Now and for Never

  18

  Ever since the picture of Allie and the creatures descrambled, Milo had been sick with worry. There were still two files that Dan’s program had yet to wrestle into submission— Milo didn’t know if it ever would—and the uncertainty was tying him in knots. Piper had tried in vain to either rationalize the images or take his mind off them as together they had boarded the little prop plane that would take them from Halifax to Entry Island, along with a couple of rock-climbing enthusiasts out for a day of cliff rappelling, a crab fisherman, a lobster fisherman, and a plain old fish fisherman.

  Even the spectacular scenery as they approached the tiny jewel of an island failed to ease Milo’s tension. And it was spectacular. Unspoiled and so beautiful, Île-d’Entrée seemed practically enchanted. Locked away from the rest of the world, a hallowed, special place.

  Once they’d set themselves up in the rustic little house they rented to use as a base of operations, Piper declared loudly that she was bloody well going to make Milo a bloody cup of tea if he so much as opened the bloody screen on that bloody machine in the next fifteen bloody minutes.

  The threat of yet more tea was almost enough to distract him.

  But then came the ping and Milo dove across the room, flipping open his laptop before Piper could squawk out a protest. The third-last image on the camera roll had finally shifted its pixels into a coherent whole. Milo’s gaze fastened unblinkingly upon it … and the wood-panelled walls of the cottage began to spin.

  An overwhelming sensation that he was staring into a mirror hit him like a brick.

  Only he wasn’t.

  The face in the picture wasn’t his. Wasn’t even vaguely similar.

  The eyes were green, the hair long and tied back, a rich shade of auburn. Tanned skin, high forehead, and sharp cheekbones above a wide mouth that looked just as likely to snarl a warning as smile a welcome. No glasses, no blue eyes, no blond hair, a completely different jawline. And yet …

  It’s me.

  And yet …

  A moment of disorientation was followed by a stabbing pain at what felt like the very centre of his brain. Milo opened his mouth in a silent scream and clutched at his temples. Then he heard it. The voice.

  Holy shit, he thought distantly through the pain, not this dude again!

  It’s him. Connal.

  And as the name formed in his mind, a gaping hole opened up there, too.

  The young man on the screen stood shirtless and with his arms held out to his sides, his skin painted with the swirling patterns of Celtic magical symbols.

  “Oh god …” Milo groaned. “Not again.”

  Still, he realized he wasn’t entirely surprised. Connal was a part of him now. Just as he was, it seemed, a part of the Druid prince. Milo had all the memories of what had happened in the life that Connal—the Connal in those pictures—had never lived. He wondered how he’d keep those memories from flooding back into the mind of the Druid prince. Memories of Comorra dead. The world Connal had known, gone. Nothing left but smoke and ashes. Memories of the madness that had followed …

  With an effort of sheer, desperate will, Milo wrenched his focus away from the face of the young man. And on to the face of the girl standing beside him. Holding a sign. Her hair was a wild tangle, her face pale, made paler by the camera flash. And her eyes were sparkling with excitement and apologetic at the same time. Milo read the message Clare had scrawled and lurched up off the couch to stagger over to the mirror hanging over a little table in the cottage’s front hall.

  “Milo!” Piper cried out suddenly from the kitchenette, and Milo heard the shattering of a cup on the floor. “Bloody hell!”

  In a flash she was across the room with her arms wrapped around him, trying to help him stay on his feet and frantically asking what was wrong. He ignored her as he felt his jaw wrenching open in a silent cry of denial. Then he fell forward, toward the hall mirror, bracing himself with rigid arms against the wall and staring at his reflection. It dimmed and flickered … and then vanished. The mirror went dark, like the inside of a cave.

  And then a living, breathing image of Connal the Druid prince wavered into view.

  Clare was there, crouched over Connal’s shoulder and staring wide-eyed. Milo could see the glint of torchlight shining off the silver pendant he’d given her.

  “Holy smoke! Milo …?” she exclaimed.

  Milo could hear her voice clearly, but it was as if he was listening with someone else’s ears. Which, he supposed, he kind of was.

  “Hey … Clare de Lune …,” he ground out between his teeth, having clenched his jaw tightly shut to keep it from unhinging with the silent scream that had overtaken him moments before. “How’s life on the island?”

  “Weird! Cool!” Clare blurted breathlessly. “Why is Goggles hugging you?”

  “I’m not!” Piper snatched her hands away and Milo almost dropped to the floor.

  “Gah! Grab him!” Clare exclaimed.

  “But … I … bloody hell!” Piper sputtered and wrapped an arm around him again.

  Clare leaned forward. “Milo—you’ll never guess who we ran into! Except, uh, maybe you will, because you’re wearing his face right now. Or he’s wearing yours … oh … this is so strange.”

  “You’re telling me,” Milo grunted, trying not to hyperventilate.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I have no idea.” He shook his head and, in the reflection, Connal’s head shook with it. “I mean … we’re mystically teleconferencing over a distance of almost two thousand years and every atom in my body feels like it’s trying to go in a different direction. Does that classify as okay?”

  “Not sure if that’s the technical term, but it sounds pretty standard considering the circumstances,” Clare said. “Milo … do you know where we are?”

  Milo started to laugh a little raggedly. “Yeah,” he said. “I do. Dunno how you ladies did it, but you’re definitely across the pond.”

  Clare’s eyes went a bit wide, but then she nodded. “We thought we might be … Where exactly did we end up?”

  “Little plot of land in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” Milo said. “It’s called Entry Island—”

  “And we only just arrived ourselves!” Piper blurted. “I was making tea!”

  Clare blinked at her. “That’s nice …”

  A jolt of something that felt like an electric shock shot through Milo, up his spine and right down into his fingertips. He clenched his hands into fists and Piper had to grab him tightly again so that he wouldn’t topple over. In the mirror, Milo saw that Connal reacted similarly. The magic felt like a swift-flowing river moving just under the surface of his skin. The Druid prince turned and spoke haltingly to Clare in words Milo’s ears didn’t recognize but his brain thought it might understand if only he could concentrate …

  “Milo?” The urgency of Clare’s tone dragged his attention back to her. “I want you to listen to Connal, okay? He has, um, ritual instructions. Goggles?”

  Piper jumped and almost dropped Milo to the floor again. “What? I mean, yes?”

  “Get Milo something to hold on to that isn’t you,” Clare said. “And maybe, I dunno, take notes or something.”

  “Right!”

  Piper disappeared from the reflection only to reappear moments later with the coat stand from the hall that she thrust into Milo’s fist as if it were Gandalf’s magic staff. He felt like a bit of an idiot clinging to the wooden support like that, but it helped. Piper disappeared again and then popped back into the mirror frame holding a notepad and pencil. With her goggles down over her face and her tongue stuck out the side of her mouth, she furiously scribbled down details as Milo relayed them to her, translating from Connal’s Iceni language.

  “There is a hill,” Connal was saying (and the effect in the mirror was disconcerting, the double image of his face overlaying Milo’s, both their mouths moving, green/blue eyes staring wildly), “a big one, near the centre of the island.”

&nbs
p; “Yeah. I saw it on the map.” Milo tried to smile but it looked more like a grimace. “It’s called Big Hill.”

  “That’s original,” Piper muttered, scribbling away.

  “You have to meet us there,” Clare said. “At sundown.”

  Milo tried hard to block the strange pain of the mystic connection and concentrate on the message, but it was getting harder by the second. “Okay …” He ground his teeth together again and tried to concentrate. “Why there? Why then?”

  “Dusk is a time of worlds between worlds,” Connal said. “And that hill is where we will open the spiral pathway, you and I.”

  Milo felt a surge of fear mixed with excitement. “What do I have to do?”

  “Wear the sacred symbols,” Connal continued. “The same ones I wear.”

  “I sent you a picture,” Clare said helpfully.

  “Got it.” Milo nodded stiffly. “Your message triggered this little conference call, I think.”

  “Oh! Right!” Clare nodded. “That’s actually what I meant to happen! Yay, me!”

  “Clare tells me you’ve opened a way—a portal—before,” Connal said, leaning forward and blinking rapidly to keep his focus.

  Milo could only nod in return and gasp out for Piper what Connal told him: that they’d be doing essentially the same thing again, only under Clare’s specific direction, as she seemed to be the resident expert on blood-magic time travel. After a few minutes of Connal’s instructions—about how best to protect himself and how to strengthen the conduits they’d create using the blood Maggie had stolen—Connal leaned back a bit, nostrils flaring as he gulped breath.

  “Clare,” Milo rasped in the silence, “where’s Allie?”

  Clare hesitated. “She’s okay.”

  “I saw … pictures of creatures …”

  “Oh.” Clare winced. “I probably should have deleted those …”

  “Monsters …”

  “It’s okay! They’re just a bunch of werecougars and Mallora told me—”

  The mirror seemed to ripple and distort.

  “What?” Milo leaned forward, desperate to hear. “Mallora told you what? Clare? Clare!”

  But Clare couldn’t answer. Milo reached for her, let go of the coat stand, and fell forward. As he thrust out a hand to save himself the mirror shattered beneath his palm, breaking the mystic connection and leaving Milo with only shards of glass and uncertainty.

  19

  The weather in the wake of the storm was unsettled, with a brisk wind off the ocean. Comorra had found a spare cloak to lend Clare and had shown her how to fasten it with a silver penannular brooch. It helped cut the chill as she stood at the top of the cliff she’d just climbed, leaning on her hands and knees and gasping for breath from the exertion.

  Down below on the beach, Connal and Comorra were directing some of their Iceni pals in the rigging of a makeshift lift system, using one of the smallest boats—not much bigger than a canoe, really—as a kind of dumbwaiter so that they could lift the bags of Druid loot topside and ready them for transport. Marcus and Clare had talked about sending just the torc back, but both were wary about leaving that much Celtic loot kicking around prehistoric Canada. And then Marcus remembered that, in the museum back in London, he’d read about all the other small hoards that had been found in and around the Snettisham area—about a dozen or so he seemed to remember—and they figured it must have been the gold stolen from Mona.

  “It all has to go,” she’d told Morholt. “To be safe. You can visit it in the museum when we get back, okay?”

  She’d thought he might cry.

  Now he was hovering around the edges of the operation, eyeing the canvas bags as they were piled into the lift boat and sighing loudly. They’d use the boat as a kind of sled, dragging it across the grassy hills. Some of the Celts from the galley would go with Llassar through the portal to help him bury the hoard when the time came. Never mind the fact that Llassar was Paulinus’s prisoner. Minor detail, Clare thought, deperately hoping that when the time came they’d figure out just exactly how to make that happen. Al would have ideas.

  Meanwhile, Clare and Marcus would hunt for Al.

  “Let’s go!” Marcus urged as Clare wheezed and silently chastised herself for not staying in better shape. He, of course, hadn’t broken so much as a sweat or a fingernail on the arduous climb.

  Stupid Legion training.

  She’d just opened her mouth to snark at Soldier Boy when a startlingly loud crackle of static filled the air and Clare almost jumped out of her skin.

  “What the hell?” she yelped.

  “Cla—skrksks—re! Are you—srssrkssk—there?”

  “Al!” Clare batted at the folds of her cloak, grabbing desperately for her bag and fishing in its depths for the Korg 70,000 BC walkie talkie. “Al?” she said, depressing the Talk button on the brown plastic handset. “Al—is that you?”

  “Allie!” Marcus cried and rushed over.

  “Yes! Clare? It’s me—sksrssss …”

  “Al? Can you hear me, Al?” she called frantically.

  Marcus looked like he was barely managing to restrain himself from tearing the thing from Clare’s hands. But, really? Clare had dibs. Although she did shift the walkie to the other side of her head so they could both hear.

  “KKrksssk ….” The walkie crackled and hissed some more. And then: “Clare? Clare! Can you hear me? I can hear you!”

  “Al! Yes! Where are you?”

  “Um.” Suddenly the static cleared and Al’s voice came through loud and clear. “It’s a little complicated.”

  “Uncomplicate it,” Clare said.

  “Okay. I’m kind of a prisoner in a Roman camp. Again.”

  Clare blinked, stunned, and exchanged a blankly incredulous glance with Marcus. “Where?”

  “On the other side of the island from where the caves are,” Al said. “The terrain slopes down to a wide beach there and that’s where Paulinus and his buddies made camp.”

  “On this island? That’s not good. Comorra told them not to set foot on it. I think she was pretty serious.”

  She heard Al snort. “Yeah, our pal Paulinus? Not so good at taking orders. Only giving them.”

  “Okay,” Clare said. “Explain. Last we saw of you, there were … things.”

  “The manimals,” Al said. “Yeah, I know.”

  Clare raised an eyebrow at the walkie. “Manimals?”

  “Cut me some slack—I can’t actually pronounce the word they call themselves. But they’re the guardians of this place. The ones Connal and Mallora were talking about.”

  “The others.” Clare nodded. “Right. And by the way? Mallora did an end run around us and summoned them. She says she was trying to save you from having to get involved but—”

  “No no!” Al said. “She was telling the truth. At least, that’s what these guys have told me. She tried to do it on her own, but when she wasn’t able to call enough of them they thought I could be useful after all and decided I should join the party. They just didn’t bother to invite me first.”

  “You’ve talked to them?” Marcus asked, ever the curious linguist. “How?”

  “The zot-magic works on them, too,” Al said. “One touch and wham! Suddenly I’m hearing translated other-speak in my head. I mean, not when they’re furry—then it’s just all growling and snarling—it only works when they look human.”

  Growling and snarling, Clare thought. Mentioned casually. Allie had clearly developed nerves of steel over the course of their adventures.

  “So you know they’re, like, weredudes, then?” she asked.

  “Hence my technical term, ‘manimals.’”Al sounded as if she was grinning. “Which is kinda funny because their leader’s name is actually Manaw … Heh. Manaw the Manimal. Clare— you should see this! They can turn into wolves and bears and I think one guy is, like, a muskox or something. Manaw turns into a cougar when he shifts. It’s kinda, well … it’s pretty cool.”

  Clare thought she’d
heard something in Al’s voice. “He’s totally hot, isn’t he?”

  “Um. No. Well, yes.” Clare just knew Al was squinching up her face in an effort not to audibly blush. “But, you know, I’m totally—”

  “Taken,” Marcus interrupted her emphatically.

  There was a moment of silence. Then Al said, a bit breathlessly, “I am?”

  “Yes.”

  Clare glanced heavenward and took back the walkie. “Fine,” she said. “Now that that’s settled, can you please explain what the hell you’re doing back in Paulinus’s nasty Roman clutches when you were kidnapped by Hello Hottie-Kitty?”

  “Manaw and his guys set it up,” Al said. “They figured if I could infiltrate the camp I could get intel on what the Romans were up to. So they got me close to the beach and then we made it look like I was being chased by a bear and I ran straight for the camp. I guess Junius the legionnaire was feeling all charitable and stuff after we saved him from drowning, because he chased off the ‘bear’ when he saw me. Of course, then he hauled my butt into camp, threw me in a tent, and put a guard on me.”

  “Great.” Clare didn’t see how this situation would be the least bit helpful. “So now what? I mean, we’ve arranged with Milo and Piper to meet at the top of the island, on the big hill, at sundown—”

  “You did?” Al asked. “How?”

  “Connal. Magic. I’ll explain later,” Clare said. “But it’s not like we can leave without you. Or even manifest shimmer conduits unless we’ve got Llassar to send through with the torc. Now you’re both Paulinus’s prisoners and this is a disaster! Stupid interfering manimals. Stupid Mallora. How on earth can you help the weredudes when you’re a prisoner? And what kind of help could they possibly need beyond all the muscley shirtless huge fangs and claws and speed and freaky animal magic they’ve already got going for them? I mean, you’re awesome, sure, and a wicked-mad techno ninja, but let’s face it, a little handicapped by the lack of a wireless router and an electrical outlet!”

  “Whoa … whoa. Hang on a second, partner,” Al interrupted. “I have a plan.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course I do. Junius said Paulinus is on his way to talk to me,” Al said. “If I can work out a way to rig the Talk button on my Korg to stay down while he’s here, I figured I could—”