Every Never After (17 page)

“Not even your whacko granny?” Clare asked.

“She’s the one I would have thought most likely to, yeah. She actually believed in things like Druid blood curses.” Piper snorted. “She kept newspaper clippings in a scrapbook about the Tutankhamun Curse and the Hope Diamond.”

Clare felt a cold shiver run up her spine. The conversation suddenly resembled one she’d once had with Morholt about the very same subject. Okay, so the coconuts didn’t fall far from the tree. Even after multiple generations.

“She also kept track of Yeti sightings and collected grainy snaps of the Loch Ness monster,” Piper went on, confirming the hypothesis. “Yup. My genetic material was corrupted at the source code. Madman and sorceress. Thanks for making that possible.”

“Don’t mention it.” Clare grinned sourly.

“Right. Nutters, all. But, aside from Gran and me, incurious nutters.” Piper finished packing the book away and waved a hand at the curio shop’s confines. “See … me? I actually believe that the past
lives
. It lives in the present and it’s our duty to keep it alive for the future. This shop is the very antithesis of a museum. People can walk in here and buy things. Touch things. Take them home and make them a part of their lives. I
had
to know what was in this.” She held up the tin. “I needed to solve the mystery.”

“What if it had proved to be nothing?”

Piper shrugged. “Then at least I would have known. And I would have sold the thing as a wartime tea tin to some granny to pot a plant in, and made a few quid off it. Also? I’m the last of my line. No siblings, no cousins that I know of. And I’m not precisely the type to settle down and raise a family.”

Clare raised an eyebrow. “Sure. You’re like, what, nineteen? How do you know? Maybe you just haven’t met the right person yet.”

Piper’s eyes flicked over to where Milo stood silently.

“Maybe,” she said. “But maybe not. And I started thinking that, if I didn’t open it, chances are no one in my family ever would. And, insofar as you two are here, I know now that I was
meant
to open it.”

“What does it say in there about Al?” Clare almost dreaded the answer.

“Well, for starters,” Milo said, “she showed up in a Roman encampment that Morholt was being held prisoner in.” Clare blinked at him in surprise. Among his other talents, apparently Milo was also a speed reader. “Initially, it seems, Morholt assumed that his demands for
you
to come and rescue him worked. Sort of. I guess he figured you somehow sent Allie in your place.”

“Great,” Clare said. “But here’s the thing—I didn’t have anything to do with sending Al back, did I? And now we know that’s definitely where she went, I still don’t have the foggiest idea how to get her back. Does the book say how we do that? Does it say how
I
can go back without a shimmer trigger? Does it say anything bloody useful at
all
?”

Milo hesitated for a moment. He glanced at Piper.

Clare huffed in frustration as the silence stretched out. “Milo?”

“No. I’m sorry, Clare. It doesn’t.”

Piper was staring at Milo, the shadow of a frown on her brow. Clare looked back and forth between the two of them. It felt suddenly as if they were keeping something from her.

“What?” she demanded. “Is it Al? Did something horrible happen to her?” Clare felt rising panic again. She’d never gone back for more than an hour or two at a time. Al had been gone since
yesterday
. “Is she in trouble? You have to tell me if—”

“She’s fine,” Piper said firmly.

Clare turned to her. “What?”

“Fine,”
she repeated, tapping the tin. “So far. On page thirty-four,
three
days after Morholt first sees her, your friend is still alive and well and—heh—feisty as ever. Apparently she’s a bit of a spitfire, that one.” Piper laughed a little. “Now, if we extrapolate from how Morholt described
your
travels, the amount of time that passes for Allie
there
is the same amount of time that would have passed for her
here
. The passage of time is a personal chronology—it remains consistent to the individual. You can enter the time stream at any point, but it’s like you carry your own stopwatch with you when you do. So. Regardless of how long Morholt’s been stuck back there, when he writes about how long
she’s
been there, it amounts to the same length of time she would have been here. She hasn’t yet been gone three days. Which means she’s
still
there,
still
in good health, and will be for at least another twenty-four hours.”

“Okay,” Milo interjected, “fine. We have a bit of breathing space. And obviously we’re still missing a key piece of the puzzle. I guess we’re just going to have to wait until it reveals itself to us.”

“That’s a terrible idea,” Clare said, although she could hardly argue with the logic. “I
hate
that idea. Wait? Just … wait? I hate waiting.” She wondered how many times Al had cursed her out loud and in colourful language for not getting her the hell back to the future already. As relieved as she was, Clare still felt terrible. Useless.

“Patience,” Piper counselled. “Virtue.”

Clare rolled an eye at her. “Patience. Shove it.”

“Right.” Piper fidgeted for a moment. “You know, maybe this all has something to do with the artifact your pal found. It was a skull, wasn’t it?”

Clare nodded, even though she found the idea unlikely. She’d held the gruesome thing in her bare hands and nary a flicker of a shimmer had she felt. Clare’s triggers had always been manmade. Not, as it were, made of man. But then again, it
had
been different with Al. The video had clearly shown that. Maybe the bony relic had something to do with Al’s temporal displacement after all.

“Could you bring it here?” Piper pressed. “To the shop?”

Clare looked at Milo. The day before they’d decided that wandering around Glastonbury with a human skull in his knapsack was probably a bad idea, so he’d hidden it in his hotel room for the time being. But Piper had spent her life surrounded by antiquities, and she’d read the diary back to front. Maybe there was something she could discover that they hadn’t.

Milo must have been thinking the same thing. He shrugged one shoulder and said, “I’m okay with that if you are, Clare—”

Suddenly the clock in the main shop bonged nine, startling the three of them. And only a few seconds later, the front door bell chimed, startling them again.

“Damn,” muttered Piper. “I forgot. The teaspoon ladies.”

Clare and Milo looked at her.

“They’re here every second Wednesday of the month at nine o’clock sharp, all giddy with anticipation, to see if I’ve got any new spoons in. Be right back …” She bustled out to the front of the shop.

Clare glanced at her watch and turned to Milo. “If I’m not at the dig site soon, the supervisors are going to start asking questions. They’re probably already wondering where the hell Al is.”

He nodded. “I’ll walk with you. I’ve got a few things to take care of too, with the virtual-reality dig program.”

When Milo reached out to pick up the book tin, Clare thrust out her hand to stop him. As much as she wanted to take it with them, she didn’t want Milo examining the line of code any more closely than he already had. She couldn’t risk him cracking it.

“Um. Look …” She struggled to find some kind of valid excuse for leaving the thing behind. “I think maybe we should leave the
book here for safekeeping. I don’t want to be carting it around in the field. And … I dunno. It’s kind of like a legacy for Goggles. I think we—okay,
me
—got off on the wrong foot with her. Maybe if we show her we trust her with it … things might go easier.”

Clare held her breath as Milo cast a long look at the battered little box.

“I think you’re right,” he said, smiling as he tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “And I think that’s pretty big of you, all things considered.”

He bent his head and kissed her lightly on the mouth, and Clare felt herself relax a little and breathe a sigh of relief.

“Anyway,” Milo continued, “if Piper’s right about Al, and I think she most likely is, then we do have a bit of time. I’ll get the skull from my hotel room this afternoon and we can come back and figure out our next move. Okay?”

“Okay … I just … Milo, I feel like we’re out of our depth here.” Clare’s anxiety had returned the second Milo stopped kissing her. “Maybe we really
should
tell Dr. Ashbourne about this. Maybe something similar has happened on one of the Tor digs before and—”

“Dr. Nicholas Ashbourne?” Piper asked, ducking back through the beaded curtain to fetch a cardboard box from a shelf labelled
SPOONS
.

Milo turned to her. “You know him?”

“He was a friend of my old wacky gran’s since back before I was born. She used to buy artifacts from him—things the museum wouldn’t take. I’ve bought a few myself from him over the years.”

Piper frowned, putting the box down long enough to take Morholt’s book tin—she hefted it as if to make sure the book was still inside—and put it away in a cupboard. Piper eyed them skeptically, but when they didn’t put up a fight, she gave her head a bit of a shake and returned to the topic.

“Do you trust him?” she asked. “Ashbourne?”

“Of course I do,” Clare said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Piper shrugged. “Moustache like that? I never completely trust anyone who finds it necessary to hide half their face from the world.”

This from someone with an obvious affinity for feature-obscuring eyewear?
Clare refrained from pointing out the irony.

“At any rate, be careful.” Piper crossed her arms and pegged Clare with a frank, appraising stare. “Surprising as it may be, Miss Reid, you are something extraordinary. You have a rare and precious gift. I believe that rare and precious things should be well taken care of. But there are those who don’t necessarily agree with me.”

In the main shop, the clamouring for spoons was getting a bit noisy.

“Step out the back way, will you? The spoon ladies tend to clog up the aisles,” Piper said. “And be careful. Don’t let your
selves
fall into the wrong hands.”

“Don’t worry about me, Goggles,” Clare said as she headed for the back door. “I’m pretty handy with a letter opener, remember?”

But once outside the shop, she frowned. Piper’s parting words echoed in her head.

“Wow,” she muttered sourly. “Alarmist much?”

As Milo took her hand in his she waited for him to brush off Piper’s comment with a bit of his usual disarming wit, but his expression was clouded with worry.

“She’s right, Clare.”

All of a sudden she was exhausted. She took a step forward and leaned her head on Milo’s chest, sinking into his embrace as his arms went around her. Clare didn’t give a damn what kind of cryptic warning she’d somehow managed to transmit down through the ages to herself. She wouldn’t tell Milo about the code—just yet—but she also wouldn’t allow herself to think he’d do something bad or wrong if she did. More than likely she’d been trying to protect him, or Al, from something. That had to be it. Milo was … Milo. And he loved his cousin dearly. He’d never do anything that would put her in danger—
more
danger.

“I know,” she sighed. “I know she’s right. But I have
your
hands to fall into and
you
to take care of me. I’ll be fine.”

“Damn straight. Because I’m not going to let anything—
anything
—happen to you.” The way he said it made Clare pull away and look up at him again. His handsome face had shifted into a fierce, hard expression.

“Milo? What’s wrong?” Clare asked quietly. “I mean, beside the obvious.”

Milo glanced back at Piper Gimble’s shop.

“Did you get hold of Maggie yet?”

“No.” Clare shook her head. “She’s in academic-lockdown mode with that conference for the next few days. And every time I pick up the phone, I kind of chicken out anyway. I’m afraid to tell her what’s happened.”

“Okay. Good.”

“What?”

Milo hesitated a moment. “Let’s keep her out of the loop on this one for the time being.”

“Seriously. What?” Clare pulled him to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk. “Milo! It’s
Maggie
.”

“I know.” He glanced around as if he expected to catch someone eavesdropping. But of course they were alone on the street in the sleepy little town. “It’s not Maggie I don’t trust. It’s everyone who might know something about this and who has access to Maggie. Look … that diary? It came from
Stuart Morholt
, shadiest of the shady. He may seem like an incompetent boob most of the time, but he had the wherewithal to make sure that thing found its way down through two thousand years to get to you.”

Clare had to agree that, for an incompetent boob, it was an impressive feat.

“And remember, the whole Boudicca museum theft, back when you were shimmering, was an inside job. As far as we know it was only Dr. Jenkins working with Morholt, but that’s
only
as far as we know. A bunch of other people were in on the Druid revival
thing back in the day. Who knows how many more of those ‘Free Peoples of Prydain’ freaks are wandering around out there.”

Clare thought about that and frowned.

“There were at least three other people just in Maggie’s photo alone,” Milo went on. “I think we should keep this—all of this— between you and me. And, obviously, our friendly neighbourhood girl-antiquarian in there. Something strange is going on.”

“Ya think?”

“I don’t just mean Allie’s disappearance. That’s the
what
. I’m talking about the
why
. We don’t have the whole picture. I don’t like not having whole pictures.” He took Clare’s hand again and they started walking back toward the Tor. “I even less like the idea that we’re being purposefully kept in the dark.”

“Kept in the dark? By who? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Clare felt a shiver run down her spine and tried to recall the faces of the other group members in the snapshot.

Milo was adamant. “I’m not running the risk that one of them might be trying to use you—use your gift—and Allie maybe just got in the way somehow.”