Once Every Never (31 page)

“I haven’t even met this boy,” Maggie protested weakly, wandering back behind her desk where she wilted down into her chair. Maggie had somehow seized on this one issue and defaulted into parental-substitute mode. “You’re not to have boyfriends unless I’ve at least
met
them …”

“He is
not
my boyfriend. He is
so
not!” Clare protested hotly. “Look—you can ground me later if you really feel the need, okay—”

“I may just do that.”

“—but right now there are slightly more important things to worry about than which archaeological curiosity I’ve been sucking face with!” Clare glanced over at Milo. “That goes for you, too!”

Clare’s outburst seemed to snap Maggie back to reality somewhat. She raked a hand through her hair, throwing one side of her neatly swept updo into disarray. “I just don’t know what you expect me to make of all this, Clare. The whole story is … well, it’s …”

“Mags,” Clare said quietly, “Please. I
know
you used to hang around with Stuart Morholt.
He
had no trouble believing any of it. And I have a sneaking suspicion that, deep down, you don’t either.”

Maggie regarded Clare sharply for a long silent moment, an obvious struggle going on behind her eyes.

“Do you?” Clare asked.

“I …” Maggie sighed and slumped forward, leaning on her desk. “… No. You’re right, Clare. I’ve … seen things. Done things. A long time ago.”

“You were one of the Order of the Free Peoples of Prydein, weren’t you, Dr. Wallace?” Milo asked.

Clare and Al turned to stare at him. And then back at Maggie.

“I was very young. Inexcusably stupid. Also a bit smitten …” Maggie smiled bitterly. “We were all antiquities students at Cambridge, and—just purely for fun, you understand—a bunch of us formed a little secret club. In the beginning it was just a silly excuse to dress up and have parties in fields. But for a core group of us, it became something more. One time, in second year, we decided to take a road trip to Glastonbury Tor.”

“That big hill in the Midlands where they have the hippie music festival every year?” Clare’s parents had actually gone to it once, back in the throes of their bizarre musical youth, and she’d seen pictures of them standing knee-deep in mud and paisley polyester at the base of the hill.

“Yes.” Maggie nodded. “There’s always been a theory—not exactly a scientific one, mind you—that says if you walk the path the right way, you open up a mystical portal to another world.”

“I did some recent aerial survey conversions of that area,” Milo said. “In overhead photographs you can see ridges in the hillside that wind around in a kind of switchback pattern. Like a maze.”

“
Exactly
like a maze.” Maggie nodded. “Some people think King Arthur’s buried there. Others think it’s a gateway to Hell. Or the Underworld.” She looked at Clare. “Or the past.”

Clare shivered.

“At any rate, there was one young man who was part of our group, and he worshipped Stuart, who treated him as a lackey, of course.” Maggie’s gaze went unfocused as she began to remember. “There was … an incident. Stuart performed a ritual he’d discovered in some arcane text with one of the artifacts we’d found on a student dig. The young man—he was just a boy, really, a Romance Languages major—he just … disappeared. Vanished into thin air right in front of our eyes. We never saw him again.”

“Did you go to the police?”

Maggie shook her head. “I’m thoroughly ashamed to say we didn’t. I didn’t. Stuart convinced us straightaway that we’d be laughed out of the university. Or worse—charged with some sort of crime. So we all agreed to never speak of it again. The poor lad’s disappearance was chalked up to a runaway due to academic stress.” She sighed, and it was the saddest sound Clare had ever heard her aunt make. “But every year on that date I drive out to Glastonbury. And I can hear him.
Feel
him there. He’s not gone. He’s just …”

“Elsewhere,” Clare said. “
Elsewhen
. I know. I’ve been there.” “Yes.” Maggie’s gaze snapped back to her niece. “And you have a
lot
to answer for young lady, after all this is said and done! What have I always told you about antiquities? NO TOUCHING.”

Clare refrained from pointing out that touching antiquities was what Maggie did all the time and, in fact, she’d developed a nicely lucrative little career for herself in the process. “So what do we do, Mags? Do we give the torc back to the museum? Hand it over to Dr. Jenkins? Tell her to increase security by about a billion percent?”

Maggie took her glasses off her head and tossed them on the desk, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I haven’t seen Ceciley all day. And frankly, I’m rather disappointed in her. She vehemently denied that Stuart Morholt is even alive—let alone responsible for the theft—even after I showed her the note he left behind. But she knows as well as I do what he’s capable of.”

“What
is
he capable of?”

“Exploding things, mostly. After the incident at Glastonbury he went a bit off the rails. I mean, mentally. We parted ways—rather acrimoniously—and I haven’t had any direct contact with him since. Not until the torc was stolen and he saw fit to send me a mocking little note letting me know
he
was the one who’d stolen it.”

“Why’d you guys break up?”

“Because after Glastonbury I decided to leave the whole of that nonsense behind me and concentrate on
real
history and
real
science. No more mystic mumbo jumbo for me. As for Stuart, in the early eighties he became notorious—wanted by Scotland Yard for several instances of what, in today’s par-lance, would be known as ‘domestic terrorism.’ He was responsible for blowing up the offices of developers and politicians who were razing sites he deemed of historical significance. Even if they were of no real worth whatsoever to the scholarly community. He once broke into a construction site near Tewkesbury and torched an entire fleet of bulldozers because a road-widening project was going to require the removal of an ancient yew tree that Stuart had decided was once sacred to the Druiddyn.”

“Really. How would he know?”

“Oh, it’s all arbitrary nonsense. He claimed he was being spoken to from the beyond, haunted by the spirit voice of an ancient Druid. One who demanded the restoration of the greatness of the Celtic Tribes—a true return to the glory of the Island of the Mighty. Honestly. He’s completely mad. And when the authorities came close to catching him one too many times, he faked his own death. I knew it wasn’t true. I think Ceciley did, too. She’s just been in denial all this time. Poor deluded thing.”

“What’s her connection to him?”

“She was also a member of the Free Peoples back in the day. I always suspected that she only did it because she was rather nutty over Morholt.”

“But Stu had his eye on someone else,” Al said.
Good lord
, thought Clare.
Maggie’s blushing
.

“I don’t think it’s safe to return the torc to the public eye at the moment,” Maggie continued, brushing aside the comment. “Dr. Jenkins doesn’t take Stuart Morholt seriously, and I don’t think she’ll believe your story about Boudicca’s curse. To this day she denies she was even
with
us at Glastonbury Tor. No. I think we have to risk returning the torc to its rightful owner.”

Clare blinked. Honestly, it was the last thing she’d expected Maggie to propose. “You mean …?”

“I think we must go to Bartlow and walk your Druid’s spiral path.”

Al was staring openly at her. “I thought you said it was all mystic mumbo jumbo.”

“I did,” Maggie replied grimly. “But I didn’t say it wasn’t real.”

“MILO?”
He’d been silent for almost a full two minutes. Clare could hardly blame him, now that she’d told him exactly what she needed him to do.

She shifted Comorra’s brooch from one leather-gloved palm to the other, reassuring herself that she had it with her so that she could leave it with the princess in her tomb. It seemed only right, somehow. Still, Clare was having massive second thoughts about the whole scheme. It was one thing to send herself hurtling through time and space, but another thing entirely to enlist Milo to play host to the disembodied spirit of an ancient mystical warrior prince. It really was asking too much.

“Milo?” she said again. “You seriously don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

“Right,” he said finally, raising his head and smiling faintly at her. “I remember you saying you didn’t want me to be a hero.”

Damn
.
I never should have opened my big mouth
. “That’s so not what I meant and you know it,” she said, frowning up at him. “I just meant you don’t have anything to prove to me.”

“I know that, Clare.”

His eyes were so blue it was almost like staring up into a cloudless sky. Clare found herself getting lost in his gaze.

He grinned. “But maybe I have something to prove to myself. I mean, hey—what kind of self-respecting geek chickens out from an actual paranormal experience? I’d have to turn in my Ghostbusters proton pack
and
my Green Lantern ring. Plus they’d bar me from the San Diego Comic-Con for life.”

Clare grinned back. “I love it when you talk nerdy to me.”

“Ooh,” he leaned down and whispered in her ear, “when all this is over, remind me to read you poetry in Elvish.”

“Elvis wrote poems?”

“Can we shelve the canoodling till a later date, guys?” Al suddenly appeared beside them, effectively putting a stop to the nerd-flirting. “I have limited reserve nerve for this mission and I’d rather not have a complete mental breakdown before we achieve our objective.”

Maggie finished double-bolting her office door and joined Clare, Al, and Milo in the middle of the room. They had decided that, before heading out to the middle of Cambridgeshire to find the Bartlow Hills tumuli, they would first test whether Connal’s spirit could indeed be transferred into Milo’s consciousness. Since they wouldn’t be able to get into the tomb without Connal’s help, they had to find out first if the magic worked.

Clare pocketed Comorra’s raven brooch and nervously picked up the silver cuff from the table. She held it out to Milo, who reached out a hand.

“Wait!” Clare said. “For luck …”

She stood on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the lips. Before Milo could turn too bright a shade of pink he took a deep breath, plucked the silver cuff from Clare’s palm, and slipped it over his wrist. Maggie and the girls watched, horrified, as Milo’s eyes suddenly flew wide and he opened his mouth in a silent scream. The muscles of his neck stood out in sharp relief and veins in his temples began to bulge. His hands grabbed for the sides of his head and collapsed forward, landing hard on his knees as he went down on all fours.

“Milo!” Clare shouted and dropped to the ground in front of him.

“Dude …” He started murmuring like a chant, his body rocking back and forth. “Dude … dude …
dude
… chill …”

“Milo?” Clare reached out but he flinched away from her.

“Chill … seriously … I’m here … I …” He wrapped his long arms around his own shoulders, hugging himself as if to keep from flying apart. “I’m right here. Let me drive. Let
me
drive, man …” Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. “Dude … Connal. Chill out, man … this hurts …”

Staggering to his feet, he backed into the corner of the office, his shoulders jamming up against the shelves, rattling the skull, and batted the glasses off his face. The girls and Maggie watched, spellbound, as Milo became … spellbound. His posture altered. So did the carriage of his head and his facial expression—all subtly, but distinctly. Clare could’ve sworn that, for the briefest instant, his blue eyes actually darkened to Connal’s almost-black brown.

“Clarinet …” Her name rasped out from between Milo’s lips in a voice that was definitely not Milo’s.

“Connal?”

“Aye …” He shook the yellow hair from his eyes and stared wildly around the room. At the books and furniture and high, plate-glass windows. At the electric light fixtures and the computer whose screen saver swirled with brilliant colours and patterns. He took a hesitant step forward and looked down at his own feet. At the jeans and sneakers he wore, at his hands … at the watch on his—on Milo’s—wrist. He fingered the fabric of the T-shirt he wore.

Then he lifted his gaze and peered at Clare as if she was hard to see. “This is the Otherworld?”

“This is
my
world,” she said quietly and picked up his glasses, handing them to him.

He put them gingerly back on his face and blinked. Then his gaze shifted to where Al stood, one fist jammed against her mouth so that she wouldn’t scream. “You.” His voice was lower than Milo’s by almost an octave. The words came out as guttural and musical at the same time. “You are … Allie?”

Al nodded and squeaked out, “I’m your cousin. His cousin. Milo’s cousin.”

He nodded, his expression turning inward. “Milo …”

“Is he there?” Clare asked.

Connal nodded and smiled, the muscles of his face tight. “He is. I can see things. Know things. Through his eyes … his mind … It is an interesting experience.”

“I’ll bet,” Clare said, and took him gently by the arm. “I’d like you to meet someone.” She looked over to where her aunt stood open-mouthed in awe. “Mags?”

Maggie stepped toward the young man who only a moment before had been someone else entirely.

“Connal.” Clare took Maggie by the elbow and drew her closer. “This is my aunt, Doctor Magda Wallace.”

“The blessings of the goddess fall upon you, Doctor Magda Wallace.” Connal’s voice was rough, but he inclined his head toward Maggie in a gesture of respect.

“I … I … it’s very nice to meet you, young man,” Maggie stammered, as star-struck as if she’d just met one of the Beatles. Which for an archaeologist, Clare supposed, she kind of had.

“Milo?” Clare shook his arm a little. “Are you still in there?”

He turned to her, and after a moment smiled the ghost of a familiar smile. “Still here, Clare de Lune,” he said, his voice sounding far away. “It’s a little crowded in here all of a sudden, but yeah … I’m still here.”