Every Never After (29 page)

He leaned down and kissed her again and Allie closed her eyes and melted completely into the sensation of his mouth pressed against hers and his strong hands kneading the silken folds of the stola close around her skin. Her arms drifted up to wrap around his neck and she tilted her head back, coming up for air only after a very long time. She felt as if she was in a dream, staring up into his face, seeing the smile—the real, relaxed, full and happy smile—curving his lips.

“We should get going back soon …” he murmured, not taking his eyes off her and seemingly unwilling to heed his own suggestion. “It’ll be sundown in another half an hour …”

Allie noticed that the sky behind his head was already shading swiftly toward a deep purplish colour. But then she looked straight up. It wasn’t darkening because the sun was going down; rather, the sky was …
Splitting at the seams
seemed to be the best description her brain could come up with. The Tor shuddered beneath their feet, lightning flashing overhead in shades of orange and blue. Marcus looked up too and made an astonished sound when everything—the Tor, the trees, the very air itself—began wavering like a mirage.

Allie clung to Marcus, who wrapped his arms around her as the whole world suddenly started to shimmer, dissolving before their very eyes.

20

T
he breath heaved in and out of Clare’s lungs and she silently cursed last year’s decision to drop track and field as an elective. She was woefully out of shape. By the time she and Piper had broken into Milo’s hotel room (Piper’s shop had, apparently, amassed a collection of handy antique-lock-jimmying kits over the years), found the diary, and started back toward the Tor, Clare was already a bit gaspy. And by the time they hit the first of the hill’s terraces, her lungs were on fire.

So, it seemed, was the top of the Tor.

And Milo, just as she’d suspected, was already there.

As the two girls had approached the hill, they’d been amazed to see a faint, gleaming phosphorescence lighting up its terraces. Well, Piper had been amazed. Clare, who’d seen the same thing happen at Bartlow during the Shenanigans, mostly just felt queasy again. The gleaming trail was the visible remnant of the path Milo had walked to the top of the hill, unlocking the Tor’s dimensional portal as he went.

It had, from the looks of it, taken him quite some time. Clare’s crazy New Age landlady at the B&B had told her that walking the mazy, switchback path of Glastonbury Tor could take well over two and a half hours. Milo probably had a much better sense of the twists and turns—with all that Druid knowledge stuffed up his head, he could probably see the track as if it were laid out with
runway-marker lights—but still, he must have been at it since shortly after he’d sent her that text.

Clare and Piper didn’t have the luxury of time to follow the circuitous path. But because Milo had been opening up a gate to temporarily connect the past to the present, that wasn’t a problem. So the girls took the most direct, and significantly steeper, route. When they reached the top, what they saw was … incredible. Impossible.

Really freaking cool …

The whole top of the Tor was awash in blinding-bright swaths of shimmering rainbow light. Piper gasped and yanked her goggles down over her eyes. Clare, squinting against the glare herself, had to grudgingly admit that Piper’s eccentric eyewear fixation might, on occasion, have its advantages. Then she glanced back at the dark, peaceful valley below and felt an irony-tinged moment of sympathy for all the seekers, hippies, and shamanic wannabes who were tucked away in their beds or mellowing over a pint in the pub, oblivious to the staggering amount of mystic mojo currently on display atop their beloved overgrown molehill.

She knew perfectly well that they’d have severed a limb or two just for the experience. An experience that—rather less romantically inclined at that moment—Clare herself considered more of a large-scale paranormal nuisance than any kind of spiritual awakening.

The medieval St. Michael’s Tower ruin was only a faint, filmy shadow standing at the heart of the plateau. The four pillars that made up its corners were vague, transparent shapes surrounding the figure of Milo McAllister, who stood at the very centre of the square, barefoot, bare-chested—

Wait. What? Oh, hello …

—with his long arms flung out to the side and his face lifted to the sky. His deep blue eyes were wide and staring and his golden hair was blown back by a wind Clare couldn’t feel. There were markings on his arms and torso: swirling knotted designs painted in blue. The patterns seemed to almost writhe like snakes on the
surface of his skin. They also had the distracting side effect of emphasizing the muscles
beneath
his skin.

“Whoa,” Piper said, her jaw hanging open slightly. “He’s really kinda something, isn’t he?”

Clare suppressed the urge to snark. Milo
was
… really kinda something. Something incredibly, intensely precious to her in that moment. She knew why he was doing this. He was rescuing Al—so that Clare wouldn’t have to. But as sweet and noble a gesture as that was, for all his brains he hadn’t stopped to consider the fact that, if something went wrong and he got stuck in the past with Al and no way to get home, he would lose her anyway.

Well, not if Clare had anything to say about it.

Directly above Milo’s head, large swaths of sky were midday blue while others were indigo and starlight or crimson with sunset. Still others shone with the pale wash of predawn clouds tinged with pink. Shimmering, glowing cracks—like frozen spears of lightning stabbing down from the sky—appeared between the fragments, splitting the air into fractured shards of different realities.

A rumbling, shuddering sensation vibrated up through the soles of her shoes—and Clare suddenly realized that she and Piper and Milo weren’t the only ones on the Tor. Other figures were shimmering into view within the fragmented realities. On one side of the plateau Clare could clearly see Al, draped in some kind of long, flowing, toga-looking thing and wrapped in … wait.

Al is wrapped in the arms of a tall, muscly soldier-looking type?

Clare made a small, surprised “Uh-
wha
?” sound.

She almost called out Al’s name. But right then, off to the side, another rift opened up and more shadowy figures appeared just beyond its wavering threshold. She saw a woman with long curly hair, and it took Clare a moment to recognize her aunt Maggie— how could she have forgotten the spiral perm from the 1986 photograph? And behind Maggie came eighties Morholt, striding (as much as his leather pants would allow) up the hill with his long flowy hair and Chriss Angel Mindfreak wardrobe, a corseted, overly mascaraed eighties Ceciley Jenkins following in his wake.

Then eighties Mark O’Donnell, resplendent in hair pouf and tartan, brought up the rear, along with a handful of others from the photo whom Clare had no names for.
Almost
no names for.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” she muttered.

She nudged Piper and pointed to one of the Free Peoples. At least he
seemed
to be from that group. He was hanging back from the rest, lurking in the shadows of the stone tower ruins—a tall man with a big beard and long hair, his face hidden beneath a wide-brimmed leather hat …

“Ashbourne,” Piper whispered.

“In yet another whimsical facial-hair disguise.”

“What did I tell you about that?” Piper said smugly.

“Hey.
You
trusted him more than I did—”

“Oh my god!” Piper pointed at one of the other rifts. “
That
looks like my gran!”

Clare peered at the shadowy figure whom Piper had described as “kookookajoob” crazy. She saw a slender, angular woman in a flowing paisley skirt and peasant blouse. Her long dark hair shot through with grey was hanging in a braid down her back, but she had the same heart-shaped face and dark eyes as the gogglewearing girl standing beside Clare.

As Clare and Piper watched, mouths agape, they saw another figure appear in Crazy Granny’s rift—a vague outline of a tall man that flickered and shimmied like a television set not properly tuned to the right channel. But before the girls could figure out what to make of it, the ground beneath them shuddered again. And this time it felt as if the hill was trying to buck them off.

Clare glanced back at where Milo stood and saw that his spine was arched with tension, his torso curving like a longbow. He seemed to be caught in some kind of energy wave, his entire body wrapped in a gauzy cocoon of flickering lights. He was so beautiful Clare wanted to weep. Or maybe jump him. But his jaw was clenched and the muscles of his neck were rigid with effort. The rifts began to move across the summit’s plateau toward the single
point where Milo stood. In another moment they would all come together.

“What are we going to do?” Piper asked tremulously. Faced with an
actual
spatio-temporal event of some fairly spectacular magnitude, she seemed to have lost some of her know-it-all-ness.

“Nothing else
to
do.” Clare took a step forward. “Time to go—”

Piper grabbed her by the arm. “Wait! If we go … how are we going to get back?”

Her voice sounded small and thin in the gathering chaos. All its musicality was gone, along with her prickly self-assurance. Piper Gimble was clearly terrified, from her goggles right down to her boots, and Clare felt a surge of sudden sympathy for her. Maybe she should suggest that Piper stay behind.

And then it hit her.

She couldn’t just suggest it. She had to
insist
on it.

Piper had asked the single most obvious question. Clare knew that once they’d gone through the portal, the portal could close. And there was no guarantee that Milo, despite whatever Druid was left in him, could open it again.

Shimmering was one thing. Apparently. Portals? Something else entirely.

When Clare had time-travelled before, she’d done it alone. Her trips had been triggered by contact with an artifact that had been enchanted, spell-cast, whatever you wanted to call it, with Clare’s blood. The artifacts themselves had stayed behind in the present, with Al, Clare’s blood sister, who’d been there to call her home.

Wait …

The other shoe dropped in Clare’s mind. Blood left stains. Rustbrown, faded by time, almost undetectable … She started to dig frantically through her bag. Finally her fingertips brushed cool metal and she pulled out the diary tin and the memorial letter opener she’d nicked from Piper’s shop. Piper glowered at her briefly. She glowered even more when Clare popped open the tin, tucked the notebook under one arm, and said, “Hold out your hand.”

Before Piper could react, Clare was jabbing the needle-sharp point of the little silver dagger into the fleshy part of her thumb.

“Sonova—!” Piper yelped as a single, deep red bead of blood welled. Through her ruby goggles her eyes practically shot lasers out at Clare. Then her mouth disappeared in a thin line. “Ow.”

“Don’t be a baby,” Clare muttered, grabbing the diary from under her arm and flipping to the page at the back with the number code on it. She peered closely at the doodle on the bottom half of the page—the slightly elongated swirl she’d dismissed as her clumsy rendition of the spiral path circling the Tor. “Sure,” she said, half to herself. “It could be that …
or
it could be a badly drawn interpretation of a
thumbprint
.”

And the barely discernible rusty stain at the centre of the whorl just might have been an old, faded bloodstain. Never mind “might have been.” It
had
to be. The minute she formed the thought, Clare sensed the rightness of it. She’d probably run out of time trying to communicate with herself—the code took a bit of figuring out—so she’d drawn the remainder in a pictogram. Of course she had. Just to overcomplicate things as much as possible and leave the widest possible margin for error. What a clever girl.

Gawd, I’m such an idiot sometimes.

And yet it made a kind of twisty Clare-sense. To wit: Clare and Al had once, long ago, shared blood pricked from their thumbs with a safety pin. Al had been Clare’s anchor during her shimmers. The diary had been enspelled by Llassar—Clare was sure of it. So sure of it, she was going to make him do exactly that when she wound up back in the past. He could—he
would
—use Clare’s blood to magic the thing up, just like the shimmer triggers that had sent Clare back in time before.

With one crucial difference. This time, it wasn’t meant to send Clare
back
. It was meant to bring her
forward
. She held out the page and told Piper to press her bleeding thumb to the very same spot on the doodle as she herself must have done—or, at least, would soon—and she could almost feel an electric tingling along her outstretched arms as Piper did as she was asked. It might have
been Clare’s imagination, but then again … it might not. She closed the book gently and handed it to the other girl, who stood sucking her thumb and staring at Clare in wide-eyed confusion.

“Remember you said you thought you were
meant
to discover this book?”