Now and for Never (7 page)

“Wonderful,” he muttered. He fixed his eyes on the horizon, wondering where the hell he'd find himself at the end of it all. Longing panged in his chest, and he wished that Allie were there.

“‘HAVING A WONDERFUL TIME TRAVEL'?”
Al read out the message on Milo's computer screen. “‘Wish you were here'?
Seriously?
”

“The hell?” Clare murmured, leaning forward. “Where am I?”

“You're on a boat,” Piper pointed out helpfully.

“Okay …” Al pushed the cowboy hat back on her head and leaned back in her seat, her gaze fixed on Clare's image. “So you're gonna shimmer. Again. Only … how do we—or rather how did
you
—get back?” She shifted her gaze to Clare. “I mean, again? Milo's Druid rift was way dangerous and, like you said all along, a one-way trip.”

Clare nodded. “Right.”

“We don't have the torc,” Al continued.

“Nope.”

“And the diary only gets us
here
from
there
and who knows where it is now on that end of things—other than probably in the hands of Mallora the Maleficent—and we have no shimmer triggers.”

Al tilted the brim of her hat back down and stared at Clare from behind her mirrored sunglasses. Clare knew she wasn't blinking.

She bit her lip. “Um.”

“
Do
we, Clare?” Al prodded.

“Well …”

“There's another trigger?” Milo asked wryly.

“Yes,” Clare said through her teeth. “There's another trigger.”

“Where?” Piper frowned.

Clare shrugged. “Bloody Nicky has it.”

Piper flicked up the green outer lenses of her goggles and narrowed her eyes at Clare through two clear glass portholes. “No he doesn't! He would have told me. He
never
told me!”

“He doesn't know.”

“What is it?” Al asked, leaning her elbows on the table. “The trigger, I mean.”

“Remember the Grad Squad Pocket Change Extravaganza?”

Al blinked. “You mean the coin hoard those archaeology students discovered at the dig site and have no doubt been patting themselves on the back about since?”

“Yup.”

“The paltry find of unmagical ancient laundry money?” Al frowned. “Not possible. There's nothing magical-mystery about plain old coins.”

“Not initially, no.” Clare tried not to sound
too
pleased with herself. “Not until I found them in their original state in Stuart Morholt's possession when we were in the prisoners' tent back in the Roman camp. I asked Llassar to magic up one of the coins using my blood while you guys were otherwise occupied.”

“And you didn't tell me.” Al had injected a strain of operatic disappointment into her voice.

“Or me,” Milo said.

“Yes I did!” Clare protested. “I
just
did.”

Al shook her head. “You made a contingency plan. You contingencied.”

“Is that even a word?”

“
Without
me!” she continued. “You arranged backup without alerting your backup! Seriously. Dude. When did you decide to go all Rogue Agent?”

Clare rolled her eyes and signalled the waitress for the bill.

The thing was, she'd been trying to keep it from
herself
. She'd done it because she was afraid that, once she and Milo and Piper had completed that last journey and rescued
Al from the clutches of history, that … well, that would be that.

Over. Finito. No more shimmering.
Ever.

The prospect had panicked Clare down to her socks. So she'd arranged for one last secret shimmer trigger. It would exist. She would
know
it existed. And that—the knowing— would be enough. Enough to convince her that she
could
go back again, even if she never did. Even if at the end of the summer she and Al got on a plane to Toronto and returned to school and graduated and got jobs and never travelled to Britain ever again, Clare could go through the rest of her life knowing that if she ever had to, she could.

Shimmer …

The little silver disc, enchanted with blood pricked from her thumb with Piper's letter opener, would be there if Clare needed it. Most likely in a box somewhere in the bowels of the museum and so quite out of reach, but there. A mental security blanket. Something to keep her from losing her mind every time she reflected back on the events of that one crazy summer.

Her little secret.

She'd never expected to use it. Certainly not so soon. But the thrill that ran up her spine at the thought of it gave her pause.

Damn,
she thought ruefully.
I'm actually becoming addicted to time travel. And I don't think there's a rehab program for that.

Milo leaned forward and put a hand on Al's shoulder. “Cut her some slack,” he said quietly. “I think I know why Clare did it.”

Clare looked at him.

“Mental security blanket?” he said, plucking the thought right from her brain.

Clare bit her lip and nodded.

“I … oh.” A look of concern washed over Al's freckle-dusted face. “You know, I didn't think of it like that. Of what all of this must be doing to you. I mean … I'm sorry, Clare.” She sighed. “Since all this started, you've just … handled it. Brilliantly. When
I
was back there? I kind of lost it. It's like I couldn't handle
any
of it. I panicked and I hated that and if it hadn't been for Marcus, I don't think I would have …”

“Would have what?”

Al shrugged and looked down. “Survived.”

“Oh.”

Milo's fingers tightened on his cousin's shoulder. “And you
still
want to go back there?”

“Want? Not really.” Al shrugged. “But I owe it to him. And probably to me, too.”

“Guess it's a good thing I was blessed with incredible foresight,” Clare sighed.

“Cursed and Blessed are two sides of the same coin …” Milo murmured, his gaze drifting into the middle distance.

“What was that?”

“Hm?” He looked at Clare, blinking his eyes back into focus. “Oh … nothing. Just something I heard. Somewhere.” He lifted his coffee cup, realized it was long empty, and set it back down on the table hard enough to rattle the remaining cutlery. “If we're going to do this,” he said, “we're going to do it right.”

Clare nodded sharply. “Agreed.”

“You and Allie are going back together and you will remain together at all times,” he went on. “And while you're there, Piper and I will remain together at all times.”

“Uh. At all times?” Clare asked.

“Yeah … at
all
times?” Piper asked.

“Yes.” Milo was adamant. “And if either of us has the slightest inkling that things are going sideways, she'll pull you back. No arguments. No resisting.”

He waited for Clare and Al to nod in agreement. Which, after a moment, they did. Piper had gone a bit wide-eyed at Milo's words, whether from apprehension or anticipation.

It better not be anticipation,
Clare thought.

She felt an uncomfortable twist in the pit of her stomach at the prospect of leaving Milo alone with cute, quirky, geektastic Goggles, but she didn't really have a choice. And to be fair, Piper had already proven herself, both as a mystical homing beacon and as a friend.

But,
Clare vowed silently,
I will still stab her with her very own Chuck and Di memorial letter opener if she so much as lays one fingerless-gloved hand on my nerd boy
.

“So we're agreed then?” her nerd boy continued. “No secrets, no improvising, no rogue-agent stuff. We keep each other in the loop.”

“How are we going to do that if Al and I are in the past?”

As if in answer, another
ping
came from Milo's computer. They all turned to see that a second image from the memory card had finally unscrambled itself. It was a picture of Al this time, holding another scrap of cloth with a message and an arrow pointing to the island that had been smaller in the background of the first picture.

“Meet us HERE” the message said, this time in Al's meticulous block-letter penmanship. “Three days from when you first see this. Sundown. DON'T BE LATE.”

“I guess that takes care of that,” Al said. “We're in the loop.”

“I dunno,” Clare muttered. “Two messages—a lame-ass joke and cryptic directions to a mysterious island—do not a loop make. Where's ‘here'? Where is that island?”

“I don't know,” Milo sighed. “But I have a feeling we'll find out sooner rather than later.”

“Sooner better be sometime in the next three days, according to this,” Al said.

“Meanwhile,” Milo said, closing the computer and shoving it back into its case, “we'd better pay a visit to our friendly local archaeologist. Because no one's going anywhere until we get Clare's shimmer trigger from Bloody Nicky's stash.”

“No problemo.” Clare shrugged and pushed her chair back. “I mean, hey—he kind of owes us a favour for having him so successfully beheaded, doesn't he? And I figure he'll be only too happy to help us retrieve his protégé from back in the day. He'll be tickled, right?”

“Right!” Al smiled and stood.

Clare put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a quick hug. Everything was going to work out just fine, she thought.

“Right,” Piper echoed. “Easy peasy lemon squeezy …”

Clare and Al turned to blink at her. Milo snorted in amusement at the Britishism.

“Good thing we're going in search of a linguist.” Clare shook her head. “Sometimes I just don't understand a thing that girl says.”

6

R
etrieving the coin from Nicholas Ashbourne would prove neither easy peasy nor particularly lemon squeezy, Clare thought—given the bitter expression that scrunched up the good professor's face as they tried to explain what the deal was with Marcus and just what the four intrepid teens had been up to since the last time he'd seen them.

Clare was flummoxed. Granted, their return meant they'd seen Postumus successfully beheaded, but hadn't that been the whole point? And the temporal-flux crossover that had allowed the Legion commander to live on in his Nicholas Ashbourne persona should have more than made up for that, right?

Well, maybe.

But the flamboyant archaeologist hardly seemed grateful. What he seemed, in fact, was mightily pissed off. Not at first, maybe. But when Clare mentioned that Goggles had acted as her temporal anchor during this most recent bout of Shenanigans, Nick fairly blew a gasket.

“You
what
?” he almost shouted, rounding on Piper and gripping her hard by both arms. “Are you all right?” he demanded.

“What? I'm fine!” Piper blinked up at him. “Why wouldn't I be?”

But Ashbourne just stared down at her, shaking her as if to make certain she didn't have any telltale rattling that meant she
wasn't
fine. Piper shot Clare a perplexed glance. Clare passed the glance on to Al, who shrugged and passed it on to Milo. Finally, Ashbourne spun around and pointed a large, blunt finger at the three of them, jabbing at the air.

“This meddling stops.” His voice was like a gunshot ringing through the tent. “Now.”

“Uh … what's up, doc?” Clare asked, frowning at him.

At a rustling sound Clare glanced over to see Al clutching to her chest the package she'd brought for the professor. Before heading to the dig site they'd stopped by the B&B so that Al could gather up the exquisite Roman costume Postumus had lent her when she'd been a prisoner in his camp. The gesture—calculated to make Al feel more like a “guest” than a prisoner—had also been incredibly kind. After all, the clothes had belonged to Postumus's dead wife. Al had truly appreciated it, and thought the erstwhile Roman praefect might in turn appreciate having the items returned. Keepsakes from another time. Another life. She'd put the delicate sandals and the neatly folded lengths of silky cloth into a paper bag and was just pulling them out when Postumus/Ashbourne freaked out about Piper.

But as Al stuffed the stola back in the bag, Ashbourne's gaze sharpened and he reached out a hand, plucking at the embroidered hem of the rich, indigo-blue silk. His expression seemed to crumple a bit, the angry flare dimming behind a veil of faraway, long-dormant memories.

Then his face went rigid again and beneath his moustache his lips pressed into a thin line. His gaze lifted and raked over Piper from head to toe as if he still wasn't sure there weren't parts of her missing. Then he turned to Clare.

“I had no
idea
you would drag Piper into the sorcerous mechanics of this … this arcane mess.”

“W-what? Wait!” Clare stammered. “We didn't have a choice if we actually wanted to get back—”

“Then maybe you should have bloody stayed there!” Ashbourne snapped.