She did not linger for a poignant goodbye. (After all, that had been thoroughly accomplished in the cellar.) Her professional instincts engaged, some ten minutes later than propriety would have liked. She turned and ran, skipping over fissures that were ripping open in the floor as she went.
—
Gabriel completed anevacuation of the Queen Mab in minutes, assisted by its shuddering walls and floorboards. Frightened guests in various states of dress pushed him aside as he came to rescue them and fled on their own initiative. Once certain that every room was empty, he ran to his own to retrieve his coat and ER kit, for the sake of the vital things they contained, then raced into the street.
The church bell was ringing, its doleful clang echoing through the village. Locals and tourists streamed out of buildings. They formed an exodus south into the fields with the efficiency of people who had been living with thaumaturgic activity for some time. Gabriel jogged through them, looking for Elodie.
There,his heart said, and a second later he saw her emerging from a cottage. At once, he released muscles he hadn’t been aware he was clenching. She led the cottage’s occupants onto the street, then pointed south. They joined the fleeing crowd, and Elodie turned toward the neighboring house. Gabrielpulled his attention away from her and ran to assist an elderly man who had fallen.
A foul odor of rotten eggs saturated the air. Cracks tore through cobblestones and trees slanted precariously as shock waves rippled out from the Queen Mab. When at last the village stood empty, the bell tolling into an otherwise portentous hush, Gabriel walked to the center of the street and looked back at the inn. Steam was billowing from its windows and chimneys.
“Well, at least we finally located the source,” said a light voice, and Gabriel glanced aside to find Elodie arriving next to him. His stomach squeezed as if he were seeing her for the first time, an unkempt dryad tripping into his life to mess up its nicely regulated schema. He frowned in automatic defense. But she wasn’t quite looking at him, her cheeks flushed with uncharacteristic shyness. Gabriel couldn’t blame her. His entire body felt like it was flushing for the same reason.
Well, maybe not his entire body. Certain parts of it ached to reach out and be with her again, kiss her again, and to make the bed in the morning after spending a long, sultry night with her. But there was the small matter of the disaster that was their relationship…er, which is to say,the disaster engulfing Dôlylleuad.
“All clear?” he asked, his voice gritty.
She nodded. “Professor Jackson is ringing the church bell. Everyone else has—”
BOOM!
They ducked. The Queen Mab’s roof burst apart, stone and dust flying. Roaring up from beneath it came an enormous jet of boiling water.
“Huh,” Gabriel said.
“Gosh!” Elodie breathed.
“Now that’s what I call magic!”
At this shout, they straightened, turning to see Professor Jackson jogging toward them, his dressing gown flapping open to reveal a disconcerting lack of sleepwear. Algernon followed, cowering as he ran. Gabriel could hear the accountant’s whimpers even from the distance.
“Stay back!” he shouted to the men as the geyser shot almost two hundred feet high, enshrouding the inn and its neighbors in clouds of steam. The rush of heat, and more emphatically the speeding fragments of shattered stone, inspired Gabriel and Elodie to retreat up the road, meeting Professor Jackson and Algernon beneath the dubious shelter of an oak tree.
“Is the world ending?” Algernon wailed from where he huddled behind the trunk.
“Maybe,” Professor Jackson told him cheerfully.
“Of course it’s not,” Elodie said. And her confident attitude might have gone some way to reassuring the young accountant had not jagged rocks begun to burst through the cobblestones of the street while she was speaking. Dirt and burning pebbles went flying. The sky glowed blue like the color of a scream. In that moment, Algernon found religion (and Professor Jackson found half a muffin in his dressing gown’s pocket, but that was less impressive).
Elodie turned to Gabriel. “An eruption of this size is sure to trigger the fey line into cascade,” she whispered so that Algernon would not hear her beneath his frantic praying.
Gabriel looked over her shoulder to where venting magic was rising like blue smoke in the east, transforming into birdsthat swooped and spiraled through the morning light before disintegrating again as ash. “I believe it already has,” he said grimly.
Taking a map from his ER kit, he held it open so Elodie could read it along with him. They mentally traced the 5-SEQ line through a range of colors and contour lines.
“The Bronze Age cairns and stone circles of Elan Valley might stop it,” Elodie said, tapping that area on the map.
“Maybe,” Gabriel said, meaningno. Thaumaturgic energy was going to sweep right over those old stones, smash through Hereford and Cheltenham, and then slam into Oxford, where libraries and museums crammed with magical artifacts, and aviaries with magical birds, created a vast thaumaturgic reservoir that would be ignited with cataclysmic effect.
And then that energy would continue on, burning, snarling, ripping magic out of the earth all the way to…
“London,” Elodie breathed.
They stared at the gray sprawl of the city on the map, then lifted their eyes again to the east. Lightning tore through the magic-stained sky.
“Amelia’s in Hereford, studying an ancient copy of the Magna Carta,” Gabriel said.
Elodie patted his arm reassuringly, sendingdelightful tingleselectrical impulses through his nervous system. “She’ll be fine, I’m sure.”
