Every Never After

  Heh …

  Out of the corner of her eye, Clare saw Milo do a double take at her. She ignored him to maintain the effect and jabbed the air with the opener.

  “You know me, don’t you?” Clare said in a low, growly tone.

  “I … um …”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about— OW!”

  Another threatening jab, but this time Clare accidentally caught the fleshy bit of the girl’s shoulder and freaked herself out enough to almost drop the little blade.

  “How?” she asked. “How do you know about me?”

  Goggles twisted away from the opener, a mutinous gleam in her magnified brown eyes. Her lips disappeared in a thin line as she rubbed the spot where Clare had poked her.

  “Oh, come on!” Clare snorted. “That totally didn’t even hurt.” Still, she backed off—not much, but enough to give the girl a bit of room. “That wasn’t a food poisoning episode this afternoon. You recognized me. How? I’ve never been here before.”

  “I swear I don’t— GAH! Stop that!”

  Okay. So much for backing off and non-threatening.

  This time Clare didn’t pull the letter opener away. Its point made a divot in the material of the girl’s sweatshirt.

  “You’re TardyTardis404.” Clare applied a bit more pressure. “And you used the word ‘shimmer’ in your comment on Al-Mac’s video blog. I want to know why you used that specific word and I want to know what you know about what happened to Al.”

  A long pause. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  “I’m listening,” Clare said.

  “Not now.” Goggles’s eyes narrowed behind the lenses and she lifted her chin in a defiant gesture. “Come back tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so. That’s why.”

  “Seriously.” Milo shook his head in weary annoyance. “You know you’re just quoting Raiders of the Lost Ark now, right?”

  The girl looked over at Milo, and Clare thought she saw a spark of interest flare in those comically distorted eyes.

  “Of course I know,” she said with an air of huffy superiority.

  Clare was about to lose it, but Goggles seemed to sense she was on the verge of getting stabbed with the letter opener again. For realsies.

  “Look. You really do have to come back tomorrow,” she said.

  “And you really do have to tell me why,” Clare said.

  Goggles huffed in frustration. “Because the bank is closed and that’s where my safe deposit box is. Trust me,” she added, her big brown blinky eyes gleaming with a strange, fervent light. “I’ll be here tomorrow morning. And I’ll have something that you’re very much going to want to see. I promise you.”

  Something in the way the girl said it made Clare think she’d actually keep her word. It seemed that, whatever was going on, it was just as important to Goggles as it was to Clare and Milo. And Al.

  And so, while it wasn’t much to go on, it seemed clear that Goggles’s promise was all they’d get. Clare didn’t know what else to do, short of actually stabbing her, and she really wasn’t prepared to cross that line. They’d just have to wait until morning. First thing in the morning, she made the other girl promise—and took the Chuck and Di letter opener as insurance (there was a tag on the handle that priced the gaudy thing at £150).

  As the door to the shop closed behind them, Clare heard Goggles say, “See you tomorrow, Clarinet Reid …”

  Milo just sighed, muttered “Movie geek,” and led Clare down the street and back toward the Avalon Mists B&B. All she wanted now was a shower.

  Later, she sat down slowly on Al’s bed. It took every ounce of strength she had to keep from weeping at the thought that she very well might be spending the night alone in the room, staring over at Al’s empty pillow. In all honesty, Clare wondered if she’d ever see her best friend again. And that was messed up.

  Seriously.

  SERIOUSLY?

  Allie never thought she’d ever see Stuart Morholt again.

  The museum thief/kidnapper/all-round overachiever in the ass-hat department had been trapped for good—forever—in the first century. Of course, Allie hadn’t counted on travelling back to that very same century herself.

  Because, really? What were the odds?

  “I beat the odds!” squawked that all-too-familiar voice.

  That set Allie’s teeth on edge like fingernails down a chalkboard—it was almost enough to stop being terrified.

  “I can’t believe it worked!” Morholt crowed to the big bearded man, receiving a stony stare in return. “Em … what I mean is—see that, you great lout?” He pointed an outstretched finger at Allie. “What did I tell you? My powers are mighty! For here is the one—or at least the annoying know-it-all Bentley-wrecker sidekick of the one—that your high priestess, the Druidess Mallora, has foreseen. I have brought this thing to pass. Me.” He waved a hand airily toward the legionnaire standing guard outside the tent flap. “And my magic will save us from the clutches of those wretched imperial drones.”

  “What is that?” Allie asked, incredulous. “Like, a top-ten-rejected Star Wars line? Do you even listen to yourself?”

  When Morholt blinked at her in confusion, Allie realized that the pop-culture reference hadn’t been deliberate. He really was just that obtuse. In that moment she desperately missed her cousin Milo, who would have totally gotten where she was coming from.

  And yet, strangely enough, Allie was almost relieved to find Stuart Morholt there in the prisoners’ tent. At the very least, he was something—someone—familiar. She wasn’t as completely alone as she’d thought. She had company in her misery, no matter how miserable the company might be.

  Morholt turned back to the Celtic prisoners, most of whom were either staring at him uncomprehendingly or ignoring him altogether. “She’ll get us—and by ‘us’ I mean ‘me’—out of here,” he said. “That is, if she knows what’s good for her.”

  Allie just snorted and shook her head. “I can’t. I’m stuck here.”

  “What? What?” Morholt’s eyes narrowed and he glared at her in disbelief. “What do you mean you’re stuck here?”

  “See, that’s the funny thing.” She grinned at him bitterly. “I thought I was speaking English. And even if I wasn’t, apparently that’s not a requirement.” Allie turned her gaze to the bearlike man who’d punched Stuart Morholt in the arm. She wished it had been his head. “I mean, I could understand you perfectly a few seconds ago, and I don’t know … um … that was Iceni, wasn’t it?”

  The man’s eyebrows raised a little, and Allie could see he’d understood her. Just as she had understood the Roman soldiers— and just as Clare’s physical contact with a Druid blacksmith had transferred a comprehension of each other’s language between them. Yay magic.

  “You’re him, aren’t you?” Allie asked. “Llassar? Boudicca’s smith?”

  He nodded once. “I am he,” he said in Iceni. “And you … I think we have a friend in common.”

  Allie smiled wanly. She liked Llassar already and could see why Clare had trusted him. “Yeah,” she said. “Clare described you pretty well.”

  Right down to the burn scars on the man’s huge knuckles and the singed patches in his hair and beard. And the keenly perceptive gaze—which was now fixed unblinkingly on Allie.

  “You and she are bound by blood,” Llassar continued. It sounded more like a statement than a question.

  “Well … yeah.” Allie shrugged, not bothering to ask how he knew that. He was a Druid mystic after all, a sorceror, and it was a theory she and Clare had come to on their own anyway. “But only, like, a drop.”

  She stared down at the little black dot in the centre of her thumb pad that she’d acquired when, as kids, she and Clare had pricked their thumbs with a safety pin and tied them together until they turned blue, thereby signifying that they were blood sisters. Inseparable. (Really, really dumb, sure, and luc
ky that neither of them wound up with an infection, but inseparable.) One teeny, tiny drop—Allie supposed that, where magic was concerned, it was more a quality than a quantity kind of thing—but it was why Allie had been Clare’s homing beacon, calling to her from her own time and place with the voice of a raven whenever Clare needed to find her way back from the past.

  Allie—now stuck in that very same past—could understand Llassar because Clare had been able to understand him. At least that part of the equation worked. So why hadn’t Clare called her back home? Did she even know Allie was missing? Did she care?

  Oh, stop it. You’re being ridiculous. Of course she cares. Although it was possible that Clare hadn’t yet noticed. Or figured out that Allie had travelled into the past. Clare had been a mite preoccupied with Milo, after all …

  “Welcome to Ynys Wyddryn, Lady,” Llassar rumbled at her. “The Isle of Glass. I apologize for not being able to greet you properly, as a host and a free man, but …” He held up his manacled wrists and shrugged his bulky shoulders.

  “Um. Yeah.” Allie frowned down at her own wrists, which were beginning to ache from the tug of heavy iron. “I’m not really sure what I’m doing here. Or how I got here … but thanks.”

  “I do not know, either,” Llassar said. “But I can tell you that this place—the Tor—is the heart of Prydain.”

  Allie understood that Prydain was his word—the ancient Iceni word—for “Britain.”

  He lifted his chin and his eyes shone fiercely. “Nowhere is the magic of my people stronger.”

  “Great,” Allie muttered, thinking that if the magic Llassar was so proud of was really all that and a bag of chips, then what was he doing chained, a prisoner in a Roman camp? “I just hope it’s strong enough to get me the hell home,” she murmured.

  “Us! Get us the hell home, you rotten little auto wrecker!” Morholt interjected. “I didn’t bring you here for a vacation, you know! You owe me.”

  “Owe you?”

  “Do you have any idea how much it’s going to cost to have my Bentley repaired? A new fender—those things are customproduced and worth a pretty penny, I can tell you—and a new paint job? You’ve seen to it my mechanic will retire a rich man!”

  Okay, Allie thought, Stu has clearly lost his marbles. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “You’ve been stuck back here for who knows how long and all you’ve done is obsess about your— admittedly choice—ride?” She had thought the Bentley was pretty stylish …

  “I want my car back!” Morholt screeched. “I want my life back! Oh, what I wouldn’t give to return to the land of gentlemen’s clubs and saunas and proper barbers.” His black eyes glinted maniacally. “Well, actually, what I would give, Ms. McAllister, is you. To whatever misbegotten, bloodthirsty, ancient Celtic deity can transport me out of this wretched era and back into my own. And I’ll cheerfully throw Clarinet Reid into the bargain if I can get my hands on her as well. Which, in fact, was rather the plan in the first place. I’m not sure why she countermanded my instructions and sent you in her stead.” He sniffed in annoyance.

  “What are you talking about, you head case?” Allie’s anxiety had pre-empted her normally cucumber-cool demeanour. “Clare didn’t send me. You didn’t give her instructions. You had nothing to do with me being here at all!”

  “Didn’t I? What about this then?” He brandished the little book he’d been writing in as if it were some sort of talisman. “It’s finally found its way into Miss Reid’s grubby little hands, hasn’t it? Mallora foresaw the whole thing, that clever girl. She promised me that it would pass down through generations of our descendants. Hand to hand, mother to daughter to granddaughter, straight down through the ages … until such time as one of them could ultimately arrange for your ridiculous chum to stumble upon it. And she was right!”

  “What is that, a notebook?” Allie squinted at the thing in the dim light, not really having followed Morholt’s frothy raving. “Big whoop.”

  “It’s the notebook, you little miscreant. The one you and your meddling monkey Bee-Eff-Eff Clare found,” Morholt scoffed, employing air quotes.

  Wow, Allie thought. Having his nefarious plots foiled by a couple of teenagers had really turned the guy bitter toward her demographic. Morholt ignored her head-shaking and kissed the book’s cover.

  “Huzzah for acid-free paper,” he chortled. “Oh, it pays to buy quality merchandise—”

  “We didn’t find that.”

  He glared narrowly at her. “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t care what you—Wait.” Allie frowned. “What did you mean … your descendants?”

  “Yes. Well …” Morholt stroked his goatee in a way probably meant to convey suaveness, but since the thing had grown ratty with prison neglect he only made it stick out in odd places. He didn’t seem to notice. “I do have a way with the ladies, you know,” he smugged. “Particularly a certain High Druidess—a very powerful sorceress—who, it just so happens, could not help succumbing to my raging charms. Also, I may have gotten her a little drunk. Or possibly it was the other way around. Really, the whole episode is a little murky—”

  “Oh gawd!”

  “—but suffice to say, there will be descendants. Oh yes.”

  “I’m so gonna barf,” Allie groaned, thoroughly squicked out.

  She involuntarily recalled his image in the photo Maggie carried and shuddered at the thought of the leather pants and pirate shirt ensemble.

  “Look. I’m telling you … I’ve never seen your stupid journal,” she reiterated.

  Morholt’s eye narrowed further. “But if you didn’t get here by way of this”—he brandished the book—“then how did you get here?”

  “Beats me. All I know is that one minute I’m digging in a field and the next minute I find a skull. Then … zot.” Her hands did a little squiggly dance. “Here I am.”

  Morholt’s lip twitched. “I thought Clare was the, er, zotter.”

  “Yeah? You and me both.”

  “Mallora doesn’t believe in leaving things to chance,” Llassar said suddenly. “This one’s—what does he call it? book?—is one path to achieving a goal. But Mallora made sure there was another. There is always a way.”

  Allie stood up and moved closer to the Druid smith, crouching down in front of him and trying her best to ignore Morholt. “You mean, like a … a contingency plan?”

  Llassar shrugged one muscle-bound shoulder. “I do not know the word,” he said in his quiet rumble of a voice. “But I sense that yes, we speak of the same thing. Mallora was intrigued by the things this one told her when we brought him before her in the sanctuary of Mona. What is left of it, that is … after the Romans burned the oak groves.” He tipped his chin in the direction of Morholt, who, no longer the centre of attention, was quietly simmering. “She listened to the stories he told of his time—a time when the Romans had been driven from this land—and it fired her imagination. She devised a … as you say—a plan. She seeks to bridge the gap between that realm and our own.”

  Allie remembered Clare saying that Connal, her Druid hottie pal, really had no sense of the passage of great lengths of time. That he couldn’t wrap his head around concepts like the distant future. That the Druiddyn lived in the “here and now.” Well, it sounded like that was exactly what this Mallora person had in mind. Turning Glastonbury into one big “here and now” no matter where and when you were. It sounded like a terrible idea. But that wasn’t all.

  “And then,” Llassar continued, “she means to send her scathach—her warrior women—out into that realm to claim it in the name of Andrasta, our goddess.”

  “Oh boy …” Allie muttered. She knew all about Andrasta. Bloodthirsty, war-hungry, vengeful (probably even more so after what had befallen the Iceni people), and terrifyingly powerful: the Raven Goddess.

  “That is why we are in this place. Mallora has seen to it that the Romans are trapped here. They will fight here and die here, at the foot of the Tor, spilling
their blood into the soil of Ynys Wyddryn. Once enough of them are dead, the gateway will open, and the worlds will collide. Yours … and mine.”

  10

  Clare had a death grip on a travel mug full of coffee when she and Milo returned to the antique shop just after eight the next morning. She hadn’t gotten a whole lot of sleep. Trying to avoid the B&B if Al wasn’t going to be there, she’d made Milo go out for dinner with her—which she was too stressed to eat, and then for a long walking tour of every Glastonbury landmark—which she’d been too stressed to pay much attention to, and then finally on a search for a late-night movie theatre—which, of course, didn’t exist in the tiny town. It had all exhausted her enough that she was finally able to go back to her room, turn her face to the wall, and catch a few brief winks.

  But it had put her in a very touchy mood. And if Goggles didn’t have anything to show them that would help bring Al home, Clare was reasonably certain she’d go Defcon One on her baggypants, hyper-bespectacled ass.

  The front door was once again open, and they found Goggles squirrelled away in the back room. She was perched on a stool at a workbench wearing yet another set of protective eyewear—clear safety lenses this time, with round, convex magnifying bubbles in the centre for close-up work—and her attention was focused, laserlike, on the object in front of her.

  Gone was the oversized sweatshirt. Goggles wore a fitted black tank top instead, negating Clare’s earlier suspicion that she’d been hiding some sort of less-than-perfect physique. In fact, Goggles sported a petite but annoyingly sculpted body. She still had on the same baggy cargo pants, but slung low on her hips and with a multitude of belts, they only served to emphasize her lithe figure. She wore stripy fingerless gloves that went up to her elbows and her hair, which was dyed a silvery-white shade of platinum blonde, was pulled up into two winglike ponytails high on either side of her head. What with the eyewear, she looked kind of like an anime character. The kind that nerd boys everywhere developed crushes on. Milo was a nerd boy. Clare felt herself frowning and wondered where the sweatshirt had disappeared to. And why.