Now and for Never

  “No!” Clare shouted and, heedless of the snarling cougar, thrashed herself free from her cloak and leaped in front of Marcus. The sword in his hand wavered. “Mark!” she shouted. “Drop it! You already wounded him once. Last night.”

  “What?”

  The bear had backed off. Clare knew it must have been the manimal that Marcus’s sword had tagged in the cave, the evidence captured in that one digital image.

  She turned slowly toward the two wild animals, her hands raised. “Drop the damn sword,” she muttered out of the side of her mouth.

  Marcus did as she asked and raised his own hands.

  All Clare could do was look into the huge dark eyes of the werecougar who stood glaring at her and think, Al must have been so terrified. Then there was a blurring of motion. Her next thought was Or possibly a little drooly.

  For where there had stood a sleekly muscular golden cougar was now a young man. A super hot, half-naked young man with long dark hair flowing past his shoulders, muscles that looked sculpted out of stone, and a mesmerizing, golden-eyed gaze that both compelled Clare not to look away and terrified her to the core.

  Marcus’s armour creaked as he drew himself up to his full height. To his credit—and hers, she supposed—neither moved a muscle as the young man stalked around them in a full circle. As he did, Clare became aware of other shadows moving in the long grass, coming closer—another, slightly smaller cougar, a pair of coyotes. They stared at her with human intelligence. It was disconcerting.

  The shirtless young man was also barefoot. He wore only a pair of what looked like suede leggings belted with a wide strip of fur with the same dark-gold coloration as his animal alter ego. When he’d finished his circuit and stopped directly in front of them, Marcus took a single step forward. “Manaw?”

  The young man frowned. Then he nodded once.

  Marcus put a hand on his chest and said, slowly and clearly, “Marcus.” Then he pointed to Clare. “Clare.”

  Manaw’s golden eyes flicked back and forth between them and he nodded again. Then Marcus pointed in the direction from where the shape-shifters had come. “Allie,” he said, and made a flapping-wing gesture with his hands.

  Manaw nodded again. Moving with a distinctly catlike grace, he stepped closer and then touched first Marcus and then Clare on the forehead. The shimmer magic did its thing— much more smoothly than usual—and suddenly Clare could understand the handsome young man when he said, “Well met and welcome. Sorry I stole your friend.”

  AFTER MAKING MANAW promise that he and his toothy pals would do everything in their power to make sure Al made it through the coming encounter unscathed, Clare left Marcus alone with the shape-shifters to plan strategy while she climbed back down the cliff to conduct her own consultations.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon going over the elements of the ritual—the makeshift, cobbled together, no-one-hasever-done-this-kind-of-thing-before ritual—with Connal and Mallora. Comorra had insisted on lending her more than capable hand in the fight (Clare wondered if she wasn’t secretly hoping she could get within striking distance of Paulinus), and so was off sharpening weapons, checking her shield and armour for any needed repairs, and securely braiding her hair before coiling it tightly around her head. The other Celts—those who’d come over on the ship as slaves and the ones already there with Connal and Comorra—likewise went about the business of preparing for battle. Some of them sang.

  Morholt, for his part, swanned around offering unsolicited advice and acting as if he was indispensable to the whole endeavour. Which, Clare sighed inwardly—noting the contours of the Snettisham Torc in his jumpsuit pocket—he really sort of was.

  “Thanks for the tips,” Clare said finally, sitting back on her heels and wiping her brow as Mallora finished going over for one last time what she thought Clare should do.

  Clare had gone to confer with the Druidess only to find her lying pale and drawn-looking on a bed of furs and blankets in her cave. After hearing all that Clare had to tell her, Mallora expressed both satisfaction and, surprisingly, gratitude. She would be staying on the island with Connal and her niece, she went on, at least until she regained the strength she’d lost in getting them all to the island in the first place. Clare was relieved to hear it. She didn’t want anything to further endanger the Druidess—or her resulting progeny—but she made Mallora double-dog promise that she or her descendants would see to it that the diary found its way back to Britain so that it could one day pass into Piper Gimble’s fingerless-gloved hands.

  “And you’ve only got about two thousand years to make that happen, so don’t dawdle!”

  She sat with Mallora for a few more minutes, listening to what sage wisdom the Druidess could offer on the upcoming mega-ritual. Her advice chiefly consisted of variations on a theme: “You will know what to do. Listen to your soul. Pay attention to the voices of the magic. Let the flow take you. Reality is a tapestry woven from many loose threads. Pull on one end and affect the whole pattern …”

  Stuff like that.

  “Great. Awesome. Thanks, Yoda,” Clare sighed, waving as she ducked out of the cave, leaving the Druidess to her rest. She wasn’t entirely certain she’d gleaned anything useful, but on the other hand she felt that if she’d had a light sabre handy she could have tapped right into the Force.

  Back in her own cave, Clare carried on with her preparations. She checked and double-checked the vial of Boudicca/ Curator Special Blend blood Al had given her, making sure it was still tightly stoppered. She rearranged the contents of her bag so that nothing was bulging or awkward, and then she carefully popped the memory card out of her camera and put it in her back pocket for safekeeping. She meticulously rewrapped the shiny red device in its layers of Faraday cage foil. It had already served its purpose, true, but she liked that camera, and if she could keep it from going shimmer-kablooey on the return trip through time, she might as well try. She tucked the camera into a deep corner of her bag and checked the contents one last time. Then one last, last time. Clare hated packing for trips. She either underpacked or overpacked and always felt like she was forgetting something.

  Which was why she ignored the feeling. It was par for the course. It would have been weird if she hadn’t felt like she was forgetting something. Right?

  “Clare?” Morholt popped his head into the cave, startling her by not, for once, referring to her as “Clarinet” or “Miss Reid” with a healthy dose of snide intonation.

  “Uh. Yeah?”

  “It’s time.”

  And that, simply put, was the most profound statement Clare had ever heard.

  21

  Milo reached out a hand to help Piper negotiate a steep bit of uneven ground on the way up to the top of Big Hill. In the far distance a pair of shaggy ponies watched them climb, placid and uncaring. Beneath his windbreaker Milo’s skin itched with the designs he’d painted there with eyeshadow. Along with the vial of blood Maggie had stolen from the hospital, he carried a bag of beach sand he’d use to create a magic circle in which to perform his upcoming magic tricks.

  It had taken some time to calm Piper down after the whole mirror, mirror on the wall episode, but she seemed to have finally gotten hold of herself. Maybe a little too much. She seemed way too calm, in fact. No … more than calm. Sad, almost. In an effort to cheer her up as they walked, Milo found himself rambling on about his cousin and Clare—and even Mark O’Donnell—and how good it would be to see them all again. To be together.

  “It’ll be like at the end of Return of the Jedi when everyone gets back together and has a party with the Ewoks on Endor. Except less cheesy. And we’ll invite the original old Anakin Skywalker, not the CG young one.”

  Piper, of course, didn’t bat an eye at the reference and Milo realized with a bit of a start that he deeply missed having to explain something like that to Clare.

  “I’ll be Han and Clare can be Leia and … uh …” He glanced over and saw that Piper was frowning. “Piper? You okay?”
>
  “Yeah … just thinking.”

  Thinking with a side order of bursting into tears, apparently.

  Milo stopped in his tracks as, beneath the lenses of her goggles, Piper’s eyes filled. Her shoulders curled forward, heaving with sudden sobs. As she turned away from him, Milo could only stand there, astonished. What on earth had he said to upset her so?

  What? You don’t know?

  No! I— Oh no, Milo thought. Not that …

  A wave of anxiety washed over him as he remembered how effortless her flirty act had seemed at Dan’s place. How she’d told him what a great team she thought they made … Had Piper Gimble actually been crushing on him the whole time they’d been together?

  Damn. Way to be sensitive, supergeek!

  Why hadn’t he seen it? He’d done nothing but talk about Clare and how much he missed her. He could have been a little more attentive to Piper’s emotional state.

  “Piper,” he said gently, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  “What?”

  “That you felt that way about me.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s just that Clare is—”

  Piper let out a snort-guffaw.

  “You idiot,” she sniffled through her tears. Then she punched him on the shoulder. “You’re not what’s got me upset!”

  Milo felt his face growing hot. He really was going to have to practise the whole interacting with females who weren’t his cousin thing a little more. “What are you upset about, then?”

  “Family,” she said.

  “Um. Family?”

  “Yeah.” Piper flipped up her lenses and scrubbed a sleeve across her face. “I mean, you’ve been nattering on about it in one way or another for most of this whole bloody trek and it’s just … well … I don’t have that. I have me. I just thought … it might be nice to have someone else for a change. And I don’t mean you.” She sniffed again and grinned. “I mean, you’re lovely and all—and I have to admit, I’ve had a bit of fun making Clare scorching jealous—but I mean … I want family.”

  “Oh.” Milo winced at his presumption. “Right. Well—”

  “And I think I know what I’m going to do the second I get home,” Piper continued, mercifully relieving him of the need to stammer an apology.

  “What’s that?” Milo asked warily, remembering the touchy familial situation Piper had left behind.

  “I’m going to march right into Nicholas Ashbourne’s silly little field tent and I’m going to sit down at that desk of his.” She blinked back the watery sheen on her eyes. “And I’m not leaving until he’s told me every one of his stories. And he’s not leaving until he’s heard every one of mine. I’m going to have a family, Milo. Like all of you have. I’m going to be family. Not just a bloodline.”

  Milo smiled at her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, giving her a hug. “Come on then,” he said. “Let’s go finish this story so that you can tell him all about it when we get back.”

  Piper looked up at him and nodded.

  “You know …” Milo said, “if Clare manages to bring Stuart Morholt back with her, you’re going to have a lot more family than you thought.”

  Piper considered that for a moment. “Well. That should make things right interesting, then, shouldn’t it?”

  “Careful what you wish for.”

  She grinned back at him and held up the silver shimmertrigger coin Milo had given her to call the others home. “Live dangerously.”

  Then she stepped forward and led the way, trailing in the footsteps of her ancestor, whistling as she went.

  THEY REACHED THE SUMMIT of Big Hill about half an hour before sunset: Connal, Clare, and Morholt, along with the six lean-muscled Celts who’d hauled up the little boat full of loot and now crouched beside it, waiting for the moment when they’d drive it forward into a spatio-temporal rift. The warrior contingent of their little band, Marcus and Comorra, had split off to head in the opposite direction, toward where Paulinus would be marshalling his war machine. Clare glanced nervously at the sky. Once the festivities below the hill began she’d have the boys fire up the spatial conduits, and then she herself would get about the business of conducting the orchestra.

  No pressure.

  Her stomach was in knots as Connal pulled out a bag of beach sand he’d collected and, after carefully pouring it out, drew a circle in the scrubby grass crowning the hill. Clare and Connal would enter the warded circle at their end, Milo at his. As long as the two circles remained unbroken, the spatio-temporal magic would stay sufficiently concentrated for Clare to bend it to her will. Then, once everyone else was headed back to where they belonged, she’d have to break the circle. To step outside it and join hands with Al—who, of course, would have made her timely escape and made it up the hill by then, right? Right!—and Marcus, and Morholt. They would have only seconds then before the conduit bearing Llassar—who, of course, Al would have brought with her, right? Right!—the treasure, and the shimmer coin closed behind the Druid master smith. And in those seconds it would be up to Piper to bring them home.

  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

  Clare looked over at Morholt, who waited outside the circle near the loot boat, ready to hand over the soon-to-be Snettisham Torc to Llassar. At least he’d better, Clare thought. His grip on the golden ring was pretty white-knuckled.

  The leading edge of the sun had dipped below the horizon and the whole western quadrant of the sky was ablaze with orange, crimson, and purple. Over Clare’s shoulder, the moon was just rising. Connal glanced at her and nodded encouragement. Then Clare fished the vial of blood out of her bag. She unstoppered it and, as Mallora had instructed, poured out drops on the four compass points of the circle he’d drawn.

  A compass to show me the way, she thought, giving in to Mallora’s admonition to go with her instincts. Then she held out the vial to Connal, who stood unselfconsciously naked from the waist up and covered in swirling blue symbols. Just as Milo would be, Clare thought with a flush of warmth, standing in the same place almost two thousand years from that moment. She grabbed her hair and piled it on top of her head in a messy bun, securing it with an elastic from around her wrist.

  Boudicca’s blood-cursed torc had been responsible for much of the spatio-temporal Shenanigans, Clare thought. And while she couldn’t lay hands on the actual torc—that needed to make its way back to Snettisham while she was in the middle of her ritual—she’d had another flash of insight. Mallora had really been on to something with the whole go with your gut thing.

  Even if that “something” is way far gone on the “eeeew” scale …

  She swallowed thickly and told Connal what to do.

  Then she stood and waited, shuddering a bit, as Connal dipped his finger into the Cursed Vial of Icky Liquid and, walking clockwise around her, drew a circle around her neck. Just like a torc. And when he joined the two ends together in the hollow at the base of her throat, just above where the Celtic pendant Milo had given her hung …

  “Whoa!”

  Clare lit up like a comet and the world burst into a fireworks display like nothing she’d ever seen. She gasped in wonder as the whole of the hill seemed to come alive with light, a swirling, spiral dance of firefly trails. Not the static paths she’d seen that time on Bartlow High Hill when they’d walked the Way to Boudicca’s grave barrow, but moving, shifting, dancing patterns. She wondered if Connal could see them too.

  She looked at him and he smiled.

  Then his face shifted, and a double-exposure image of Milo seemed to slide over his features like a transparent mask.

  “Milo …?”

  The green/blue eyes that gazed on her were alight with excitement.

  “Clare de Lune …” Milo’s voice echoed out of Connal’s mouth.

  And then, somewhere in the distance, Clare could hear the faint thrum of marching feet. She could see the hazy glow of torchlight. She crossed her fingers and whispered, “Okay, Al … that’s your cue!”

  THE SUN WAS
SETTING as they marched inexorably across the broad sweep of rolling meadowland. In the distance, over the helmeted heads of the regimented ranks of legionnaires in front of her, Allie could just make out the place where the ground began to undulate upward, sloping toward the summit of Big Hill. She looked at Llassar where he shuffled along beside her and he shot her a grim smile that bent the crinkled, singed hairs of his moustache upward. Allie had convinced Junius to convince Paulinus to bring the two of them along. It seemed the bruiser legionnaire really did have some sense of honour—one that demanded he repay her for saving his life. He’d persuaded the governor that the two prisoners might be useful bargaining tools if they encountered any resistance on their merry way to turn Big Hill into a giant smoking ember. They might even be able to trade them for some of that gold, he speculated, which—down the road—could prove handy in trading with the indigenous folk as they went about setting up their mini-empire.

  In Canada, of all places. Jeez …

  Allie figured Paulinus was probably just humouring Junius. Still, the men seemed to respect the centurion, and so Paulinus needed him in his corner. There were only eighty, maybe a hundred soldiers in all, marching. Plus the entire contingent of mariners from both galleys. Small numbers for an invading army, maybe, but Allie knew what kind of damage the soldiers of Rome could do. Boudicca’s army of tribes had vastly outnumbered Paulinus’s Legions, but under his command those soldiers had decimated their opponents. The Iceni had been virtually wiped from the face of the map.

  The Romans had trampling feet and they had fire. Lots of it—rows of torches just waiting to set the island alight. When she’d finally parsed Paulinus’s actual strategy, Allie had been horrified. That horror swiftly calcified into a hard, sharp knot of incandescent anger in her stomach. She hoped desperately that Marcus and Clare had guessed what the governor’s plan was, too—and that they’d be ready.