Now and for Never (5 page)

Especially,
he thought as his eyes finally drifted shut,
in an age when there's almost nowhere left to find. Almost
…

4

S
tanding in the upstairs hallway of the Avalon Mists the next morning, waiting for Clare to get dressed, Allie regarded her reflection in a long mirror on the wall through bleary eyes. Gone was the elegant Roman stola, and her feet were once more encased in boots. Beneath the artfully battered black cowboy hat—Clare had thoughtfully rescued it from the dig site after Allie's unintentional time-zot—her flat-ironed hair was sleek and straight. She'd wriggled into a pair of black skinny jeans that morning and her alabaster-skinned arms were once more covered to the wrists in a clingy black long-sleeved T-shirt stencilled with a silvery, glow-in-the-dark Iron Man “arc reactor” heart. Sartorially speaking, she was back to her old self.

But there was something … different about her. Something that looked just a little out of place. Or time. Beneath the brim of her hat, Allie could see there were shadows twisting in the depths of her stormy grey gaze.

She was still standing there, glaring at herself, when her cousin's reflection appeared over her shoulder.

“Hey, Allie,” Milo said, wrapping her in a brief hug. “Good morning.”

The circles under
his
eyes were even darker than the ones under hers. But after their argument last night, Allie was less
than sympathetic. She had only four words for him: “He has a Walkman.”

“What?” Clare asked, poking her head around the door, her golden-brown waves shining. She looked annoyingly well-rested and bright-eyed.

“A Walkman,” Allie repeated. “A portable cassette tape player. From, like, the eighties. I'd never seen one up close before, but there it was. With a secret stash of batteries and this mix tape of songs that was, like, all distorted because he'd been playing it for years, in secret. He still had that stupid skinny leather tie. I know you both think he's fine there. Acclimatized. But he's not. He
doesn't
want to stay there.”

Milo's brow began to knot behind the blond fringe of his hair.

“Allie,” he sighed. “I thought we decided—”

“You.” Allie cut him short. “
You
decided.”

“Okay. I'm eating breakfast before we have this conversation,” Milo said and, turning on his heel, left the girls standing there.

“Wow,” Clare said. “Need coffee much?”

“He's not the only one.” Allie realized her head was actually throbbing a bit.

“No kidding.” Clare put a hand on Allie's arm. “Hang on a second …”

She frowned and seemed to search for words.

“You gonna tell me again how wrong I am?” Allie bristled.

“No.” Clare shook her head. “I was going to tell you that you're right.”

Allie glared at her suspiciously. “And … you came to this conclusion when, exactly?”

“It probably started when I was snogging your cousin goodnight.”

“I see.”

“Also, I didn't sleep much.” She shrugged. “Partly because
you were snoring like a freight train, but mostly because I couldn't stop thinking about it and ultimately, yeah. I came to the conclusion that I think you're right. Soldier Boy
did
want to come with. And not because he's yearning for a contemporary music fix or pining for the latest in retro-future fashion. I saw how he looked at you.”

Allie felt a sudden wave of heat rush up her cheeks. With any luck it would at least drive away some of her hangover pallor.

Clare grinned evilly. “He thinks you're se-e-ex-ey …” she sang in an annoying warble.

“Shut up,” Allie muttered. The after-effects of the brandy made it particularly grating.

“He called you ma-a-ag-ic …”

“Shut!”

“He wants to ki-i-iss you— Urk!”

Allie's hands were around Clare's throat, but she couldn't seem to muster a robust choking grip and it did nothing to stop the laughter burbling up through Clare's windpipe. After a fruitless moment, she dropped her hands to her sides and sighed.

“Oh, look,” Clare said once she'd stopped giggling. “You wanna know exactly what I was thinking last night when I should have been sleeping and dreaming of even more snogging with your cousin?”

“Er, no.”

“I was thinking that if Mark O'Donnell or Marcus Donatus or whatever the hell he wants to call himself had never encountered you, you brainy little temptress, he probably
would
be completely content to stick it out in the past, fighting barbarians and marching and digging and sharing tales of soldierly glory around campfires late into starry, only-slightlyobscured-by-the-pall-of-smoke-from-a-nearby-burning-village nights.”

Allie raised an eyebrow.

“What? Those were my exact thoughts, more or less. Which is when I realized something.”

“What's that?”

“I grudge.”

“You
grudge
?”

“I do. I actually begrudge him. Soldier Boy.” Clare frowned, evidently troubled by the admission. “Not proud of it. But I think I've been distinctly biased against the guy based solely on his profession.”

“Because he's a legionnaire.”

Clare nodded. “And that's not cool. It's not fair. To either of you.”

“Not fair how?”

“Because I keep thinking that, if he was some hot Druid who'd fallen for you and wanted to move to the future, or not even a hot Druid but just some regular Iceni tribesman—”

“Still hot though, right?”

“Right.” Clare dismissed any un-hot possibilities with a wave. “And if that was the case, I probably wouldn't have even argued with you. I'd be all like ‘Awesome! Let's turn on the Wayback Machine, collect the dude, and then do a musical shopping montage where we hit the High Street and transform Barbarian to Babe, huzzah!'” She did a little jazz-hands cheer and then dropped her arms to her sides, sheepishly shaking her head.

“But,” Allie continued on Clare's behalf, “because Marcus is a Roman … sort of …”

“Even though he's
not,
” Clare nodded, “he looks and acts like one, and so my first reaction was still ‘The hell with
that
guy.' I realized, well, that that makes me a … something-ist. I'm not quite sure what. But I don't like it.”

Allie was touched by Clare's honesty. And, as always, more than a little amused.

“You're not a something-ist,” she assured her. “And I think a musical shopping montage is one of your better ideas. Let's go see if we can't convince my cousin, your boyfriend, of that.”

“Let's!” Clare linked an arm through Allie's and improvised ridiculous lyrics based on their adventures to a variety of cheesy musical numbers all the way from the Avalon Mists down the street to the pub.

MILO WAS SITTING WITH
Piper on the Rifleman's patio when Clare and Al joined him, a steaming pot of coffee at his elbow, already half-empty. His food order, according to Goggles, had been prodigious.

Al launched directly into a passionate defence of going back and getting her man, Clare wedging in her own affirmations and sound-bite backups.

“So that's it. I'm going,” Allie summed up finally. “Come hell or high water.”

“I'm betting on both!” Clare enthused.

And then Milo called her a traitor.

But when Clare began to sputter a protest, he held up a hand. “A traitor in the service of a noble cause. Look, I
get
it.” He held up his other hand. “And I give up.”

Clare exchanged a glance with Al. “You do?”

“Clare,” Milo sighed wearily, “I don't know if I ever really thought I had a hope—I mean a real, legitimate hope—of convincing you to stick close to the old homestead, temporally speaking.”

“You didn't?”

He shrugged. “Let's face it. You're an off-leash beagle.”

Goggles almost did a spit-take with her coffee.

“I'm a
what
?” Clare asked a bit frostily.

“You had that beagle named Reggie growing up,” Al
commented unhelpfully. “Remember? He had that little drooling problem. And separation anxiety—”

“Yes,” Clare interrupted. “And floppy ears. And I
still
don't get the analogy.”

Milo shook his head and pegged her with a pointed gaze. “Do you know why you almost never see a beagle in an obedience trial?” he asked, lifting his coffee cup to his mouth.

“Because they're lousy at taking orders?”

“Yup.” He took a long swallow of coffee and stared at her over the rim of his cup. “They're incredibly single-minded. Once they catch a scent of something, it's almost impossible to call them off. You're a beagle.”

Piper snorted and Al nudged her sharply with an elbow. The nudge jostled Piper's arm, knocking Morholt's Moleskine journal off the table. It landed on the patio decking and flopped open to the back page. The girl-antiquarian gasped as if she'd just dropped a limited-edition Royal Doulton china figurine and launched out of her seat onto her knees, reached for the journal … and froze.

“What on earth …?” she murmured.

“What?” Clare asked.

Piper held up a silencing hand as she carefully set the diary back on the table. Clare bent her head and looked closely. There was a … thing. A little bit of extra paper—like the corner of a square—was sticking out from the top edge of the seam where the Moleskine's decorative backing paper was glued to its back cover. It looked as though someone had carefully lifted up the backing with a knife blade and concealed a folded bit of a page torn from somewhere else in the book. Goggles pulled a utility knife out of a pocket of her baggy cargo pants and flipped open a blade. She patiently, meticulously worked loose the carefully creased square of acid-free paper and peeled back the edges.

Clare watched as Piper's mouth drifted open, but she
couldn't see what had so astonished her until Piper sat back. There, lying in the middle of the age-creased scrap of page, was a tiny flat square of black plastic.

“It's … a memory chip,” Al said in a hushed voice.

Piper bent over again, peering at it minutely through the lime-green lenses of her steampunk-styled goggles du jour. She held it up between her thumb and forefinger so the others could see.

“So it is,” she murmured in agreement. “From a digital camera.”

Clare and Milo exchanged a glance.

Clare knew that when he'd briefly absconded with Morholt's little journal he'd doubtless examined the thing thoroughly. That was what Milo did. And there wasn't much that was beyond his understanding.

Except maybe this.

“I don't understand,” he said. “That … that wasn't there before. I mean, I'm pretty sure I would have noticed it.” He turned to Piper. “Did you know it was there? I mean,
you
would have noticed it, right?”

Goggles raised an eyebrow at him. Of course she would have noticed. Over the years it had been in her possession she'd read the diary back to front countless times, memorizing every scratch of ink, every crease and contour. The chip might have been carefully concealed, but surely she would have noticed the slight bulge behind the backing paper …

Clare leaned across the table and plucked the card from Goggles's grip. She brought it close to her face, examining it, and when she turned it over she noticed a tiny smear of crimson on the back.

“Gah!” She dropped the thing on the table.

It looked like …
blood
.

Then Al picked it up. “Huh. Nail polish.”

Clare grabbed the bit of plastic back from Al's fingertips.
Before they'd even started on the journey to Glastonbury the girls had joked about manicures and how they'd ever manage to keep theirs in decent shape, what with all the digging in trenches. Clare, ever forward thinking, had packed several shades of lacquer. One of them, labelled “Hot Tamale!,” was a favourite summertime shade.

In fact, she had a bottle of it in her bag.

The bag hanging off the back of her chair.

Wordlessly she reached for it, unzipped the main compartment, and pulled out first the little glass bottle and then her digital camera. In all the excitement she'd forgotten she'd packed the thing, and had yet to take a single picture of their Glastonbury sojourn. As Al and Milo and Piper watched, Clare popped open the back of the camera, worked the memory chip free from its slot, and laid it down in the centre of a drink mat. Then she shook the bottle of crimson enamel, cracked it open, and used the brush to paint a tiny dot on the back of the memory card. As she lifted the little brush from the surface, it left a smear along one edge of the dot. Like a comet tail. She blew on the thing to dry it and then put it back down.

Fingers trembling, Piper laid the other card—the one from the journal—beside it on the table. Its polish mark—like a tiny red dot with a comet tail—was a perfect match.