Every Never After (5 page)

“Good god, Mags …” Clare gaped at the picture in disbelief. “You had a spiral perm!”

“And you were hot!” Milo exclaimed, crowding over her shoulder for a look. “I mean—
are
hot.”

Maggie’s eyebrow crept toward her hairline as she regarded him sideways.

“
Still
hot.”

Maggie rolled her eyes and reached across the table to snatch the picture back again, but Clare kept it out of her reach. “Look at the shoulder pads, Al! And is that … holy crap. It
is
!”

Clare’s jaw fell open as she stared at the image of a young Stuart Morholt, who struck a pose in a flowy, open-necked pirate shirt and tight leather pants. His black hair was long and wavy, and his eyes were rimmed with kohl.

“That is some
seriously
egregious guyliner.” Clare shook her head in disgust.

Al remained silent, leaning in on Clare’s other side. Her gaze was fixed like a laser beam, not on Maggie’s questionable sartorial choices or Stuart Morholt’s outlandish getup, but on the face of a boy who stood at the end of the line. The boy who’d disappeared. Clare could hardly blame Al for staring—it was a pretty tragic story. She glanced back down at him herself. Mark O’Donnell grinned excitedly at the camera, but his eyes were shadowed by a fringe of—good lord, Maggie hadn’t exaggerated, it
was
poufy— mullet-style hair. It kind of reminded Clare of the coif she’d seen Bono sporting in really old U2 music videos. The boy in the picture also wore skinny hip-hugger tartan pants and—

“Is that a
leather
tie?” Al asked, pointing at the narrow strip of neckwear.

“Wait,” Milo interjected. “Is
that
Dr. Jenkins?”

“Is she wearing a leopard-print corset?” Clare snorted. “Gawd!” Clare hadn’t managed to muster up much in the way of sympathy for the crazy curator. Not seeing as how Dr. Ceciley Jenkins had tried to kill Clare and her friends and Maggie only a few weeks earlier.

“Jeez, Perfesser!” Al’s customary sardonic grin slid back into place and she shook her head. “You guys kinda look like a bunch of avatars from Guitar Hero!”

“I’m not even going to pretend I know what you’re talking about.” Maggie sniffed and retrieved the photograph, sliding it back into the notebook and returning it to her satchel. Clare thought she might have been beaming just a bit from Milo’s “hot” comment. But after a moment she shook her head, the melancholy creeping back into her expression.

“Poor lad … Morholt treated him like a lackey,” she said. “A pet. If he could have had the dear boy carry his books around campus, I think he would have. I wish I could have stopped him. I wish I’d tried. I wish …” She sighed again and took another sip of her cider. “Ah, well …”

The crispness returned to her gaze as she glanced around the table at the trio of young people she was about to leave in the place where, all those years ago, she’d lost Mark O’Donnell to the mists of time.

“Now. Enough. I know I don’t need to tell you this, but you three
will
be careful while you’re here. Do you understand me?” The air almost crackled with the electric force of her stare.

“Maggie?” Clare reached over and laid a hand on her aunt’s arm. “Believe me. If there’s
anyone
who understands that … I think it’s us. We’re probably the only ‘trowel monkeys’ Dr. Ashbourne has ever had working for him who know just how careful you have to be when you start digging up the past. Trust me. Nothing is going to go wrong. Nothing.”

4

T
he landlady at the Avalon Mists Bed and Breakfast insisted on making the girls a cup of tea before they toddled off to bed. “Dream Tea” she called it: a blend of chamomile and mugwort infused with valerian root and patchouli and various other hippie-sounding herbs and spices, guaranteed to help facilitate vivid dream experiences, she assured them. So they could better tap into the mystical “Dream Walks” that proximity to Glastonbury Tor bestowed upon the “seekers and the pilgrims.” Clare thought it was probably a bunch of New Age hooey—and the tea smelled a bit like cat pee and tasted like watery grass clippings—but she didn’t want to offend their purple-haired, crystal-festooned hostess, and so she forced herself to choke back a few tiny sips.

Al, being quicker on the uptake, begged off, claiming herbal allergies.

As it was, Clare went to bed that night dreaming of Milo.
So much for the purported astral potency of Dream Tea,
she thought, smug in her REM sleep state. She dreamt of Milo pretty much nightly these days and didn’t exactly require boggy-tasting tisanes to help in that arena.

Clare sighed and settled into her visions of a Thames-side, lateafternoon stroll, hand in hand with the boy genius at her side … the dream-rich colours of sunshine and blue skies echoing in Milo’s blond hair and sparkling gaze … a gentle breeze wafting the
subtle, fresh scent of the soap he used … Clare losing herself in his eyes as Milo smiled down at her and leaned in for a kiss …

Best. Dream. Ever.

Riiight up until it wasn’t.

With her dream-eyes closed for the purposes of dream-kissing, Clare wasn’t sure exactly when or how the scene had shifted all around her. But suddenly, jarringly, she realized that the dreamday had turned grimly overcast. She was no longer on a path that ran beside London’s famous river, but on a strand of grey beach pounded by the angry waves of a stormy, steel-grey sea. There was a heavy, briny smell in the air—salt and seaweed and wet sand. And Milo, who’d been right there with her, was suddenly nowhere to be found.

Stupid Dream Tea …

With a shock, Clare recognized the pungent dream-odour that assaulted her dream-nostrils. It was the same scent she’d detected in those few moments when she and Stuart Morholt had been locked together in a time-shimmer. In the instant before she’d let go of the Great Snettisham Torc and abandoned Morholt to his fate, trapped back in
AD
61.

Right on cue, Stu appeared over the horizon, a whirlwind tangle of arms and legs racing toward the beach and looking pretty much exactly how Clare had left him. In one hand he clutched the Snettisham Torc. In the other, a bulky bag of assorted artifacts also stolen from Boudicca’s tomb. And he was being chased by a handful of Celtic warriors astride swift, sturdy ponies. They were gaining on him fast.

Clare curbed her own impulse to run as Morholt and the Celts headed straight for her. She knew that, in the way of dream-logic, she probably couldn’t have anyway. The horsemen got within ten yards of where Clare stood before one of them leapt from his mount and tackled Morholt to the ground. The others circled him and then the biggest one dismounted and walked over.

Although the man was cloaked and hooded, Clare couldn’t help feeling there was something familiar about him.

He pointed to the torc in Morholt’s fist. “That isn’t yours.”

“Now wait just a second,” Morholt protested, shrugging off his tackler and clambering to his feet. “There are certain technicalities to be considered here. I stole this, fair and square. From a museum that—in a manner of speaking—had already stolen it from its
rightful
owner. A charmingly demented lady by the name of Boudicca. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?”

“Boudicca is dead,” the big man said simply. Then he threw back his cowl.

Clare heard her dream-self gasp: it was Llassar, the Druid metalsmith. The one responsible for creating the very same cursed torc that had sent Stuart Morholt back in time and that Stu was now waving around like a Frisbee. Llassar took a step closer to Morholt. “She was my queen and that torc once belonged to her. I know because I made it. But now she is dead.”

“Yes, well,” Morholt muttered. “She’d been dead for almost two thousand years when I met her. Didn’t stop her from trying to kill me.”

Llassar’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps I should finish the task.”

“Right. Uh, look … I think perhaps we can come to some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement where not killing me is concerned, don’t you? I have power. Wagonloads of it. I could be of great use to you in your … endeavours.”

Clare noticed Morholt’s hand creeping toward the hip pocket of his
Mission Impossible
–esque jumpsuit.
Oh, this should be good
, she thought, mentally leaning in to get a closer look at the dreamscene unfolding in front of her. She wondered what Stu was up to and kind of wished she had some dream-popcorn to go along with the drama.

“Behold!” Morholt yelped suddenly, drawing forth a disposable Bic lighter and flicking the little wheel. “I command the power of fire!”

Seriously?

Clare felt herself rolling her dream-eyes.

Llassar stepped back a pace—although whether in fear, or awe, or a simple desire not to have his beard ignite was open to interpretation.

“Ha!” Morholt waved the tiny flame in a circle like a warding talisman, keeping the lighter concealed in a tight fist so that it looked as though the fire sprang from the tip of his thumb. “Ha? See that?”

But the others didn’t back off in quite the way Morholt had probably anticipated. Rather, they shifted slightly, ranging themselves around Morholt and Llassar as if they were spectators at a competition and wished to get a better view.

Morholt glanced around nervously.

“Ouch, dammit!” he swore, flinching as the lighter grew too hot. The flame went out and Morholt stuck his burned thumb in his mouth, glaring fiercely at his captors. Clearly, the effect was perhaps not as majestic as he’d hoped.

Then Llassar took a single step forward, held out his hand, focused a laser-like gaze on his open palm, muttered a word … and conjured fire. Out of thin air and
without
having to flick a Bic.

Clare was hardly surprised. She’d seen firsthand what her Druid friends—and Llassar was one—were capable of. Granted, so had Morholt. But apparently he still thought they were a bunch of dimwits he could impress with party tricks.

That’s gonna cost him …

Llassar extinguished the flame by closing his hand into a fist. Then he took another step forward, and with the same fist thumped the master thief/self-proclaimed Lord High Druid/academically disgraced archaeologist-turned-crackpot right on the top of his head. Morholt’s eyes rolled up and he slumped unconscious to the ground, the torc rolling from his hand. Llassar knelt and picked it up. Clare saw him glare fiercely at the thing and then stuff it into Morholt’s bag along with the rest of the booty he’d absconded with.

That surprised Clare. She would have thought he’d treat
that
particular object a little more reverentially. But then she remembered
Llassar’s resistance when Boudicca had demanded he use Clare’s surreptitiously collected blood—along with the Iceni queen’s own—to craft a torc cursed with her mad vengeance.

Llassar stood. Turning to his companions, he gestured down the beach to where a handful of ratty fishing vessels—barely more than animal hides stretched over wicker frames—lay upturned on the sand.

“Bring me a fish sack,” he said to one of the men. “We’ll bag this one and put him in the boat. Mallora will want to see him.”

Mallora? Who the heck is Mallora?

“Why should the High Druidess have any interest in a common thief?” the other man asked, staring down at Morholt in disdain.

High Druidess?
Clare thought.
I
so
don’t like the sound of that …

“Mallora has foreseen this.” Llassar’s tone was grim. “And whatever else this one is,” he said, glaring down at Morholt, “he’s
not
common.”

“No,” Clare agreed, “but he
is
a dumbass …”

Suddenly, in that annoying way dreams had of shifting scenes, Clare found herself sitting beside a stream at night, in a place where she’d been before. With a young man she’d known in the past. Connal—handsome, green-eyed, Druid prince Connal—turned to Clare, his eyes reflecting the flames that had suddenly sprung up somewhere behind her.

“The goddess Andrasta will paint her limbs with woad and wash her hair in blood and hitch twin ponies of smoke and shadow to her war chariot,”
he said, his voice echoing and ethereal.
“The fiery trail from her wheels will scorch the sky and the world will burn.”

And as before, when he’d said the very same thing to her in real life, Clare heard herself reply with the words: “Uh … that’s a euphemism, right?”

But this time Connal didn’t laugh. This time he just stared at her until Clare wrenched her own gaze away and willed herself to sink back into the deep, black, dreamless sleep that was her only escape route out of that place. And time.

ALLIE McALLISTER WENT TO SLEEP
that night to the sounds of Clare’s gentle snoring. In the pale blue glow that filtered in through the curtains of the B&B’s tall window, Allie could just make out Clare’s face turned toward her and mushed into a feather pillow. She wasn’t drooling, but Allie had a sneaking suspicion that she’d fallen asleep thinking about Milo. There was a curve of a smile on her lips.

Allie felt a tiny, stinging twist of envy.

Not that she wasn’t happy for Clare. She was. For Milo, too— she adored her cousin and thought the two of them made a delightfully weird pair. It was just that … she was kind of used to it being just her and Clare. The two of them together, standing united and defiant against a world not prepared to “get” either of them. And, of course, it still was. The two of them.