Now and for Never (10 page)

“I can't believe you stole bodily fluids, Perfesser,” Al said. “That's badass.”

“Borrowed,” Maggie amended sternly.

“And you called
me
larcenous.” Clare shook her head.

“It was for a very good cause,” Maggie said primly. “If Ceciley is to be believed.”

“What did she tell you?” Milo leaned forward across the table, his blue gaze burning.

“That Clare has
got
to go back in time,” she said. “It's imperative.”

“Yeah. I know, I know!” Clare threw her hands in the air. “A thousand times already!”

“What was Dr. Jenkins's reason?” Milo asked.

Maggie pushed her glasses up her nose. “Well … think of time as though it's the shape of the Snettisham Torc. A circle, but a broken one. At the moment that's how things are, and it's the torc itself that's done it—that's caused the breach.”

Clare blinked. “I don't get it.”

“Where did you last see the neck ring, Clare?” Maggie asked.

“Uh …” Clare frowned, thinking back. “On top of Glastonbury Hill. After Suetonius Paulinus … uh … beheaded Professor Ashbourne.”

“Last place I saw it, too,” Al confirmed. “It fell off his … er … stump.” She made a slashing gesture toward her own neck and went a bit pale.

Clare nodded. “That's exactly what happened. Thereby breaking the curse, right? I mean, I thought that was it. I thought we did it. Fixed everything. Marcus was the last loose end, y'know? I figured once we do this last shimmer we'll get back to now and ta-da! Happy ending.”

“I'm afraid it's not that simple.”

“Why?” Clare was starting to get angry. “
Why
isn't it that simple?”

Maggie put a hand on her arm. “Because the torc must find its way back to its original resting place.”

“Do you mean Original Resting Place Boudicca's Tomb,” Al asked, “or Original Resting Place Hole-in-the-Ground-in-Snettisham?”

“Snettisham.”

“I get it.” Milo's expression was turning grim. “I can't believe I didn't see it before now. It's sort of like what we were talking about earlier at the pub when we found the memory card.”

“What memory card?” Maggie asked.

Milo gave her the rundown—it was probably telling that Maggie accepted it without a great deal of surprise or trepidation—and then continued. “It's all about the way the timeline is playing out,” he said. “The way it stands now, the torc never did make it into the tomb with Boudicca when she died. Not in this reality. In
this
reality it wound up in a hole in the ground in Snettisham with a hoard of other artifacts, where it was discovered in 1950. But if it doesn't somehow make its way into that hole, then
this
reality—the one we exist in
at this very moment
—won't exist.” He looked at Clare over the rim of
his glasses. “You won't ever touch the torc in the museum and discover your gift. Stuart Morholt will never steal the torc, or go back in time trying to steal it again—”

“Oh bloody hell!” Piper wailed suddenly.

Maggie glanced at her, startled.

“It's just as I thought!” Her enormous brown eyes were shiny with tears. “I
am
vanishing from the pages of history again, aren't I? Rubbed out. I thought we'd gotten this all sorted and now I'm
still
going to disappear!”

“Wait! Wait …” Clare held up a hand. “Goggles, seriously. Chill. No one's getting rubbed out. Look, Mags. I just assumed that someone … I don't know … Llassar or that Mallora chick … I mean I just assumed that one of
them
would eventually make sure the torc found its way there. To Snettisham. I mean … it did. It has. Hasn't it?”

“Not according to Ceciley,” Maggie said. “Or rather, not according to the Druiddyn mystical sight trapped within her.
That
was the message I was to convey to you. That the timeline is, apparently, still dangerously in flux.”

Clare glanced at Milo, who was back to listening intently and frowning, blue eyes troubled behind his angular black glasses frames. Clare wondered what the residual Druiddyn mystical sight still stuck in
his
head had to say on the matter.

“All I know,” Maggie continued, “is that Ceciley said the torc is travelling far from the soil of its home and needs to return. That you, Clare—as one of the engines of the blood curse woven into the torc—must see to it. She said the torc would call to you, draw you to it, until you did. That if you ignored that call, peril would befall you and all those you cared about. It will remain so as long as the torc is a wild card.”

Maggie pulled the shirt sleeve back down over the bruises on her arm.

“Wow,” Clare murmured. “No pressure.”

Suddenly she wasn't so sure she wanted to go back. Rescuing Marcus was one thing. Resetting the chronology of the universe … that was another. Maggie and the others must have read her thoughts. There was a general shifting among them as they all exchanged glances.

“Mags,” Clare said, “are you sure
you're
okay with this? With me doing this?”

“Oh, duckling …” Maggie reached over and patted Clare's hand. “I'm not sure that what
I'm
‘okay with' has any relevance whatsoever in this situation. You have a gift, Clare. Or a burden. Perhaps a destiny is the best way to say it. But it's yours and I'm not about to keep you from it.”

“Are you
sure
you're related to my mom?”

“Don't be prickly, dear,” Maggie admonished, but she did grin a bit. “Your mother loves you. She just … well, she wouldn't understand this. Nor would your father. They are practicalminded people. By the way, I spoke to them yesterday—hello from Oslo, the orchestra tour is going swimmingly, your father wishes you would turn on your phone once in a while, don't forget to wear sunscreen—and
somehow
I managed to convince them that you girls are fine and staying out of all sorts of trouble.”

“You're a peach, Mags.”

“Yes, well. Delightfully fruity or not, my darling sister
will
kill me if you don't come through your summer vacation unscathed.” Maggie held up one of the vials of blood. “So, please. Go. Do the things you have to do to set this all to rights. But I beg you. Remain unscathed.”

Clare reached out and took the little glass tube, absurdly relieved that it was cool, not warm to the touch. “No scathing,” she said. “Scout's honour.”

Maggie nodded and managed to smile encouragingly. “Best get cracking then.”

“CRACKING” CONSISTED MOSTLY
of packing. In her first temporal go-around Clare had discovered certain advantages to such equipment as glowsticks and emergency road flares, so they made short work of ransacking Piper's shop to procure likewise useful oddments.

“COOL!” Al exclaimed at one point, discovering an original, still-in-the-package pair of Korg 70,000
BC
walkie talkies buried in a box full of pop-culture kitsch.

“Did they change the dictionary definition of that word again while I wasn't paying attention?” Clare asked, eyeing the dusty cardboard backing depicting the TV family of prehistoric cave dwellers.

“These were part of a merchandise line for an old Saturdaymorning Hanna-Barbera show that aired in the seventies,” Al enthused, ignoring Clare's dig. “I stumbled across episodes posted on one of my geek-chat forums. It's about these Neanderthals and it is
so
gloriously cheesetastic, I can't
even
!”

Piper plucked the package from Al's hands and examined it critically. “My gran traded a perfectly good Doctor Who TARDIS lawn ornament to some American chap for those when I was little. Told you she was a nutter. I never could figure out where the hairy bloke on the package got a radio, or how on earth he'd figure out how to use the thing.”

“They didn't
actually
have walkies on the show,” Al said, rolling her eyes. “It's just marketing. And the series never aired in the UK so I wouldn't really expect you to understand the appeal.”

“And so I don't,” Piper said and tossed the set back. “Consider them a parting gift.”

“Awesome!” Al exclaimed. She pried at a corner of the plastic, muttering enthusiastically, “These are in near-mint condition. I hate to destroy the packaging … maybe I can save it if I'm careful … Don't suppose you have two nine-volt batteries lying around? Says here they're not included …”

Piper sighed gustily and walked off to dig through a drawer under the shop counter. Clare went back to emptying all the makeup and crumpled granola bar wrappers out of her bag, but when Piper hadn't returned she looked up to see her still over by the counter, frowning down at Morholt's diary, which had once again found its way into her hands.

“Hey … Goggles?” Clare asked. “You okay?”

“Hm?” Piper looked up. “Oh. Yeah. I'm grand.”

“I just thought …” Clare shrugged. “The whole Ashbourne revelation thing. I'm sorry you had to find out that way.”

“I'm sorry I had to find out at all.” She sniffed and waved a hand as if it was no big deal. Which it clearly was. “The man's a right prat. Anyway, it doesn't really matter. I already told you—my genealogy is so profoundly fraked up I'm surprised I don't have two heads.”

“I dunno,” Al said, organizing her own gear. “Maybe I just got to see a different side of the dude back in the day, but when he was in command of a Legion, he didn't seem so bad to me.”

“And your grandmother certainly seemed to have taken a shine to him.”

“Gran was mad.”

“I guess.” Clare was unconvinced. “She knew there was temporal weirdness where the diary was involved, and yet she still gave it to you.”

“Left it for me to open after she was gone, yeah.” Piper shrugged. “It's not like she sat me down and had ‘the chat' with me about it. She never even opened it herself.”

“Still …” Al picked up the diary where it lay at Piper's elbow. “Why didn't Ashbourne ever tell you all this stuff?”

“Because he's right about how badly that conversation would have gone. ‘Hey, kid, by the way … I'm your grandfather.' ‘Really? How interesting! And how did you and dear old gran hook up back in the day?' ‘Well, I stepped out of a
temporal rift in the moment of my first-century beheading, and there she was, just waiting for me. I don't age, my own daughter thought the whole thing was freakish enough to disown the lot of us, and by the way, you might just cease to exist one day because we've messed up the very fabric of the cosmos. How was your day at the shop?'” She laughed bitterly. “Aside from that, I don't think he cares a whit about me.”

“If that's true, he could have just left when your grandmother died,” Milo pointed out. “Instead he stuck around and grew a ridiculous moustache.”

“The facial hair alone has to earn him some points,” Clare agreed.

“It doesn't matter,” Piper said, waving the matter away. “Let's just get on with it.”

Maggie bestowed a briskly sympathetic smile on Piper. “Now,” she said. “Remember. The torc
must
be your priority, girls. Beyond that, you must do whatever else you can to bring Mark back.” She picked up the vials of blood and stared at them as if they were talismans. “Hopefully you'll find some way to use these to those ends …”

Clare knew perfectly well what Al's priority was, fabric of the universe or no, but she wasn't about to tell Maggie that. She just plucked the tubes from her aunt's fingers and handed them to Al. “I hereby designate you the Keeper of the Cursed Vials of Icky Liquid.”

“Ew,” Al said, taking them gingerly. “What d'you suppose we're actually supposed to do with this stuff?”

“I think it's probably a ‘need to know' kind of situation.” Clare shrugged. “We'll know when we need to. Right, Milo?” But Milo looked as if he was listening to a voice only he could hear. “What is it?”

“Hm?” He blinked at her rapidly, his gaze snapping back into focus.

“What are you thinking?”

Milo reached out a hand to Al. “Leave one of the vials with us,” he said.

Al looked at Clare, who shrugged and said, “Okay. Why?”

“I … I don't know,” he murmured. “Yet.”

“Fair enough,” Clare said. “Me neither. Give him the blood, pal.”

Al handed over one of the tubes and tucked the other one safely away in her messenger bag. The others turned back to their preparations, but Clare kept sneaking glances at Milo. She was worried about him. About them. About leaving him behind with Piper.

“Hey, uh … Milo?” She tried to keep her tone nonchalant. “Um …” She cast around for something to say. “Oh! I know— did any other pictures load up from the camera card? I mean, maybe I actually wrote something helpful at some point.”

“I'll check,” Milo said, taking out the machine and flipping it open. His fingers slid back and forth across the touch pad for a few long moments before he finally swore under his breath and slammed a fist down on the countertop.

“The files are corrupted,” he said. “After the first two pictures, the rest are scrambled. Damn it!”

“No!” Clare leaned over his shoulder. “I thought you said the Falderall cage would protect the camera!”

“Faraday,” he corrected. “And it did. The camera worked fine. It took pictures. The image files are here, they're on the card … the computer just can't read them for some reason. I guess I'm not totally surprised. After all, this memory card was hidden in the back of Morholt's diary for almost two thousand years.”

“But … if the data is still there,” Al chewed on her lip, frowning, “there must be a way to retrieve it. Isn't there anything we can do?”