Elodie’s wistfulness combusted in a flame of irritation. “Don’t talk down to me,” she retorted, stepping on the lobby’s stone floor with a clunk of her bootheels, forcing Gabriel to move back. Unfortunately, because she was shorter than him, this resulted in him literally talking down at her.
“I’m not,” he said.
“Listen, I know you’re miffed—”
“Miffed?”
“—but if we’re to do a good job here—”
“Miffed!”
“—we need to work as—what is that?”
“What is what?” he asked with unconcealed exasperation.
Slowly, Elodie raised a hand, pointing behind him. “That.”
Gabriel glanced back, and his expression unraveled.
“Good lord. What the hell is that?”
Chapter Five
Territory could fairly be spelled with “terror”
when one is discussing thaumaturgic geography.
Blazing Trails, W.H. Jackson
“Aaaagghhh!”
The scream shook everything out of Elodie’s brain. Which might have been a good thing, since she was obviously hallucinating. After all, inn lobbies generally did not contain a white billy goat with a tufted beard, pink knitted pom-pom hat, and more to the point (literally), large sharp horns protruding from said hat.
A moment later her wits returned, however, and she found herself still looking at a sizable goat. In the intervening two seconds, the animal had turned from glaring at her and Gabriel to ducking its head and huffing as it lined up an angle of attack against Algernon, who apparently had entered the lobby, taken one look at the goat, and suffered an instantaneous internal landslide. His scream having made the situation worse, he was now trying to crawl into the five-inch-high space beneath a sideboard.
“Let’s go while the creature is distracted,” Gabriel murmured to Elodie.
“But poor Mr. Jennings,” she argued.
“Just think of the money we’ll save on feeding him. He himself would approve.”
Ignoring this, Elodie stepped forward, clicking her tongue softly and holding out a hand to the goat. He really was an adorable fellow in his pom-pom hat, to say nothing of the fluffy—
“MEHH!”
The goat pivoted toward her with terrifying speed, rearing up on his hind hooves and beating at the air. Elodie’s pulse stammered. But she had barely enough time to withdraw her hand before Gabriel moved, pushing her back roughly. Well, how obnox—
Thwomp.
His umbrella burst open. He held it out like a shield between Elodie and the goat, and the creature dropped to all four hooves.
“Mehhhh,” he declared (the goat, that is, not Gabriel), managing to combine surrender and utter disdain in one noise. There followed a moment of dire silence as the geographers waited to see what he would do next.
“Baby!”
The call snapped out like a whip from the inn’s kitchen doorway. Everyone jolted, including the goat. A young woman with a tempest of black ringlets stepped into the corridor, rolling pin in one hand and apple in the other. She tossed the latter, and the goat bounced forward to catch it expertly in his mouth. Elodie was so impressed by this feat, she felt compelled to applaud.
Algernon shot her a look of outright horror from where he huddled against the sideboard. “How can youclapfor abeastthat just tried tokillyou?” he asked, his syllables leaping more than the goat itself had done.
