As she crouched down over the duffle bags to double-check she’d packed everything, Clare came across the heavy canvas work gloves her aunt had given her. They were purple and red tartan, a tiny bird with a red rhinestone eye embroidered on each cuff. A raven. Maggie had special-ordered a custom-made pair for each of the girls. Al’s were exactly the same as Clare’s—except her tartan was black and grey—and she was just as thrilled that Maggie had been so thoughtful. Well, in Al’s case it might have been thoughtful. In Clare’s, it was careful. The merest touch of Clare’s bare skin against an ancient artifact could—and had, on more than one occasion—send her tumbling through a vortex to wind up back in the past. Hence the gloves. And long-sleeved T-shirts.
Maggie had witnessed firsthand her niece’s astonishing abilities and knew the potentially dire consequences. But, Clare suspected, Maggie also recognized that, for the first time in Clare’s young life, Clare was actually engaged—mentally, emotionally, one hundred percent invested in learning about something that didn’t come from a magazine or a mall—and Maggie, in her understated British sort of way, couldn’t be more thrilled. She really seemed to want this for Clare. And Clare sure as hell wanted it for herself. She wanted to do this. And she could do this.
Couldn’t she?
“What are you frowning about?” Al asked, misinterpreting why Clare was suddenly staring so intently at her gloves. “Glastonbury is a tourist town. There’s bound to be at least one nail salon in a five-mile radius of the place.”
“Well then I’ll be fine,” Clare snorted and stuffed the gloves back into her gear bag, ignoring the chill that had just crawled up her spine. “But unless you packed your own supply of Midnight Matrix Glossy Black, your manicure is toast, pal.”
Al’s standard mode of couture fell on the techno-ninja side of things—sleek and dark-hued. It had started out in middle school as a kind of silent rebellion against her mother’s arty-farty, elegant-whacko bohemian style. Clare was never sure if the rebellion had worked or not—it was so hard to tell what, if anything, Mrs. McAllister noticed about her daughter—but Al had grown into the look and now wore it like a second skin over her own alabaster-pale flesh. And the dark hair made her grey eyes look super cool and mysterious. Clare had been briefly amused, wondering how Al was going to cope with the required sunhat. But then Al had surprised her by doffing a beat-up, black suede cowboy hat with a hand-rolled brim and silver-coin band that somehow not only worked with her streamlined black attire but actually complemented it.
It was a striking contrast to Clare’s own low-slung jeans, butterfly-sparkly long-sleeved T-shirt, and Aussie outback–style chapeau perched atop the long, loose waves of her tawny locks, but then she and Al had always seemed like the odd couple—when in reality they were closer than sisters. It was one of the reasons why Clare was, impending Milo-lessness notwithstanding, really glad Maggie had set up the dig gig. She’d had twinges of unease where Al was concerned, simply because Milo was so much a part of the picture now, and—as much as she knew Al adored her cousin— Clare didn’t want her to feel any third-wheeliness. Their friendship was way too important to risk that. Clare and Al were like each other’s shadow. They knew each other’s thoughts. They spoke the same language—
“We’re off to Glastonbury!” Al suddenly exclaimed, heaving her gear bag into the van. “Hic iacet Arturus rex quondam rexque futurus!”
Okay … maybe scratch that last one.
“Al? Do I have to Heimlich you?” Clare asked.
“No. Why?”
“You kinda sounded like you were choking there.”
“Very funny.” Al sniffed in mock hurt. “For your information and enlightenment, that was Latin for—”
“‘Here lies Arthur, The Once and Future King,’” Clare said airily.
Al gaped at her.
“Oh c’mon. Who doesn’t know Latin?”
Clare had a tough time keeping a straight face for the few seconds her best and brainiest friend puzzled. But then Al blinked and snorted in amusement.
“You totally hacked my tablet password.”
“I totally hacked your password.” Clare nodded, grinning. “And spent a few quality minutes speed-reading all the pages you faved about Glastonbury Tor—supposed resting place of King Arthur, possible interdimensional doorway, gateway to the netherworld, and general all-around hippie magnet.”
“Cheater.”
“Ingenious cheater.”
“Ingenious …” Al muttered. “Right. Okay. How’d you guess—”
“You bought yourself that thing as a reward for surviving the Time Monkey Shenanigans.” Clare shrugged. “‘Monkey’ was the second word I tried. Right after ‘time.’”
“Ugh. That obvious? I am the worst techno-sidekick ever.”
“Best,” Clare contradicted her. “I’m the only person in the world who would have figured that out. And anyway, remember how you boosted Morholt’s Bentley with, like, chewing gum and a paper clip?”
“More like with Bluetooth-enabled code decrypters and Milo’s cyber connections, but okay.” Al grinned. “I’ll cop to the amazingness of that feat. Do you remember how pissed he was for what we did to his precious luxury sedan?”
“Oh yeah. I think he vowed catastrophic revenge, didn’t he?”
“Pretty much.” Al shook her head. “Probably a good thing Stu’s stuck somewhere two thousand years in the past. He’s gonna have a tough time making our lives miserable from way back then.”
“Yeah … I think you’re probably right.”
But Clare frowned at the thought and felt a twinge of guilt. She hadn’t meant to let go of Boudicca’s torc during that last, inadvertent time-shimmer—with Morholt hanging on to it for dear greedy life—thereby stranding him with no way to get back to his own time. She felt bad for having let it happen. Then again, it was really Morholt’s own fault. He’d been trying to steal the torc. Again. And he’d bitten her. That was why she’d let go of the damned thing. Really. She hadn’t wanted to leave him stuck in the past—no matter how much of a poseur, super-villain-wannabe, self-serving jerk-ass he was. Still, she couldn’t help feeling she could have hung on just a little longer.
“Right then …” Maggie reappeared suddenly, stepping briskly through the front door of the townhouse and locking it behind her. “That’s the last of the gear, is it? Let’s get on the road, shall we? All those pot shards aren’t just going to lie around waiting for you to find them!”
The girls exchanged a glance.
“Well. I mean, yes,” Maggie conceded, “I rather suppose they are. Still.”
“It’s okay, Mags.” Clare grinned and piled into the back of the van, followed closely by Al. “We get it. Tally-ho. Time’s a-wastin’ and adventure waits for no girl.”
2
Allie was awoken by a sudden, bone-shaking jolt.
“Whoops!” Maggie yelped a bit as the van bounced on its suspension. “To the devil with these potholes!”
Startled to full conciousness, Allie sat up and glanced around, bleary-eyed and discombobulated by the bright sunshine that poured in through the windows of the van. She’d been dreaming of darkness. A blood-red moon. And … fire. And voices. Beside her, Clare was doing exactly the same thing. Well, dreaming, anyway. Allie didn’t have the faintest idea what about. She shook off her own unease at the fleeing dream sensations and poked Clare in the arm.
Clare snorted and rolled one eye open.
“You’re kinda drooling a little,” Allie pointed out. Then she yawned and stretched and said, “Are we there yet?”
“What are you, six?” Clare grinned and ran the edge of her sleeve around the corner of her mouth. “Of course we’re not there yet. We’ve only been on the road for—”
“Here we are!” Maggie announced, pulling off onto a side road.
“Um.”
“You were saying?” Allie asked Clare.
“I guess I was out longer than I thought.”
“Me too, pal,”
Allie nodded. “Guess time passes briskly in weirdo dreamland.”
Clare glanced at her sideways. “You had a weirdo dream?”
The way she said it made Allie glance back. “Yeah. You?”
“Yeah …”
“What was yours?”
Clare hesitated for a moment and then started to say something, but Maggie was already slowing the van and turning into a parking area bustling with people.
“Well, it’s not Bath, exactly,” Clare’s aunt said, referring to the town with the magnificent Roman ruins not too far to the north of where they were. “But it’s a good place to get your feet wet!”
Allie snorted in amusement at the wordplay, but Clare just groaned.
“Tell you later,” Clare said, brushing the dream chat aside.
Allie didn’t press her on it. She had a feeling she knew the general subject matter of Clare’s dreams anyway—fifty percent Milo, fifty percent ancient Britain. And when Clare sighed a little wistfully, Allie figured there must have been at least a little Milo in there somewhere. She knew Clare was trying not to miss him already and she grinned a bit to herself, knowing something—for once—that Clare didn’t, and feeling a little smug about it.
AT THE DIG SITE’S DESIGNATED STAGING AREA, their van was approached by a barrel-chested man with—Clare had a hard time not staring—an honest-to-god handlebar moustache. It was irongrey and bushy and had been waxed into curly points that stuck out an inch on either side. He also wore a pith helmet, a Nehru jacket, jodhpurs, and riding boots, with a bright red scarf tied up high on his neck. The dude looked like a safari guide or a liontamer. Or someone’s Halloween-party idea of what an archaeologist in the field should look like.
Maggie sighed audibly as the man walked toward them from the field beyond, her hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel for the briefest of moments.
“Wow,” Clare said, “that’s quite the sartorial statement.”
“Be polite now,” Maggie muttered out of the side of her mouth. “That’s Dr. Nicholas Ashbourne. I’ve known him since I was a student at Cambridge. And yes he dresses like he thinks he’s the reincarnation of bloody Howard Carter, but he’s also top in his field, and responsible for this entire dig. The Glastonbury Initiative is his brainchild. That means he is, in effect, your boss for the next several weeks.”
Bloody Howard Who now? Clare was about to ask, but Al had already insta-Wikipediaed. She held out her tablet to Clare, who scanned the article and its accompanying grainy black-and-white photos.
Ah, she thought, so bloody Howard was the guy who discovered King Tut’s Tomb. And bloody Nicky Ashbourne thinks he’s a bloody fashion plate to be bloody emulated.
She giggled silently to herself as she mentally employed the Britishisms. Clare got a distinct kick out of the idiosyncrasies of Maggie’s Queen’s English, especially when her aunt was annoyed— when everything became “bloody this” and “bloody that.” Then it suddenly occurred to Clare that perhaps she was fixating a bit unhealthily on the use of the word “bloody.” Insofar as she herself had once been the victim of a blood curse, she should probably stop doing that.
And speaking of curses …
“Wait a second,” she said warily, handing back the tablet. “Wasn’t there a curse or something to do with that whole Tut thing?”
Al shrugged. “It’s been largely debunked.”
Clare was unconvinced. “‘Largely,’” she said dryly.
“What are you worried about?” Al gestured out the window, drawing Clare’s attention back to the scenery that rolled away to the horizon in lush emerald waves. “This isn’t exactly Egypt.”
“Maybe not.” Clare shrugged. “And yet I remain wary of tombs. And curses.” She grinned sardonically. “Bloody hell, I can’t think why …”
Maggie reached back and patted Clare’s knee. “Don’t swear, dear. And Alice is right. There are no tombs here. No bodies. Despite its reputation for spookiness—and despite what I’ve told you about what happened here all those years ago—I don’t think you have anything to worry about. In all the years Nicky’s grad students have been poking about in the fields around Glastonbury, they’ve never found so much as a toe bone. It’s definitely no tomb. Alas, it’s no treasure trove either. This is strictly a training exercise and, for the most part, you girls will be working in what amounts to a midden pit.”
“A what now?” Clare asked.
“A refuse dump.”
“Gross.”
“A very old refuse dump. Nothing fresh, nothing squashy, worry not.”
“And we’ll be digging what there?”
“Realistically?” Maggie raised an eyebrow. “Mostly pot shards.”
“Oh. Yippee.” Clare circled one finger in the air. “My very favourite.”
“Trust me. You’ll be the toast of the dig if you manage to uncover something as grand as a pitted coin.”
“I love how action-packed you make this sound.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, duck.” Maggie grinned a bit evilly.
“The pursuit of the past is abundantly tedious in the main, shot through with brief flashes of glorious boredom and steeped in the thrill of repetitive dullness.”
Clare grinned back. “You’re not talking me out of this.”
“Is that what I was doing?” Maggie said mildly.
Clare leaned over the seatback and gave her aunt a peck on the cheek. “Yes. Now stop worrying. I have the gloves.”
“And she has me,” Al chimed in. “I won’t let anything happen to her. Don’t worry, Perfesser. I’ll keep an eye on Shimmer Girl.”
Clare sputtered a bit. “You don’t have to!” she protested. “I will not touch anything. I’m not gonna shimmer. I promise. I—”
At that moment Dr. Ashbourne reached the van and tapped enthusiastically on the driver’s side window with one calloused knuckle. Maggie rolled down the glass.
“Nicky!” she greeted Walrus Face with a bright, only slightly brittle smile. “So lovely to see you.”
“Ah, Maggie, old chum,” Nicky rumbled through his ’stache. He ducked his pith-helmeted head into the darkened confines of the van and peered about, squinting at the girls’ faces under the brims of their hats. “Marvellous, marvellous. I see you’ve brought us a delightful duo of trowel monkeys!”
“Trowel monkeys?” Clare mouthed to Al, whose expression of arid disapproval was so hilarious it almost made Clare laugh in the renowned archaeologist’s fuzz-bedecked face.
“I did indeed,” Maggie said. “They’re all yours. And no need to be gentle with them on my account.”
“Marvellous!” Nicky enthused.
The girls would fairly quickly discover that this was Nicholas Ashbourne’s favourite saying. He could infuse it with all sorts of different meanings: everything from “Oh, you found a coin! Marvellous!” to “Oh, it’s raining. Marvellous …”
Clare thought briefly about another archaeologist, Dr. Ceciley Jenkins, who at that very moment was lying in a bed in a psych ward back in London (after having wilfully courted possession by the enraged spirit of Boudicca, the Iceni warrior queen), and wondered if being an eccentric—or even an out-and-out loon—was some kind of prerequisite for becoming an archaeologist. Doctors Jenkins and Ashbourne made Maggie look positively sane in comparison, and yet, growing up, Clare had always thought of her aunt as definitely on the nutty side of the party-snacks table. She wondered if she herself would wind up in that same bowl one day.
I hope I’m a cashew.
And with that thought, she’d already pretty much proved her own hypothesis. Oh well, nuts or not, it was Bloody Nicky’s show now. Maggie was headed back to London later that evening and on the morrow—at a no-doubt obscenely early hour—Clare and Al would be put to work in the trenches. Literally. But for the rest of the day, they had a free pass to play tourist and go exploring.
“First stop …” Clare said as they left Maggie and Ashbourne chatting awkwardly by the van, “… the Magical M
ystery Tor!” And then she broke into a fairly decent rendition of the Beatles tune as, together, she and Al headed off toward the hill.
THE TOR WAS A LONG, wedge-shaped hump of land that rose out of a sea of rolling green fields to loom over the surrounding countryside like some kind of monstrous sentinel. From the top of the hill, the view was spectacular. To the north, on a good day, you could see clear across the Somerset Levels—the rich farmland that had been reclaimed from swamps and wetlands—and on to the Bristol Channel and South Wales. It was amazing, and climbing to the top, Clare could easily imagine what it must have been like back in the days of the Celtic tribes, where it would have been almost entirely surrounded by lakes and marshes except for a few tracts of higher ground.
A series of ridges, like shallow terraces, wound around the sides of the hill in an ascending spiral that led, like a labyrinthine path, to the top where a single stone tower—all that remained of a medieval church called St. Michael’s—pointed up into the air like a stone finger. For some reason the Tor reminded Clare of Bartlow Hills, the final resting place of Boudicca and the culminating site of Clare’s aforementioned time-travel adventures. Glastonbury had the same kind of feeling, only amplified. Even on that bright, sunny afternoon, it still seemed as if the hill lay like a slumbering dragon, shrouded in mystery, forbidding. Or foreboding.
Probably both, Clare thought, a little hazy on the distinction. As she and Al reached the top of the great hill, Clare had to admit that, even though she was totally winded and sweaty and probably flushed and blotchy from the climb, Glastonbury Tor was a pretty incredible place. And it was made all the more incredible by the sudden, totally unexpected sight of Milo McAllister, who stood at the edge of the summit plateau, a pair of sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, scanning the lay of the land.
Clare immediately forgot all about her sweaty, blotchy exhaustion. Even from a distance, his long, lean build and the way the sunshine lit the dark gold of his hair made him look like some kind of Greek—or was that Geek—god, feet apart, one hand shading his brow …
Every Never After Page 2
