Emma stopped short. Her heart lurched. She seized a stick and pushed at the mass, sending the stubborn, rubbery bodies squirming away. Knowing what she would find beneath.
The lone female trapped at the heart of the pile. Legs broken at odd angles, ribs caved in. Her belly had split open. Emma could not dislodge the last frog from her back. He stared up with hopeful headlamp eyes, still clamped in position over his dead lover. Slowly, his head tracked down. Down, where the clotted crystal jelly of her insides peered through. His tongue flicked once. Twice. He gave a louder croak. Deeper. Without warning, he opened his mouth wide and plunged it into her side. The other frogs approached again, a hopping tide. They tore into the open seam of her belly, jellied innards dripping from their tongues. Guttural croaks ricocheted from the alley walls.
Emma dropped the stick.
Nature was itself. It was wondrous and it was wild and hungry. Even as a little girl, she had never needed it to be pretty to love it. Never needed to turn away at the sight of its appetite. And yet she found she was almost running now, straining for the North Gate ahead.
She huffed a laugh. If her mother could have seen her, running away from a few frogs. She deliberately walked the last steps to let herself into Gabriel College. By the time she reached her bedroom, her heart had stopped its nauseous dance. She wriggled outof Helena’s dress, feeling as though she shed a skin. In her own soft nightclothes, hands cradling a moon-silvered cup of tea, the world felt right again.
She turned her back on the window, where the wind whispered at the pane. Where the dark called. Where, down below, the frogs still feasted on their love.
CHAPTER 6
The next day began for Emma as though her world had not just been rocked off its axis. The Great Hall echoed with the clink of cutlery. Nat was crunching his way through a bowl of sugar-coated cereal. Emma slid her phone from her pocket. No messages yet. She shouldn’t have expected to hear from Jasper right away, of course. She stabbed at her porridge with her spoon.
Nat was agog to hear the details. When she told him about meeting Jasper, he looked closely at her face and just smiled. Much as she’d tried to make her voice sound offhand, she knew her cheeks were burning.
She pressed her hands to her face, hoping to cool it. “I never expected—It was all just so…”Magical,she managed to stop herself from saying.
“It is so much fun to see you like this.” Nat slurped the last milk from his bowl. “Usually it’s me who’s stupid with love. I quite like being the superior, sensible one, for a change.”
Emma snorted. “You will never be the sensible one.”
“We’ll see. Now.” Nat clasped her shoulder. “Lectures, at last! Come on, we don’t want to be late.”
“Don’t we?” Emma muttered. But she let Nat chivvy her from the Great Hall.
After the quiet of Gabriel College, city life outside hit them with an open-handed smack. Thirty colleges made up the University. And since colleges were only places to sleep and eat, that meant further buildings for lecture halls and classrooms, laboratories and museums. All filled with students and professors and staff, streaming from one to another until well after dark. The city was some distance from London, and not a tenth of its size, but its streets teemed with just as much chaos.
Streams of bicycles whirred past, incurring the wrath of cars and pedestrians alike. Groups of students wreathed the pavements, trailing chatter.
“Got a tute on Thursda—”
“Told you he had my gown, the—”
“—pukedon the bursar—”
Seemingly intoxicated by the pearly September morning, Nat flung his arms wide. Passing cyclists swerved. “Is it mad that I missed—nay,yearnedfor lectures when the flood got them canceled?”
“Yes,” said Emma flatly. “Mad as mad.”
“Chaucer,Beowulf,anything,” Nat continued dreamily, floating down the pavement. “But to come back to two hours on the sonnets with Professor Lindman? The gods do smile upon us mortals sometimes.”
“And I have three back-to-back classes I know I’m going to fall asleep in.”
“I thought it was better this year? Elective year and all.”
“Law is never better. I thought land law might be more interesting, but…” Emma shrugged.
“You know, there’s no shame in changing course, if something doesn’t suit you.”
But Emma shook her head and ducked away, leaving her friend at the corner between the law and English faculties.
Emma did not fall asleep during her classes. Instead, she let her mind drift. Imagined peaceful green hours in the river, fish flashing by her ankles. A Guilder deer stepping down the bank to drink, fooled by her stillness. The long glance they would share.
Class must have ended. She hadn’t heard a thing. Emma gathered her books and dodged the exodus from the lecture theatre. Flood gossip was the spice on every tongue. A fresher who’d drunk floodwater on a dare—and started claiming that the University’s statues were alive—had just been carted off to hospital. The Wessex chaplain, while supposedly logging water damage, had been discovered dreamily painting tree runes across the walls of their Christopher Wren chapel. And the Fenchurch rowing team had apparently bailed the last water from their boathouse that morning, and found their fiberglass boats sprouting branches of tender new holly. Emma smiled inwardly. People did love to embroider stories.
She drifted across the square to the church crypt café. Nat had saved their regular table. For Emma, the same thing every time. For Nat, whatever sounded newest and strangest on the menu.
