“Everyone!” she called out as they approached the table. But it was to no avail: she may as well have been methane in a wetlands.
“Ahem.” Gabriel cleared his throat discreetly. At once the professors fell silent, tankards halted mid-gesture, egos on defensive alert.
“The 5-SEQ is in cascade!” Elodie said, the words tumbling with her haste to speak.
Half a dozen pairs of bushy eyebrows elevated.
“It’s heading right this way!” she elaborated, pointing to the window, which actually faced northeast, but that was not important. Besides, no one even glanced at it. Instead, they exchanged amused looks.
“The situation is dire,” Gabriel added.
“Oh?” Professor Diggley, a specialist in oceanography despite not having left Oxford for the past fifteen years, smirked—or at least his shaggy white mustache tilted in a manner that suggested he was smirking beneath it. “I should say, young man, that there’s a more interesting situation right before us.”
Both Elodie and Gabriel stared at him with impatient confusion. He waggled a finger in their direction. “This, here.”
Elodie noticed that every professor’s attention was now angling toward her lower body. She glanced down and realized she and Gabriel were still holding hands.
Aghast, she went to pull away. But Gabriel gripped her hand more firmly.
“Gentlemen,” he said in such a domineering manner, several of the professors had to remind themselves they’d graduated decades ago. “Professor Tarrant and I are going to establish a defense out past Wytham Village. Should it fail, a secondary defense will be needed.”
“Aren’tyouProfessor Tarrant?” Professor Coffingham asked Gabriel with a drunken chuckle.
Alas, poor fellow, it took him three weeks to recover from the mental injury caused by Gabriel’s glare.
Elodie, torn between wanting to bristle at Coffingham’s insult and swoon at Gabriel’s response, settled on just wishing she had a tankard of beer too. With luck, the cascadewould hit Oxford before this conversation became any more stressful.
“What kind of defense do you recommend?” asked Professor Abness, an elderly gentleman of the Scottish persuasion who tended to get so directly to the point that his lectures lasted only twenty minutes. Elodie smiled at him with gratitude.
“Iron and gold barricades have proven to work against this particular energy signature,” she said.
The professors turned their heads as one to Gabriel. He scowled. “Why are you looking at me? She just gave you the answer.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Elodie murmured.
His scowl darkened. “Yes, it does.”
“No, it really doesn’t.” She’d spent years worrying about what these men thought of her, studying all through the night so they had no cause to fail her, marrying Gabriel in the hope it would stop them from looking down their noses at her (or, more specifically, at her bosom). She’d succeeded in her career despite them—and because of herself. Because she was tenacious, and clever, and had great sources of funding. And now here she stood, an expert in disaster management, with the fate of Oxford in her hands, and they were no more than a group of old fools who discounted vital information simply because it came from a woman. She didn’t intend to waste another moment on their stupidity.
“The prime location for a defense is by the observatory,” she told them in a cool, professional tone, bringing from her skirt pocket a sketched map with calculations she and Gabriel had made during the train journey.
Abness hesitated the merest second, then took the map and perused it carefully before nodding. “That does make sense,” he admitted (mainly because he recognized Gabriel’s handwriting on the map, although he had at least enough intelligence not to confess it). “We shall get to work at once.”
This pronouncement seemed to invigorate the other professors. They set down their tankards, smoothed their mustaches, and began to rise. Chairs scraped against the floor, and Elodie squeezed Gabriel’s hand in sympathy as she watched him try not to wince at the noise.
“How long do we have?” Professor Dunning asked.
“Less than an hour,” Gabriel told him.
“Right!” Rubbing his hands together briskly, Abness looked around at his colleagues. “Summon the graduate students! Bring out the spades! And somebody get a box for this food. If we’re saving the world, we’ll be wanting snacks!”
This apparently was enough for Gabriel; he pulled Elodie from the pub without another word, as if rescuing her from certain death via the mingled odors of fried fish and mustache wax. Bright daylight swamped her vision, and when she closed her eyes against it, she saw an afterimage of herself standing in front of her peers, holding Gabriel’s hand.
Oh my God. They couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d outright shouted,We had sex in a cellar!The academia rumor network was going to go wilder than a triggered fey line. Elodie released a shaky breath, and beside her, Gabriel did the same. Their hands tightened in each other’s grip.
Then they turned to assess the northwest sky, because they might be muddled-up nitwits who couldn’t manage a sensible adult relationship, but they were also still professionals.
“Nothing yet,” Elodie said.
