Algernon leaped up, his chair crashing to the ground. Everyone in the taproom stared in shocked bewilderment as, wailing, he fled.
“Baby!” Tegan shouted (almost certainly in reference to the goat, not the man), and ran after him.
“I’ll do the bell!” Professor Jackson announced indecipherably and also dashed out, dressing gown flapping.
Elodie and Gabriel exchanged a weary look. “Evacuation Plan A?” Elodie suggested.
“With a level four withdrawal,” Gabriel said.
Nodding in agreement, they turned to depart, but stopped abruptly at the sight of three large, scowling men in front of them. Mr. Parry and his friends had come for a word. Specifically:“Evacuation?!”
“Do you in any way appreciate the financial damage such an overreaction will cause?” Mr. Parry hissed angrily, then glanced sidelong at his customers to be sure none had heard him.
“It’s not an overreaction,” Gabriel said, crossing his arms and frowning over the rim of his spectacles in a manner that would have had the men blubbering were they university undergraduates. But alas, they were hard-bitten denizens of the real world, and they didn’t understand that they were supposed to be daunted. “I must urge you to listen,” Gabriel continued nevertheless. “We are professional scientists who have compiled extensive instrumental and experiential data andconcluded that there exists unequivocal danger of an imminent, significant thaumaturgic eructation.”
The scowls wavered into confusion.
“We’re brainy,” Elodie translated, “and we’re warning you, things are about to go boom. You need to get everyone out of here.”
“Oh well, if you put it like that,” Mr. Parry said. He turned to his friends. “Come on, men, let’s get moving!”
—
“This really isa disaster!” Elodie exclaimed as she surveyed their situation.
“It isn’t ideal,” Gabriel concurred.
She threw him a vexed look. “We’re locked inside a cellar directly above an immensely potent source of thaumaturgic energy that might erupt at any moment.”
“I am aware.” He rubbed a scratch on his hand, obtained during their several attempts to bash down the cellar door or find another exit among the shelves and boxes in the underground chamber. But after Mr. Parry and his friends had hauled them to the cellar, forced them down the stairs, and told them to bloody well stay there until they came to their senses and stopped messing with people’s income, the men had bolted the door to ensure that they did so. There was no way out. Well, except for the ultimate exit when the magic beneath them inevitably erupted, that is.
Elodie did not want to think about that. Unfortunately, her body would not let her forget. Its pulse shoutedYou’re going to die!at her unceasingly, and her nerves were even more strained than that time she’d taken a train all the way to Edinburghbefore remembering she’d not turned off the gas lamps at home.
“I can’t believe they imprisoned us!” she said, wildly gesticulating.
In fact, Mr. Parry had insisted they were doing no such thing. “We’re providing you a special opportunity to meditate—free of charge!” he’d explained with a benevolent chuckle before he slammed the door shut. But Elodie did not feel especially meditative.
“The floor is beginning to warm,” she said, stamping her foot against the flagstones. “And it’s grumbly.”
“Yes,” Gabriel agreed, so tense he did not even argue about semantics.
“We’re going to die here.”
“Yes.”
Elodie went very still. Gabriel saying it made everything feel a thousand times more real, and all at once she could scarcely bear to breathe, let alone speak.
They stared at each other through the dim lantern light and musty shadows. Fear and regret, grief and intense yearning crammed into the space between them, draining Elodie’s warmth, turning Gabriel’s eyes darker than the core of a storm. The cellar walls trembled, shedding dust, but neither of them noticed. Elodie thought of the sunlit fields they might have walked together, the joint lectures they might have given, the children that might have been born to them if only she’d had enough time to weave wishes into hope, and then into a beautiful truth. Her heart broke, and broke, and broke.
Gabriel’s hands clenched as if he were trying to stop time. Elodie felt love swoop from her throat to the pit of her stomach, like a bird falling from the sky. All around her, the roombegan to tremble as if it too were frightened. A jar of preserves tumbled from a shelf and rolled noisily over the stone into a corner, where it caught alight with sullen, silvery magic. Fine cracks spread across the floor like the veins of a leaf. The bitter scent of fatal magic filled the air.
Abruptly, Elodie took three paces toward Gabriel, even as he moved toward her. They met in a swirl of dim light and glinting blue dust—reaching, grasping, so that nothing remained between them.
They were kissing before she realized it.
Neither spoke, but their bodies were eloquent: arms encompassing, lips conspiring, blood shouting ardently. They staggered, although whether from an excess of passion or the quaking of the floor cannot be determined. Had Elodie but taken a moment to sit quietly with a biology textbook, she would have understood the effect peril was having on her hormones, and as a result she would no doubt have thrown the textbook aside, then gone back to kissing Gabriel. As it was, she thought of nothing but him. His strength enclosing her, his hands gripping her hair. His jumper getting in the way of what she wanted. She tugged on it, and he released her so as to assist in the process. Then together they stripped her of her opera coat, letting it fall to the dust. Elodie slid Gabriel’s suspenders off his shoulders; he unfastened her long skirt; she wrangled with his trouser buttons; he pulled down her skirt and drawers in one efficient move. She held on to him for dear life as he lifted her, pressing her back against the stone wall. Her ankles locked at his back. He did not hesitate. And then suddenly,finally, they were together.
They stopped, staring at each other in amazement.
