But not with him. In his eyes, she saw a reflection of herself that was perfection.
“Would that we had an eternity,” he said sadly.
Her fingers tightened around his hand, silently encouraging him to continue. When her watch chimed the hour of midnight with tiny metallic tings, she flinched. One. Two. Three…
“You are magnificent, lass,” he said, tracing his finger down the curve of her cheek. “Such a fearless heart.”
Five. Six. Seven.
“Have you come to care for me, if only a bit, Gwen?”
Gwen nodded, her throat suddenly thick, not trusting herself to speak. He looked so sad that she was afraid she might blurt out silly sentimental things and make a fool of herself. She’d already said one thing during their lovemaking she’d never thought would slip past her lips, and now if she wasn’t careful she’d get disgustingly mushy on him.
Nine.
“That, and my faith in you, must be enough. Would you aid me, were I in danger?”
“Of course,” she said instantly. Then, more hesitantly, “What about me?”
“My life for you,” he said simply. “Lass, doona fear me. No matter what happens, promise me you will not fear me. I am a good man, I vow I am.”
Stricken by the pain in his voice, she brushed his jaw with her fingers. “I know you are, Drustan MacKeltar,” she said firmly. “I don’t fear you—”
“But things might change.”
“Nothing can change that. Nothing could make me fear you.”
“Would that it could be true,” he said, his eyes dark.
Twelve.
Thirteen?
He cried out then, dragged her roughly into his arms, and kissed her, a deep soul kiss—and the world as Gwen Cassidy knew it began to unravel at the seams.
She began gyrating in his arms, bobbing and spinning like a cork in a whirlpool, up and down, side to side, back and forward…then a new direction that wasn’t a direction at all.
Space-time shifted, her very existence within it changed, and somehow she melted from Drustan’s arms.
Her backpack slipped from her shoulder and went sailing off into a vortex of light.
As if from a great distance, she saw her hands reaching for it, but there was something wrong with them. They had an added dimension her mind couldn’t comprehend. She wiggled her fingers, struggling to grasp their new quality. Her palms, her wrists, her arms were so…different.
She thought she saw Drustan spinning past and then she thought she heard a distant sonic boom, but a sonic boom would have meant that she was moving faster than the speed of sound, and she wasn’t moving at all, unless one counted the fact that she felt as ineffectual as a butterfly batting fragile wings against the gale-force winds of a tornado. She fancied she could feel the tips of those delicate appendages tearing off. Besides, she thought dimly, struggling for some core of sanity, the person moving faster than the speed of sound didn’t hear the sonic boom. Only those standing still did.
Then a flash of white encompassed her, so blinding that she lost all sense of time and space and self. Whiteness filled her: She choked on it, breathed it, felt it beneath her skin, soaking into her cells and rearranging them according to some alien design. Terminal velocity for the average skydiver, the scientist within her recited in a chilly voice, averages ninety-three to one hundred twenty-five miles per hour. Sound travels seven hundred sixty miles per hour, on a humid day. Escape velocity is the speed required to exit the earth’s atmosphere and achieve interplanetary travel, or twenty-five thousand miles per hour. Light travels one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. Then the peculiar thought: A cat always lands on its feet. Maintain an angular momentum of zero.
There was no sense of motion, yet there was a horrible vertigo. There was no sound, yet the silence was deafening. There was no fullness of body, yet there was no emptiness. Escape velocity achieved and exceeded, white and whiter, she was—in? on? off?—a long bridge or tunnel. She had no body to instruct to run.
The white was gone so abruptly that the darkness hit her like a brick wall. Then there was blessed sight and sound, and feeling in her hands and feet.
Maybe not so blessed, she decided. Taste was a bitter metallic bile in the back of her throat; weight was a sickening pressure after the terrible vacuum.
Stifling the urge to vomit, she lifted a head that weighed two tons and felt as swollen as an overripe tomato.
Around her, the night exploded. Driving hail pelted the ground, gouging tendrils of mist from the soil. The wind wailed and keened, flung leaves and snapped branches. Large chunks of ice stung her bare skin.