Every Never After

  Then eighties Mark O’Donnell, resplendent in hair pouf and tartan, brought up the rear, along with a handful of others from the photo whom Clare had no names for. Almost no names for.

  “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” she muttered.

  She nudged Piper and pointed to one of the Free Peoples. At least he seemed to be from that group. He was hanging back from the rest, lurking in the shadows of the stone tower ruins—a tall man with a big beard and long hair, his face hidden beneath a wide-brimmed leather hat …

  “Ashbourne,” Piper whispered.

  “In yet another whimsical facial-hair disguise.”

  “What did I tell you about that?” Piper said smugly.

  “Hey. You trusted him more than I did—”

  “Oh my god!” Piper pointed at one of the other rifts. “That looks like my gran!”

  Clare peered at the shadowy figure whom Piper had described as “kookookajoob” crazy. She saw a slender, angular woman in a flowing paisley skirt and peasant blouse. Her long dark hair shot through with grey was hanging in a braid down her back, but she had the same heart-shaped face and dark eyes as the gogglewearing girl standing beside Clare.

  As Clare and Piper watched, mouths agape, they saw another figure appear in Crazy Granny’s rift—a vague outline of a tall man that flickered and shimmied like a television set not properly tuned to the right channel. But before the girls could figure out what to make of it, the ground beneath them shuddered again. And this time it felt as if the hill was trying to buck them off.

  Clare glanced back at where Milo stood and saw that his spine was arched with tension, his torso curving like a longbow. He seemed to be caught in some kind of energy wave, his entire body wrapped in a gauzy cocoon of flickering lights. He was so beautiful Clare wanted to weep. Or maybe jump him. But his jaw was clenched and the muscles of his neck were rigid with effort. The rifts began to move across the summit’s plateau toward the single point where Milo stood. In another moment they would all come together.

  “What are we going to do?” Piper asked tremulously. Faced with an actual spatio-temporal event of some fairly spectacular magnitude, she seemed to have lost some of her know-it-all-ness.

  “Nothing else to do.” Clare took a step forward. “Time to go—”

  Piper grabbed her by the arm. “Wait! If we go … how are we going to get back?”

  Her voice sounded small and thin in the gathering chaos. All its musicality was gone, along with her prickly self-assurance. Piper Gimble was clearly terrified, from her goggles right down to her boots, and Clare felt a surge of sudden sympathy for her. Maybe she should suggest that Piper stay behind.

  And then it hit her.

  She couldn’t just suggest it. She had to insist on it.

  Piper had asked the single most obvious question. Clare knew that once they’d gone through the portal, the portal could close. And there was no guarantee that Milo, despite whatever Druid was left in him, could open it again.

  Shimmering was one thing. Apparently. Portals? Something else entirely.

  When Clare had time-travelled before, she’d done it alone. Her trips had been triggered by contact with an artifact that had been enchanted, spell-cast, whatever you wanted to call it, with Clare’s blood. The artifacts themselves had stayed behind in the present, with Al, Clare’s blood sister, who’d been there to call her home.

  Wait …

  The other shoe dropped in Clare’s mind. Blood left stains. Rustbrown, faded by time, almost undetectable … She started to dig frantically through her bag. Finally her fingertips brushed cool metal and she pulled out the diary tin and the memorial letter opener she’d nicked from Piper’s shop. Piper glowered at her briefly. She glowered even more when Clare popped open the tin, tucked the notebook under one arm, and said, “Hold out your hand.”

  Before Piper could react, Clare was jabbing the needle-sharp point of the little silver dagger into the fleshy part of her thumb.

  “Sonova—!” Piper yelped as a single, deep red bead of blood welled. Through her ruby goggles her eyes practically shot lasers out at Clare. Then her mouth disappeared in a thin line. “Ow.”

  “Don’t be a baby,” Clare muttered, grabbing the diary from under her arm and flipping to the page at the back with the number code on it. She peered closely at the doodle on the bottom half of the page—the slightly elongated swirl she’d dismissed as her clumsy rendition of the spiral path circling the Tor. “Sure,” she said, half to herself. “It could be that … or it could be a badly drawn interpretation of a thumbprint.”

  And the barely discernible rusty stain at the centre of the whorl just might have been an old, faded bloodstain. Never mind “might have been.” It had to be. The minute she formed the thought, Clare sensed the rightness of it. She’d probably run out of time trying to communicate with herself—the code took a bit of figuring out—so she’d drawn the remainder in a pictogram. Of course she had. Just to overcomplicate things as much as possible and leave the widest possible margin for error. What a clever girl.

  Gawd, I’m such an idiot sometimes.

  And yet it made a kind of twisty Clare-sense. To wit: Clare and Al had once, long ago, shared blood pricked from their thumbs with a safety pin. Al had been Clare’s anchor during her shimmers. The diary had been enspelled by Llassar—Clare was sure of it. So sure of it, she was going to make him do exactly that when she wound up back in the past. He could—he would—use Clare’s blood to magic the thing up, just like the shimmer triggers that had sent Clare back in time before.

  With one crucial difference. This time, it wasn’t meant to send Clare back. It was meant to bring her forward. She held out the page and told Piper to press her bleeding thumb to the very same spot on the doodle as she herself must have done—or, at least, would soon—and she could almost feel an electric tingling along her outstretched arms as Piper did as she was asked. It might have been Clare’s imagination, but then again … it might not. She closed the book gently and handed it to the other girl, who stood sucking her thumb and staring at Clare in wide-eyed confusion.

  “Remember you said you thought you were meant to discover this book?”

  Piper nodded.

  “You were. This book … it’s a link. It’s the thread that ties you and me together.”

  “You and … me? What on earth—”

  “Listen. My blood was already on that page. I put it there two thousand years ago. I mean, will put it there. Now yours is there, too. Here and now. So I’m going there and you’re staying here. And it’s going to be up to you to bring me back from there—from then—when I need you to.”

  “How do I do that?” Piper’s voice was actually warbling with panic now. “How will I know?”

  “I … I can’t tell you that.” Clare shrugged helplessly. “I’m not really even sure how it works myself. If Al was here she could maybe explain it to you, but insofar as her lack of hereness is the actual crux of our difficulties, well … all I can say is this: Al told me she just always kind of knew when the moment was right. Sensed it. Instinct, I guess. And when it was, she just sort of … willed me back.”

  “Sure. That’s great.” Piper crossed her arms, a mutinous look on her face. Her pale ponytails lifted on the breeze like wide white wings and she glared fiercely at Clare through her ruby-lensed goggles. “You and your buddy Al have a bond of friendship stretching back years and years. You just met me. And I’m reasonably sure you can’t bloody stand me.”

  “Oh, come on.” Clare punched her encouragingly on the shoulder. Admittedly, there was a bit of mustard behind the blow. “You’re the bloody descendant of a bloody arch-druidess and my bloody arch-nemesis. That’s a lot of arch. And blood. Plus, you know what they say—there’s a fine line between love and hate. If that’s true? Then you and me are practically besties.”

  “I …”

  “You can do this, Goggles. I’m counting on you. We all are. Hell … in a way, you’re kind of counting on yourself.” r />
  Beneath them the Tor heaved again, this time feeling like it was about to crack asunder. Milo cried out in what sounded like excruciating pain, and Clare’s head whipped back around to see him spread-eagled on the wind, limbs outstretched as though invisible giants were playing tug-o-war with him. She glanced wildly back at Piper, ready to plead with her. But then Piper nodded once. Decisively. With a flash of sudden steel in her gaze.

  Good enough.

  It would have to be. Without another word, Clare turned and launched herself in a sprint across the Tor’s summit just as all the rifts were converging on Milo’s position. She had to gauge it exactly right—and so, when she slammed into Milo in the centre of his back, between his shoulder blades, she made sure to shove him in the direction of the rift where Al was still hanging off the neck of the soldier guy. Milo stumbled forward with a grunt of pain, taken by surprise and knocked off balance. Clare wrapped her arms around his waist, and—just as she felt them falling through space and time—saw the bearded-’n’-hatted figure of Nicholas Ashbourne grab the poufed-’n’-tartanned figure of Mark O’Donnell by the shoulders and heave him toward the converging rifts.

  So that’s what had happened all those years ago.

  Somehow Ashbourne/Postumus had known he’d have to send Mark O’Donnell from the eighties back into the first century in order for events to come to pass as they had. And Clare now knew, instinctively, just how that “somehow” had occurred. She made a mental note to add it to her list of things to tell Al to tell the Roman commander to remember to do when the moment came upon him … in 1986. Even though Clare still wasn’t sure how he ended up in that time period.

  Damn.

  Clare felt a sharp stab of guilt at the look of surprise and fear that flashed across the young man’s face just before the darkness of the storm-ridden, gale-lashed time fracture swallowed him whole. Maggie’s fellow student—a poor, unsuspecting kid—disappeared into the past without a trace, his parents and friends left to mourn his absence in the present, and it was all her fault. Or all Boudicca’s fault, or all Morholt’s fault … or Mallora’s, or Postumus’s … it didn’t matter. It was done. And she had to make sure that it got done. Her gaze lingered on the space in the fragment of the time where he’d been standing only a moment before. Postumus/Ashbourne turned and locked eyes on her for an instant, and then there was nothing more for Clare to see. The fractured sky-rifts winked out, and with her arms wrapped tight around Milo, Clare squeezed her eyes shut as everything flashed fireworks-bright, blinding her utterly.

  Next thing she knew, she and Milo were windmilling across the grassy surface of the Tor’s plateau. Limbs tangled, rolling and bouncing, they came to a stop only after they’d taken the legs right out from under Allie … and the dude in the leather skirt she was sucking face with.

  Clare lay on her back, gasping painfully for air and making baby seal noises as she gazed up at a sky now uniformly earlyevening blue. Half on top of her, Al struggled to push herself up onto her hands and knees.

  “Clare?” Allie peered down at her through the tangle of her dark hair. “Oh. My. God!”

  “Hey, pal,” Clare wheezed. She waggled the fingers of one hand, barely able to contain the smile that split her face at the sight of her best friend. Up close and in person after way, way too long. In fact, she thought, she might just burst into actual tears of joy as Al sat back on her haunches, grinning sardonically.

  Especially when Al laughed and said, “Damn. You have crappy timing.”

  21

  “I thought we agreed,” Clare panted. “No punning.”

  “What?” Allie blinked at her. “‘Crappy timing’? That wasn’t even wordplay.”

  “I just thought ‘time-ing’ …”

  “It was really more just a statement of fact,” Allie snorted, rolling an eye at her epically tardy best friend while trying to untangle herself from the folds of her borrowed silk palla. Then she threw herself at Clare and hugged her so hard she thought both their heads might pop off. When she stepped back, both girls were grinning from ear to ear. Clare glanced over to where Marcus and Milo were climbing to their feet, and Allie shook her head at the look on her face.

  “Seriously,” Allie murmured in a voice low enough that the boys wouldn’t hear. “Did I interrupt you when you were getting all historically romantic back during the Shenanigan days? Did I?”

  “Yes,” Clare answered dryly, equally sotto voce. “Yes, you did.”

  “Oh. Right.” Allie remembered now: she’d once called Clare back from a shimmer trip only to have her rematerialize with smears of blue paint on her cheek because Connal, the woad-painted Druid Prince of Hotness, had decided it might be fun to kiss a magical girl from the future. “Well …. I guess we’re even now.”

  “Even?” Clare spluttered in a half-whisper. “Even? I’ve spent the last couple of days worried crazy-sick about you and here you are, flouncing around in red-carpet couture—good look, by the way—and getting all cozy with a random Roman! I had flaming arrows! How is that even?”

  “I’ll see your flaming arrows and raise you a fiery spear,” Allie said. “And he’s not really random. He’s … um. You’re not going to believe this, but he’s Maggie’s lost boy. From that night. His name is Marcus. Mark.”

  “Uh?” That knocked Clare right out of murmur mode. She’d known she was bound to encounter Mark O’Donnell in the past because of what Nicholas Ashbourne had told her. She just hadn’t expected him to look like … “This guy? This guy is Mr. Poufy?”

  “Clare!” Allie tried ineffectively to shush her.

  “This is that guy? The skinny guy in the plaid pants?”

  Marcus ambled over to where the girls stood, smoothing down the leather straps of his legionnaire’s armoured skirt. “I had a late growth spurt,” he said. “Cut my hair. Ditched the pants and started wearing these gnarly leather skirts. You know, the usual. Plus four years of strength training digging fortification ditches and marching with a fifty-pound rucksack on my back. Totally beats the hell out of Jazzercise.”

  Clare blinked and Allie laughed at her expression.

  “He has a few weirdo eighties pop-culture references you kinda have to overlook,” she explained. “Also a few first-century ones. You get used to it.”

  “Ohmigod,” Clare snorted. “Did you tell him about your mom’s karaoke nights?”

  Allie felt herself on the verge of blushing again as she thought about dancing to Marcus’s mix tape … “It’s been discussed. Yeah.”

  Marcus put out a hand. “Hi. You must be Clare.”

  “She really must,” Allie agreed as Clare tentatively shook the handsome young legionnaire’s hand. “She just can’t help herself.”

  Milo stepped forward. “Nope. She can’t. Not even a little bit.” He raised a hand in a kind of modified Legion salute that looked only a little bit like a Vulcan greeting. “Hi. I’m Milo. That’s my cousin you were making out with.”

  “Marcus Donatus.” Marcus nodded. “Here, that is. Mark O’Donnell where you lot come from. And my intentions were strictly honourable.”

  “Nice to meet you. You’re a terrible liar.”

  “Nice to meet you, too. Your cousin’s a total babe.”

  Milo eyed Marcus’s Roman tunic and leathers. “Wicked party dress.”

  Marcus took in Milo’s spiral Druid markings. “Bitchin’ body paint.”

  The two of them nodded, shook hands, and—just like that— seemed to have totally understood each other and already formed the basis for a deep and lifelong brotherhood. Clare and Allie shook their heads at the mysteries of the male of the species.

  When that was all taken care of, Allie was surprised to see Clare suddenly round on Milo and smack him right in the middle of a squiggly blue swirl painted on his bare chest. Then Clare glared up at him wordlessly, seemingly on the verge of bursting into tears. Milo just bowed his head a little, opened his arms, and Clare walked into his embrace.

  “Dumbass,” she mut
tered, in the tenderest of tones.

  Marcus glanced at Allie, who shrugged in response. After a moment she cleared her throat. “So … uh … now that you guys’re here, how do we get the hell home? ’Cause I assume that’s the plan, right?”

  “That’s the thing.” Clare frowned, stepping reluctantly out of the embrace. “It is the plan. We’re just not exactly sure how to implement it. Yet. I mean … I’m sure we will be soon. But there’s a couple of things we have to do first. So. Where’s Morholt?”

  Allie blinked, but didn’t even bother to ask Clare how she knew Morholt was in the vicinity. She just sort of rolled with that stuff now. “He’s down in a holding tent with a bunch of other Celts who are due to be shipped back to Rome to become slaves. Llassar’s one of them.”

  Clare nodded. “I know. Did he have a book with him? Morholt, I mean—a diary kind of thing?”

  “Yup. Scribbling in it like a maniac. Well, y’know …” Allie shrugged. “Like the maniac he is.”

  “Good. I need to get my hands on it.” Clare’s eyes tracked back and forth and Allie could see she was thinking fast and furiously. Even Milo deferred to her in that moment. “So that means you,” Clare turned to Marcus, “are going to have to find a way to sneak us into that prisoners’ tent.”

  He grimaced. “Easier said than done—”

  “Sure, fine, whatever,” Clare said with a wave of her hand. “Don’t worry. You’ll make it happen.”

  “You have a great deal of confidence in me, considering we just met.”

  “Al is a keen judge of character and she deems you kissable. Therefore, you’re now part of the club. Your super-secret decoder ring is in the mail and Al can give you directions to the tree house. Excelsior!” Clare grinned. “Also? I happen to know that you’ve already somehow managed to sneak me into the tent. It’s a done deal.”

  Marcus blinked. “It is?”

  Allie patted his arm. “It’s a time-monkey thingy.”

  “Has slang changed an awful lot then, in my absence?” he murmured, bemused.