skyward, squinting fiercely. “Nothing stirring at all.”
Then they looked at each other again, like compasses turning inevitably to magnetic north. Elodie felt misery shadow her eyes. Gabriel blinked as if the light hurt him.
“I know the magic exists, though,” she said, her voice growing as quiet and dry as the landscape around them.
“It does,” he agreed.
They went on looking, not talking, until at last Elodie tugged her gaze away once more. Gabriel frowned at his thaumometer.
“There’s nothing underground either,” he said, “according to this reading.”
“Perhaps the energy disseminated at a velocity that minimized damage here,” Elodie suggested. “It also might have exhausted the lode, which would explain our zero readings. But there is a real sense of this place being…”
“Derelict,” Gabriel said.
“Dead as a dodo,” she said at the same time.
And somehow they were looking at each other again. Elodie expected another comment about her idiomatic language, but instead she saw amusement twitch at the corner of Gabriel’s mouth. Her heart did a double take. Gabriel quickly turned away, his profile severe against the blank sky, leaving her to conclude that she’d witnessed no more than a trick of the light. She did not sigh then, but she did exhale rather heavily.
“I’m going to investigate further,” she said, and left before he could reply.
But an hour’s walking around poking at weeds, taking measurements, ignoring Algernon’s complaints about boredom and Mumbers getting in the way as he composed sonnets about the various broken pieces of mine equipment ultimately brought them back to where they had started: standing side by side, trying hard not to look at each other.
“This site is exhausted,” Gabriel said.
Elodie nodded, which accidentally brought her gaze in line with Gabriel’s sun-gilded profile. “All the evidence does suggest as much.”
“Hm.” Gabriel ran a hand through his hair, which resulted purely by chance in him facing her. “The recent crisis must have been caused by an—”
“Undiscovered thaumaturgic deposit,” they chorused. A thrill twinkled between them. Elodie was unable to repress a grin, although she dug her heels into the ground to keep herself from leaping forward and hugging Gabriel in excitement. He seemed equally excited, his mouth straight and brow unfurrowed.
“My calculations placed the trajectory of yesterday’s energy burst six hundred yards west of here,” he said, squinting in that direction. The land bulged gently, covered with an oak wood whose lush autumnal canopy appeared to smolder in the sunlight. Regarding it intently, Gabriel frowned, and Elodie knew he was seeing not trees but angles and inches. “I propose we move west and see if we can pick up thaumaturgic resonance in that direction.”
“Good plan,” Elodie agreed. She paused, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear shyly. “I hope your foot isn’t still hurting.”
Gabriel stiffened, as if she’d insulted him somehow. “It’s fine,” he murmured, and walked off without further conversation. This time, Elodie did sigh. Then she hurried after him, because what else could she do?
After a minute she recollected the other two men’s existence, primarily because Algernon pleaded for both her and Gabriel to slow down. But Gabriel was intent on his thaumometer, and Elodie felt so energized by the prospect of a new, unmapped trove of thaumaturgic materials that she did not glance even once at the incandescent glory of leaves rustling quietly overhead, nor imagine what fairy revelries the shadows below might be hiding.
Upon emerging from the woods at the crest of the hill, they met an expansive view of countryside billowing west to the sea and east toward Britain, villages and farmhouses tucked among its honey-colored copses and along the river, smoke rising from their chimneys like unfurled dreams. But Elodie and Gabriel saw none of this. They stopped, a shock of silence passing between them.
Some thirty yards ahead was a monolith. Six feet tall, extensively etched with symbols, it evoked a sense of antiquity, sacredness, and danger, the latter mostly due to the angle at which it leaned—and the human figure leaning in opposition, trying to keep it from toppling altogether.
Elodie and Gabriel exhaled with identical tones of weary frustration.
“Oh look,” Algernon said as he came up behind them. “We found Dr. Jackson.”
“How is he holding up that rock?” Mumbers asked in amazement. “It’s almost like—”
“Magic,” everyone said.
At that moment, the old professor noticed their arrival. Squinting through large round spectacles at them, he grimaced, his face purple with the effort of propping up the monolith.
“Hello there!” Mumbers called out, waving.
Dr. Jackson waved back…
“Aaahhh!” he screamed.
THUD.
“Damn!” Gabriel and Elodie swore in unison, and even as blue smoke arose from the fallen stone, they began to run.