Every Never After (27 page)

“Aw, damn!” she exclaimed. “No, no,
no
, Milo! No!” She started frantically searching for her shoes. “You need to ‘take care’ of something?
This
is what you meant? Argh! Stupid, overprotective man!”

The image on the screen looked just like the unseen, labyrinthine track that Milo had walked on Bartlow High Hill weeks earlier, when he led Clare and Al and Maggie on a journey through a mystical gateway and into the heart of Boudicca’s tomb.

He’s trying to do it again,
Clare thought.
Without me!

Only
this
time, in
this
place, the path would tunnel not into a tomb, but right through the walls of the space–time continuum itself. Milo must have thought he’d open up a doorway himself, walk in, get Al, and walk back out again. And for all Clare knew, he could probably do it, too. If he still had a nogginful of Druid brain, he could. And if the latest screenshot was any indication, he was already halfway there. She’d have to hurry. With one foot in a found shoe—the wrong foot, sadly—Clare glanced back at the screen and stalled for an instant, her thoughts frozen in apprehension.

Then something solid hit the window beside her head. She jumped, tripped over the corner of her bed—almost doing a header through the casement—and looked down into the little garden courtyard. Her heart leapt: a figure with dark hair was standing below. But when she saw the gleam of light reflected in twin circles—the lenses of a pair of ruby goggles—she huffed an impatient sigh.

Clare ran, mono-shod, downstairs and then hauled Piper Gimble back up to her room. When she showed her the screen-cap progression, the other girl frowned worriedly and then pulled her phone out of one of the many pockets of her cargo pants. Even
that,
Clare thought fleetingly, kind of reminded her of Morholt, with his ridiculously multi-pocketed jumpsuit. But she decided to hold that observation in reserve, depending on how much the other girl annoyed her.

“Look,” Piper said, handing over the phone. “I remembered that I’d taken a picture of the last page of Morholt’s diary not long after I’d first read it all the way through. The page with the numbers on it. I did it ages ago and forgot it was there. I once thought of scanning the whole diary just in case, but the binding is too fragile to stand it. Still, I was intrigued by the last page and used to try to figure it out every now and then. Never did. If it
is
a code, it’s a pretty sophisticated one.”

Clare snorted. “Yeah.
Or
… a painfully stupid one. Same diff in this case, I guess.”

“So I was right!” Piper narrowed her eyes at Clare. “You
do
know something about this. I thought so from the way you acted in the shop. You’re terrible at nonchalance, you know.”

Clare sighed, gazed heavenward, and wished the Chuck and Di letter opener wasn’t buried in the bottom of her shoulder bag. Shaking off the urge, she turned the phone to horizontal view and zoomed in.

“Piper. Get me a pencil and a piece of paper.”

At the top of the page, the words were still in Morholt’s ostentatious handwriting:

The writing scrawled off the page. Clare could almost hear herself saying “Gimme that!” as she snatched the thing out of Morholt’s hands to write herself her coded note. Then she zoomed in on the dirt-smudged spiral doodle at the bottom of the page. But even close up it was still just a squiggle. No hidden meaning there, at least none she could decipher. Probably she’d just been trying to
occupy herself to keep from punching Stu in the face. She turned her attention once more to the lines of numbers.

Beneath Morholt’s truncated sentence, Clare already knew the first line: her self-instruction not to tell Milo she could read the code. Okay. So. She hadn’t. Wondering briefly if that had been a mistake, she started to work through the rest of the numbers. It took her almost no time at all, considering she hadn’t given a thought to the damn silly grade-school encryption in probably over a decade. If Al had been beside her she’d have made a quip that would let Clare know her best pal still thought she was a whole lot smarter than she gave herself credit for. Piper, on the other hand, just sat there silently, which kind of put a damper on Clare’s sense of accomplishment.

Once deciphered, the rest of Clare’s message to herself was brief and to the point:

Blood? What?
Clare wished she’d been
slightly
less cryptic with herself …

The last line in the code had only one word:

Clare finished the tail on the “y” on the word “hurry” and put the pencil down, a slight tremor in her hand. She glanced up at Piper, who’d been reading over her shoulder as she wrote. The two girls looked at each other, and then looked back down at the page for a brief, gobsmacked moment. Clare reached for her other shoe. Then she reached for her cell phone and made the excruciating call to Maggie.

And then, together, she and Piper bolted for the door.

19

M
arcus hadn’t even bothered to order her manacled this time. And, as Allie grudgingly admitted to herself, there was really no need. Even if she managed to escape from the camp again, where on earth would she go? She’d wind up bog bait inside of two days. Despite her furious, less-than-kind words to him before he’d left her at the tent, she had to hand it to young used-to-be Mark O’Donnell for having managed to survive as long as he had before Postumus found him. Allie doubted she could have done the same. Three weeks? Not a chance.

As the tent flap closed behind her sentry, she sank down on the neatly made camp cot in the corner. Feeling sorry for herself, sorry for what she’d said to Marcus, and sorry that she couldn’t help the praefect out of what was surely to become a fairly dire situation, she curled up into a ball and drifted off into a fitful doze, emotionally exhausted to the point of numbness.

Clare,
she thought as she nodded off,
I know you’re trying. You have to be. I’ll wait, okay? I’ll wait right here. For as long as I can. Patience. Virtue.

And in the back of her mind, she could almost hear Clare’s voice answer back: “Patience. Shove it. I’m working on it, pal …”

Okay,
Allie thought, a half-smile forming on her lips,
she’s working on it.

She must have still been smiling when Marcus woke her up after what seemed a very short while later.

“Nice dream?” he asked, crouching down beside the bed where she lay.

Allie surreptitiously checked for drool before she pushed herself up onto her elbows, blinking blearily. “Um,” she answered. “If it was, it wasn’t about this place …” She hadn’t meant it as a personal insult, but the second she said it she saw Marcus’s mouth flatten into a line and his brows come together in a frown.

Gawd, not again. Rude much, McAllister?

She sighed. “Look … I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

“No,” he cut in before she could really apologize. “Don’t. You’re right.” He stood and paced a few steps from the bed as she sat up. When he turned back, his expression was rueful. “I don’t think …I mean, I haven’t been very polite to you.”

That’s an understatement,
Allie thought.
Manacles? Not really up there in Miss Manners’s Top Ten Polite Things.

“What you said to me … it made me think. Which is something the Legion tries to breed out of its soldiers.” A kind of half-smile dimpled one cheek, and he looked away. “Allie, forgive me. Between the two of us,
I’m
the one who should be sorry, not you. I know who—or at least, what—you are. Any of the others, Junius or the praefect … they’d be well within their rights to think wrongly of you. To think you were the enemy. You don’t know what they’ve been through, these men. Half the tents in this camp are empty. We can’t leave this place, we can’t stay. They’ll win in the end. But that’s neither here nor there. When I first saw you … and I
did
see you appear, just as Junius said, I knew with one glance that you were like me. And because of that if nothing else, I should have been kinder to you.”

As Allie listened, her eyes traced his profile, and for an instant she could see the shadow of the boy he’d been—a ghost-image cast over the features of the young man he’d become.

“I guess part of it was just … I thought
I
was the only one. I thought I’d always be the only one. I never expected to see anyone from my world ever again. You were right. In a lot of ways, I
have
made myself a life here and I was afraid that …”

“That I’d blow your cover.”

“For lack of any other way to put it.” His mouth quirked in that half-smile again. “Yes. But I also remember what it felt like when I first got here. The fear. The bewilderment. Even just the lack of creature comforts.”

“Well, I have to admit,” Allie said, “I’d probably be willing to go one on one with a scathach for a hairbrush and a breath mint.”

“That’s … why I’m here now.” The other half of Marcus’s mouth turned up, making it a full smile—if a still-wary one. “You get used to things like no showers and no shampoo after a while, but … it’s tough. At first. I thought you might appreciate an opportunity to … um … freshen up.”

Allie blinked up at him. This really wasn’t the conversation she’d been expecting.

“I’m not staying here,” she said quietly. “I’m going to find a way home.”

“I know.” He raised one hand in a placating gesture. “I actually kind of don’t doubt that you will. But … in the meantime, I brought you this.”

He turned and Allie saw that he had a lidded box with him, like a square, shallow wicker basket. He brought it over and set it down beside her on the cot. Allie opened the lid. Inside were several folded lengths of silky cloth, dyed a rich midnight blue with an exquisitely embroidered silver border. There was also a hair comb that looked as if it was carved out of ivory or bone, some silver bangles (that would, unfortunately, slide right off her wrists, just as the manacles had), and a pair of dainty, lace-up leather sandals. She could smell lavender and saw a small linen bag that looked as though it contained toiletries.

Soap?
Oh dear god, how she longed for soap …

There were also a few green twigs, and several sprigs of spiky green leaves. She raised them to her nose. “Mint!” she exclaimed.

“It grows wild around here. I can show you how to make a kind of toothbrush by chewing on the ends of the twigs. You strip the bark off first and the end gets all fibrous—works surprisingly
well—especially using the mint. Not exactly up to hotel standards, but it’s the best I could do in a pinch.”

The best he could do? Allie almost started to cry at the kindness of the gesture. To distract herself, she reached out a hand to touch the fabric. It was smooth, almost slippery to the touch; it might even be actual silk. Allie marvelled at the skill that had gone into weaving such a thing, wondering for a moment where it had come from.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“It was made in a town in Crete famous for their cloth-making,” Marcus said as if reading her mind. “It belonged to Postumus’s wife. He kept a few of her things for the rare occasions when she’d visit him in the camps. He always travelled with a fresh stola and palla for her—that’s the long wrap the goes over the tunic dress. He gave them to me to give to you.”

Allie looked up at him warily. “Is this some kind of bribe?”

Marcus laughed. “More of a gift, with perhaps a touch of incentive tucked in. I mean, yes. He still thinks that maybe you can help him. And Postumus is an honourable man.”

“Isn’t his wife going to be a little miffed he’s passing around her stuff?”

“She’s dead.”

“I … oh.”

“There was a raid on their villa to the south of here three years ago. A Durotrigan band of rebels attacked the place not long after he found me. I’d met her only the week before, when I’d accompanied the praefect on his leave. His wife was a gracious lady. I think she wouldn’t mind at all.”

Allie blinked away the sudden shine of tears on her lashes.

“His troops mean everything to him. Allie … if you can help him break this curse—” Marcus stopped and rubbed a hand over the top of his head. “So, yeah. Maybe a bit of a bribe. But I also think he saw that
I
wanted to do something … nice for you.”

“You did? I mean … you do?”

“I really do. Like I said—I should have been kinder to you. Maybe I’m just rusty at talking to girls.” He ducked his head. “Hell … who am I kidding? Girls never talked to me in the first place. I have nothing to be rusty about. For that matter, guys never talked to me either. I wasn’t what you’d call one of the in crowd. I guess that was one of the reasons I was so excited about joining up with the Free Peoples. For the first time, I felt like I actually belonged. Sure—I mean, they were a bunch of other weirdos and misfits, but … it was belonging of a sort.”