Every Never After (10 page)

“That’s hardly encouraging. And don’t
say
that.” She smacked him on the chest with the flat of her palm. “She’s coming home. Not at the end of summer … now. Today.”

Before Milo could stop her, she knelt down and scooped up the skull bare-handed. The hollow-shadowed, eyeless thing seemed to stare deep into Clare’s own head. Her vision seemed to tunnel, fire licking around the periphery, and she went rigid, expecting at any second to shimmer back to wherever Al had gone. Nothing happened. At least, nothing on the order of shimmering.

Only … ribbons of light and shadow raced over the field, cast by the day’s high-altitude, wind-driven clouds. Which wouldn’t have been the least bit out of the ordinary … if there’d actually
been
any high-altitude, wind-driven clouds. There weren’t. The sky was a bright, unbroken blue.

“Aw, crap,” Milo muttered, looking up into the sky and then down at the ground where the bands of shadows streamed past, confused apprehension on his handsome face.
Some
thing odd was happening, that much was certain. But it
wasn’t
something odd that was also bringing Al back.

Awash with sudden despair, Clare handed Milo the skull. She struggled against the urge to give in to the burgeoning panic working its way up from the depths of her stomach and into her throat.

“I have to bring her home, Milo. I have to be Al’s anchor.” But the realization was inescapable. And the more Clare thought about it, the more she feared the plain truth of the matter. “I just don’t know how to make that happen.”

8

T
his couldn’t be happening.

Clare never had anything even remotely this crazy bad happen to her!
Allie thought and was instantly aware that this was in no way accurate. But she was terrified. And panicky hyperbole, she decided, was a valid stress response given her current situation. So she went with it.

Sure—a Druid had attacked Clare and almost cut her throat,
Allie continued silently in that vein,
but he’d been gorgeous and had made up for it with kissing!

No hyperbole there. And, really? Clare had never been thrown in irons! She’d only had to help Comorra impersonate a goddess (granted, at considerable risk to her own life and limb), but ultimately that had worked out just fine. Thanks in large part to the fact that Allie had left her well stocked with useful objects like glowsticks and road flares and pocket lighters. What had Clare done for her? Nothing! Allie had been Clare’s anchor. Her homing beacon. Her way home when things got too hairy.

“Things are hairy, Clare!” Allie shouted at the night sky as the blacksmith bolted a shackle to her wrist by the light of his glowing forge. “Way too hairy! Now would be a good time for a recall!”

The Legion blacksmith—who, incidentally, rather closely resembled the cave troll that attacks the heroes of the Fellowship in the Mines of Moria back in the first
Lord of the Rings
movie— just rolled one beady eye at her in incomprehension and attached
the shackle to her other wrist. Even Clare’s
blacksmith
had been cooler than Allie’s. He’d been artistic. And a Druid. He had created magic—
real
magic—and objects of beauty and power. Allie wondered if the brute standing in front of her with the hammer even cared about the quality of his work. She doubted it. He’d barely even glanced at her as he’d hammered the irons shut. At least he’d aimed well enough not to accidentally pulverize her hands into salsa, but Allie chalked that up to blind luck.

He grunted to Junius that his task was finished and the soldier prodded Allie with the butt of his spear once more. She spun around and shot out a glare that actually made him back off half a step. But then he set his jaw and, grabbing a handful of her shirt material, half-dragged her away from the smith’s forge toward the tent alleys.

The chains felt as heavy as bowling balls tied to Allie’s wrists. They pulled her off balance, and she stumbled and fell to her knees. For a moment all she wanted to do was stay there. But Junius picked her up and shoved her forward, down a narrow lane toward a tent guarded by two sentries. The flap doorway was lit by the sullen smoky flares of a pair of torches in a stand. Another shove and she was through the flap. Allie found herself standing in the pitch-dark confines of a prisoners’ tent. She could hear the breathing and rustling of others in the near vicinity. The clank and hiss of chains. She didn’t know how many others were in there, and she wasn’t anxious to find out.

Shuffling her feet, trying not to hyperventilate from fear, Allie backed herself into a corner as far away from her fellow captives as she could get. With her spine up against a corner tent pole, she sank down to the cold ground and pulled her knees in tight to her chest, contemplating how on earth she’d come to this.

She’d
totally
been joking.

The whole “skeletal remains” thing?
Joking!

What didn’t the cosmos understand about that?

Frankly, she hadn’t been particularly keen to unearth anything even remotely resembling human remains. Let alone
exactly
resembling. Honestly, Clare’s bog bodies—and there’d been thirteen of those dudes—had been more than enough human remains to last Allie a lifetime. And yet? She’d had the audacity to joke about it. Blog Buddies. Skel-e-mail Remains.

Ha ha, very funny. Stupid irony.

She should have been at least a
touch
reverential. Especially considering everything she and Clare had experienced since setting foot in Britain, with all of its history and mystery and strange, mystical power. But that was in crystal-clear hindsight, and unless she had some sort of time machine—okay,
less
funny—there wasn’t much she could do about it. With the weight of the iron manacles dragging at her wrists
and
her spirit, there wasn’t much she could do about anything. Allie rested her head on her forearms and finally allowed silent tears to slide out from under her eyelids as she wept herself into a forlorn, exhausted sleep.

CLARE WISHED SHE WERE HOME.
Back in Toronto, even back in London. Anywhere else. She wished Maggie was there. The last time something like this happened, Clare had gambled on her aunt. Not only on Maggie’s willingness to believe wild declarations of magic and time travel and nefarious thievery, but on her ability to help sort the whole mess out. Clare could really use Maggie’s mad skills in that regard.

But her calls to Maggie’s office at the museum, to Maggie’s cell phone, and to Maggie’s flat all went unanswered. That wasn’t particularly unusual—Clare’s aunt wasn’t one of those tethered-totechnology types, and a phone conversation with her the previous evening—back when things at the dig site were proceeding along quite nicely without any hint of paranormal disruption, thank you very much—had most likely assured Maggie that, well, things at the dig site were proceeding along quite nicely
without any hint of paranormal disruption, thank you very much
. Therefore, she was no doubt going about her business as usual, which for that week, Clare knew, meant an international conference of historians
at which Maggie was keynote speaker and distinguished panelist. And, as Al or Milo would no doubt say, out of communicator range for the duration.

So Mags was out of the picture, help-wise. That left the only other authority figure in the vicinity: moustachioed, “marvellous,” bon-vivant-busybody-in-a-pith-helmet Bloody Nicky Ashbourne. Only … Clare was understandably reluctant to tell the dig’s supervising honcho that one of his precious trowel monkeys had vanished, potentially mystically so. So far Bloody Nick had left Milo and the girls pretty much to their own devices. Clare was perfectly well aware that the only reason they were even allowed within a half-mile radius of the excavation was that her aunt had pulled strings and called in favours. Fine. But now she had to put her faith in a man she knew almost nothing about. Still, maybe something like this had happened before. Maybe Nicholas Ashbourne knew something about it. Either way, Clare needed help. She needed to get Al back.

Which was why she now found herself sitting in a torturously uncomfortable folding camp chair outside the Glastonbury excavation project’s Command Central, waiting for Dr. Ashbourne to finish with a group of grad students so that she could inform him that Al had gone spatio-temporally AWOL and could he please offer some insights as to how to maybe retrieve her from the distant mists of time, thank you. Clare and Milo had been waiting for almost a quarter of an hour.

Milo had spent the last several minutes on the phone. Something to do with … satellites. Maps.

Hardly the time,
Clare thought to herself irritably.

But she supposed it was Milo’s way of occupying himself while Dr. Ashbourne finished debriefing the PhD candidates who’d unearthed a small hoard of coins. As far as she could tell from the excited chatter drifting through the walls of the tent, the gaggle of grads had found, like, five or six of the things. This was apparently a significant find, and the whole camp was abuzz over it. Over pocket change.

Whoop-dee-doo.

Not like the grad students had discovered a mystical
torc
or, oh, say,
Boudicca’s lost tomb
—like Clare had—or unearthed, oh, say, an enchanted freaking
skull
or anything—like Al had. Clare and Al were way cooler. They’d found magic. Only, the more Clare thought about it, the more it seemed to her that, with what little she could tell from the video blog, there were certain discrepancies between her magic and Al’s.

“It’s
different
this time …” she muttered to herself.

Clare watched Milo as he paced back and forth, checking something on his phone’s display screen and talking to some computer guru hacker guy named Dan about something technically arcane. Sitting in her camp chair, Clare had a white-knuckled grip on Al’s tablet, clutching it to her chest as if it were some sort of enchanted talisman. A looking glass or a magic mirror that she could peer into and see the future. Or the past …

“Milo?”

She tugged on his sleeve, trying to get his attention as he drifted past her. Whoever he was speaking to couldn’t possibly be of any use in finding Al and was thus deeply unimportant in that moment. And Clare desperately needed a sounding board to talk her way through her embryonic observations. Under any other circumstances, that sounding board would have been Al.

“Milo?” she said again. “It’s different this time—”

Milo nodded, stuck a finger in his free ear, and kept on pacing, leaving Clare to ponder theories darkly to herself.

“For
one
thing?” she muttered. “It wasn’t me.
I’m
supposed to be the one with the whole Druid blood-curse thing happening. Not like I think I’m super-special or anything … just that it was
my
blood that got all tangled up in Llassar’s artifacts in the first place. Al was the one who always brought me back. I don’t know how to bring Al back. I’m not good with being the anchor. I’m not … grounded like she is.”

“Clare—” Milo, having finally finished his call, sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

“—And another thing,” Clare continued, “as far as I can figure it, Al didn’t touch anything metal. Nothing manmade. No extraspecial whammy-imbued time-trip trigger from the ingenious magical forge of Llassar the mystical Druid smith. There is
no artifact
. A skull is not something you can
forge
using someone else’s
blood
. I touched the skull and nothing happened. No shimmering. The only thing I’m getting out of all this is a migraine. And I think that’s just from stress. Stress is not magical.”

“Clare—”

“There is no blood here, Milo!” Clare flailed a bit, growing increasingly agitated.

“I know. But I think—”

“I just don’t get it,” Clare went on in a low, staccato hiss, glancing warily in the direction of the tent. “There’s
nothing
to connect that stupid skull to Al. Nothing!” She waved a hand sharply at Milo’s knapsack, as if the skull inside it could hear her and maybe apologize for its presumption. “Unless, of course,” she continued with angry sarcasm, “that skull just so happens to belong to
Al,
in which case …”

She had meant it to be a joke.

“Oh … god …”

What if it wasn’t? What if the head in the bag really
had
once belonged to Allie McAllister? What if—

“Clare!”

She turned to Milo as if in slow motion. He lunged for her, an expression of alarm on his face, and Clare realized that she’d actually started to fall forward in a semi-faint. The edges of her vision had grown dark with panic at the thought of Headless Allie McAllister.

Milo pried the tablet from her fingers. “Stop.”

His voice was like cool water on the flash burn of her freak-out. He brushed back the hair that had escaped her ponytail and tilted her head up. Now she was looking straight into those clear blue eyes that stared back at her, calm and mesmerizing, from behind the angular black frames of his glasses.

“Just stop … and
listen
to me, Clare.” His long fingers cupped the sides of her face. “I’ve been through this situation before. I’ve seen it happen from
this
side of things, okay? With you. Every single time with you … when you shimmered? When you disappeared? I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again. And it just about killed me
every
single time, but you have to remember how it all turned out.”