Every Never After (2 page)

“You’re punning,” Clare silenced her with a stern tone. “I thought we agreed. No punning.”

“Technically, it’s not a pun.” Al glanced up, deadpan. “It’s wordplay.”

“No.”

“But—”

“We’re not going anywhere near a bog this time!” Clare shook her head adamantly. “At least, I don’t think we are …” She turned and called over her shoulder to her aunt, who appeared at the door to her townhouse, lugging duffle bags out to the van. “Yo, Mags. Are there bogs where we’re going?”

Maggie shrugged the canvas straps off her shoulders and dumped the bags on the sidewalk at Clare’s sneakered feet. “No, dear,” she said. “Not anymore. They drained all the marshes and turned it into arable farmland a very long time ago. And anyway, I
would have thought you’d already had enough bog-hopping to last a lifetime. Or, perhaps, several.”

“Yeah.” Clare smiled at Maggie and saw the shadow of concern hiding behind her aunt’s serene gaze. She supposed she could hardly blame her; it had been there since the beginning of summer, when Clare had, quite inadvertently, messed about a bit with the space–time continuum by flinging herself to and fro between the present and the far-distant past in a series of events the girls now cryptically referred to in casual conversation as the “Time Monkey Shenanigans.”

Clare had found herself smack in the middle of a war: an epic historical struggle between the mighty Roman Empire and a particularly feisty Celtic warrior queen named Boudicca, who’d been bound and determined to withstand that might using any means necessary, which meant calling on some fairly dark forces of magic. Blood magic. And somehow, somewhere along the line, it was
Clare’s
blood that got tangled up in the whole mystical mess.

Hence Maggie’s concern.

But now that almost an entire month of summer vacation had gone by without so much as a spatio-temporal blip, Maggie had at least loosened up enough to let the girls head out on an excursion of sorts. She’d even been the one to arrange it.

“Okaaay,” Al mused, oblivious to Clare’s contemplative silence. “How about … Skel-e-mail Remains?”

Clare turned and raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Y’know. Like ‘skel-e-tal remains,’” she said, overemphasizing her pronunciation to make the point. “It’s more of a stretch, but …”

“Seriously.
What?
”

“Skeletal remains.” Al blinked at Clare. “Bones.”

“I
know
what skeletal remains are, Al.” Clare sighed indulgently and regarded her best friend since grade three. “I’m just not exactly sure why you’re talking about them.”

“Because we might actually find some!” Al enthused gruesomely. She tucked the tablet under her arm and mimed holding
a skull up in front of her face, à la Hamlet.
“Alas, poor Yorick,”
she intoned dramatically,
“I knew him, Horatio
…
”

“Put that down!” Clare waved away the imaginary noggin. “You don’t know where it’s been.”

Al pretended to toss the skull over her shoulder and grinned. After a moment, Clare grinned, too. The girls were, in fact, almost giddy with excitement. And
that
was something Clare would never in a million years (give or take) have thought herself capable of in similar circumstances only a few weeks earlier. They were going on an archaeological dig. With digging and everything. In
dirt
.

To be fair, the dig was a smallish affair, and they’d only be there for a couple of weeks, tops. The excavation was situated at the foot of the ancient hill of Glastonbury Tor, a British Heritage site as well as the locale for an annual music festival. For years, Glastonbury had discreetly hosted small, unobtrusive digs that were really more along the lines of training exercises for university students with the help of a handful of enthusiastic volunteers like Clare and Al and usually not really all that exciting.

Recently, in one of the fields around the Tor, a farmer had made a discovery of small-to-midish significance to the historical community—by deftly running his tractor over a fragment of what turned out to be an ancient Roman slave chain dated to sometime around the first or second century. The find was deemed interesting enough to round up the usual bunch of pasty-white library lurkers and send them out into the field to soak up some vitamin D. And it proved the perfect opportunity for Clare to test her new-found academic resolve, born out of her time-trippy experiences with the past. And Al was more than willing to tag along.

Maggie had wrangled the gig for the two girls using her museum and university connections, and she’d made a promise, as part of the bargain, that Clare and Al would do a video blog while they were there—a kind of running commentary that the museum would feature as a learning tool in its education outreach program. They hadn’t settled on a name for it yet.

Clare had been partial to “Clare and Al’s Magical Mystery Tor,” but then she’d always had a fondness for the Beatles. Al was leery only because she thought using the words “magical” and “mystery” might be tempting fate.

“Oh. And ‘Blog Buddies’
doesn’t
?” Clare said suddenly.

“Doesn’t what?” Al straightened up from doing a gear check.

Clare realized she’d been continuing a conversation silently in her head and had only just now spoken out loud. “Nothing …” she murmured.

Al’s suggested riff on “Bog Bodies” was cute. But Clare had vivid, haunting memories of the Iceni warriors Boudicca had sacrificed— ritually killed and thrown into a bog—and even more vivid memories of those same warriors coming back to life, busting out of their glass museum cases where they’d been on grim display, all zombie-like and gross and wanting to kill her.

Al had an occasionally morbid sense of humour.

Well, whatever they decided to call it, their video commentary was their ticket to the dig, so Clare wasn’t going to be too precious about it. In truth, she’d been a little surprised that Maggie had even agreed to a Glastonbury expedition—let alone arranged for it to happen. It was, after all, the one place where Clare’s aunt had experienced her own particularly unsettling paranormal experience back in the eighties. But, not wanting Maggie to rethink her decision, Clare tried, wherever possible, to avoid bringing the matter up.

She remembered distinctly the first time her aunt—the esteemed, analytical, and not really given to flights of unnecessary fancy Dr. Magda Wallace—had ever talked about it. After Clare had confessed to her own bouts of paranormal activity, Maggie had talked about her experience at Glastonbury Tor. The place was supposed to be some sort of magical, mystical hub of arcane energies. A gateway to the Otherworld or a portal to hell. Or even— and this both amused and unsettled Clare—a vortex into the past. But, as Maggie had more recently explained, it was the only dig she could wrangle volunteer positions for that summer and so
Clare had enthusiastically agreed, cancelling out trepidation with excitement. Mostly.

In some ways, she wished the dig had been anywhere
but
Glastonbury Tor. Even somewhere in Norfolk, Boudicca’s erstwhile stomping ground. At least she was familiar with the history around those parts.
Intimately
familiar.

Yeah … okay. Maybe digging around Good Queen Bonkers’s old ’hood isn’t such a great idea.

Let sleeping Druids lie. Surely Boudicca’s blood curse wasn’t as far-reaching as Somerset. And anyway, Clare and Al had done some reading in preparation for their little excursion and there was virtually no written record of anything catastrophic happening in the immediate Glastonbury area around the turn of the first millennium, which was whenabouts Clare had wound up during the Shenanigans.

They were good to go.

The only thing that put any kind of damper whatsoever on the whole affair was the thought that Clare would be away from Milo for a few weeks. Milo McAllister was Al’s cousin. He was also Clare’s … she didn’t quite know what. But definitely something. Something tall and blond and over-the-top genius-level smart in a way that somehow didn’t make Clare feel dumb. Also, he’d wilfully allowed himself to be temporarily possessed by the spirit of a Druid warrior prince named Connal—all so that he could help Clare find Queen Boudicca’s hidden tomb, right a couple of historical wrongs, and save Clare from being trapped forever in the past. And he’d done it in a manner that made it look like it was all in a day’s work. Even when Connal’s spirit refused to be evicted and they’d had to fight tooth and nail to keep Milo’s own soul from being trapped and lost forever.

He’d done it for Clare.

Since that time, Clare and Milo had been almost as inseparable as Milo and Connal had been—although in a much less scarymystical-rampaging-Druid sort of way. Clare had initially worried that Milo’s feelings for her might have been a byproduct of all the
excitement—even though Al had repeatedly, eye-rollingly assured her that he’d been pretty much crushing on her since he was a kid. But Milo seemed just as keen on spending as much time together as possible as she did. And so the thought of being separated from him for any length of time, so near the end of her summer tenure in Britain and just when they were on the verge of becoming … whatever it was they were on the verge of becoming, was a downside. Even though Clare totally understood that Milo had a job to do in London and he couldn’t just up and go gallivanting around the Somerset countryside on a whim.

Milo made maps. Complex digital maps for the Ordnance Survey, Britain’s venerable mapmaking agency. Somehow, Milo made mapmaking sexy. Clare couldn’t quite wrap her head around that fact, but as a girl who’d recently discovered that she could mystically travel into the distant past, Clare was willing to just roll with things. Most things. It was easier that way.

As she crouched down over the duffle bags to double-check she’d packed everything, Clare came across the heavy canvas work gloves her aunt had given her. They were purple and red tartan, a tiny bird with a red rhinestone eye embroidered on each cuff. A raven. Maggie had special-ordered a custom-made pair for each of the girls. Al’s were exactly the same as Clare’s—except her tartan was black and grey—and she was just as thrilled that Maggie had been so thoughtful. Well, in Al’s case it might have been thoughtful. In Clare’s, it was
care
ful. The merest touch of Clare’s bare skin against an ancient artifact could—and had, on more than one occasion—send her tumbling through a vortex to wind up back in the past. Hence the gloves. And long-sleeved T-shirts.

Maggie had witnessed firsthand her niece’s astonishing abilities and knew the potentially dire consequences. But, Clare suspected, Maggie also recognized that, for the first time in Clare’s young life, Clare was actually engaged—mentally, emotionally, one hundred percent invested in learning about something that didn’t come from a magazine or a mall—and Maggie, in her understated British sort of way, couldn’t be more thrilled. She really seemed to
want this for Clare. And Clare sure as hell wanted it for herself. She
wanted
to do this. And she
could
do this.

Couldn’t she?

“What are you frowning about?” Al asked, misinterpreting why Clare was suddenly staring so intently at her gloves. “Glastonbury is a tourist town. There’s bound to be at least one nail salon in a five-mile radius of the place.”

“Well then
I’ll
be fine,” Clare snorted and stuffed the gloves back into her gear bag, ignoring the chill that had just crawled up her spine. “But unless you packed your own supply of Midnight Matrix Glossy Black,
your
manicure is toast, pal.”

Al’s standard mode of couture fell on the techno-ninja side of things—sleek and dark-hued. It had started out in middle school as a kind of silent rebellion against her mother’s arty-farty, elegant-whacko bohemian style. Clare was never sure if the rebellion had worked or not—it was so hard to tell what, if anything, Mrs. McAllister noticed about her daughter—but Al had grown into the look and now wore it like a second skin over her own alabaster-pale flesh. And the dark hair made her grey eyes look super cool and mysterious. Clare had been briefly amused, wondering how Al was going to cope with the required sunhat. But then Al had surprised her by doffing a beat-up, black suede cowboy hat with a hand-rolled brim and silver-coin band that somehow not only worked with her streamlined black attire but actually complemented it.

It was a striking contrast to Clare’s own low-slung jeans, butterfly-sparkly long-sleeved T-shirt, and Aussie outback–style chapeau perched atop the long, loose waves of her tawny locks, but then she and Al had always seemed like the odd couple—when in reality they were closer than sisters. It was one of the reasons why Clare was, impending Milo-lessness notwithstanding, really glad Maggie had set up the dig gig. She’d had twinges of unease where Al was concerned, simply because Milo was so much a part of the picture now, and—as much as she knew Al adored her cousin— Clare didn’t want her to feel any third-wheeliness. Their friendship
was way too important to risk that. Clare and Al were like each other’s shadow. They knew each other’s thoughts. They spoke the same language—

“We’re off to Glastonbury!” Al suddenly exclaimed, heaving her gear bag into the van.
“Hic iacet Arturus rex quondam rexque futurus!”

Okay … maybe scratch that last one.

“Al? Do I have to Heimlich you?” Clare asked.

“No. Why?”

“You kinda sounded like you were choking there.”

“Very funny.” Al sniffed in mock hurt. “For your information and enlightenment, that was Latin for—”

“‘Here lies Arthur, The Once and Future King,’” Clare said airily.

Al gaped at her.

“Oh c’mon. Who
doesn’t
know Latin?”

Clare had a tough time keeping a straight face for the few seconds her best and brainiest friend puzzled. But then Al blinked and snorted in amusement.

“You totally hacked my tablet password.”

“I
totally
hacked your password.” Clare nodded, grinning. “And spent a few quality minutes speed-reading all the pages you faved about Glastonbury Tor—supposed resting place of King Arthur, possible interdimensional doorway, gateway to the netherworld, and general all-around hippie magnet.”