Every Never After

  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 cous
in 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.

  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

  Three 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 t
hey 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.”