Chapter Eighteen
There are worlds within worlds, and
entire universes in the heart of a woman.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
Whirling back to the table, Elodie grinned. “I’ve found it! It’s here!” she said in an excited whisper. Then the meaning of the words struck her belatedly, and the grin vanished.
“It’s here ,” she repeated in a tone of horror. “The unstable trove. It’s beneath the inn.”
“What?” Professor Jackson and Algernon exclaimed in a tumble of excitement and horror.
“Mr. Parry said he’s recently extended the building,” Elodie recollected, her pulse quickening as the answer finally came together. “He must have damaged a deposit of magic beneath the land—one dormant for so long, it’s never been discovered. But once activated, it sucked in the energy from the trove beneath the mine shaft, and…” She opened her hands, fingers spreading, in an evocative gesture.
Gabriel stood, not even noticing how his chair scraped across the ground. “Evacuation time,” he said emphatically. “I want the entire village emptied.”
“Yes,” Elodie said. “South?”
“That’s probably best. The most important thing is to keep people calm, or—”
“Aaagghh, we’re all going to diiie!”
Algernon leaped up, his chair crashing to the ground. Everyone in the taproom stared in shocked bewilderment as, wailing, he fled.
“Baby!” Tegan shouted (almost certainly in reference to the goat, not the man), and ran after him.
“I’ll do the bell!” Professor Jackson announced indecipherably and also dashed out, dressing gown flapping.
Elodie and Gabriel exchanged a weary look. “Evacuation Plan A?” Elodie suggested.
“With a level four withdrawal,” Gabriel said.
Nodding in agreement, they turned to depart, but stopped abruptly at the sight of three large, scowling men in front of them. Mr. Parry and his friends had come for a word. Specifically: “Evacuation?!”
“Do you in any way appreciate the financial damage such an overreaction will cause?” Mr. Parry hissed angrily, then glanced sidelong at his customers to be sure none had heard him.
“It’s not an overreaction,” Gabriel said, crossing his arms and frowning over the rim of his spectacles in a manner that would have had the men blubbering were they university undergraduates. But alas, they were hard-bitten denizens of the real world, and they didn’t understand that they were supposed to be daunted. “I must urge you to listen,” Gabriel continued nevertheless. “We are professional scientists who have compiled extensive instrumental and experiential data and concluded that there exists unequivocal danger of an imminent, significant thaumaturgic eructation.”
The scowls wavered into confusion.
“We’re brainy,” Elodie translated, “and we’re warning you, things are about to go boom. You need to get everyone out of here.”
“Oh well, if you put it like that,” Mr. Parry said. He turned to his friends. “Come on, men, let’s get moving!”
—
“This really is a disaster!” Elodie exclaimed as she surveyed their situation.
“It isn’t ideal,” Gabriel concurred.
She threw him a vexed look. “We’re locked inside a cellar directly above an immensely potent source of thaumaturgic energy that might erupt at any moment.”
“I am aware.” He rubbed a scratch on his hand, obtained during their several attempts to bash down the cellar door or find another exit among the shelves and boxes in the underground chamber. But after Mr. Parry and his friends had hauled them to the cellar, forced them down the stairs, and told them to bloody well stay there until they came to their senses and stopped messing with people’s income, the men had bolted the door to ensure that they did so. There was no way out. Well, except for the ultimate exit when the magic beneath them inevitably erupted, that is.
Elodie did not want to think about that. Unfortunately, her body would not let her forget. Its pulse shouted You’re going to die! at her unceasingly, and her nerves were even more strained than that time she’d taken a train all the way to Edinburgh before remembering she’d not turned off the gas lamps at home.
“I can’t believe they imprisoned us!” she said, wildly gesticulating.
In fact, Mr. Parry had insisted they were doing no such thing. “We’re providing you a special opportunity to meditate—free of charge!” he’d explained with a benevolent chuckle before he slammed the door shut. But Elodie did not feel especially meditative.
“The floor is beginning to warm,” she said, stamping her foot against the flagstones. “And it’s grumbly.”
“Yes,” Gabriel agreed, so tense he did not even argue about semantics.
“We’re going to die here.”
“Yes.”
Elodie went very still. Gabriel saying it made everything feel a thousand times more real, and all at once she could scarcely bear to breathe, let alone speak.
They stared at each other through the dim lantern light and musty shadows. Fear and regret, grief and intense yearning crammed into the space between them, draining Elodie’s warmth, turning Gabriel’s eyes darker than the core of a storm. The cellar walls trembled, shedding dust, but neither of them noticed. Elodie thought of the sunlit fields they might have walked together, the joint lectures they might have given, the children that might have been born to them if only she’d had enough time to weave wishes into hope, and then into a beautiful truth. Her heart broke, and broke, and broke.
Gabriel’s hands clenched as if he were trying to stop time. Elodie felt love swoop from her throat to the pit of her stomach, like a bird falling from the sky. All around her, the room began to tremble as if it too were frightened. A jar of preserves tumbled from a shelf and rolled noisily over the stone into a corner, where it caught alight with sullen, silvery magic. Fine cracks spread across the floor like the veins of a leaf. The bitter scent of fatal magic filled the air.
Abruptly, Elodie took three paces toward Gabriel, even as he moved toward her. They met in a swirl of dim light and glinting blue dust—reaching, grasping, so that nothing remained between them.
They were kissing before she realized it.
Neither spoke, but their bodies were eloquent: arms encompassing, lips conspiring, blood shouting ardently. They staggered, although whether from an excess of passion or the quaking of the floor cannot be determined. Had Elodie but taken a moment to sit quietly with a biology textbook, she would have understood the effect peril was having on her hormones, and as a result she would no doubt have thrown the textbook aside, then gone back to kissing Gabriel. As it was, she thought of nothing but him. His strength enclosing her, his hands gripping her hair. His jumper getting in the way of what she wanted. She tugged on it, and he released her so as to assist in the process. Then together they stripped her of her opera coat, letting it fall to the dust. Elodie slid Gabriel’s suspenders off his shoulders; he unfastened her long skirt; she wrangled with his trouser buttons; he pulled down her skirt and drawers in one efficient move. She held on to him for dear life as he lifted her, pressing her back against the stone wall. Her ankles locked at his back. He did not hesitate. And then suddenly, finally , they were together.
They stopped, staring at each other in amazement.
Elodie’s breath shook, wordless. Gabriel’s eyes grew heavy. Slowly he kissed her, a deeper, more intense kiss than ever before, as if he needed her in order to sustain himself. He began moving inside her, and it was just like Elodie had remembered, strong and steady, proving that he’d always belonged there. A tidal wave of sensation overwhelmed her. She moaned against his mouth, and he chased the sound with his tongue, and everything grew hotter, faster, desperate, as a long, miserable year of pining compressed into passion then barreled toward what the trembling, steaming floor promised would be an abrupt end.
Still holding her, Gabriel turned, pushing a wicker basket of plums off a sideboard before setting her down in its place. As her bare skin met the wooden surface, Elodie felt like she was being electrified. She tipped her head back so she could gasp a breath, and at once Gabriel seized the opportunity to kiss her throat. But just as her pulse rushed to meet him there, he stopped, and he withdrew altogether from her, leaving her feeling more bereft than she’d ever been in her life. She murmured a protest. Not answering, he lay her back gently on the sideboard.
It was not the most comfortable of beds, and Elodie considered making a polite complaint—but then Gabriel began kissing the soft curve of her naked belly, making a scintillating course southward. Elodie promptly decided that backache (and what felt awfully like a splinter in her hip) was a small price to pay for such delight.
He was so tender, and yet it seemed like he was igniting wildfires in her blood. Elodie didn’t know whether to laugh with joy or cry with overwhelming wonder that she lay naked beneath Gabriel’s mouth. As he arrived at the secret place she’d never allowed any other man but him to reach, his kisses grew more elaborate, and Elodie pressed one hand over her eyes, the other against his head to ensure he did not stop what he was doing. All the while, the sideboard quivered beneath her and dust showered from the ceiling, but Elodie didn’t care. Let the world explode! Life couldn’t get better than this moment anyway.
Then Gabriel lifted his head again, leaving her on the brink of something that felt like everything, and she swore at him. He calmly raised her up and guided her to the edge of the sideboard, where they reunited in one swift and thrilling movement that took Elodie’s breath away. This time, Gabriel escalated matters by also using his fingers in the same way his mouth had so profitably been employed, and Elodie’s breath returned like a tempest. She was ablaze; she was going to perish before any thaumaturgic explosion had a chance to kill her. It would be an undignified way to go, but God, so worth it.
“Wait for me,” Gabriel whispered, half command, half plea.
A wry laugh shook from Elodie’s throat, that he should say such a thing after all these years, here at the end when they’d no time left to them. “Hurry,” she urged.
“No.”
Stubborn, arrogant sod. She caught his face between her hands, and their lips met with painful urgency. It felt like both a reunion and farewell, and the poignancy of it fanned Elodie’s internal flames to such an intensity that she was forced at last to break the kiss with a sob. Still Gabriel would not hurry.
“You’re mine,” he growled. “I won’t let time take you from me.”
“Such a tyrant,” she complained, and kissed his jaw, his temple, and all the places on his beautiful face that she’d spent so long dreaming over. Fear and grief faded away. The disaster surrounding them became a mist, a rattling song. They cared for nothing but each other. Gabriel’s movements quickened at last, and he gazed with such reverence into Elodie’s eyes, it was as if he saw her soul. She felt it shine for him.
I love you, she thought, and came apart in a billowing of bright, singing stars.
At the same moment Gabriel went still, gasping. Elodie could have sworn magic poured through her, every nerve lighting up in response.
A soft, tremulous quiet followed (which is to say, clattering and rumbling followed, and the smash of glass as jars fell from shelves, but that was in the universe beyond their hearts). Gabriel drew her against him, enfolding her in a strong embrace. They held each other tight, eyes closed, pulses throbbing heavily, fingers digging in as they awaited the end.
BANG!
They hugged even tighter, every muscle tensed.
But it had only been the door slamming open. “Are you still in there?” came Mr. Parry’s shouted voice from above.
It was as though a map had been flipped over, showing a whole new world on the other side. Instantly, Elodie pushed Gabriel back as she scrambled down from the cabinet, her boots sending up clouds of sparking blue dust as they hit the floor. Gabriel, blinking rather dazedly, positioned himself in front of her as a shield against Mr. Parry’s view—never mind that his own nakedness made it clear what they had been doing. But Mr. Parry, on the landing, only called out once more, “Hello, are you there?” and Elodie realized the shadows and the rising thaumaturgic mist concealed them from sight.
“Where the hell else would we be?” Gabriel shouted up to the innkeeper. “You locked us in!”
“Yes, sorry about that,” Mr. Parry answered contritely. “You were right after all. There will be a discount on your bill, as an apology. But now we’re getting out. Hurry!”
Elodie’s nervous system imploded with hysterics. She did not know whether to laugh or scream. She’d just had desperate, urgent sex with her husband by way of farewell, and now the bloody door was open !
Which was, of course, a good thing.
Maybe a good thing, part of her responded darkly as Gabriel half turned away from her to restore his clothing. Death by thaumaturgic explosion would have been more comfortable than the certain demise from panic that she was about to experience. What had it all meant? What—what—what what?! Had it merely been incited by the danger and the banging and the impending death? The absolute in nervous overexcitement? Or had it been as heartfelt for Gabriel as it had been for her?
Actually, thank goodness the door was open, because she intended to run away as soon as she got her knickers on.
They dressed hurriedly while the room filled with a heat that was not due entirely to their mutual agitation, considering the smell. “Sulfur,” Elodie said, wrinkling her nose. “I knew it.”
Suddenly, a high set of shelves toppled, its load of jars smashing to the floor in a violent explosion of glass. Gabriel yanked Elodie protectively against him, their heartbeats crashing together. Flames were igniting from the broken glass, and cracks widening in the floorboards, and hot steam began to belch from within the tormented earth.
“Go!” Gabriel shouted, pushing Elodie toward the stairs. They raced up, even as the steps behind them caught fire and spilled fruit transformed into twisted black trees. Reaching the corridor above, they stumbled on trembling floorboards.
“I’ll clear the building,” Gabriel said, steadying himself with a hand against one wall. “You begin evacuating the village.”
Elodie nodded. “Be safe.”
“You too.”
She did not linger for a poignant goodbye. (After all, that had been thoroughly accomplished in the cellar.) Her professional instincts engaged, some ten minutes later than propriety would have liked. She turned and ran, skipping over fissures that were ripping open in the floor as she went.
—
Gabriel completed an evacuation of the Queen Mab in minutes, assisted by its shuddering walls and floorboards. Frightened guests in various states of dress pushed him aside as he came to rescue them and fled on their own initiative. Once certain that every room was empty, he ran to his own to retrieve his coat and ER kit, for the sake of the vital things they contained, then raced into the street.
The church bell was ringing, its doleful clang echoing through the village. Locals and tourists streamed out of buildings. They formed an exodus south into the fields with the efficiency of people who had been living with thaumaturgic activity for some time. Gabriel jogged through them, looking for Elodie.
There, his heart said, and a second later he saw her emerging from a cottage. At once, he released muscles he hadn’t been aware he was clenching. She led the cottage’s occupants onto the street, then pointed south. They joined the fleeing crowd, and Elodie turned toward the neighboring house. Gabriel pulled his attention away from her and ran to assist an elderly man who had fallen.
A foul odor of rotten eggs saturated the air. Cracks tore through cobblestones and trees slanted precariously as shock waves rippled out from the Queen Mab. When at last the village stood empty, the bell tolling into an otherwise portentous hush, Gabriel walked to the center of the street and looked back at the inn. Steam was billowing from its windows and chimneys.
“Well, at least we finally located the source,” said a light voice, and Gabriel glanced aside to find Elodie arriving next to him. His stomach squeezed as if he were seeing her for the first time, an unkempt dryad tripping into his life to mess up its nicely regulated schema. He frowned in automatic defense. But she wasn’t quite looking at him, her cheeks flushed with uncharacteristic shyness. Gabriel couldn’t blame her. His entire body felt like it was flushing for the same reason.
Well, maybe not his entire body. Certain parts of it ached to reach out and be with her again, kiss her again, and to make the bed in the morning after spending a long, sultry night with her. But there was the small matter of the disaster that was their relationship…er, which is to say, the disaster engulfing D?lylleuad.
“All clear?” he asked, his voice gritty.
She nodded. “Professor Jackson is ringing the church bell. Everyone else has—”
BOOM!
They ducked. The Queen Mab’s roof burst apart, stone and dust flying. Roaring up from beneath it came an enormous jet of boiling water.
“Huh,” Gabriel said.
“Gosh!” Elodie breathed.
“Now that’s what I call magic!”
At this shout, they straightened, turning to see Professor Jackson jogging toward them, his dressing gown flapping open to reveal a disconcerting lack of sleepwear. Algernon followed, cowering as he ran. Gabriel could hear the accountant’s whimpers even from the distance.
“Stay back!” he shouted to the men as the geyser shot almost two hundred feet high, enshrouding the inn and its neighbors in clouds of steam. The rush of heat, and more emphatically the speeding fragments of shattered stone, inspired Gabriel and Elodie to retreat up the road, meeting Professor Jackson and Algernon beneath the dubious shelter of an oak tree.
“Is the world ending?” Algernon wailed from where he huddled behind the trunk.
“Maybe,” Professor Jackson told him cheerfully.
“Of course it’s not,” Elodie said. And her confident attitude might have gone some way to reassuring the young accountant had not jagged rocks begun to burst through the cobblestones of the street while she was speaking. Dirt and burning pebbles went flying. The sky glowed blue like the color of a scream. In that moment, Algernon found religion (and Professor Jackson found half a muffin in his dressing gown’s pocket, but that was less impressive).
Elodie turned to Gabriel. “An eruption of this size is sure to trigger the fey line into cascade,” she whispered so that Algernon would not hear her beneath his frantic praying.
Gabriel looked over her shoulder to where venting magic was rising like blue smoke in the east, transforming into birds that swooped and spiraled through the morning light before disintegrating again as ash. “I believe it already has,” he said grimly.
Taking a map from his ER kit, he held it open so Elodie could read it along with him. They mentally traced the 5-SEQ line through a range of colors and contour lines.
“The Bronze Age cairns and stone circles of Elan Valley might stop it,” Elodie said, tapping that area on the map.
“Maybe,” Gabriel said, meaning no . Thaumaturgic energy was going to sweep right over those old stones, smash through Hereford and Cheltenham, and then slam into Oxford, where libraries and museums crammed with magical artifacts, and aviaries with magical birds, created a vast thaumaturgic reservoir that would be ignited with cataclysmic effect.
And then that energy would continue on, burning, snarling, ripping magic out of the earth all the way to…
“London,” Elodie breathed.
They stared at the gray sprawl of the city on the map, then lifted their eyes again to the east. Lightning tore through the magic-stained sky.
“Amelia’s in Hereford, studying an ancient copy of the Magna Carta,” Gabriel said.
Elodie patted his arm reassuringly, sending delightful tingles electrical impulses through his nervous system. “She’ll be fine, I’m sure.”
“I’m not worried about her,” he said. “If anyone knows how to handle magic, it’s my sister. I’m thinking that the charter’s parchment is the skin of a sheep who drank from Ullswater.”
Elodie gasped. “That’s one of the lakes claiming to be where Nimue handed Excalibur to King Arthur! It’s a level six node.”
“Exactly. According to Amelia, the parchment has an extremely high thaumaturgic charge. This new trove is not so distant from those currently mapped along the 5-SEQ that it couldn’t represent a…” He winced very slightly. “A wiggle in the fey line. If we place the Magna Carta at a point along the line, ahead of the cascading energy, it could act like a reflective shield and make that energy rebound.”
“Aah,” Elodie said in approval. “Reverse the cascade and squelch the magic.” Gabriel looked at her, all bright and lovely and slightly rumpled from the things he’d done to her some fifteen minutes ago, her eyes reflecting magic from the sunlit geyser, and he nodded. The surrender to colloquialism was worth it just to see her smile in response.
“You’d be risking a massive explosion in the village,” Professor Jackson remarked through a mouthful of buttered muffin.
“As a matter of fact, my team and I did something similar a few years ago in Sheffield,” Gabriel said, “although on a smaller scale, and the result was a squelching rather than an explosion.”
“It’s a good plan,” Elodie said. “So we need to reach Hereford at all speed.”
“I still have my bicycle here somewhere,” Professor Jackson said. He looked around as if he expected the bicycle to be propped against the tree.
“That’s not necessary,” Gabriel told him. “We are dignified professionals. Bicycles have no place in this assignment. We will hire horses to get to Aberystwyth and catch a train from there.”
“And hopefully outrace the cascade,” Elodie said.
“I’ll come too,” Professor Jackson offered, licking butter from his fingers.
“No, we need you to stay here in case of further trouble,” Gabriel told him. “Mr. Jennings, you also stay.”
Algernon squeaked from behind the tree. “What? Here? Are you mad?! I’m going home to Leicester, where it’s safe.”
“Perfect.” Gabriel rolled up his map, then looked directly at Elodie. As she looked back at him, the silence between them seemed to pulse with the memory of that mad, beautiful experience in the cellar.
I love you, disaster girl, he thought.
Then he turned from her, his expression hardening as he stared into the horizon.
“Let’s go.”