“Lost your way?”
“No,” he said, raising his voice calmly above the crackle of the lightning, and Elodie reflected that he wouldn’t recognize banter even if it hit him smack in the face. She had a sinking feeling that this assignment was going to prove methodical, orderly, and effective—all of which would look great in the official report but would make living through it a tedious misery.
“You might want to stand back,” Gabriel warned her. “As we anticipated, the graveyard has attracted excessive power from the fey line, and thaumaturgic sublimation is emitting magic into the atmosphere. Matters may become dire at any minute.”
Stand back?As if she weren’t a professional, the same as him! A calm, sensible professional with unfaltering mental discipline! Indeed, she was so professional, she could take that umbrella he was holding, lightning and all, and shove it—
“Ahem.” Elodie cleared her throat before the sudden violent idea turned into words and got her into the kind of trouble that thinking aloud had done in the past—for example, married to the arrogant sod with the umbrella.
“I can see that,” she said instead, maintaining her stride. Indeed, she’d have had to be a humanities scholar to not recognize the danger. Above the lush, leaf-strewn grass of the graveyard, several sparks of ignited gases formed out of leaking thaumaturgic energy were being drawn together to become a single greenish-blue globe that pulsed with magic as it grew. Dancing over headstones, illuminating them with its ephemeral, sinister light, it made the name “will-o’-the-wisp” seem far too dreamy.Thisghost light was a nightmare.
Elodie hastily calculated the globe’s probable trajectory and realized that, without a doubt, it was going to hit the village like a bomb. And although ignis fatuus phenomena, even when thaumaturgically activated, generally did not have a high charge density, still the danger of civilians being scorched or turned into a flock of chickens remained.
If only she’d not lost her own umbrella, she might have been able to attract and contain the energy bomb with its silver tip, like Gabriel was doing with his. But as it was, there seemed no way to prevent the impending disaster.
“Think, Elodie Hughes; think,”she muttered under her breath, an old habit that had not changed even after she’d married Gabriel and taken on the name Tarrant…
“Aha!” she exclaimed with such force, Gabriel raised his eyebrow at her again. An idea whipped through her imagination, and at once she began to run. Leaping over a narrow, weedy ditch that cut across the graveyard’s entrance, she wove a haphazard route through the headstones, heartily grateful for the shorter length of her field skirt as she skipped over thistles and splashed through murky puddles.
“What are you doing?” Gabriel demanded.
“My job!” Elodie shouted in reply. The rain began to fallharder, filling her eyes with stars of watery light and ending any possibility of conversation. She felt herself enter the thaumaturgic energy flow. It prickled against her skin and beneath her boots, lifting her some three inches until she was running literally on air and magic. She laughed, delighted. As the sizzling bomb of blue light rushed at her, she raised her hand like she had any hope in the world of stopping it.
And everything turned to gold.
Chapter Six
A geographer must become familiar
with danger, in order to define safety.
Blazing Trails, W.H. Jackson
For one horrifyingmoment, Gabriel’s heart relocated itself to the pit of his stomach. He could see nothing but burning light and, at its core, a stark after-image of Elodie raising her hand to death. Panic utterly overwhelmed him, such as it never had in all his life. He threw his umbrella aside, not caring about what happened to the thaumaturgic energy it had been harnessing, and closed his eyes—breathing, breathing, desperately trying to control his internal environment. Some five seconds later, a fuckingeternitylater, the light faded. He began to run even before opening his eyes. After all, he never really needed to look to know exactly where that wife of his stood. He was always aware of her, the same way he was aware of present dangers in a field: from sheer self-defense.
Except she wasn’t standing now. She was lying on her back in the mud and grass between a headstone and a grimy marble angel, eyes closed, a strange sound emitting from her mouth…
Was shelaughing?
He skidded to a halt beside her, dropping to his knees. Shewas indeed laughing, a laugh like river water tumbling over rocks on a bright summer’s day. As Gabriel stared in frantic confusion, she opened her eyes and looked directly into his.
Now he was the one who died, for one stark moment so infused with emotion he could not bear to exist in it. Elodie’s eyes shone as green as a man might imagine the meadows of heaven looked—
And at that, Gabriel came abruptly back to his senses with a scientific, self-disgusted thud.Imagine? Heaven?This was what the woman did to him. Much longer in her sphere of influence and he’d be writing poetry and adopting fluffy kittens.
“What do you think you were doing?” he demanded, only just restraining himself from grasping her shoulders and shaking her. After all, the laughter might be a hysterical reaction to some injury…
The thought tried to kill him all over again. “Are you hurt?” he asked, urgently scanning her body. When she did not reply, he yanked off his gloves to perform a physical examination, but hesitated, his hands hovering above her, restrained by propriety or fear or some damned feeling he couldn’t even begin to understand despite all his academic qualifications.
Thenshereached up, smiling, and set a hand against his chest as if in reassurance. Or perhaps she was too dazed to know what she was doing. Either way, Gabriel felt his breath, his pulse, all the world simply…
Stop.
Lingering magic cast a phantasmic glow over Elodie’s wet, mud-streaked face. Her nose was turning red from the cold, and her hair spilled in tangles over the dirty grass. Altogether it created such a vision of ethereal beauty, one might indeed begin to believe in a heaven that had created her. Gabrielstared wonderingly as a raindrop fell from his eyelashes to kiss a corner of her mouth. Elodie’s smile faded. Her hand stroked his chest, creating warmth that twinkled with silvery magic. It soaked through clothes, skin, bone, to infuse Gabriel’s heart with something as tender and vulnerable as the secret trove of memories he kept just for her…
And suddenly both his pulse and his rationality jolted back into beating. The sharp-edged elements of the world became painfully clear once more. Gabriel caught Elodie’s hand, pulling it away from him, and pressed two fingers against her wrist to check the pulse within. It leaped and trembled.
“I’m fine,” Elodie told him, contradicting this physical evidence. “Ugh, very wet though. Can you help me up?”
