Now and for Never (12 page)

Three pieces,
Allie's brain corrected her snappishly.
You, Clare, and Marcus.

Right.
She shook her head.
Eyes on the prize.

Her very own, distinctly geeky prize.

She fervently hoped she was right. And that Mark O'Donnell really,
really
did want to come home. Allie could feel a sheen of sweat break out on her brow as she withdrew the ancient silver coin from her pocket and held it out to Clare.

Why is this time so nerve-racking?
she wondered.

Because it's different. There's stuff. Hanging in the balance. There's Marcus.

The coin glinted dully in the fading light.

“Right,” Clare said, her hand hovering over Allie's palm. “In for a penny …”

“In for a pounding,” Al muttered.

Clare hesitated and shot her a look. “Okay, pal,” she said. “Now or never.”

“Right. Now. Now and for never,” Allie stammered back.

The coin had been cool to the touch … until Clare came into contact with it. Then it sparked with a metaphysical heat and Allie felt it vanish from her hand. More accurately, she felt her hand vanish from around the coin—as if the coin had fallen through a hole in her palm. But then that feeling was washed away by an overwhelming sensation of plunging into a giant glass of cosmically charged ginger ale. She watched Clare's eyes go saucer-wide and heard herself yelp—a tiny mousenoise sound lost in the shimmering—as stars burst all around them, exploding into firecracker sparks, and the world and the tower at the top of the Tor fell away.

So did the Tor.

And the rest of terra firma.

Moments later, Clare and Allie hit the deck of a Roman sailing ship as it crested a massive ocean wave. And that right there almost ended their shimmer trip before it had even begun.

“CLARE!”

She heard Al scream her name as she hit the heaving, sea-spray-slick planking, landing hard on knees and elbows and tumbling out of control toward the outer rail. Clare hit the side boards just as the deck dropped sickeningly beneath her, the ship nosediving into the trough between two massive waves. Arms and legs flailing, she pitched over the low rail and spun through the air, heading for the boiling grey cauldron of ocean below.

Clare's own scream added a discordant harmony as she felt her hand slip out of Al's grasping fingers. But the knot in the silk scarf binding them together held—barely—and Clare
jerked to a sudden stop in mid-air. She felt as if her shoulder had been half ripped from its socket as she dangled above the angry churning waters, struggling and kicking her feet. With the scarf tightening painfully around her wrist, Clare hung there like bait on a fish hook, thrashing and trying desperately to reach up with her free hand to grab the rail or a rope or anything.

In the depths of her full-on panic, she was dimly aware of voices crying out over the crashing waves and the howling winds that filled the blue-and-white-striped sail that billowed and snapped above her.

“Clare!” Al shouted again. “Hang on!”

“I'm trying!” Clare yelled back, her own voice screechy with pain and fear. She really was. But she knew she was slipping and that any moment she'd fall into the sea and sink below the waves.

I'm going to die.

“Da mihi manum!” a harsh, deep voice suddenly hollered from above.

I don't know what that means …

“Give him your hand!” Al urged frantically.

“Wh—”

Clare couldn't lift her head to see who “him” was, but with her last ounce of strength she threw her free arm up and scrambled with her sneakered feet to try and climb just that few inches higher up the side of the ship. She felt herself falling back toward the water when, with a sudden, shocking jolt, the calloused grasp of an iron-fingered hand suddenly clamped around her wrist, viselike and bruising. Clare gasped at the familiar lightning-bolt sensation of physical contact with someone in the past—and got a lungful of sea spray as she lurched upward as if she'd just bounced off a trampoline. Then she flew, arms and legs windmilling, through the dark, salt-damp air to land hard on her shoulder.

As Clare lay there choking, she rolled her head to one side and saw Al splayed out on the deck beside her, one arm curled tightly around a rope-wrapped bollard and the other stretched out toward Clare, still tethered to her by the stripy scarf. Allie clambered up onto her hands and knees, heaving and flushed, her dark hair plastered to her face and her grey eyes wild. When she saw that Clare was safe—gasping like a landed flounder, but safe—her face broke into a fierce, feral grin. Clare couldn't help but grin back. She was alive. Only a moment earlier she'd thought she was doomed.

Then a shadow fell over her face and she looked up into a pair of hazel-grey eyes, burning with cold fire, and said, “I
am
doomed.”

“That's what my men have been saying for the last thirteen days,” Suetonius Paulinus said in a steel-edged voice. The same voice that had shouted for her to take his hand. In Latin. He was massaging the fingers of that hand, his gaze ticking back and forth between his calloused digits and Clare's face. Obviously he'd felt the surge of her shimmer power, which was why they could understand each other. It was a nifty function of the shimmer magic that Clare had discovered early on with Comorra—physical contact bestowed upon the contactees mutual comprehension—but it still weirded Clare out. Never in a million years, even with all the time Al had spent practising her Latin homework out loud within Clare's uncaring earshot, did she think she'd ever be able to understand another human being speaking the Language of the Emperors.

“Convince me my men are wrong,” Paulinus continued, his words auto-translating in Clare's brain, “and I may yet decide
not
to throw you back overboard.”

Clare was pushing herself up—easier said than done what with the ship rolling and pitching like a six-coupon ride at the Exhibition—as another man in scuffed leather armour
and more than a few days' growth of beard stepped up beside Paulinus.

He looked at Clare and grunted at the governor, “So the little witch brought a companion this time, I see …”

“Oh, hey Junius,” Al grunted in a pained voice as she and Clare climbed unsteadily to their feet. “How's it hangin'?”

Junius—the brutish legionnaire Al had first encountered in the Roman camp at the foot of Glastonbury Tor—cocked his head at her like a bulldog that had flunked out of obedience school. The poor guy was clearly in the linguistic dark.

“Poor guy” my butt,
Clare thought.

The first time Junius had seen Al was when she'd materialized out of thin air, right in front of him, in the middle of a battle with Mallora the Druid priestess's scathach. He'd been advocating for Al's demise—on account of her being some kind of wicked-ass sorceress—ever since.

Al had evidently decided he was the least of her concerns. Her gaze raked the shipdeck, preoccupied with finding a certain chiselled young legionnaire. Finally she turned to Clare with a puzzled frown. “I thought—”

“I know,” Clare answered, flicking her eyes sideways at the Roman governor and cutting Al off before she could say too much in front of him. “And I don't know.”

The boat heaved then and Clare's ankle bent inward, sending her crashing down again onto one knee. She swore colourfully and winced in pain. This was all some kind of mistake. Marcus was nowhere in sight. Neither was Llassar the Druid smith, he of the magicked-up coin that had gotten her and Al on board the ship in the first place.

She cast an eye skyward, desperately hoping Owl-Goggles would appear in the skies to call her and Al home. They needed a take-two on this whole nightmare scene. Another wave crashed into the side of the boat and the deck slanted
dangerously. Al made a grab for Clare and the two of them clung together until the heaving craft righted itself.

Talk about heaving …
Clare thought as her stomach flipped over.

“Throw them to the waves, Governor,” Junius growled to Paulinus. “Their presence aboard this ship can only lead to more ill.”

“I'm not convinced of that,” Paulinus murmured.

“Look around you!” Junius waved a hand, gesturing at the sky and the sea. “At what's been happening to us! We are at the
end
of the
world
. And now the Druidess has sent her minions here to see to it we sail over the edge and into oblivion.”

Paulinus ignored him and took a step toward the girls as Al helped Clare get to her feet again. The two girls stood there, swaying and stutter-step weaving from side to side as the ocean continued to batter at the cargo ship. Silence broken only by the crashing of the waves stretched out between them.

“I do not think so, Junius,” Paulinus said finally. “If we are truly sailing for the edge of the world, by that logic the ship we chase will precede us into the great void. And that Druidess is not a woman I would peg as longing for death. Not her
own
death.
Ours,
certainly. But there are easier ways to try for that outcome, I should think.”

Clare and Al exchanged a glance.

They must mean Mallora,
Clare thought.

Clare didn't know all that much about the Druid high priestess, beyond the fact that she was Boudicca's sister— although that itself was a cautionary factor. She'd only glimpsed Mallora when she appeared on Glastonbury Tor with Stuart Morholt just as Clare and her friends were shimmering. But the Druidess had made one hell of a first impression, what with the crazy hair and the crazier eyes and the wild cloak of
raven feathers flowing behind her as she ran, shouting curses into the firelit night sky.

The image had stuck with Clare. Just as Boudicca's had the first time she saw her—bloodied but unbowed, careening down a chariot track with Connal the Druid. They were two women plainly cut from the same cloth.
I wonder if the Druidess sisters got along when they were little girls, learning to cast blood curses, play-fighting with little wooden swords—

A shout sounded from a sailor stationed at the ship's bow.

“Brace yourselves!” he barked. Or the Latin equivalent thereof.
“Hold on!”

Junius swore and lunged for a nearby stanchion, wrapping one hairy arm around it and ducking his head between his hunched shoulders. Paulinus, his face twisting into a determined grimace, swivelled on his sandalled heel and stalked toward the front of the ship. The girls turned to watch him go—and beheld the sight of something so terrifying that neither could utter a sound. The angry, purple vortex was swirling open before them like the yawning maw of the proverbial giant whale, looking to swallow the ship whole.

Which it did.

As a twilight-tinged umbra swept over the ship, Clare instinctively dove for cover—in this case a short stack of cargo barrels secured to the rolling deck with a rough hemp net— and, still tethered to Al by the wrist, she took her down with her. The girls gripped the netting and huddled together as the sky overhead roiled with clouds painted in shades inspired by bruises and hallucinatory nightmares.

With one hand Clare felt under her shirt for the meticulously wrapped foil package containing her digital camera. It was still there, still reasonably secure—or so it felt—and she breathed a sigh of relief in the midst of her panic. It was a brief sigh, interrupted when the cargo netting came loose
with the next heave of the ship and Clare and Al were sent flying amidst a barrage of rolling barrels.

Caught in the net like a couple of landed fish, they tumbled painfully across the deck and dropped through an open hatch into the dark, foul-smelling ship's innards. The stench of bilge water and the absolute blackness in the cargo hold made Clare start to hyperventilate. The breath wheezed in and out of her lungs in an anxious rasp and it was only the death grip of Al's hand in hers that kept her from starting to scream and flail in a full-fledged panic attack.

Then a voice, deep and sonorous in the darkness. “Clarinet? Is that you?”

“Llassar?” Clare peered around but she couldn't even make out shapes. It was as if night had fallen in the middle of the day, swift and absolute. A moonless, starless, terrifying, epically dark night.

Beside her, Clare could hear Al fumbling around in her messenger bag. There was a popping sound and then a steady, greenish glow lit up the hold. Or enough of it for the girls to discern the hunched, tangle-haired shape of the Druid smith. He sat slumped on a crate, chained to a wooden post with heavy iron manacles. His black eyes gleamed in the chemical light of the glowstick, his gaze fearless, curious, welcoming, and weary all at once.

Clare rushed forward, throwing her arms around the heavily muscled man and dragging Al with her on the scarf-leash.

“Llassar!” she exclaimed. “Oh, thank god! I was worried we were the only non-Romans on this boat!”

“Urk,” Al said as her face scrunched up against Llassar's shoulder.

Clare exclaimed an apology and yanked at the silk Doctor Who scarf around their wrists. Al brushed her fumbling fingers away and began working patiently at the water-swollen knots, nodding her head at Clare to continue.

“I'm
really
glad to see you,” Clare said, her relief running away with her mouth as she started to babble. “I mean, I would have been totally okay if this hadn't happened, because then I wouldn't be on a boat captained by a truly scary dude and trying hard not to think about the fact that I think I'm prone—like really,
really
prone—to motion sickness and wondering how on earth we're going to get out of this one when I don't have the faintest idea where we are. But I'm guessing we're here because you still have the coin we magicked up, right? Do you know where Marcus is? The young super-hot Roman dude? We sort of have to find him. And get the hell out of here.”