Now and for Never (4 page)

Piper blinked and said, “Right. Zot.” She pushed back from the workbench and stood. “I'll go put the kettle on. I think maybe a switch to a nice cup of strong tea might be in order.”

“I'm not drunk!” Al exclaimed. “I'm mad!”

“No argument,” Piper muttered, putting the kettle on despite Al's protests. “As a Hatter, I'd say.”

“You're funny,” Al said, then turned to Clare and Milo. “She's funny. I can totally see why you replaced me with her.”

Clare rolled her eyes. “Al—”

“No no … s'okay. I get it.” Al sniffed. “I mean, just because Marcus thinks I'm amazing and magic and the coolest person he's ever met is no reason for you guys to think the same thing—”

“For crying out loud, Al!” Clare grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

A big sloppy teardrop spilled from Al's left eye and rolled down the side of her freckle-dusted nose. “I
promised
him, Clare!”

Clare let go of her and sighed.

“At least I meant to,” Al continued. “I know I promised
myself
…”

“Of course you did.” Clare nodded wearily. “Probably just after he kissed you.”

“Right before
you
interrupted us.” Al sniffled and shot her a look. “Yeah, sure. Then. Or maybe it was before that. Maybe it was after I saw him naked.”

“Uh?”

Al waved a hand in extravagant nonchalance. “Bathing. In the river.” The wave turned into a descriptive gesture that bordered on PG-13. “He has a legionnaire physique …”

Milo pinched the bridge of his nose and turned away from his cousin's pantomime. “Allie—”

Al suddenly seemed to realize what her hand was doing and snatched it out of the air, hiding it behind her back. Clare stifled an inappropriate snort of amusement. Now was not the time. Al was an emotional wreck (something Clare had, in all the years of their friendship, never had to deal with) and this was serious stuff they were discussing. Potentially messing with the space–time continuum—
again
—stuff. Clare needed to maintain a serious face.

“My
point
is …” Al continued, grey eyes unblinking even as a faint hint of pink crept up her pale cheeks, “I wanna bring him home. Here. But not for me. For
him
.”

Clare chewed her bottom lip.

“He held my
hand,
Clare,” she said.

“He also let go,” Milo pointed out quietly.

Al turned to her cousin. “Sorry?”

Clare blinked at him. “What?”

“He let go,” Milo said again, a hard edge to his voice. “You told us that when you first met him he had no intention of ever returning to the future. The present. Maybe he changed his mind at the last minute. Maybe he really didn't want to
come back, Allie. It's not a huge stretch to imagine him having second thoughts—”

“Why are you doing this?” Al interrupted him, eyes narrowed and angry.

“Doing what?”

“Arguing like this.” Al's disappointment at suddenly losing an ally was stark on her face.

“Because,” Milo said, “Clare's really the only one who gets to wear the expert hat in this situation.” He glanced over at Clare. “She's right. It's just getting too damned dangerous and way too damned complicated. And Clare's the shimmerer. The rest of us are … incidental.”

Clare heard the dull hurt in his voice and her heart clenched a little.

“She doesn't want you going back,” he continued. “Neither do I.”

Al shook her head. “Mi—”

“
No,
Allie.” Milo's eyes blazed. “We're not continuing this discussion. Not now. Not tonight.”

In a tense pause, the two of them engaged in a staring contest. A silent battle of McAllister wills. Finally Milo turned away, shaking his head.

“It's almost not even night anymore,” he said quietly. “The sun will be up in a few hours and none of us is in any kind of fit mental state to discuss this calmly or rationally. Especially not you.”

“He's right.” Piper sighed wearily. “I think we should all turn in.”

Clare nodded. “We can meet tomorrow at the Rifleman for breakfast and decide what to do from here. Okay, Al?”

Al stuck out her bottom lip mutinously but then got up slowly. Milo shrugged into an old windbreaker Piper held out for him, zipping it up over his bare, still faintly blue chest so that he could walk the girls to their B&B in the chilly
pre-dawn darkness without raising any eyebrows. The fact that Al was still dressed for an upscale toga party would be hard enough to explain, should they meet any passersby on the short walk back to the Avalon Mists. Which they probably wouldn't. Glastonbury was a quiet little town and most of its inhabitants were sensibly asleep at that time of night, not having just experienced a mystical spatio-temporal anomaly atop the town's beloved molehill.

WITH AL SAWING LOGS
on top of the covers and still wrapped in her stola, Clare walked Milo out to the B&B's little courtyard. She looked up into his face. In the moonlight the hint of blond stubble on his chin was almost silvery, the planes of his cheekbones carved with deep shadows. His normally placid blue gaze was the colour of a stormy sea.

“What if it was you?” she asked quietly.

“What if what was me?”

“Stuck back there. Like Marcus.”

“It's not the same.” He shook his head. “And I'm not like him.”

“I know that.” Clare crossed her arms, hugging herself against the cold. “You don't run around in skirts and sandals following silly orders and oppressing the indigenous populace. But … what
if
? I mean, what if it was you who'd gotten trapped?”

“Then I'd have to deal with it.” Milo shrugged. “And I
wouldn't
expect you to come after me, even though I know you probably would.” He sighed deeply. “Clare … Allie barely even knows this guy. And he was born in the
seventies
. He's way too old for her!”

“You're kidding, right?”

“Yes,” Milo said. “Sort of. But think about it. You saw him. He's a soldier in the Roman army, and a pretty well-acclimatized
one at that. He has a life there. Then. It's not like we've left him in a place where he can't take care of himself. Where he hasn't built himself some kind of rewarding existence.”

“Rewarding?” Clare asked sardonically, remembering what the Roman camp looked like the last time she'd seen it. “I'd say more like flammable.”

Milo went silent, his gaze boring into her, intense and troubled.

“Clare …” he said finally. “You know you scare the hell out of me, right?”

“I do?”

He nodded. “I mean, not so much you but … the things you do. I worry that one day it's not all going to come back around and be all right.” He shrugged helplessly—a gesture he was distinctly unsuited for. “I worry that I'll lose you. Or worse, that I'll never have had you in the first place.”

“But then you wouldn't even know, would you?”

“Maybe not.” He reached up and traced the curve of her cheek with a fingertip, making her shiver. “But I don't want to find out.”

“I don't either.”

They lapsed into silence again and the night spiralled out all around them, dark and serene and filled with small night sounds made by small night things.

“Milo … back in the camp,” she said hesitantly. “With the fire and the fighting and the danger and running around … did you really—”

“Mean what I said?”

She looked up at him. What he'd said was
“I love you.”

“Yeah, Clare de Lune. I really did. And that's why I can't risk losing you again.”

“What about at the end of summer?” she asked, giving voice to a silent, nagging doubt that she'd only just now acknowledged. “I mean, I'll be going back home …”

“And you think I can't be bothered to cross a measly ocean to come and see you?” Milo's voice had gone a bit husky. “I have a ton of lieu time banked at work, a light course load next semester, a fantastic travel agent, and an intense burning incentive to get on a transatlantic flight. I might just make it to Canada before you do.”

Clare was about to say something flirtatious and witty when Milo bent his head, his eyes burning like blue flames before they drifted closed, his lips stealing every cubic inch of breath from her lungs. Milo's kiss was spectacular, and Clare kissed him back for all she was worth. It went a long way toward making up for all the not-so-spectacular stuff that had transpired in the hours since the skies above Glastonbury Tor had shattered at Milo's command and Clare had felled him with a bodycheck, knocking him back into the past to rescue his cousin together. It also convinced her that she'd do anything he asked. All she and Milo had been trying to do was keep each other safe. To save each other from harm—just as Al and Marcus had been trying to do. She started to come to a decision.

No. No decisioning while kissing,
said a voice in her head.

Too late,
said another voice.

Do
not
mess with the kissing.

I'm not stupid.

Uh …

All right! All right. I'll sleep on it, okay?

The voices in her head continued on arguing in that fashion while Clare's lips steadfastly ignored them both and got on with the important things. Because in the morning those same lips would be the ones to tell Milo all the decisions Clare was making that he wasn't going to want to hear.

Yay, lips.

IT WAS WITH GREAT
reluctance that Milo finally pried himself away from Clare's lips and let her go. When he got back to his room in the Glastonbury hotel he didn't even bother turning on the lights. He had an overwhelming urge to fall face-first into a pillow and commence snoring. The bone-deep weariness dragging at his limbs was worse than any all-nighter he'd ever pulled—and there'd been more than a few of those over the course of his academic career.

He bolted the door and in a kind of dream state shuffled toward the bed, navigating by way of the dim blue moonlight that filtered in through the window and stripping off the windbreaker as he went. As he passed the bathroom, Milo caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and was startled by the writhing blue patterns undulating across the moon-pale skin of his arms and chest. Slithering, serpentine …
glowing
.

He lunged through the bathroom door, slamming his hand against the light switch on the wall. A soft gold glow filled the room and Milo stood, panting with sudden fear, in front of the mirror. There was nothing. He twisted and turned, examining every inch of his back and chest and arms in his reflection. Here and there he could still make out faint remaining traces of glitter from the eye makeup he'd substituted for traditional Druid woad. But no more than that. The designs were gone.

It's your imagination, idiot …

He closed his eyes and recalled the sensation of Clare redrawing the markings that had become smudged when she'd football-tackled him through the temporal portal and into the past. Her fingertips on his skin, a wry glint of mischief in her eyes as she dragged the blue paint along his ribs. It amazed Milo how Clare could maintain a sense of humour when the world around her was burning to the ground. How she could just sort of roll with things. Even when the going got weird— and it
really
did—she managed somehow not to collapse. Not to lose it.

The Raven watches over her …

Yeah? Is that a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Cursed and Blessed are two sides of the same coin.

Right. I knew you were gonna say something like … wait. Who am I talking to …?

Milo took his glasses off and stared at himself in the mirror.

The eyes that stared back at him were leached of all colour by the room's dim yellow light. They looked dark, almost black, not like his eyes at all. The sharp shadows under his cheeks and the growth of stubble on his chin made him look harder, older than usual. As if he'd seen things and done things he hadn't.

But Connal had.

Connal the Druid warrior prince.

Clare had been horrified when she realized that vestiges of the young Druid's consciousness were still floating around, trapped in Milo's mind.

“He's still in your head, isn't he?”
she'd asked him.
“Connal?”

It wasn't as if he was possessed or something. Not anymore. But there were … things. Knowledge. Secrets. Magic …

Power.

Yeah,
he thought to himself.
Power that you will never again have the opportunity to use. And that's the way it should be. You have what you need. You have her.

The dream girl of his geek heart. Clare de Lune. And he would keep her, because he would keep her safe—by
not
messing around with any more Druid magic.

It was chilly in the room, so he went to the drawer where he'd unpacked a stack of T-shirts and plucked one off the top, pulling it on over his head. The faded Superman crest, with the swirling lines of the iconic
S,
was like some kind of modern pop-culture riff on the ancient protective Druid markings he'd worn painted on his skin only hours earlier. Milo frowned and stripped off the shirt, reaching instead for one emblazoned
with the Batman logo. The foreboding, winged silhouette seemed more appropriate that night.

He flopped down on the neatly made bed and stared up at the ceiling, remembering kissing Clare in the Roman camp to the accompaniment of catapult song and battle cry and sword clash. That … had really been something. He couldn't quite believe it had happened. Still, he'd have to turn in his D&D Dungeon Master credentials if he failed to acknowledge that the whole experience had been
seriously
levelled-up COOL. Demonstrably cooler than making maps.