Every Never After

by Lesley Livingston

  “You’re not hallucinating. You’re just … you.”

  Clare didn’t know whether that was meant to be reassuring or not.

  When they reached the spot where she’d left Al less than two hours earlier, the field was utterly empty. Not even a grumpy gradstudent supervisor anywhere to be seen. Clare slowed to a stop on the lip of the trench where she and Al had been working, directly under the shadow of the Tor where the hillside merged into the field below.

  “She’s here somewhere,” Milo said again, sounding even less convinced. “And she’s fine. Maybe she’s found herself a grad student to crush on. Or be crushed on by.”

  “What?” Clare said absently, turning in a full circle. “You mean all those ruggedly intellectual-looking types always offering to lend Al their vernier calipers?”

  Milo, his mouth quirking in a half-smile, seemed reasonably impressed with Clare’s correct use of terminology. “That’s exactly what I mean. You’re not the only geek bait around here, you know,” he said wryly. “And I did actually see a couple of the dig guys giving Allie the eye the other day. Is it beyond the realm of possibility to think she might have noticed? And maybe … reciprocated interest?”

  “I guess not …” Clare muttered, barely restraining herself from turning over rocks in the field to see if Al was hiding under one.

  Frankly, she found the idea of Al ditching her and Milo to go make out with a history PhD student—and more to the point, not telling Clare about it during their late-night, post-dig gab sessions—even more disturbing than a random, unexplained disappearance. Then again, Clare had been preoccupied. Maybe she’d just missed the signals. Did that make her a bad friend? Was Al really off somewhere canoodling with a stubbly, sun-bronzed archaeology nerd?

  “Maybe you’re right,” she sighed. “I just—”

  Clare stopped abruptly at the look on Milo’s face.

  Something had caught his eye and his smile had vanished instantly. Clare followed his gaze but couldn’t tell what he was looking at. At first. And then she saw it, too: Al’s shiny new tablet lying face down in the dust of the shallow trench where she’d been working. A cold hand of fear closed around Clare’s throat. You’d practically have to cut Al’s hands off to get her to relinquish her new techno-toy.

  And then beat her senseless with those same severed hands to get her to leave it face down in the dirt!

  For a second Clare feared that was exactly what had happened … and then realized that it was only Al’s gloves lying on the ground, not her actual appendages. But that moment of relief was followed by a crushing surge of panic as Milo crouched down and picked up the tablet. He knew just as well as Clare did that his cousin didn’t go anywhere without her tech. Not willingly. He pushed the tablet at Clare and ran to the edge of the trees.

  “Allie?” he called out, alarm in his voice. “Allie! Where are you?”

  Clare looked down at the screen in her hands. It was cool to the touch, so she had no way of knowing how long it had been in sleep mode. She called up the password screen. Hoping desperately that Al hadn’t changed it since Clare had figured it out, she entered 6-6-6-5-3-9—numbers corresponding to the letters that made up the word MONKEY. When the tablet glowed to life she checked to see what Al had been doing with it last. It was set to video-camera mode, and Clare called up the last clip Al had shot.

  “Hey! Okay, all you dig-diggers out there in Cyberlandia, this is your friendly neighbourhood Al-Mac out here on day three of the Glastonbury Dig, and I’m back atcha with another dispatch from the field …”

  Al’s familiar voice tumbled cheerfully out of the little speaker. Her grinning face, with its newly acquired adorable smattering of freckles across her nose, filled the screen.

  Two minutes and fifty-six seconds later, according to the counter on the video clip, Milo was still hollering for his cousin. Clare didn’t bother calling out. She knew what had happened. And she knew—with a certain, sinking horror—that Al was nowhere in the near vicinity.

  Or, more accurately, nowhen near.

  Moving like a zombie, slow and unthinking and full of dread, Clare traced a path on the trajectory dictated by what she’d seen in the video. And there it was, lying in the grass—the thing she thought she’d seen in the video.

  Clare heard Milo come up behind her. “What the hell?” he murmured.

  Clare nudged the skull with the toe of her sneaker.

  In the video, she’d seen Al take off her gloves—WTH!! Why did you take off your gloves?!—and work an object free of the ground. She’d seen Al fall out of frame as she tugged the thing free … and the bright light of day dimming and reddening, washing over the empty scene from the direction where Al had rolled before the tablet tipped over on its face and stopped recording.

  Milo walked back to the trench and knelt down beside Al’s field kit. Clare nudged the skull again, its rounded bone surface a weathered, bronzey colour. The touch of Clare’s shoe sent it rolling toward Milo. He reached out toward it and Clare howled at him: “DO NOT TOUCH! What are you—crazy?”

  Milo paused, silently raised an eyebrow at her, and held up the long thin dowel of the wooden paintbrush he’d plucked from Al’s kit. He very gently prodded the skull until it turned over, exposing the underside where the unfortunate ex-owner’s spinal column would have attached.

  Clare wondered what had happened to whoever this had been.

  Who had this been?

  Then she remembered Connal, the Druid warrior prince she’d encountered during her shimmer trips, saying something about the fierce tribes to the west. She grew instantly frantic: would Al have found herself among a tribe of rather less friendly Britons than Clare had? And by “friendly” she meant a tribe in which one of its members—that very same Druid prince—had held her at sword point more than once. In fact, he’d almost lopped her head off before she’d been able to convince him otherwise. She stared at the dirt-encrusted undercarriage of the disembodied skull.

  Holy crap …

  Al was in a world of trouble. And it was Clare’s fault.

  Clare knew she’d been neglecting her best friend. She knew Al was feeling odd-man-out, and yet she’d still left her alone and gone blithely on her merry, Milo-happy way. Now Al was gone.

  “This is all my fault,” Clare moaned half to herself.

  “Hey …” Suddenly Milo was there, his arms wrapped around her. “This is not your fault and Allie is not your responsibility. If anything, she’s mine. Don’t worry—I’ll be the one her mother kills when she doesn’t make it back to Toronto at the end of the summer.”

  “That’s hardly encouraging. And don’t say that.” She smacked him on the chest with the flat of her palm. “She’s coming home. Not at the end of summer … now. Today.”

  Before Milo could stop her, she knelt down and scooped up the skull bare-handed. The hollow-shadowed, eyeless thing seemed to stare deep into Clare’s own head. Her vision seemed to tunnel, fire licking around the periphery, and she went rigid, expecting at any second to shimmer back to wherever Al had gone. Nothing happened. At least, nothing on the order of shimmering.

  Only … ribbons of light and shadow raced over the field, cast by the day’s high-altitude, wind-driven clouds. Which wouldn’t have been the least bit out of the ordinary … if there’d actually been any high-altitude, wind-driven clouds. There weren’t. The sky was a bright, unbroken blue.

  “Aw, crap,” Milo muttered, looking up into the sky and then down at the ground where the bands of shadows streamed past, confused apprehension on his handsome face. Something odd was happening, that much was certain. But it wasn’t something odd that was also bringing Al back.

  Awash with sudden despair, Clare handed Milo the skull. She struggled against the urge to give in to the burgeoning panic working its way up from the depths of her stomach and into her throat.

  “I have to bring her home, Milo. I have to be Al’s anchor.” But the realization was inescapable. And the more Clare thought about it, t
he more she feared the plain truth of the matter. “I just don’t know how to make that happen.”

  8

  This couldn’t be happening.

  Clare never had anything even remotely this crazy bad happen to her! Allie thought and was instantly aware that this was in no way accurate. But she was terrified. And panicky hyperbole, she decided, was a valid stress response given her current situation. So she went with it.

  Sure—a Druid had attacked Clare and almost cut her throat, Allie continued silently in that vein, but he’d been gorgeous and had made up for it with kissing!

  No hyperbole there. And, really? Clare had never been thrown in irons! She’d only had to help Comorra impersonate a goddess (granted, at considerable risk to her own life and limb), but ultimately that had worked out just fine. Thanks in large part to the fact that Allie had left her well stocked with useful objects like glowsticks and road flares and pocket lighters. What had Clare done for her? Nothing! Allie had been Clare’s anchor. Her homing beacon. Her way home when things got too hairy.

  “Things are hairy, Clare!” Allie shouted at the night sky as the blacksmith bolted a shackle to her wrist by the light of his glowing forge. “Way too hairy! Now would be a good time for a recall!”

  The Legion blacksmith—who, incidentally, rather closely resembled the cave troll that attacks the heroes of the Fellowship in the Mines of Moria back in the first Lord of the Rings movie— just rolled one beady eye at her in incomprehension and attached the shackle to her other wrist. Even Clare’s blacksmith had been cooler than Allie’s. He’d been artistic. And a Druid. He had created magic—real magic—and objects of beauty and power. Allie wondered if the brute standing in front of her with the hammer even cared about the quality of his work. She doubted it. He’d barely even glanced at her as he’d hammered the irons shut. At least he’d aimed well enough not to accidentally pulverize her hands into salsa, but Allie chalked that up to blind luck.

  He grunted to Junius that his task was finished and the soldier prodded Allie with the butt of his spear once more. She spun around and shot out a glare that actually made him back off half a step. But then he set his jaw and, grabbing a handful of her shirt material, half-dragged her away from the smith’s forge toward the tent alleys.

  The chains felt as heavy as bowling balls tied to Allie’s wrists. They pulled her off balance, and she stumbled and fell to her knees. For a moment all she wanted to do was stay there. But Junius picked her up and shoved her forward, down a narrow lane toward a tent guarded by two sentries. The flap doorway was lit by the sullen smoky flares of a pair of torches in a stand. Another shove and she was through the flap. Allie found herself standing in the pitch-dark confines of a prisoners’ tent. She could hear the breathing and rustling of others in the near vicinity. The clank and hiss of chains. She didn’t know how many others were in there, and she wasn’t anxious to find out.

  Shuffling her feet, trying not to hyperventilate from fear, Allie backed herself into a corner as far away from her fellow captives as she could get. With her spine up against a corner tent pole, she sank down to the cold ground and pulled her knees in tight to her chest, contemplating how on earth she’d come to this.

  She’d totally been joking.

  The whole “skeletal remains” thing? Joking!

  What didn’t the cosmos understand about that?

  Frankly, she hadn’t been particularly keen to unearth anything even remotely resembling human remains. Let alone exactly resembling. Honestly, Clare’s bog bodies—and there’d been thirteen of those dudes—had been more than enough human remains to last Allie a lifetime. And yet? She’d had the audacity to joke about it. Blog Buddies. Skel-e-mail Remains.

  Ha ha, very funny. Stupid irony.

  She should have been at least a touch reverential. Especially considering everything she and Clare had experienced since setting foot in Britain, with all of its history and mystery and strange, mystical power. But that was in crystal-clear hindsight, and unless she had some sort of time machine—okay, less funny—there wasn’t much she could do about it. With the weight of the iron manacles dragging at her wrists and her spirit, there wasn’t much she could do about anything. Allie rested her head on her forearms and finally allowed silent tears to slide out from under her eyelids as she wept herself into a forlorn, exhausted sleep.

  CLARE WISHED SHE WERE HOME. Back in Toronto, even back in London. Anywhere else. She wished Maggie was there. The last time something like this happened, Clare had gambled on her aunt. Not only on Maggie’s willingness to believe wild declarations of magic and time travel and nefarious thievery, but on her ability to help sort the whole mess out. Clare could really use Maggie’s mad skills in that regard.

  But her calls to Maggie’s office at the museum, to Maggie’s cell phone, and to Maggie’s flat all went unanswered. That wasn’t particularly unusual—Clare’s aunt wasn’t one of those tethered-totechnology types, and a phone conversation with her the previous evening—back when things at the dig site were proceeding along quite nicely without any hint of paranormal disruption, thank you very much—had most likely assured Maggie that, well, things at the dig site were proceeding along quite nicely without any hint of paranormal disruption, thank you very much. Therefore, she was no doubt going about her business as usual, which for that week, Clare knew, meant an international conference of historians at which Maggie was keynote speaker and distinguished panelist. And, as Al or Milo would no doubt say, out of communicator range for the duration.

  So Mags was out of the picture, help-wise. That left the only other authority figure in the vicinity: moustachioed, “marvellous,” bon-vivant-busybody-in-a-pith-helmet Bloody Nicky Ashbourne. Only … Clare was understandably reluctant to tell the dig’s supervising honcho that one of his precious trowel monkeys had vanished, potentially mystically so. So far Bloody Nick had left Milo and the girls pretty much to their own devices. Clare was perfectly well aware that the only reason they were even allowed within a half-mile radius of the excavation was that her aunt had pulled strings and called in favours. Fine. But now she had to put her faith in a man she knew almost nothing about. Still, maybe something like this had happened before. Maybe Nicholas Ashbourne knew something about it. Either way, Clare needed help. She needed to get Al back.

  Which was why she now found herself sitting in a torturously uncomfortable folding camp chair outside the Glastonbury excavation project’s Command Central, waiting for Dr. Ashbourne to finish with a group of grad students so that she could inform him that Al had gone spatio-temporally AWOL and could he please offer some insights as to how to maybe retrieve her from the distant mists of time, thank you. Clare and Milo had been waiting for almost a quarter of an hour.

  Milo had spent the last several minutes on the phone. Something to do with … satellites. Maps.

  Hardly the time, Clare thought to herself irritably.

  But she supposed it was Milo’s way of occupying himself while Dr. Ashbourne finished debriefing the PhD candidates who’d unearthed a small hoard of coins. As far as she could tell from the excited chatter drifting through the walls of the tent, the gaggle of grads had found, like, five or six of the things. This was apparently a significant find, and the whole camp was abuzz over it. Over pocket change.

  Whoop-dee-doo.

  Not like the grad students had discovered a mystical torc or, oh, say, Boudicca’s lost tomb—like Clare had—or unearthed, oh, say, an enchanted freaking skull or anything—like Al had. Clare and Al were way cooler. They’d found magic. Only, the more Clare thought about it, the more it seemed to her that, with what little she could tell from the video blog, there were certain discrepancies between her magic and Al’s.

  “It’s different this time …” she muttered to herself.

  Clare watched Milo as he paced back and forth, checking something on his phone’s display screen and talking to some computer guru hacker guy named Dan about something technically arcane. Sitting in her camp chair, Clare had
a white-knuckled grip on Al’s tablet, clutching it to her chest as if it were some sort of enchanted talisman. A looking glass or a magic mirror that she could peer into and see the future. Or the past …

  “Milo?”

  She tugged on his sleeve, trying to get his attention as he drifted past her. Whoever he was speaking to couldn’t possibly be of any use in finding Al and was thus deeply unimportant in that moment. And Clare desperately needed a sounding board to talk her way through her embryonic observations. Under any other circumstances, that sounding board would have been Al.

  “Milo?” she said again. “It’s different this time—”

  Milo nodded, stuck a finger in his free ear, and kept on pacing, leaving Clare to ponder theories darkly to herself.

  “For one thing?” she muttered. “It wasn’t me. I’m supposed to be the one with the whole Druid blood-curse thing happening. Not like I think I’m super-special or anything … just that it was my blood that got all tangled up in Llassar’s artifacts in the first place. Al was the one who always brought me back. I don’t know how to bring Al back. I’m not good with being the anchor. I’m not … grounded like she is.”

  “Clare—” Milo, having finally finished his call, sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

  “—And another thing,” Clare continued, “as far as I can figure it, Al didn’t touch anything metal. Nothing manmade. No extraspecial whammy-imbued time-trip trigger from the ingenious magical forge of Llassar the mystical Druid smith. There is no artifact. A skull is not something you can forge using someone else’s blood. I touched the skull and nothing happened. No shimmering. The only thing I’m getting out of all this is a migraine. And I think that’s just from stress. Stress is not magical.”

  “Clare—”