“I do.” Maggie stopped her short. “I know exactly what you meant. Not at first, of course. But I figured it out. It’s the reason I’m here and the reason you must go back, Marcus or no Marcus.”
Maggie darted a glance at Piper, and Clare was suddenly reminded of Mags’s dramatic declaration upon entering Ashbourne’s tent. Something about his “lovely young descendant here vanishing from the pages of history as if she’d never existed …”
“You don’t have a choice,” Maggie continued. “None of us does. If you don’t return to set things to rights”—her voice dropped into a lower, doomy-pronouncement range—“then the fabric of the universe as we know it could come apart at the seams and this, our present existence, might never come to pass.”
“Maggie?” Clare said quietly.
“Yes, dear?”
“What—seriously what—are you taking about?” She fixed all her attention on her aunt. “You know,” she said, “like you’re always telling me: start at the beginning.”
“Well, that’s just it, really!” Maggie exclaimed. “There isn’t one.”
“One what?”
“Beginning.”
“Sigh.” Clare dropped her chin on her chest.
“It’s all one big loop, dear,” Maggie said.
Al nudged her cousin, a look of faint superiority on her face. “See?” she muttered. “Told ya. My closed-loop theory trumps your multiverse.”
“An unbroken circle,” Maggie continued. “At least, it should be. Let me explain.”
“I’d like that.”
“After you called, I realized I was unclear on a few things.”
“Only a few?” Milo murmured. “Got the rest of us beat.”
“Well, the ‘bring blood’ instruction,” Maggie said. “It just didn’t make any sense. I mean … I know you were in a hurry, but honestly, Clare, you could have been a little more specific.”
“Gosh, yeah.” Clare nodded wearily. “That’s what I told myself. Literally.”
“At any rate,” Maggie continued, “I got to thinking. As I understand it, it was your blood that was used to enspell the artifacts that send you shimmering. Well, you have all the Clare blood you need, obviously, and so I thought you must have meant other blood. Perhaps the other blood that was used, specifically, on the Great Snettisham Torc, which was the only other artifact cursed with both your blood and—”
“Boudicca’s,” Clare blurted.
“Right.” Maggie held up a hand. “I know what you’re thinking. Even if one could dig a hole down into her grave barrow, it’s not as if there’s any blood left in those old bones to extract. Is there?”
“Gad! I certainly hope not.” Clare shivered at the memory of the great queen’s remains. In the torch-lit chamber beneath Norfolk’s Bartlow High Hill, her pale skeleton had lain in repose on a carpet of long red hair. Clare had recurring dreams—nightmares, really—of that encounter.
“Right! But … then it hit me.” Maggie’s eyes sparked behind her glasses. “Ceciley.”
“Dr. Jenkins?” Al leaned forward.
“When she was possessed by the spirit of Boudicca,” Maggie explained, “the transformation was more than just psychological. It seemed at the time, dare I say it, almost physiological.”
Yeah … Clare remembered all right. The vengeful queen had taken over the starchy museum curator and turned her into a feral force of un-nature. A supernatural tiger lady. And the sudden purging of Boudicca’s spirit—when Clare had torn the enchanted torc from around the curator’s neck—had rendered the good doctor catatonic. Clare still sometimes tried to muster up sympathy for Dr. Jenkins, left lying insensible in a hospital bed in London, but it wasn’t easy. After all, despite Stuart Morholt’s claims to mastermindyness, she was the one responsible for the theft of the great golden torc from the museum in the first place.
“I was acting on a sheer hunch, you understand,” Maggie continued. “But it was one that paid off.” She shook the little lunch bag, its contents clinking musically. “I went to the hospital and spoke to a nurse who assured me that she was in the same state she’d been in since the museum incident. No change. A deep coma, she said. She said that I could sit in the room for a little while. She was on her way there to take some blood samples for routine lab work anyway and—”
“Oh god.” Clare suddenly saw where this was going. It made her stomach do a queasy little flip. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.” Maggie emptied the bag out onto the tabletop. “‘Bring blood,’ you said. And so I have.”
Two thin glass tubes filled with dark crimson liquid rolled across the worn wooden surface and came to a stop inches from Clare’s horrified elbow.
“You … you brought me curator blood?” she said in a quavery voice, shrinking back from the vials. “How thoughtful.”
“Can you use that somehow to make sure I don’t get erased?” Piper asked.
“I sincerely hope so, my dear,” Maggie said grimly, then turned back to Clare. “After the nurse had taken the samples she bustled off to deal with another patient for a moment. Quite suddenly, Ceciley bolted upright in the bed, eyes wide open, and grabbed my arm.” Maggie tugged up her sleeve and showed them the purple bands of finger-mark bruises.
“What?” Clare gasped, horrified by the thought that Boudicca’s vengeful spirit might still be inhabiting Ceciley. “I thought she was in a coma! You even just said—”
“She is.” Maggie put up a hand. “Again. But for a few brief moments she was awake, lucid, and utterly adamant that I deliver a message. She wouldn’t let go until I promised. Then she sank back into unconsciousness and I ran for the door. The nurse had left five or six vials of Ceciley’s blood on the cart outside the room. I nabbed two and got out of there as fast as I could.”
“I can’t believe you stole bodily fluids, Perfesser,” Al said. “That’s badass.”
“Borrowed,” Maggie amended sternly.
“And you called me larcenous.” Clare shook her head.
“It was for a very good cause,” Maggie said primly. “If Ceciley is to be believed.”
“What did she tell you?” Milo leaned forward across the table, his blue gaze burning.
“That Clare has got to go back in time,” she said. “It’s imperative.”
“Yeah. I know, I know!” Clare threw her hands in the air. “A thousand times already!”
“What was Dr. Jenkins’s reason?” Milo asked.
Maggie pushed her glasses up her nose. “Well … think of time as though it’s the shape of the Snettisham Torc. A circle, but a broken one. At the moment that’s how things are, and it’s the torc itself that’s done it—that’s caused the breach.”
Clare blinked. “I don’t get it.”
“Where did you last see the neck ring, Clare?” Maggie asked.
“Uh …” Clare frowned, thinking back. “On top of Glastonbury Hill. After Suetonius Paulinus … uh … beheaded Professor Ashbourne.”
“Last place I saw it, too,” Al confirmed. “It fell off his … er … stump.” She made a slashing gesture toward her own neck and went a bit pale.
Clare nodded. “That’s exactly what happened. Thereby breaking the curse, right? I mean, I thought that was it. I thought we did it. Fixed everything. Marcus was the last loose end, y’know? I figured once we do this last shimmer we’ll get back to now and ta-da! Happy ending.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”
“Why?” Clare was starting to get angry. “Why isn’t it that simple?”
Maggie put a hand on her arm. “Because the torc must find its way back to its original resting place.”
“Do you mean Original Resting Place Boudicca’s Tomb,” Al asked, “or Original Resting Place Hole-in-the-Ground-in-Snettisham?”
“Snettisham.”
“I get it.” Milo’s expression was turning grim. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before now. It’s sort of like what we were talking about earlier at the pub when
we found the memory card.”
“What memory card?” Maggie asked.
Milo gave her the rundown—it was probably telling that Maggie accepted it without a great deal of surprise or trepidation—and then continued. “It’s all about the way the timeline is playing out,” he said. “The way it stands now, the torc never did make it into the tomb with Boudicca when she died. Not in this reality. In this reality it wound up in a hole in the ground in Snettisham with a hoard of other artifacts, where it was discovered in 1950. But if it doesn’t somehow make its way into that hole, then this reality—the one we exist in at this very moment—won’t exist.” He looked at Clare over the rim of his glasses. “You won’t ever touch the torc in the museum and discover your gift. Stuart Morholt will never steal the torc, or go back in time trying to steal it again—”
“Oh bloody hell!” Piper wailed suddenly.
Maggie glanced at her, startled.
“It’s just as I thought!” Her enormous brown eyes were shiny with tears. “I am vanishing from the pages of history again, aren’t I? Rubbed out. I thought we’d gotten this all sorted and now I’m still going to disappear!”
“Wait! Wait …” Clare held up a hand. “Goggles, seriously. Chill. No one’s getting rubbed out. Look, Mags. I just assumed that someone … I don’t know … Llassar or that Mallora chick … I mean I just assumed that one of them would eventually make sure the torc found its way there. To Snettisham. I mean … it did. It has. Hasn’t it?”
“Not according to Ceciley,” Maggie said. “Or rather, not according to the Druiddyn mystical sight trapped within her. That was the message I was to convey to you. That the timeline is, apparently, still dangerously in flux.”
Clare glanced at Milo, who was back to listening intently and frowning, blue eyes troubled behind his angular black glasses frames. Clare wondered what the residual Druiddyn mystical sight still stuck in his head had to say on the matter.
“All I know,” Maggie continued, “is that Ceciley said the torc is travelling far from the soil of its home and needs to return. That you, Clare—as one of the engines of the blood curse woven into the torc—must see to it. She said the torc would call to you, draw you to it, until you did. That if you ignored that call, peril would befall you and all those you cared about. It will remain so as long as the torc is a wild card.”
Maggie pulled the shirt sleeve back down over the bruises on her arm.
“Wow,” Clare murmured. “No pressure.”
Suddenly she wasn’t so sure she wanted to go back. Rescuing Marcus was one thing. Resetting the chronology of the universe … that was another. Maggie and the others must have read her thoughts. There was a general shifting among them as they all exchanged glances.
“Mags,” Clare said, “are you sure you’re okay with this? With me doing this?”
“Oh, duckling …” Maggie reached over and patted Clare’s hand. “I’m not sure that what I’m ‘okay with’ has any relevance whatsoever in this situation. You have a gift, Clare. Or a burden. Perhaps a destiny is the best way to say it. But it’s yours and I’m not about to keep you from it.”
“Are you sure you’re related to my mom?”
“Don’t be prickly, dear,” Maggie admonished, but she did grin a bit. “Your mother loves you. She just … well, she wouldn’t understand this. Nor would your father. They are practicalminded people. By the way, I spoke to them yesterday—hello from Oslo, the orchestra tour is going swimmingly, your father wishes you would turn on your phone once in a while, don’t forget to wear sunscreen—and somehow I managed to convince them that you girls are fine and staying out of all sorts of trouble.”
“You’re a peach, Mags.”
“Yes, well. Delightfully fruity or not, my darling sister will kill me if you don’t come through your summer vacation unscathed.” Maggie held up one of the vials of blood. “So, please. Go. Do the things you have to do to set this all to rights. But I beg you. Remain unscathed.”
Clare reached out and took the little glass tube, absurdly relieved that it was cool, not warm to the touch. “No scathing,” she said. “Scout’s honour.”
Maggie nodded and managed to smile encouragingly. “Best get cracking then.”
“CRACKING” CONSISTED MOSTLY of packing. In her first temporal go-around Clare had discovered certain advantages to such equipment as glowsticks and emergency road flares, so they made short work of ransacking Piper’s shop to procure likewise useful oddments.
“COOL!” Al exclaimed at one point, discovering an original, still-in-the-package pair of Korg 70,000 BC walkie talkies buried in a box full of pop-culture kitsch.
“Did they change the dictionary definition of that word again while I wasn’t paying attention?” Clare asked, eyeing the dusty cardboard backing depicting the TV family of prehistoric cave dwellers.
“These were part of a merchandise line for an old Saturdaymorning Hanna-Barbera show that aired in the seventies,” Al enthused, ignoring Clare’s dig. “I stumbled across episodes posted on one of my geek-chat forums. It’s about these Neanderthals and it is so gloriously cheesetastic, I can’t even!”
Piper plucked the package from Al’s hands and examined it critically. “My gran traded a perfectly good Doctor Who TARDIS lawn ornament to some American chap for those when I was little. Told you she was a nutter. I never could figure out where the hairy bloke on the package got a radio, or how on earth he’d figure out how to use the thing.”
“They didn’t actually have walkies on the show,” Al said, rolling her eyes. “It’s just marketing. And the series never aired in the UK so I wouldn’t really expect you to understand the appeal.”
“And so I don’t,” Piper said and tossed the set back. “Consider them a parting gift.”
“Awesome!” Al exclaimed. She pried at a corner of the plastic, muttering enthusiastically, “These are in near-mint condition. I hate to destroy the packaging … maybe I can save it if I’m careful … Don’t suppose you have two nine-volt batteries lying around? Says here they’re not included …”
Piper sighed gustily and walked off to dig through a drawer under the shop counter. Clare went back to emptying all the makeup and crumpled granola bar wrappers out of her bag, but when Piper hadn’t returned she looked up to see her still over by the counter, frowning down at Morholt’s diary, which had once again found its way into her hands.
“Hey … Goggles?” Clare asked. “You okay?”
“Hm?” Piper looked up. “Oh. Yeah. I’m grand.”
“I just thought …” Clare shrugged. “The whole Ashbourne revelation thing. I’m sorry you had to find out that way.”
“I’m sorry I had to find out at all.” She sniffed and waved a hand as if it was no big deal. Which it clearly was. “The man’s a right prat. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. I already told you—my genealogy is so profoundly fraked up I’m surprised I don’t have two heads.”
“I dunno,” Al said, organizing her own gear. “Maybe I just got to see a different side of the dude back in the day, but when he was in command of a Legion, he didn’t seem so bad to me.”
“And your grandmother certainly seemed to have taken a shine to him.”
“Gran was mad.”
“I guess.” Clare was unconvinced. “She knew there was temporal weirdness where the diary was involved, and yet she still gave it to you.”
“Left it for me to open after she was gone, yeah.” Piper shrugged. “It’s not like she sat me down and had ‘the chat’ with me about it. She never even opened it herself.”
“Still …” Al picked up the diary where it lay at Piper’s elbow. “Why didn’t Ashbourne ever tell you all this stuff?”
“Because he’s right about how badly that conversation would have gone. ‘Hey, kid, by the way … I’m your grandfather.’ ‘Really? How interesting! And how did you and dear old gran hook up back in the day?’ ‘Well, I stepped out of a temporal rift in the moment of my first-century beheading, and there she was, jus
t waiting for me. I don’t age, my own daughter thought the whole thing was freakish enough to disown the lot of us, and by the way, you might just cease to exist one day because we’ve messed up the very fabric of the cosmos. How was your day at the shop?’” She laughed bitterly. “Aside from that, I don’t think he cares a whit about me.”
“If that’s true, he could have just left when your grandmother died,” Milo pointed out. “Instead he stuck around and grew a ridiculous moustache.”
“The facial hair alone has to earn him some points,” Clare agreed.
“It doesn’t matter,” Piper said, waving the matter away. “Let’s just get on with it.”
Maggie bestowed a briskly sympathetic smile on Piper. “Now,” she said. “Remember. The torc must be your priority, girls. Beyond that, you must do whatever else you can to bring Mark back.” She picked up the vials of blood and stared at them as if they were talismans. “Hopefully you’ll find some way to use these to those ends …”
Clare knew perfectly well what Al’s priority was, fabric of the universe or no, but she wasn’t about to tell Maggie that. She just plucked the tubes from her aunt’s fingers and handed them to Al. “I hereby designate you the Keeper of the Cursed Vials of Icky Liquid.”
“Ew,” Al said, taking them gingerly. “What d’you suppose we’re actually supposed to do with this stuff?”
“I think it’s probably a ‘need to know’ kind of situation.” Clare shrugged. “We’ll know when we need to. Right, Milo?” But Milo looked as if he was listening to a voice only he could hear. “What is it?”
“Hm?” He blinked at her rapidly, his gaze snapping back into focus.
“What are you thinking?”
Milo reached out a hand to Al. “Leave one of the vials with us,” he said.
Al looked at Clare, who shrugged and said, “Okay. Why?”
“I … I don’t know,” he murmured. “Yet.”
“Fair enough,” Clare said. “Me neither. Give him the blood, pal.”