Every Never After (9 page)

Sexy dead languages. You really are a high-order geek, McAllister
.

She really was.

Also? Speaking of “dead”? You
know
you’re in mortal peril here, right?

She really did. She was just trying her best to ignore that fact. Concentrate on the minutiae, avoid the big-picture panic. Right. Or maybe she could listen to what they were actually saying instead of just the sexy way it was being said.
That
might be helpful.

“A Druidess, Centurion.” The young legionnaire glanced back over his shoulder in her direction. “At least, Junius here seems to think so.”

Junius—a thick-necked bull of a man—stepped forward, glaring sideways at Allie as he passed her. Despite his size and obvious strength, it almost seemed, now that the fever of battle madness was gone from his eyes, as if he was afraid to look at her directly. Junius stopped in front of the centurion and threw a salute forceful enough to make his armour rattle. Then he looked at Allie’s rescuer and nodded in agreement.

“She … appeared in front of me, sir,” Junius confirmed, casting glances at Allie. “Just
appeared
. Right out of thin air.”

“Right out of thin air, eh?” The centurion walked over and looked down on Allie as if she were something offensive he’d just scraped off the bottom of his sandal. He hawked and spat to one side, plainly unimpressed by the so-called Druidess. “Well, let’s see if she can disappear
back
into thin air after we’ve clapped chains on her and thrown her on a ship bound for the slave markets in Rome along with her fellow barbarians. Take her to the blacksmith and get her fitted. Then put her in with the others.” He turned to the young legionnaire. “As for you, attend me. I want a full account of what’s going on out there.”

The centurion turned on his heel and stalked away. Allie was instantly forgotten in the wake of more important matters. Their curiosity satisfied, the other soldiers dispersed in groups of twos and threes, drifting off down the alleyways between the regimented lines of tents that made up the Roman camp. There were rows and rows of the things, and Allie wondered just how many
soldiers there were in the compound. Then she wondered what her odds of escape might be. Probably worse than abysmal.

Junius grabbed Allie ungently by her arm, and she saw the young soldier cast a long look back at her as he followed in the centurion’s wake. Then the two men disappeared down a side alley and Junius shoved her forward, prodding her with the butt end of his spear as she stumbled toward a thin line of smoke that rose up between two tents. A blacksmith.

He was going to put her in chains.

Allie felt her heart sink into her stomach.

7

C
lare’s lunch wasn’t sitting very well. And she hadn’t even had the fish and chips. Mostly she just had a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach as she and Milo retraced their route back to the dig site. They’d lingered in the pub for half an hour longer than usual, just waiting to see if Al would show. She didn’t. Nor did she call Clare’s cell phone to tell her she’d be late. Calls to Al’s cell went unanswered. Text messages, the same.

“You know that half the time she’s got the thing on silent and stuffed in the bottom of her bag, right?” Milo said, reiterating a version of his standard reassurance. He’d been cycling through several variations with slightly altered wording ever since they’d ordered lunch.

But to Clare’s ears, even he wasn’t sounding so sure anymore. “So you’re saying she probably just stumbled on a really gripping essay on the web about dendrochronology,” she said. “Or, I dunno, tree-ring dating—”

“Those are the same thing.”

“—what
ever
and is sitting somewhere with her nose happily glued to her shiny new gadget. Oblivious of tummy rumblings or the need to call me and expound on her latest scientific theorizing about … stuff.”

“Clare … it’s Allie. She of the level head,” Milo called after her as she quickened her pace and pulled away from him. “Wherever she is, she’s fine.”

But Clare wasn’t so sure and was almost sprinting by the time the fork in the road that led to the dig site came into view. She shoved open the livestock fence that barred the gap in the tall, thick hedgerow leading to the dig field, ran through, and then paused. From the north, she thought she could hear something. A far-off noise that sounded like …

“Whoa!” she exclaimed, diving for cover in the long grass.

All around her the air shook with the thunder of horses galloping madly past. The ground beneath Clare’s feet trembled and her ears rang with piercing neighs and the gruff shouts of many men. A wave of darkness washed over her. Clare smelled smoke and blood and churned mud … and then, in the sudden silence, it was gone.

“Clare!”

Milo came tearing around the corner of the hedgerow, leaving the gate to swing shut behind him.

“What is it? What’s
wrong
?”

Clare glanced wildly around. The day was back to its sunshiney bird-tweety empty-meadow normalcy. And Milo was hauling her up off the ground and gripping her by the arms, staring down worriedly into her eyes.

“You didn’t hear that?” Clare pushed past him, looking for the massed cavalry that—she was certain—had just thundered past. “The galloping and the whinnying and the potential trampling?”

He shook his head.

Clare ran back to the gate and hoisted herself up on the rail, looking up and down the road for signs of a nearby rodeo that had just experienced a horsey jail break. Not even a dust cloud to be seen in either direction. Maybe it had been … thunder? She glanced skyward. Not a cloud.

“Nothing?” she asked.

“I didn’t see or hear a thing,” Milo said. And then added cautiously, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Mental breakdown it is, then. Enh. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve approached that fine line. I still haven’t crossed over it. Yet.

She told herself she was just worried about Al and that it was causing her imagination to run away with her. Milo stood watching her patiently, head tilted, arms crossed over his chest.

“Oh … quiet, you,” she sighed as she stalked past him. “I’m not normal. You know that. Let’s go find your wayward cousin. And
not
tell her about my invisible horsey friends. She’s already been driving me crazy with the watching-like-a-hawk thing to make sure I don’t inadvertently do something enormously stupid like fondle the artifacts without adequate protection. Imagine how she’d react if she thought I was suddenly hallucinating.”

“You’re not hallucinating. You’re just … you.”

Clare didn’t know whether that was meant to be reassuring or not.

When they reached the spot where she’d left Al less than two hours earlier, the field was utterly empty. Not even a grumpy gradstudent supervisor anywhere to be seen. Clare slowed to a stop on the lip of the trench where she and Al had been working, directly under the shadow of the Tor where the hillside merged into the field below.

“She’s here somewhere,” Milo said again, sounding even
less
convinced. “And she’s fine. Maybe she’s found herself a grad student to crush on. Or be crushed on by.”

“What?” Clare said absently, turning in a full circle. “You mean all those ruggedly intellectual-looking types always offering to lend Al their vernier calipers?”

Milo, his mouth quirking in a half-smile, seemed reasonably impressed with Clare’s correct use of terminology. “That’s exactly what I mean. You’re not the only geek bait around here, you know,” he said wryly. “And I did actually see a couple of the dig guys giving Allie the eye the other day. Is it beyond the realm of possibility to think she might have noticed? And maybe … reciprocated interest?”

“I guess not …” Clare muttered, barely restraining herself from turning over rocks in the field to see if Al was hiding under one.

Frankly, she found the idea of Al ditching her and Milo to go make out with a history PhD student—and more to the point,
not
telling Clare about it during their late-night, post-dig gab sessions—even
more
disturbing than a random, unexplained disappearance. Then again, Clare had been preoccupied. Maybe she’d just missed the signals. Did that make her a bad friend? Was Al really off somewhere canoodling with a stubbly, sun-bronzed archaeology nerd?

“Maybe you’re right,” she sighed. “I just—”

Clare stopped abruptly at the look on Milo’s face.

Something had caught his eye and his smile had vanished instantly. Clare followed his gaze but couldn’t tell what he was looking at. At first. And then she saw it, too: Al’s shiny new tablet lying face down in the dust of the shallow trench where she’d been working. A cold hand of fear closed around Clare’s throat. You’d practically have to cut Al’s hands off to get her to relinquish her new techno-toy.

And then beat her senseless with those same severed hands to get her to leave it face down in the dirt!

For a second Clare feared that was exactly what had happened … and then realized that it was only Al’s
gloves
lying on the ground, not her actual appendages. But that moment of relief was followed by a crushing surge of panic as Milo crouched down and picked up the tablet. He knew just as well as Clare did that his cousin didn’t go anywhere without her tech. Not willingly. He pushed the tablet at Clare and ran to the edge of the trees.

“Allie?” he called out, alarm in his voice. “Allie! Where are you?”

Clare looked down at the screen in her hands. It was cool to the touch, so she had no way of knowing how long it had been in sleep mode. She called up the password screen. Hoping desperately that Al hadn’t changed it since Clare had figured it out, she entered 6-6-6-5-3-9—numbers corresponding to the letters that made up the word MONKEY. When the tablet glowed to life she checked to
see what Al had been doing with it last. It was set to video-camera mode, and Clare called up the last clip Al had shot.

“Hey! Okay, all you dig-diggers out there in Cyberlandia, this is your friendly neighbourhood Al-Mac out here on day three of the Glastonbury Dig, and I’m back atcha with another dispatch from the field …”

Al’s familiar voice tumbled cheerfully out of the little speaker. Her grinning face, with its newly acquired adorable smattering of freckles across her nose, filled the screen.

Two minutes and fifty-six seconds later, according to the counter on the video clip, Milo was still hollering for his cousin. Clare didn’t bother calling out. She knew what had happened. And she knew—with a certain, sinking horror—that Al was nowhere in the near vicinity.

Or, more accurately, no
when
near.

Moving like a zombie, slow and unthinking and full of dread, Clare traced a path on the trajectory dictated by what she’d seen in the video. And there it was, lying in the grass—the thing she thought she’d seen in the video.

Clare heard Milo come up behind her. “What the
hell
?” he murmured.

Clare nudged the skull with the toe of her sneaker.

In the video, she’d seen Al take off her gloves—
WTH!! Why did you take off your gloves?!
—and work an object free of the ground. She’d seen Al fall out of frame as she tugged the thing free … and the bright light of day dimming and reddening, washing over the empty scene from the direction where Al had rolled before the tablet tipped over on its face and stopped recording.

Milo walked back to the trench and knelt down beside Al’s field kit. Clare nudged the skull again, its rounded bone surface a weathered, bronzey colour. The touch of Clare’s shoe sent it rolling toward Milo. He reached out toward it and Clare howled at him: “DO NOT TOUCH! What are you—
crazy
?”

Milo paused, silently raised an eyebrow at her, and held up the long thin dowel of the wooden paintbrush he’d plucked from Al’s
kit. He very gently prodded the skull until it turned over, exposing the underside where the unfortunate ex-owner’s spinal column would have attached.

Clare wondered what had happened to whoever this had been.

Who
had
this been?

Then she remembered Connal, the Druid warrior prince she’d encountered during her shimmer trips, saying something about the fierce tribes to the west. She grew instantly frantic: would Al have found herself among a tribe of rather less friendly Britons than Clare had? And by “friendly” she meant a tribe in which one of its members—that very same Druid prince—had held her at sword point more than once. In fact, he’d almost lopped
her
head off before she’d been able to convince him otherwise. She stared at the dirt-encrusted undercarriage of the disembodied skull.

Holy crap …

Al was in a world of trouble. And it was Clare’s fault.

Clare
knew
she’d been neglecting her best friend. She knew Al was feeling odd-man-out, and yet she’d still left her alone and gone blithely on her merry, Milo-happy way. Now Al was gone.

“This is all my fault,” Clare moaned half to herself.

“Hey …” Suddenly Milo was there, his arms wrapped around her. “This is not your fault and Allie is
not
your responsibility. If anything, she’s mine. Don’t worry—I’ll be the one her mother kills when she doesn’t make it back to Toronto at the end of the summer.”