Once Every Never

by Lesley Livingston

  “Neither do I …” Clare glanced down and saw Connal’s wrist cuff—the one he’d left lying on Boudicca’s bier two thousand years earlier—on the stone between the queen’s skeletal feet. “But I might have a backup plan if things go totally south.” Putting on the leather gloves she’d tucked in her pocket, Clare picked up the cuff and pocketed it. Carefully—so that Connal wouldn’t see. The air felt like it was growing thin and she hurried back over to the others. She didn’t have much time left. Ironically.

  “Okay, Milo,” she said quietly. “Hand over the reins to Connal. It’s not a sports car anymore, it’s a war chariot. And he has to be the one driving.”

  25

  Clare spent the ride back to London in the cramped confines of the convertible’s backseat, trying not to stare worriedly. Connal had yet to relinquish his control of Milo, and he sat with his lanky frame folded awkwardly to fit behind the driver’s seat and his shoulders pulled taut around his ears. His eyes kept darting about at all the unfamiliar twenty-first-century sights they passed as though seeing everything for the first time. Which he really was.

  Clare had reluctantly agreed that, until they tracked down the vengeful warrior queen who’d hijacked Dr. Jenkins, Connal’s consciousness should remain at the fore.

  “Are you okay?” Clare now asked for the hundredth time. Connal had used his magic to transport them out of the barrow—and he’d almost collapsed at the base of the hill as a result. He’d managed the feat, but it had cost him.

  “Connal?” Clare put a hand on his knee.

  For a long moment he stared at her hand, his eyes fever-bright. Then slowly, methodically, as if trying to commit it to memory, he began tracing the contours of each of her fingers. Over and over again, all the way back to London. It seemed to calm him. Clare was afraid to withdraw her hand, but by the time they reached Great Russell Street at the edge of London’s financial district, she was also just a little freaked out.

  Having driven Milo’s Bimmer like a maniac all the way back from Bartlow, Maggie now slowed to just over the speed limit. She drove past the ornate wrought-iron fence that surrounded the grand edifice of the British Museum and turned onto a side street that led to the entrance for staff parking. All the museum’s windows were dark—the place looked deserted. Something was not right. Even in the dead of night there were always floodlights illuminating the stately marble faces of the building. But on this night the building loomed up in the darkness, a dim grey shape against the storm-tossed sky.

  And it wasn’t just the museum. The whole neighbourhood looked as though it had blown one gigantic fuse. Not even the streetlights shone. And no one was out on the streets complaining about it. High overhead the clouds roiled and scudded across the face of the sky as though driven by gale winds, but on the ground things were utterly still. Not a leaf stirring.

  Something was very not right.

  Maggie stopped near a service entrance at the back of the museum, where they found Stuart Morholt’s Bentley parked at a haphazard angle. She went around to the back of the car while Al tilted her seat forward so that Clare could climb out. But Connal clenched her hand in an iron grip.

  “It’s okay,” she said, gently prying his fingers loose as he stared at her with Milo’s unblinking eyes. “I’m right with you.”

  Maggie reappeared at the driver’s side door and tilted her seat forward as well. Then she held out Milo’s cricket bat, retrieved from the trunk of the car. “I think, perhaps, our warrior prince might feel more at ease if he were armed with a weapon.”

  Connal looked at what to him must have seemed a good, stout wooden war club and smiled. He let go of Clare’s hand and got out of the car. Then he took the proffered bat, testing its heft with the assurance of a trained fighter.

  Maggie smiled at him and, nodding for the girls to follow, headed toward a set of utility stairs, fishing a security pass out of her pocket as she went. The indicator lights on the card reader were dark, though, and the door swung open on its hinges at a touch.

  “Shimmer-fried,” Al murmured, touching the dead panel with a fingertip. “I’ll bet every electrical system in the building is toast. Boudicca must be pulling down some serious mojo.”

  Clare looked at her. “And you saw the sky outside, right?” “Yeah. I don’t like storms.”

  “Me neither, pal.”

  The air inside had a sepulchral quality to it. Intermittent shafts of moonlight spilled through high windows, cutting the hallway floor into alternating strips of light and dark. Maggie hesitated on the threshold as if her familiar world had become an alien, otherworldly realm.

  An eerie wail suddenly echoed toward them from somewhere in a far-distant part of the building.

  “We’d best hurry,” Maggie said with calm determination. They found their way in the near-darkness to the East Stairs and came out onto the upper floor’s Ancient Near East Collection. Maggie led them at a clip through the Egyptian Collection, a series of connected rooms filled with sarcophagi, grave goods, and statues of long-dead pharaohs that stared at them with flat, dead eyes as they rushed past.

  The room directly below the one that held the Bog Bodies display was home to an exhibit of medieval arms and armour. As they hurried through it on their way to the stairs, Clare noticed that one of the cases had been shattered and was empty. What had it contained? There was no time to stop and investigate.

  They emerged onto the fifth level behind an information partition in the Bog Bodies display room. The four of them collectively paused and then slowly, silently, leaned around the partition.

  At the far end of the room Stuart Morholt, duct-taped to an identification-plaque stand and dotted with taped-on bricks of grey plastic explosive, cowered before Ceciley/Boudicca, who held a detonator remote in one hand. The blinking light was alternating red and green.

  The curator-turned-demon queen looked wild and weathered, thin and angular—as though the power she used was using her. Her feet were still bare, the soles now darkened with dirt. Her lab coat lay in a heap on the floor. Her pencil skirt was ripped up the side almost to the hip and she’d torn off the sleeves of her blouse at the shoulders.

  Clare watched as she bent down to scoop up all but one of the dozen or more swords that lay at her feet—swords that must have come from the shattered medieval exhibit case. She stalked around the room like a prowling jungle cat, stopping to gaze hollowly at each of the Bog Body exhibits and to lay a weapon from her iron bouquet on top of every case.

  Clare did a quick count of the glass cases in the room. And then she did it again. She was sure. Where there had once been thirteen, only twelve cases now held the spirit warrior remains. Clare really had changed history.

  Connal hadn’t died in the bog that night. Not in this timeline.

  “This is what became of my spirit warriors,” Boudicca murmured. “Ghosts trapped in glass cases. How I long to set them free …” Her circuit of the room complete, she paced languidly back toward Morholt. Now she crouched down on her haunches before the last sword, her head tilted to one side and her eyes hooded like a snake regarding its prey in the moment before striking. “Do you know who I am?” She spoke as if she had no knowledge of Morholt’s identity. Dr. Jenkins must have been completely buried beneath the queen’s persona.

  “Wh … uh … which one of you?” Morholt stammered.

  “Do you know what I did?” The Iceni queen placed the detonator on the floor and picked up the blade. “How many lives I ended with the edge of my sword?” She drew her hand along the length of the antique weapon, leaving a bright, crimson smear on the iron. “Or with a word?” she continued. “Or a wave of my hand?” She waved her bloody palm at Morholt.

  “I … well, um, seventy thousand was the … the official number …” Morholt said weakly.

  “Seventy thousand.” From Ceciley’s lips Boudicca’s husky tones drifted like smoke. The smoke of burning Celtic villages. She rolled the words around in her mouth as though her mind was trying to compreh
end the number by way of its burnt taste. “Seventy … thousand …” The queen reached up to her throat, ran the palm of her bloodied hand across the golden torc, and began to murmur words under her breath.

  In his terror, Morholt began babbling. “Seventy thousand, yes! And ‘jolly good’ I say … well done! Cracking efficiency. Take that, you bunch of pansy Roman gits!”

  Clare winced and rolled her eyes. She ducked back behind the partition and glanced at her companions. “We’re going to have to do something fast or Boudicca’s gonna turn Stu into tomato paste.” Unfortunately, she had no idea what that something was. Maggie didn’t look as if she had any ideas either, and Milo/Connal didn’t seem up to formulating cunning plans just at the moment. His eyes were unfocused behind his glasses and there was a sheen of sweat on his brow. He looked like it was a struggle just to stay upright.

  Huddled beside Clare, Al tapped her on the shoulder. “Got the time?” she whispered.

  “Yeah, it’s …” Clare automatically checked her watch. “No,” she whispered back, holding up her wrist. “Shimmer-fried, remember?”

  “Yup.”

  Clare waited for the forthcoming cunning plan.

  “When you shimmer, you disrupt electrical currents, right?”

  “Yeah …”

  “Boudicca-Doc’s detonator is electronic and, with the batteries in, it’s live. The torc around her neck is a shimmer trigger. All you have to do is get close enough to touch the torc. Then …”

  “Zot.”

  Al grinned. “Zot, indeed.”

  “We need a distraction—”

  A howl abruptly rang out and the sound of shattering glass exploded in the room. Shards of display cases started shooting up like crystalline geysers from all twelve of the Bog Body display cases.

  “That’s fairly distracting,” Maggie muttered, her voice bone-dry with something close to fear—well, as close to fear as Maggie ever got.

  “Okay,” said Clare, “our plan just got a lot more complicated.”

  Boudicca had raised both hands into the air. With a cry of summoning, she’d reclaimed her spirit warriors. Now, from within each of the demolished glass boxes … things were stirring.

  “Oh God,” Al gasped in horror. “When I said ‘bring on the bog zombies’ a couple of days ago I was kidding!”

  “Those poor souls,” Maggie murmured, wide-eyed at the ghastly spectacle. The warriors’ reanimated remains were barely recognizable as human. Hollow-eyed and leather-skinned, their faces were contorted with Boudicca’s borrowed rage—as long-dead as they themselves were. They clutched their weapons with spidery fingers whose bones had long since been dissolved by the peat-bog tannins that had preserved their flesh and skin. The only thing that kept them upright was the power of Boudicca’s blood magic that flowed through their desiccated limbs as surely as their own blood once had.

  They heaved themselves out of the cases without muscle power or minds and, howling like banshees, began hewing about with whirling blades, smashing through the cases that contained the other, smaller artifacts and tearing through partitions and information boards. Laughing madly, Boudicca retrieved the detonator at her feet and spun in a circle, her face twisted in fierce, grotesque triumph.

  Maggie went ashen. “If those abominations find their way out of the museum and into the city …”

  “I have to get to Boudicca,” Clare said. She didn’t just need to touch the queen’s torc, she needed to get it away from her. From Dr. Jenkins, whose own life force was powering the queen’s magic. Just as Milo’s was for Connal.

  “My queen!” he hailed, his voice resonating through the gallery as he stalked past Clare into the room, swinging the cricket bat like a broadsword. “Boudicca!”

  “Okaaay …” Clare threw a hand up in the air even as she fought down a panicked surge. “Change in plans …”

  Her borrowed face a mask of fury, Boudicca turned on the intruder … and her lips stretched in a grim and welcome-less smile. “Connal.”

  “Andrasta bless you, Lady.”

  “She has not.” Her voice was cold. “She was displeased with my last, incomplete sacrifice to her. I hope she looks more favourably upon this one.” She turned to the shambling creatures gathering around her. “Kill him. Kill him and, for your reward, I will give you a new spirit warrior to lead you in death.” She turned her flat stare on Morholt and then pointed the detonator remote at him.

  “Boudicca. Do not do this thing,” Connal pleaded as the first of the bog warriors charged him, sword swinging wildly with an uncanny power behind it. Connal dodged nimbly out of the way and the creature’s sword shattered on the steel frame of a display case. Connal employed Milo’s long limbs with the grace of a dancer as he brought the cricket bat around in a blow that sent the creature sprawling almost the length of the room. “You are a hero to thousands, Boudicca!” he shouted as two more of the bog men attacked.

  And a cautionary tale to thousands more, thought Clare.

  “You avenged the shame brought upon us by the Romans,” he panted, parrying sword strikes as they came at him.

  “I have brought more shame upon my people than the Romans ever could have,” Boudicca snarled. “I sacrificed my honour. Mine … my daughters’ … our entire tribe’s.” Tears, unheeded, welled up in her empty eyes and spilled down her cheeks. “So many ghosts hang upon my shoulders. Their voices haunt my sleep …”

  “I tell you again: you are a hero to many, Boudicca—” Connal whirled, and with a solid, sickening thump, smacked another bog man on the back of what passed for his head. The creature went down but struggled up again almost immediately. Connal couldn’t keep it up forever. Clare had to do something.

  As long as Connal could keep Boudicca talking she had a chance to get close. She just had to find a way to sneak over to where Boudicca stood, across the room and next to a staircase.

  Clare ducked back behind the partition. “Mags,” she whispered, “is there some other way I can get to that staircase?”

  Maggie nodded quickly. “Go back down this one and through to the end of the medieval exhibit. There’s a statue of an armoured horse and rider. It’s just beyond that. You can’t miss it.”

  “Good. You and Al should stay behind this wall. If Boudicca hits that button I don’t want you anywhere near Morholt when he meets his explody doom.” It suddenly occurred to her that she was giving her aunt orders. And Maggie was taking them without hesitation.

  Without much hesitation, that is. “Clare, wait! It’s far too dangerous. Your mother will never forgive me if I let anything happen to you.”

  “You didn’t see the bill for cleaning the baby grand piano after the party, Mags. She’ll probably look the other way. Al, stay with her.” Clare kissed her aunt swiftly on the cheek and took off back down the staircase before Maggie could stop her.

  Clare tore through the fourth level gallery, bounded up the far stairs, and poked her head around the corner. Connal must have disarmed one of the bog warriors, because now he and Boudicca were savagely going at it in a duel of flashing, ringing blades.

  Boudicca had clipped the detonator to her belt—the red and green lights blinked steadily—but with all that lethal steel swinging around, there was no way Clare could get to it. Just then Connal looked over to where she was crouched. Their eyes locked—and for a flashing instant Clare thought she saw Milo gazing out at her. He smiled and, with his next swing, left himself wide open for a counterstrike. Boudicca saw the opening and lunged viciously, her sword slicing across his flank. Clare gasped and her brain screamed “NO!” as blood sprayed from the wound. In paralyzed horror she watched as Connal folded around Boudicca’s over-extended weapon, wrenched it from her grasp, then staggered back and fell to his knees. He’d left himself vulnerable on purpose for a chance to disarm the queen.

  “Milo!”

  Clare heard Al scream her cousin’s name from the other end of the long room. As Boudicca’s head snapped around, Clare leaped at her from behind and
grabbed hold of the torc. In that instant the detonator exploded in a shower of sparks and acrid smoke and Clare felt herself starting to shimmer. But in the moment before the lightning flash hit that would send her hurtling back through time, she wrenched the gold collar off Dr. Jenkins’s neck and threw herself backward, flinging the torc down the length of the hall. It hit a marble pillar with a resounding clang, harmonizing monstrously with the skirling howl that tore from the throat of the woman who had once been Dr. Ceciley Jenkins. And Boudicca the queen.

  Clare hit the marble floor hard, sliding on one hip and skidding to a stop in a pile of glass shards at the base of a display case. All around her lay the defeated spirit warriors, deflating into piles of leathery skin and once more as empty of life as they’d been for the past two thousand years. A soft, whispering noise escaped from the desiccated windpipe of the tattooed abomination that had once been Macon, proud Iceni warrior. It sounded almost like a sigh of relief.

  Clare turned her gaze away from the withered remains and hunched there paralyzed with horror as, in front of her, the possessed curator threw her arms up, clawing at the air with grasping fingers. Her ear-shattering screams built to a monstrous crescendo and swirling, sourceless light painted the walls and ceiling of the museum hall in red and purple swaths. Blood rushed madly beneath Dr. Jenkins’s too-pale skin—a network of crimson maplines pulsing with fiery sparks. Her rigid limbs flailed wildly and the faint, flickering outline of a wild-eyed, red-haired Iceni queen appeared, superimposed on Dr. Jenkins’s form—a phantom image in a double-exposure photograph. The ghostly apparition cried out in tandem with the cursed archaeologist and then it flashed like lightning and faded … and the screams died on Dr. Jenkins’s lips. Her eyes rolled back white in her head and she collapsed to the floor in a senseless heap.

  26

  A wash of dim blue shadows and silence settled once more on the museum hall.

  Clare scrambled over to where Milo had fallen onto his side, his long body still curled around Boudicca’s sword. He was panting and shaking, his hair plastered to his forehead and hanging in front of his eyes. Clare rolled him gently over onto his back and pulled the weapon out from under him. The long, shallow gash across his chest seeped blood through his Superman T-shirt, but it was nowhere near as bad as Clare had feared. His gaze was unfocused—wild still in the aftermath of the fight—but even as she watched, Clare saw that he was drifting back toward a lucid state.