“Perfect sense.” Hestia sighed. She was absurdly romantic, although she channeled most of it into books rather than life.
Ellie expected her to wax poetic, but instead, Hestia yelled, “Cows!”
“What?” Ellie said, or at least she meant to say. She wasn’t sure she said anything really.
A trio of cows seemingly appeared out of nowhere. She wasn’t sure why they’d stepped onto the road just then, orwhythere were cows hidden in the woods beside the road.
If the cows had waited thirty seconds later, there would be no issue.
In that fractured second, however, Ellie realized swerving wasn’t an option. She had to slam into the cows or risk killing the bicyclist whojust as suddenly appeared on the opposite side of the road.Who rides a bike in these temperatures?A bicyclist wouldn’t survive an impact with a car. Even forty-five miles per hour was fast enough to kill a person.
Cows, it is.
As the car careened toward the trio of cows, Ellie’s brain felt like it was going slowly and logically. Adrenaline flooded her mind. It made the moment betweenseeingthe cows andhittingthe cows stretch out like wet taffy.
And in that taffy-slow moment, Ellie decided she wasn’t ready for the death that would likely follow a cow-collision.
“God help me!”
She stomped hard on the brakes—which wasexactlythe wrong choice. Her brakes locked up, and the car started to slide into a spin.
“Hold on!” she yelled.
There was no one, nothing, to stop the accident.
Except
somehow
time
did
slow.
The moment of the accident was stretching. The taffy of the instant pulled, stretched, extended out so far that it was thin and showing holes.
If Ellie believed in things like magic, she’d realize she had, in fact, just slowed time. She’d know that she’d saved her own life with a reservoir of magic that she didn’t even believecouldexist. As it was, she didn’t realize anything in that moment other than the dizzying lurch as the car went twisting off the road, executed several full spins through trees and brush, and shuddered to a halt.
The last things she saw were the eyes of the cow now half-stuck on the hood of her car. Huge brown eyes staring at her as something wet trickled down her face.
“Ellie!” Hestia cried.
But Ellie couldn’t look away from the dying cow. She tried to turnher head to look at Hestia, but couldn’t.Nothingmoved. Not her toes, not her head. The fear that should come at that detail wasn’t there, just the taffy feeling. The very air looked like it was stretching around the cow in her windshield.
“Time shouldn’t be taffy,” she told her aunt and the dying cow, trying to focus on that and not the fact she couldn’t feel her legs or that sticky liquid was dripping down her face.
6Maggie
Maggie glared at the man in front of her.Was this Leon’s doing? Had he hired one of the lowlifes he knew? Had Craig been kidnapped, too?
Her captor was doing that thing Leon liked to do, the patronizing smile and calming tone. Being a woman didn’t make her hysterical. That was merely a word used to quash a woman’s voice. A man was bold, outraged, courageous for using his voice. A woman, especially a diminutive one with a Southern drawl, was called “hysterical” and treated as such.
“I want to go home,” she repeated in her courtroom voice.
“Now, Margaret—”
“Don’t you ‘now, Margaret’ me!” Maggie poked her finger into the man’s ridiculous robe, meeting firm muscles that made her pause in a flicker of utterly inappropriate interest, before continuing, “I put up with that nonsense from my ex-husband, and I’ll be damned if I’ll hear it from some nutter in a castle that smells of spoiled eggs.”
