Once Every Never (33 page)

Clare took a deep breath. In the uncertain, goblin-green light the shadows leaped and danced on the barrow walls like giant raven’s wings spreading wide on phantom winds. But that was just an illusion. And the voice Clare had heard was just a trick of her overheated imagination. She was sure of that. Mostly sure …

Stuart Morholt unzipped another compartment of his pack, removed bricks of what looked like modelling clay, and stacked them in a little pyramid.

“Is that what I think it is?” Milo asked in a cracking voice.

“It is, if you think it’s plastic explosives.” Morholt withdrew a handful of batteries and inserted them into a little black box he pulled from another pocket. A light on its side blinked red and green. Satisfied, he took out the batteries and put them back into the pocket. “Just in case. We don’t want any stray zotting to fry my detonator now, do we?”

“Shimmering,”
Al barked. “And what the-detonator
hell
?” Morholt chuckled. “I, in my wisdom, foresight, and extreme cleverness, saw fit to bring enough C-4 with me on this little expedition to bring down half of Mount Everest.” He patted the bulky pack affectionately. “I’d planned on using it to get
into
the tomb …”

Clare was agog at the damage he could wreak. “You were going to
blast
your way in here?”

“Yes.” Morholt grinned unpleasantly. “But fortunately I had you, Dorothy, to lead the way down the Yellow Brick Road. And so now I’ll just use it to get out. I’ll pack the original entry with the plastique and kaboom. Under this much dirt, even the local pub hounds won’t hear a thing. Then off I’ll go into the night, with the richest hoard of treasure this side of the Valley of the Kings!”

“You can’t do that! You can’t blow a hole in Boudicca’s tomb—”

“Oh, stop.” Morholt’s voice was cold. Hard. “Don’t get all self-righteous with me, Miss Reid. How on earth did
you
plan on getting back out? Do you have a magic spell for that, too? No? I warrant a few dark, cold hours down here with no apparent egress—”

“‘Egress’?” Clare interrupted him.

“
Way out
, you twit!” Morholt snapped. “And I’d hazard a guess that, after a few hours trapped down here, you lot would be
begging
for a couple of sticks of dynamite.”

Clare thought about that for a moment. She turned to glance at Milo, who was frowning faintly. His eyes were cloudy and she wasn’t sure how much of the conversation he—or rather Connal—had understood. It was true, they’d walked the path to get
into
the barrow. She wasn’t entirely certain now that there even
was
a way out. Tombs were generally supposed to be one-way only, right? Maybe, once they’d returned the torc to its rightful owner, that would be it. Maybe they weren’t ever meant to get out—

A stack of folded canvas bags landed with a thump at her feet.

“Now, ladies, gentleman, if you please …” Morholt gestured at the bags. “Start with the gold, move on to the silver, and then, if we have room, choose a couple of the nicer bronze pieces. You can leave what’s left of Boudicca’s sword—in truth, I abhor violence—but don’t forget her anklets and the gold belt. And that rather lovely silver wrist cuff sitting on the bier at her feet.”

“Oh,
man
.” Al looked like she was trying to decide between getting sick or just plain fainting. “You want us to rob a
corpse
?”

“An historically significant corpse, yes.” Stuart Morholt smiled coldly. “I’d pack
that
up too, if I thought Boudee’s old bones could stand the journey. Alas, I’ll have to settle for incalculable riches over academic worth.”

Maggie’s lips disappeared in a thin white line. She took a step forward, but Morholt just glared at her and held out the rosewood box. “Since you’re the expert in handling antiquities, Maggie old girl, fetch me that neck ring.”

“No. Shoot me if you want, but I won’t desecrate that corpse.”

“I think you will. Because if you don’t, I’ll shoot your niece.” The gun swung to point at Clare. “And I am deadly serious this time. I’m very much done playing games with young Miss Reid.”

“You really are a son of a bitch, Stuart,” Maggie said. But she went and gently removed the torc without rattling a single bone. The golden neck ring was covered with a layer of dust, Clare saw, but otherwise looked exactly like the one that had lain in the box that Morholt held out to her aunt. Maggie placed it reverently on the velvet lining and Morholt snapped the lid shut.

“Put it over there, by the entrance, if you please.” He indicated the tunnel through which they’d passed and then went about emptying a basket full of gold and silver torcs into the bag he held in his hand. Maggie set the box down in the shadowy mouth of the passageway and returned to Clare and the others.

“Good girl.”

Maggie looked as if she was about to weep with rage. “Now, Magda, no sentiment or misplaced notions of archaeological significance, I beg you.” Morholt waved at the bier. “The old bird would never have been discovered in the first place without the profound historical meddlings of your delightful young charge. And I’m quite sure Boudicca herself, were she here, would be the first to tell you that
that
”
—
he pointed to the remains on the bier—“isn’t her and has very little to do with her. Those are scraps. Mortal remains. Her spirit, I’m sure she’d say, lives on.”

“Are you?” said a voice of smoke and ashes from the darkness of the tunnel mouth. “Are you really sure? Why don’t you ask her yourself and find out.”

24

D
r. Jenkins stepped out of the shadows and into the circle of light. There was something … very
different
about her, and Morholt was the only one who didn’t seem to notice it right away.

“Damn it, Ceciley,” he said, barely glancing at her as he emptied another basket of ill-gotten booty into a bag and pulled the drawstring, stuffing it into his knapsack. “You were supposed to wait with the car and fend off any nosy locals. Can’t you ever take direction?”

Ah
, Clare thought.
So that’s how Stu was able to steal the torc so easily in the first place. Inside job
.
That’s probably who he’d been yakking on his cell phone to back at the warehouse
.

She looked back at the curator. Dr. Jenkins’s glasses were gone and her lab coat hung from her shoulders in an almost cloaklike manner. Her hair, loosened from its severe updo, hung in waves past her shoulders, and in the light from the glowstick it looked redder somehow. She was barefoot. But the most notable thing about her appearance was that Boudicca’s torc lay gleaming about her neck. The rosewood box lay open and empty at her feet.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Maggie muttered. “Ceciley, you stupid,
stupid
wretch …”

Smiling unpleasantly, Dr. Jenkins stood in a relaxed yet threatening stance in the mouth of the passageway. “Hello, Magda,” she said in a low growl. “You’re looking … unwell. A bit pale. Perhaps it’s the loss of all that smug superiority.”

Suddenly the curator’s face twisted even more grotesquely and she clutched at the torc around her throat as if it strangled her. She seemed to be going through what Milo had experienced when he’d slipped Connal’s bracelet on. She panted like a wounded animal, gritting her teeth against the urge to scream, her eyes rolling white in her head.

After a moment her head fell forward and she looked as if she might sink to her knees. She thrust out a hand to steady herself against the wall.

“Ceciley?” Maggie took a tentative step forward.

Morholt finally interrupted his pillaging to look over at his accomplice. “What the hell—”

Dr. Jenkins’s head snapped up, her gaze zeroing in on Stuart Morholt. “Thief …” she whispered, the word slithering from her lips.

The air in the chamber seemed to be growing hotter and stuffier by the second and Clare wondered for a panicked moment if they were using up all the oxygen. The shadows leaping up the wall behind Dr. Jenkins looked as though they were too thick.
Shadows weren’t supposed to be thick
, Clare thought. They seemed to have weight. Dimension.
Anger
…

Suddenly the pitch torches on the chamber’s walls—cold and dead for almost two thousand years—flared to brilliant, roaring life. Al yelped like a puppy and Clare dropped her candle, snuffing out its meagre flame. Morholt’s glowstick exploded in a shower of green spatters that sputtered and extinguished—but it no longer mattered. The angry, writhing swaths of crimson and orange light racing across the domed roof of Boudicca’s tomb cast more than enough illumination.

Morholt swung the barrel of his gun in the direction of the curator. Dr. Jenkins flung her arms wide and the weapon flew from his hand to shatter against the rough-hewn stone wall.

“Damnation!” Morholt protested. “That was an authentic film prop! I stole that!”

Anger momentarily trumped fear and Clare pegged him with a disgusted stare. “You mean that it wasn’t even a
real
gun? Oh, I hate you so much.”

“I told you,” Morholt muttered. “I abhor violence.”

“Well
that’s
too bad,” Clare snarled. “Because I’m gonna kill you with my bare hands.”

Morholt’s eyes hadn’t left Dr. Jenkins’s face. He nodded at the curator. “You may have to take a number.”

“I’ve already got mine,” Maggie said, glaring at him sideways.

“Shut up, Magda!” Dr. Jenkins spat furiously. “You had your chance with him. You were just too blind and frightened to take up the mantle of the Druid Queen. You could have had everything—with Stuart at your side.”

Morholt made a scoffing sound. “
She
would have been at
my
side, if anything …”

“Oh, Ceciley.” Maggie shook her head sadly. “Is that really it? All this time you’ve been jealous of my relationship with this … this charlatan?”

“I’m hardly that!” Morholt said hotly. “You were there the night I opened that portal. You cannot possibly deny my power in the face of that. My abilities …”

Dr. Jenkins’s laugh was tinged with an edge of hysteria. “
Your
abilities. You had nothing to do with it. You don’t even know how you managed it. But you are right about one thing. Dear precious Maggie here turned her back on the greatness of that achievement. And because of that, the sacrifice was in vain.”

“Sacrifice!” Maggie was aghast. “You
intended
what happened to that poor boy?”

“What?” Morholt looked confused.

“Yes,” Dr. Jenkins said flatly.

“No!” Morholt’s complexion went ashen. “That was
not
part of the plan. It just happened. Magda—you know me better than that—”

“Which is why I never let you in on that part of the ritual, Stuart,” the curator said. “You’re weak. Sneaking. Power-hungry … easy enough to manipulate. I may not have known exactly what would happen that night, but I knew something would. But we were never able to replicate the feat afterward—not without your participation,
Doctor
Wallace.” The way she said Maggie’s title made it sound like an insult. “But how ironic that this girl—this blood relation of yours—would be the one to cross over truly. The one to become our conduit and our guide. My path to Boudicca’s vengeance …”

The curator’s head fell forward again, hair curtaining her features. Maggie took another uncertain step toward her colleague. Toward the woman who was
once
her colleague. The shadows roiled and coalesced, gathering around her. After long moments Ceciley Jenkins raised her head again, her dark eyes gleaming.

“For Andrasta …”
she hissed. Her voice held no trace of the curator’s now—it was all Boudicca’s.

She’s transforming on a much deeper level than Milo did
, Clare thought. She exchanged a worried glance with Al.

“Was I a pawn, too, my queen?” Milo took a step forward. The curator’s eyes flicked over to where Milo had spoken in Connal’s voice. In the language of the ancient Iceni.

“A game piece in your schemes?” he continued.

“Connal. My. What a surprise.” Boudicca’s gaze went flat and serpentine. Full of an old rage as harsh and indelible as a dried blood stain. “Yes, you were.” She too spoke in the Iceni tongue. “An ineffectual one. You were supposed to die that night and lead my spirit warriors to victory. Not live to watch our home and people go down under the sandal of the Roman. And there will be a reckoning for that. The spirit warriors will see to it.”

Clare was assaulted once again with the image of Connal’s remains in a glass case. “For the record? Their deaths didn’t do you one damn bit of good,” she said. “Neither did Connal’s. It didn’t make a difference—and so it didn’t have to happen. And for another record? I was the one who helped him escape that ‘fate.’ Me and Comorra. Would you punish her, too?”

“She is my daughter,” Boudicca said simply.

“She is indeed,” Connal said. “And she followed close behind in your footsteps, my queen. She lies in the next chamber.”

The shadow of a frown crept over Boudicca’s face.

“She drank from your cup.”

“No.”

Boudicca spun on her heel and stalked toward the ante-chamber where Clare had seen Comorra’s body and where dead torches now flared to life. A moment of weighted silence filled the dark air. Then a keening wail, almost inhuman, drifted back toward the main chamber. It raised the small hairs on Clare’s arms.