As Elodie sprintedthrough woodrush and old quaking grass, she felt magic sparking around her ankles, fierce and spiky even through the leather of her tall boots. But it was nothing compared to the magic in her heart.Gabriel was holding her hand.
She’d spent most of her life escaping things—parental rules, a provocative husband, enchanted trees. But she’d never before escaped with someone else. Oh, there had been students to guide across treacherous fields while pursued by a boulder, and colleagues whose kisses beside campfires helped her elude melancholic thoughts brought on by too much wine. But no one had taken her hand and run with her, literally or otherwise.
Within seconds, she learned that it was the most incredibly, extraordinarily unhelpful experience.
Gabriel’s pace was much longer than hers, and she stumbled repeatedly as she strove to match it. Mud splashed up under her skirt, charring the lace of her drawers with hot, fetid thaumaturgy. At one point she almost fell, and was saved only by Gabriel yanking on her arm, an intervention that rescued her knees from bruises but just about dislocated her shoulder.
“Faster!” he shouted, as if she could somehow extend her legs at will. Elodie tried to point out the unreasonableness of his demand, but her every breath was otherwise engaged.
Jagged rocks thrust violently through the subsoil, sending dirt and shards of sandstone flying. A clump of thistles exploded in green fire, forcing them to swerve or else be impaled by burning prickles.
Then they swerved again, avoiding a sudden mud geyser.
And again, batting at swarms of dead leaves that flickered about their faces like ragged brown butterflies.
“The farmhouse!” Gabriel called out, and they angled toward it. Groundwater began to rise all around them, a muddy, backward kind of rain that rapidly twisted into high, thin columns spun by furious magic. Elodie counted three—fivewaterspouts that screeched with witchlike fury as they began plowing through the field, churning up grass, dirt, and flaming stones. Water blasted the air. The hellhound was instantly shredded, black, jagged remnants of its magic slicing through the air like knives.
Elodie could barely see anything, her eyes full of grime and strands of hair. She could hear only the screaming of agonized wind. Gabriel’s hand was her center of gravity, and she clung to it desperately as they ducked and dodged a way through the maelstrom. Survival seemed an impossible hope, violently ripped apart and slapped in their faces.
Then the farmhouse appeared out of the turmoiled shadows before them, solid as—well, not as a rock, considering Elodie’s experiences of more than one rock turning into a bonfire or a gaggle of fanged geese that chased her, but since she did not presently have the luxury to contrive a better simile, it would have to do. They stumbled up to its door, and Gabriel raised his free hand to knock.
Elodie flung him an incredulous look, then grasped the doorhandle, shoved open the door, and pushed him over the threshold, following immediately behind. A dim impression of a cozy, firelit room barely registered with her senses. She and Gabriel moved against each other while he shut the door again and she bolted it, as if they were one person with double the usual limbs. They pulled across a large wooden box filled with boots and old shoes to serve as a barricade, although that would hardly keep out any force determined to get in. Then, stepping back, they stood side by side, panting with near exhaustion, to stare at the door.
Magic slammed against it, causing the heavy oak to rattle on its hinges. Wind speared through gaps between the wood and its frame, howling, shattering into tiny silver stars. But the door held, and after a minute Elodie and Gabriel exhaled in unison.
“Well, that was—” Elodie began, but she tumbled into an astonished silence as Gabriel turned to grasp her head between his hands. Her pulse, which had just begun to slow, leaped up once more, racing around wildly with no idea of what on earth was happening.
“Are you all right?” he demanded. His voice was rough, as if he’d dragged it behind him through the squall. His eyes were fierce, urgently assessing her mud-streaked face. He appeared enraged by the possibility that she might be injured.
“I’m fine,” Elodie lied. In fact, she felt completely wrung out by a force more intense than that which raged beyond the door: her hopeless, unrequited love for this man. The thought that he’d been in peril, that he might have died, made her distraught. She ran her hands across his chest, his arms, checking him for injury, even while he did the same to her. His fingers stroking her face slid through mud and filthy water and, ugh, something slimy that she suspected was part of a worm. But Gabriel, the world’s most fastidious man, did not even flinch. As he grew sure she was unharmed, his breathing slowed, but still something shook through it, something that almost seemed to Elodie like fear.
“I’m fine,” she reiterated. “Just a little damp. Are you—”
“Fine,” he said brusquely.
Their gazes locked. The building might have smashed apart with magical tornadic winds in that moment and neither of them would have noticed. Their entire world had compressed into the small, desperate space between them, its atmosphere a storm of adrenaline and longing and years of unspoken love.
“You—” Elodie began.
“You—” Gabriel said, his voice layering over hers.
And then, suddenly, they were kissing.
Chapter Twelve
Sometimes place is a feeling.
Blazing Trails, W.H. Jackson
If there everwas a kiss that stopped time, this was it. They stood in a cottage deep inside the storm-wrecked Welsh countryside, lips meeting with desperate passion…they stood inside a small Oxford chapel, sealing their marital vows with unrequired tenderness…and the year between those moments seemed like a shadow adding depth to their ardor.
Gabriel’s hand slid down to cup the back of Elodie’s neck as he intensified the kiss, and she twined her arms around his neck, drawing him closer. He tasted of water and dirt and perfection. He warmed her so thoroughly, the icy bitterness of magic shed from her skin. She felt transported by desire—and yet she also felt like she’d always been here with him, kissing him. Gabriel was as much part of her existence as were skies and trees and apology letters to her head of department. She knew him the way she knew the shapes of the continents. His kiss was home.
All her longing dissolved into a bright haze of love. She lifted herself on tiptoes, and he wrapped an arm around herwaist, everything hardening and softening, aching and easing with relief. For less than half a second, Gabriel pulled away an inch to change his angle, and Elodie thought her heart might break. Then they met again with even greater fervor, lips heating, tongues…
“Oy!”
They jumped apart. Belatedly, and now rather urgently, Elodie took in the room. It was charming in a rustic kind of way, with a spinning wheel in one corner, a table laden with food at its center, and most noteworthy of all, a man walking through the doorway at the far side of the room with a bowl of peas in his hands and stunned amazement gripping his face. Behind him came a woman carrying a toddler propped on her hip, and behind her a little boy who was craning to see.
