Every Never After (6 page)

The two of us … plus one.

It felt uneven somehow.

Also? It somehow felt as if Clare had suddenly acquired some sort of mysterious power that Allie had yet to manifest—or even figure out. Not only had Milo finally made a move, but during Clare’s shimmer trips to the past she’d also attracted the undivided attention of a super-hot (according to Clare, at least; Allie had never actually seen him in the flesh) Druid warrior prince. A super-hot Druid warrior prince who’d kissed her under a full moon on the eve of a battle with the Roman army.

Sure, it had been dangerous for Clare in the past. And there’d been bloodshed and death and a bunch of other stuff that Allie’s best friend was still, despite her fairly bounce-back demeanour, having a few difficulties dealing with. It wasn’t obvious to anyone else, but sometimes Allie would see Clare’s gaze turn inward, as if she was replaying the footage of a memory. As much as it had been an adventure and a kick and fun in a kidnapped-threatenedmystical-crazy-let’s-not-do-that-ever-again kind of way, Allie knew Clare had seen things that the average contemporary North American seventeen-year-old girl wasn’t really supposed to see. And it had stuck with her. Allie supposed death and grief did that
kind of thing. Even to a girl like Clare. The last couple of weeks had been better for her, though.

So it wasn’t as if Allie begrudged Clare her Milo-time.

Milo helped. The dig would help: if their muscle fatigue from climbing the Tor was any indication, the taxing work of excavation would help keep Clare from dwelling on those events late into the wee hours. It certainly seemed to have done the job tonight.

In theory, it should have worked for Allie too. Her muscles ached from the climb, her head was woolly, and her eyes felt gritty with weariness. And yet there she was. Flat on her back in a cozy little room in the middle of Somerset, England, staring up into the dark while her brain whirred around in her skull trying to make sense of the things she knew had happened to her best friend. And the things that had, to a lesser degree, happened to her best friend’s aunt all those years ago.

Maggie’s story had really stuck with Allie. She couldn’t stop wondering what had happened that night. She wondered how she would have felt if something like that had happened to her instead. Sure—she’d been instrumental in the Shenanigans. She’d been kidnapped along with Clare when Morholt had decided to play hardball to get her to do his dirty work, and she’d shimmered along with Clare into Boudicca’s mystically guarded underground tomb. But that was just it. She’d been “along” for the ride.

Sidekick, accomplice, third wheel …

She felt a little weird about that. And she felt weird about feeling weird.

Allie’s thoughts looped in and around each other as she finally started to drift off. And then the quiet solitude of the deep, empty night was shattered by an ear-pummelling cacophony.

What the hell?

Allie bolted upright, wondering what on earth could be making all that noise—noise that sounded like … horses. A lot of horses. In fact the thunder of hoofbeats was suddenly so loud that she flinched and dove back under the covers. The drumming of hooves was followed by the noise of a car horn madly beeping
and the squeal of tires on asphalt. Allie sat back up in bed. There was a moment of silence …

And then she heard what sounded like her own voice.

“Help! Clare!
Me!
Somebody …”

Allie jumped out of bed and flicked on the little bedside lamp.

“Help!
Help!
”

The cries were followed by what sounded like the high-pitched screams of a multitude of furious women. The curtains billowed like sails in the room as Allie threw open the casement and stuck her head out into the cool night air. But there was nothing. A thin ground mist swirled in rolling eddies as if something—or someone—had just run past, but the road was an empty ribbon of gravel. The moon came out from behind a bank of swiftsailing clouds and cast the Avalon Mists’s immaculate little yard in a clear, silvery light.

It, too, was empty. Not a potted geranium out of place.

Dream. It was a dream.

Allie looked over to where Clare was enthusiastically sawing logs. She considered waking her, but Clare deserved a good night’s sleep and pleasant dreams for once. Although her blissful smile, Allie noticed, had bent into something of a smirk.

I wonder what she’s dreaming about now
, she thought.

Whatever it was, it made Clare snort once and mutter “Dumbass …”

Allie grinned and lay back down on her bed. Her head sank into her feather pillow and she soon drifted back into a deep, and very dreamless, sleep.

5

T
hree days’ worth of digging and the blister on Clare’s finger had developed into a mighty, rock-hard layer of scaly reptile hide. The muscles of her forearms had stopped searing and the dull, burning throb in her trowelling shoulder had settled into a soothing, delightful ache. She groaned and dug through her messenger bag for the bottle of ibuprofen that had almost taken over from Al as her bestest friend.

When, on the first day, they reached their assigned area of the dig—the place where they’d spend most of their waking hours for the next three weeks—it was to discover that there was nothing the least bit spooky or even particularly impressive about it. It was mostly just a corner of a farmer’s field, surrounded by forest on one side and tall hedgerows on the other. There were no obvious ruins poking majestically out of the ground, no palace walls or broken mosaics depicting naked gods cavorting. No bits of statuary. What there was, however, were several meticulously dug trenches, mostly rectangular, some with varying depths carved like steps within the depressions. In places, stakes were driven into the ground supporting a grid network of hemp strings that sectioned off the areas into checkerboard patterns. It was all very efficient and industrious. And yet, on the whole, the entire operation seemed … well … kinda dinky.

But it was theirs. Their own little “Holes Away from Home.”

As they surveyed the trenches, Clare and Al had tried their best to mask their disappointment. Milo, on the other hand, was positively giddy from the get-go about
his
new pet project. Every day at around noon he came loping through the field, effusive with geographic praise. Mentally mapping the topography as he went. Or the geography.

Probably both.

Clare wasn’t particularly certain of the distinction. And she still struggled with the subtleties of strata and striations.

“The stratigraphy of the Tor itself is unique,” Milo would say. Or, “The view from the summit of the surrounding terrain is incredible!”

“And if there’s anything your cousin loves,” Clare said to Al on one such occasion, “it’s surrounding terrain.”

“Or, really, any kind of terrain,” Al had agreed, panting with exertion as she jammed her shovel into a rock-hard patch of soil.

As for the girls, though, so far on the dig they’d discovered … nothing much. Well, nothing much beyond the fact that digging was hard work. Even if you were only doing it with a weenie baby hand shovel. Clare glanced over at Al, whose blue-pale skin had lost its milky translucent glow and was actually—gasp!—starting to freckle. It messed with her techno-couture, but it was actually kind of cute on her. It made her solemn grey gaze less solemn. Moreover, Al, who’d come with Clare on this dig as a matter of intellectual curiosity—and of riding shotgun on her impulsive BFF—had even admitted at breakfast that she was beginning to enjoy the physical exertion.

Clare had fessed up, in turn, that she was too.

Sure. It hurt. A lot. But the aches and pains and twinges were more than compensated for by the fresh air, sunshine, companionship (including frequent visits—and accompanying blissful shoulder rubs thereof—from Milo), and the fact that they were doing something interesting and different. Something that most of their school friends had never even thought of doing. It would buy them some locker-talk cred when they got back to school at
the end of the summer. Even if they still hadn’t found anything more interesting than the busted-off handle of a ceramic wine jug.

Also, an unexpected yet strangely gratifying side bonus was that the whole video-blog thing had scared them up a kind of mini cult following, which was in itself kind of cool. Using the camera on Al’s tablet and the screen names ClareTheLoon and Al-Mac, the girls had been shooting video entries several times a day and streaming them live to the website they’d set up in conjunction with the museum to record their dig experience. So far, most of the entries had consisted of stuff like “hour three of shovelling … still nothing … my calluses are developing calluses … this is some kind of practical joke, right? … wait—is that a … nope … it’s a rock …” and so on.

Of course, a third of the comments from their followers were pretty obviously posted by twelve-year-old boys and consisted of lewdly misspelled boob jokes. But there were also actively interested hobby historians who’d offered up a decent amount of encouragement to the girls. It was kind of fun.

Clare checked her watch: about a half-hour left before they’d break for lunch. On the ground between the two trenches where she and Al had been assigned to work was a shallow tray that contained a few bits of broken pottery and a random bit of twisted metal that might have once been a horseshoe nail or part of a cloak fastener. Or in all likelihood, just a random bit of twisted metal.

“I’m going to go log our bounteous finds with Command Central, ’kay?” Clare called over to Al.

“Gloves on?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Clare rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses.

“Okay then.”

“You wanna come with? We can head straight to lunch after.”

Clare could see the crown of Al’s cowboy hat shake in the negative. “I’ll be there in a bit. I finally finished sawing through this
nasty old tree root and I feel I should reward myself by digging some more.”

“You’re in a groove, huh?” Clare laughed, hauling herself out of her own pit and dusting off the knees of her jeans.

“You could say that.” Al grinned up at her, tipping back her hat and wiping the sweat from her brow with her sleeve. “Come get me when you’re done and we’ll head over to the Rifleman.”

The Rifleman’s Arms was a quaint little English pub they’d found. It had a cute little patio and hearty food. And the owner would serve the girls one little baby half-pint of cider each with their meals, even though technically they weren’t of legal drinking age quite yet. The owner said they deserved to be treated like adults because of the job they were doing with such dedication over at the great hill: “Illuminatin’ the past and all that. Very important work.”

It was nice that the Rifleman’s proprietor felt that way, Clare mused as she walked through the long grass, heading for the large canvas tent set up in the far corner of the adjacent field. Especially given the one or two locals who didn’t exactly see the excavations in that light. Emphatically so. Even though Glastonbury’s bustling little tourist economy traded heavily on the past—and people’s fascination with it—some of the town’s residents were of the opinion that what’s buried should stay buried. And you didn’t want to go messing about with the hill, meddling with the natural (some said
un
natural) energies of the place. The girls got opinions from all sides on the matter. Glastonbury itself, and the hill in particular, seemed to inspire strong reactions in people.

Clare got that. What she
wasn’t
getting was anything out of the ordinary. No spooky vibes, no shimmer shimmies … and for that she was grateful. She was doing good hard work, she was learning stuff, and she was having fun. She left it at that.

NORMALLY, ALLIE WOULD HAVE JUMPED
at the chance to knock off a few minutes early and retreat to the cool comfort of the
pub’s back patio. But on the third straight day of digging, she was actually finding a kind of rhythm to the work. And after the effort of clearing the roots, she felt as though she just might find something. Something that had lain hidden for a long time there in the shadow of the hill. It felt almost like a premonition. And it was what kept her there digging after Clare had gone to file their log.

The girls had been working side by side since they’d been there, the camaraderie between them an unbreakable bond. They were their usual inseparable duo. And lunches with Milo made for a cheerful, easygoing triumvirate. Even Allie’s feelings of thirdwheel awkwardness had dissipated. The trio was getting to be known as a familiar sight, with Milo in the middle and the girls on either side. But
something
was making Allie stay in her trench that morning. And in fact it wasn’t long before her trowel hit that very something. At first she thought it was a rock. But it was smooth and round in a way that all the other rocks she’d encountered so far were most definitely not.

Okay. Another pot shard …

But a bigger one. Maybe a whole, entire pot!

Oh, the giddy thrill!
she enthused with silent sarcasm. At least, that’s what she was going for. But her inner voice actually
did
sound giddily thrilled.