Once Every Never

  A stack of folded canvas bags landed with a thump at her feet.

  “Now, ladies, gentleman, if you please …” Morholt gestured at the bags. “Start with the gold, move on to the silver, and then, if we have room, choose a couple of the nicer bronze pieces. You can leave what’s left of Boudicca’s sword—in truth, I abhor violence—but don’t forget her anklets and the gold belt. And that rather lovely silver wrist cuff sitting on the bier at her feet.”

  “Oh, man.” Al looked like she was trying to decide between getting sick or just plain fainting. “You want us to rob a corpse?”

  “An historically significant corpse, yes.” Stuart Morholt smiled coldly. “I’d pack that up too, if I thought Boudee’s old bones could stand the journey. Alas, I’ll have to settle for incalculable riches over academic worth.”

  Maggie’s lips disappeared in a thin white line. She took a step forward, but Morholt just glared at her and held out the rosewood box. “Since you’re the expert in handling antiquities, Maggie old girl, fetch me that neck ring.”

  “No. Shoot me if you want, but I won’t desecrate that corpse.”

  “I think you will. Because if you don’t, I’ll shoot your niece.” The gun swung to point at Clare. “And I am deadly serious this time. I’m very much done playing games with young Miss Reid.”

  “You really are a son of a bitch, Stuart,” Maggie said. But she went and gently removed the torc without rattling a single bone. The golden neck ring was covered with a layer of dust, Clare saw, but otherwise looked exactly like the one that had lain in the box that Morholt held out to her aunt. Maggie placed it reverently on the velvet lining and Morholt snapped the lid shut.

  “Put it over there, by the entrance, if you please.” He indicated the tunnel through which they’d passed and then went about emptying a basket full of gold and silver torcs into the bag he held in his hand. Maggie set the box down in the shadowy mouth of the passageway and returned to Clare and the others.

  “Good girl.”

  Maggie looked as if she was about to weep with rage. “Now, Magda, no sentiment or misplaced notions of archaeological significance, I beg you.” Morholt waved at the bier. “The old bird would never have been discovered in the first place without the profound historical meddlings of your delightful young charge. And I’m quite sure Boudicca herself, were she here, would be the first to tell you that that”—he pointed to the remains on the bier—“isn’t her and has very little to do with her. Those are scraps. Mortal remains. Her spirit, I’m sure she’d say, lives on.”

  “Are you?” said a voice of smoke and ashes from the darkness of the tunnel mouth. “Are you really sure? Why don’t you ask her yourself and find out.”

  24

  Dr. Jenkins stepped out of the shadows and into the circle of light. There was something … very different about her, and Morholt was the only one who didn’t seem to notice it right away.

  “Damn it, Ceciley,” he said, barely glancing at her as he emptied another basket of ill-gotten booty into a bag and pulled the drawstring, stuffing it into his knapsack. “You were supposed to wait with the car and fend off any nosy locals. Can’t you ever take direction?”

  Ah, Clare thought. So that’s how Stu was able to steal the torc so easily in the first place. Inside job. That’s probably who he’d been yakking on his cell phone to back at the warehouse.

  She looked back at the curator. Dr. Jenkins’s glasses were gone and her lab coat hung from her shoulders in an almost cloaklike manner. Her hair, loosened from its severe updo, hung in waves past her shoulders, and in the light from the glowstick it looked redder somehow. She was barefoot. But the most notable thing about her appearance was that Boudicca’s torc lay gleaming about her neck. The rosewood box lay open and empty at her feet.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” Maggie muttered. “Ceciley, you stupid, stupid wretch …”

  Smiling unpleasantly, Dr. Jenkins stood in a relaxed yet threatening stance in the mouth of the passageway. “Hello, Magda,” she said in a low growl. “You’re looking … unwell. A bit pale. Perhaps it’s the loss of all that smug superiority.”

  Suddenly the curator’s face twisted even more grotesquely and she clutched at the torc around her throat as if it strangled her. She seemed to be going through what Milo had experienced when he’d slipped Connal’s bracelet on. She panted like a wounded animal, gritting her teeth against the urge to scream, her eyes rolling white in her head.

  After a moment her head fell forward and she looked as if she might sink to her knees. She thrust out a hand to steady herself against the wall.

  “Ceciley?” Maggie took a tentative step forward.

  Morholt finally interrupted his pillaging to look over at his accomplice. “What the hell—”

  Dr. Jenkins’s head snapped up, her gaze zeroing in on Stuart Morholt. “Thief …” she whispered, the word slithering from her lips.

  The air in the chamber seemed to be growing hotter and stuffier by the second and Clare wondered for a panicked moment if they were using up all the oxygen. The shadows leaping up the wall behind Dr. Jenkins looked as though they were too thick. Shadows weren’t supposed to be thick, Clare thought. They seemed to have weight. Dimension. Anger …

  Suddenly the pitch torches on the chamber’s walls—cold and dead for almost two thousand years—flared to brilliant, roaring life. Al yelped like a puppy and Clare dropped her candle, snuffing out its meagre flame. Morholt’s glowstick exploded in a shower of green spatters that sputtered and extinguished—but it no longer mattered. The angry, writhing swaths of crimson and orange light racing across the domed roof of Boudicca’s tomb cast more than enough illumination.

  Morholt swung the barrel of his gun in the direction of the curator. Dr. Jenkins flung her arms wide and the weapon flew from his hand to shatter against the rough-hewn stone wall.

  “Damnation!” Morholt protested. “That was an authentic film prop! I stole that!”

  Anger momentarily trumped fear and Clare pegged him with a disgusted stare. “You mean that it wasn’t even a real gun? Oh, I hate you so much.”

  “I told you,” Morholt muttered. “I abhor violence.”

  “Well that’s too bad,” Clare snarled. “Because I’m gonna kill you with my bare hands.”

  Morholt’s eyes hadn’t left Dr. Jenkins’s face. He nodded at the curator. “You may have to take a number.”

  “I’ve already got mine,” Maggie said, glaring at him sideways.

  “Shut up, Magda!” Dr. Jenkins spat furiously. “You had your chance with him. You were just too blind and frightened to take up the mantle of the Druid Queen. You could have had everything—with Stuart at your side.”

  Morholt made a scoffing sound. “She would have been at my side, if anything …”

  “Oh, Ceciley.” Maggie shook her head sadly. “Is that really it? All this time you’ve been jealous of my relationship with this … this charlatan?”

  “I’m hardly that!” Morholt said hotly. “You were there the night I opened that portal. You cannot possibly deny my power in the face of that. My abilities …”

  Dr. Jenkins’s laugh was tinged with an edge of hysteria. “Your abilities. You had nothing to do with it. You don’t even know how you managed it. But you are right about one thing. Dear precious Maggie here turned her back on the greatness of that achievement. And because of that, the sacrifice was in vain.”

  “Sacrifice!” Maggie was aghast. “You intended what happened to that poor boy?”

  “What?” Morholt looked confused.

  “Yes,” Dr. Jenkins said flatly.

  “No!” Morholt’s complexion went ashen. “That was not part of the plan. It just happened. Magda—you know me better than that—”

  “Which is why I never let you in on that part of the ritual, Stuart,” the curator said. “You’re weak. Sneaking. Power-hungry … easy enough to manipulate. I may not have known exactly what would happen that night, but I knew something would. But we were never able to r
eplicate the feat afterward—not without your participation, Doctor Wallace.” The way she said Maggie’s title made it sound like an insult. “But how ironic that this girl—this blood relation of yours—would be the one to cross over truly. The one to become our conduit and our guide. My path to Boudicca’s vengeance …”

  The curator’s head fell forward again, hair curtaining her features. Maggie took another uncertain step toward her colleague. Toward the woman who was once her colleague. The shadows roiled and coalesced, gathering around her. After long moments Ceciley Jenkins raised her head again, her dark eyes gleaming.

  “For Andrasta …” she hissed. Her voice held no trace of the curator’s now—it was all Boudicca’s.

  She’s transforming on a much deeper level than Milo did, Clare thought. She exchanged a worried glance with Al.

  “Was I a pawn, too, my queen?” Milo took a step forward. The curator’s eyes flicked over to where Milo had spoken in Connal’s voice. In the language of the ancient Iceni.

  “A game piece in your schemes?” he continued.

  “Connal. My. What a surprise.” Boudicca’s gaze went flat and serpentine. Full of an old rage as harsh and indelible as a dried blood stain. “Yes, you were.” She too spoke in the Iceni tongue. “An ineffectual one. You were supposed to die that night and lead my spirit warriors to victory. Not live to watch our home and people go down under the sandal of the Roman. And there will be a reckoning for that. The spirit warriors will see to it.”

  Clare was assaulted once again with the image of Connal’s remains in a glass case. “For the record? Their deaths didn’t do you one damn bit of good,” she said. “Neither did Connal’s. It didn’t make a difference—and so it didn’t have to happen. And for another record? I was the one who helped him escape that ‘fate.’ Me and Comorra. Would you punish her, too?”

  “She is my daughter,” Boudicca said simply.

  “She is indeed,” Connal said. “And she followed close behind in your footsteps, my queen. She lies in the next chamber.”

  The shadow of a frown crept over Boudicca’s face.

  “She drank from your cup.”

  “No.”

  Boudicca spun on her heel and stalked toward the ante-chamber where Clare had seen Comorra’s body and where dead torches now flared to life. A moment of weighted silence filled the dark air. Then a keening wail, almost inhuman, drifted back toward the main chamber. It raised the small hairs on Clare’s arms.

  “Well that’s a bit distracting,” Morholt said, stepping toward the archway. “Right. I’ll just go take care of this unforeseen complication …”

  Maggie put out a hand to stop him. “I really don’t think—” “Magda.” Morholt rolled an eye at her. “The poor woman is distraught. She needs comforting and, insofar as she is desperately in love with me, I dare say I’m the best party to offer it.”

  Maggie gaped at the utter brainless arrogance of the man. “To Ceciley, perhaps—although I have my doubts about that—but not to Boudicca.”

  “It’s Ceciley’s unrequited passion that’s made her vulnerable to Boudicca in the first place,” he said as if explaining the matter to a child. “If I can reach her, convince her she has a shot with me, I’m sure I could distract her long enough to get out of this mess before all the breathable oxygen runs out. Trust me. Love is all-powerful.” He hitched up his utility belt and stalked down the corridor.

  “And stupidity,” Maggie shook her head, “knows no bounds.”

  “This is a staggeringly bad idea,” Al murmured.

  “Agreed,” Clare said. “Let’s go watch Stu get his pompous ass kicked.”

  “CECILEY—” Morholt put out a placating hand.

  “Don’t you touch me!” Dr. Jenkins turned on Morholt viciously, her face clouded with an anger that was more than just her own.

  “Darling, it’s me—”

  “You stole my heart,” she snarled. “Wretched thief …”

  “Ceciley, darling …” Morholt tried again. “I really think you’re just experiencing a touch of borrowed aggression. If you would just allow me to—”

  “Worst smooth-talker ever,” Al murmured to Clare.

  “You stole my gold.” The curator’s fingertips brushed the sinewy contours of the torc around her neck.

  “Er … Boudicca?” Morholt peered at her closely.

  “My husband. My daughters.”

  “Is Ceciley there?”

  “You … stole … my … land!” Boudicca’s raven’s-cry voice howled out of her wide-open mouth, louder than a full, crashing orchestra. The room grew even brighter and hotter, the air shimmered, and then she seemed to draw all the light and energy and heat back into herself. Beads of perspiration shone on her forehead, her face looked gaunt and strained, her limbs shook. But in the light of the now-flickering torches her eyes still glinted almost red. Shadows licked at the dense air—Clare swore that she could almost feel them tangling in her hair like bats—swooping and diving, howling like wind through a tunnel.

  The curator/queen stepped toward Morholt, hands splayed wide like the talons of some great bird of prey.

  She did not see Stuart Morholt.

  “Thieving Roman,” she screeched. “I will make you pay!” She saw Seutonius Paulinus.

  “Good God, woman!” Morholt began to retreat down the passageway, and as she advanced toward him he turned and made a run for it. He barrelled past Clare and the others as Ceciley/Boudicca followed swiftly in his wake, looking for all the world like an avenging Fury.

  They heard Morholt’s screams. There was a flash of fire that sent them all scrambling away from the tunnel mouth … and then there was darkness. Clare started to panic until she remembered the safety matches in her pocket. With shaking fingers, she struck one off the cavern wall. The sting of sulphur made her eyes water, but the bright little flame was enormously comforting in the absolute blackness.

  At her side, Clare heard Al take a shaky breath. On her other side, she felt Milo—or maybe Connal, it was getting a little hard to tell—help her to her feet.

  “Come,” he said. “Come on. Take my hand.”

  He led her over toward the wall where he lifted one of the ancient torches out of a sconce. It was cold to the touch and Clare wondered at the fire that Boudicca had coaxed out of it. Before the match burned down completely she touched the flame to the brittle, pitch-crusted rag and it caught, giving off an oily light from pale sullen flames wreathed in choking smoke.

  “Wait here.”

  Milo reappeared a moment later with another torch that he’d lit from the first. Now there was enough light to see their way back into the main chamber.

  Maggie and Al fell in close behind her as Clare started carefully toward the tunnel. But when she glanced back, the sight of Milo’s face as he stood looking down at Comorra’s bier shocked and terrified her.

  It’s only the shadows, Clare told herself. The shadows and your imagination.

  Maybe. But for a brief instant there, in the glow from the sputtering, smouldering torch, Milo hadn’t looked anything like Milo at all. He had looked exactly like Connal … and there had been a look of something like madness in his eyes.

  BOUDICCA’S CHAMBER, when they got there, was empty. Both Morholt and Dr. Jenkins were gone. So was the knapsack full of looted artifacts. And most of the plastique.

  “Mags?” Clare’s voice was soft in the gloomy air. “This is bad, right?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not good.” Maggie’s voice was tight. “Even if there was a sufficient amount of C-4 left behind, we haven’t a detonator.”

  “Can we dig our way out?” Al asked. Her teeth were chattering, but Clare didn’t know if it was from fear or cold. It was starting to get awfully clammy.

  “The barrow walls are probably ten feet thick at their thinnest point,” Milo said in his own voice.

  It was weird, because he was Milo again, but he was obviously drawing on Connal’s knowledge. Clare moved closer to him, trying to get a g
ood look at his face through the pall of smoke and darkness. His eyes were a little glassy and perspiration shone on his forehead and upper lip.

  “Milo? You okay?”

  He nodded tersely.

  “How about Connal?”

  “He’s … fine. A little pushy.” Milo grinned a bit crookedly at her.

  “Does he know where Boudicca has gone?”

  “I … I don’t know. I think—he thinks—she’ll try to raise her spirit warriors again.”

  “Then she’ll have gone to find their bodies in the museum,” Maggie said.

  Milo nodded. “She’ll probably try another sacrifice to provide them with a leader.”

  “You mean Stuart.”

  “He’s the closest thing she has to a Druid now,” Milo said.

  Al’s breath was starting to sound raspy and Clare was feeling lightheaded. “We have to get out of here,” she said. “I mean—obviously—but does anyone have any bright ideas?”

  “Tell him …” Connal’s cadences took over Milo’s vocal cords again. “Clarinet. Tell him I need control. Tell … Milo … I need him to let me be fully free in order to work the magic.”

  “I …” Clare hesitated.

  A hand in the darkness gripped her arm above the elbow and Milo’s face appeared close to hers. The shadows under his eyes and in the hollows of his cheekbones stood out in stark contrast to his pale skin. “You must. I can get us out of here. Tell him to set me free or we will all stay here trapped forever under this hill to keep my princess company.”

  “Clare.” Al tugged her by the sleeve of her other arm, pulling her over by Boudicca’s bier and out of Connal’s earshot. “Do you think that’s such a good idea? He’s not exactly the poster boy for mental health stability at the moment. He’s almost as off-the-rails as Queen Bee.”

  “Yeah. He is,” Clare readily agreed. “Got a better idea?”

  Al sighed so deeply it sounded as though she were deflating. “For the second time today—and I think this is a first for me—I’m ashamed to say I really don’t.”