Now and for Never (24 page)

I
t was infuriating.

The time it was taking Dan's stupid program to unscramble the photos from Clare's camera's memory chip wasn't normal. It had chugged away for the entire flight. By the time they'd gotten to Heathrow they had less than two hours to wait before their flight to Toronto. Once there, they'd changed planes and flown to Halifax, where they'd wait until the next day for the puddle-jumper flight to the little island. Now Milo and Piper had checked into their Halifax hotel for the evening, and he still had only one more photo to show for his troubles.

And it's not as if it tells me anything I didn't already bloody know!

Only that, travelling by way of first-century Roman galley, Clare and Allie had somehow already arrived at their mutual destination. Entry Island. Suppressing another surge of frustration, Milo sighed and flipped to that picture again. It was a shot of Clare, still looking slightly wind-mussed but otherwise hale and hearty—
and ridiculously pretty,
Milo thought longingly—sitting in a cave beside a stoic-looking Marcus Donatus and holding a sign:

You're not going to believe this, but …
Look for us ACROSS THE POND!
(er—not sure where, exactly …)

“Well … at least we know we're on the right track,” Milo murmured.

“Yes,” Piper agreed in a bored tone. “We do. For the millionth time. Would you please put that thing away for a nanosecond? You're driving me around the twist!”

“Sorry?” Milo looked up at where Piper sat across from him in the little lobby lounge/restaurant, the sandwiches on their table going mostly untouched.

“You're getting a bit OCD about your girlfriend's holiday snaps is all,” Piper said. “Doesn't that machine go
ping
when it's accomplished something? Like unscrambling another shot?”

Milo fiddled with the cursor pad for another moment. “Yes.”

“Well then. Watched pot and all that, right?”

It was possible she had a point. Milo sighed and, making sure the audio notification was turned on and the volume up, he reached for the screen and pulled it closed. In truth, he hadn't really been lingering on the image because it offered proof positive that not only had Clare and Allie accomplished stage one of Operation Roman Holiday, they'd successfully made contact with Allie's favourite legionnaire. And made it safely onto the right island. He'd never really doubted that. No … it had a good deal more to do with the tiny heart drawn on the corner of the canvas with CR + MM written inside.

Ever since his first (ill-advised and blue-painted) rescue mission, he'd had a growing, nagging feeling that he and Clare had been on the verge of a really big … something.

Fight. It's called a “fight,”you idiot.

I prefer the term “disagreement.”

Prefer away. It's still a fight.

Milo had never fought with a girl before. He'd never even been in a situation where such a thing would have been … a thing. He could count on one hand the number of girls he'd gone out with for more than just coffee or a movie. He'd just been too busy with work and school. And no one had ever measured up to Clarinet Reid in his mind.

That's your mind. What about hers?
the voice in his head had nagged at him. What if she'd changed her mind? Clare, he was sure, had barely spared him a thought in all the long years he'd been besotted with his cousin's best friend. She hadn't had any reason to. And now? What if she felt differently about him? What if she didn't? After all, she'd be going home at the end of the summer.

Yeah? And you've waited this long for her.

I'd wait forever. And ever.

Let's hope you're not left waiting for never.

Shut up.

“So … we make a pretty good team, right?”

Milo looked up again, startled out of his reverie by the sound of Piper's voice. He kept almost forgetting she was sitting there. “Sorry?”

“You and me,” she said with a casual shrug. “Like at that Dan guy's place. Back in London. We were like … I dunno. TV detective partners or something.”

“Oh … uh, yeah. I guess we do,” Milo said. “Like … uh …”

“Holmes and Watson?”

Milo smiled and nodded. “Sure. Or the Doctor and a companion.”

Piper grinned and finally reached for her sandwich.

It was only when they got back to their rooms that the
ping
sounded loudly from inside Milo's messenger bag. Milo strode past Piper, slung the bag on her bed, pulled out his laptop, and flipped open its lid.

Piper peered over his shoulder and he heard her gasp as the next picture in the digital queue began to resolve into a coherent image. Then the next, and the next …

“What the
hell
…?” Piper murmured.

Most of the shots were unfocused and motion-blurred. But in one, whoever was shooting—Milo assumed it was Clare— had managed to capture the scene with crystal clarity: Allie, unconscious, her head lolling back, wrapped in the muscle-corded, deeply tanned arms of a shirtless young man with long dark hair and sharply defined features. His eyes glowed the way an animal's do in photographs. The effect was startling. His teeth were bared in a frightening grimace and they looked sharper—and
longer
—than a normal person's teeth. He wore a long loincloth draped around his hips and a wide belt of yellow animal fur fastened with an intricate pattern of knotted leather cords and coloured beads.

Milo zoomed in on the background. Silhouetted against a blurred, silvery curtain of rain and framed by the arching mouth of a cave were
cougars
—three enormous, powerfully muscled hunting cats crouching there, fangs bared, snarling, ready to spring.

Piper reached over his shoulder and drew her fingertips across the track pad, zooming in on the face of the boy cradling Allie in his arms and snarling at the camera. “Who … what
is
that?”

“I don't know.”

“It doesn't look human,” Piper said in a strained voice.

“No. It doesn't. And it has Allie.”

“What the hell is happening on that island?”

“I don't know,” Milo said grimly. “But I get the feeling that on Entry Island, Druid blood magic might not be the only supernatural kid on the block.”

CLARE COULDN'T SLEEP.

Even though it was deep night, probably closer to morning even, she was still tossing and turning beneath the thickly woven woollen blanket. In the gloom of the cave she kept imagining that the shadows the fire cast on the rock walls weren't shadows. Her eyelids were lead-heavy and kept drifting closed, but then a noise—the rumble of thunder from the storm that had rolled in after sundown, the crash of a wave on the beach beyond the cave mouth—would jolt her back out of a downward spiral toward slumber. On the other side of the fire Al was sawing logs with gusto. She'd drifted off to sleep with the strap of her messenger bag slung across her torso, arms wrapped around the thing as if it was a teddy bear. She still wore the voluminous raven cloak Mallora had given her, which she seemed to be taking quite a shine to. Marcus—in a fit of adorable chivalry—had positioned himself near the mouth of the cave, an obstacle to any wayward local fauna seeking shelter from the storm. His breathing was deep and regular. The spring pool at the back of the cave made an occasional burble and the fire cracked and popped.

At long last, Clare managed to drift off.

When she jolted awake again the fire had burned so low it was barely embers. The shadows had more substance now, and drifting white smoke seemed to hover in the still air. Clare wasn't sure what had awakened her. For a second she couldn't even remember where she was. But then she knew. A noise.

Noises …

The sounds in the darkness were enough to make her blood run cold. Hissing and growling and the low, guttural huffing of animals breathing. Mingled with that were voices, speaking in a language Clare didn't recognize—not Iceni, not English, but something else entirely. Her own breath had stopped in her throat and she froze, holding herself as still as she could. When she cracked open one eye, the dying fire
was just able to illuminate the hunched shapes moving about the cave.

The air was faintly perfumed with a sickly sweetness that seemed to crawl up Clare's nose and tug at her eyelids. It made her want to pull the blanket over her head and sink back down into oblivion. Then suddenly Al screamed—a blood-curdling cry in the darkness—and Clare heard Marcus startle awake with a shouted curse. The interior of the cave devolved into chaos in moments.

Clare couldn't think, couldn't move …

She heard Marcus howling for Al and the scrape of steel as he drew his sword, but in the dark he was stumbling and clumsy, bashing into walls and falling over himself as he swung wildly at the shadowy shapes. Clare, too, was rubberlimbed and out of control as she tried to untangle herself from her bedding and stand up. It felt as though she was tumbling through a dream—a nightmare—except that each time she fell to her knees on the hard rock floor the pain was shockingly real. Then she remembered the cloying scent that had drifted through the cave in a weird narcotic haze.

They must have thrown something on the fire.

They who?

The shadow shapes.

In the confusion, Clare did the only thing her foggy brain could think to do. She reached for her bag and hauled out her camera, groped in the darkness to find the On button, and fired off a string of shots in the direction of the intruders, hoping to scare them off with the brightness of the flash and managing to momentarily blind herself in the process. When her vision cleared she saw Marcus, a look of pure, feral battle rage on his face, swinging his sword in a downward arc that drew a swath of bright blood from the muscle-bunched shoulder of a dark-haired man—
no,
Clare's brain groggily corrected her,
that's not a man, that's a freaking bear
—who grunted in pain
and then blurred like smoke, disappearing through the cave mouth and out into the storm, Marcus in hot pursuit.

Clare staggered to her feet and lurched forward, still firing off camera flashes, but one of the shadow shapes turned and snarled, a beastly throaty sound that stopped her in her tracks. Clare locked eyes with whatever it was in the darkness, and then the thing leaped. She saw a flash of claws and teeth—and then a sudden arcing swath of flames. Someone was swinging a burning tree branch and roaring a full-throated challenge.

And that someone, Clare realized in the light of another flash, was Stuart Morholt.

Where on earth did
he
come from?!

Wild-eyed and wilder-haired, his torn-up jumpsuit hanging loosely off him, Morholt swung for the head of another shadowy figure—a figure that was
carrying Al
—but it ducked with inhuman speed, leaped past Morholt, and disappeared into the night, followed by the others. In a moment they were all gone and, save for the crackling of Morholt's flaming branch, the cave was silent again. By the time Clare managed to stagger outside to join Marcus, all she could see was … nothing. Rain and darkness.

“Al!” Clare screamed.
“Al!”

Al didn't respond. Or couldn't.

Clare took a step toward the path leading up the cliff face, but a fork of lightning, blinding bright, stabbed down into the ocean waves not thirty yards from where they stood. The thunder, immediate and bone-jarring, felt like someone had fired off a cannon. She glanced at Marcus, then together they ran back to the shelter of the cave before they'd be flash-fried by the island's storm gods.

Clare sank to the ground beside the fire pit, shedding rainwater in a puddle all around her. She felt fuzzy-brained and sluggish and jittery all at once, as if she'd pulled an all-nighter and overcompensated with too much caffeine.
Marcus seemed to be feeling the same way, only worse. Since he'd been sleeping closest to the fire, he was affected the most by whatever the intruders had thrown on the flames that had produced the narcotic haze of smoke. But that didn't matter— once he'd regained his faculties, he was apoplectic.

Marcus blamed himself, cursing his idiocy and pacing back and forth at the cave mouth, just beyond the deluge going on outside. Having shrugged into the shirt of ringmail armour that was part of his gear, he shimmied and clinked like a can full of pennies.

One step outside into the storm wearing that and ZOT!
Clare thought.

Strike after strike of lightning lit up the sky, magnesium-flare bright, illuminating the anguished frustration on Marcus's face.

“Oh rel
ax,
will you?” Morholt drawled, the first words he'd spoken since appearing out of nowhere to save Clare's bacon. “You'd be a human lightning rod out there in all that metal.”

Marcus fingered the edge of his ringmail sleeve as if about to throw it off and run out into the storm clad only in his linen tunic.

“I wouldn't do
that
either,” Morholt warned, pointing to a set of long parallel gouges—claw marks—in the hard-packed dirt at the mouth of the cave. “In case it escaped your notice, we're not the only species on this lump of rock, and without all that tin you're nothing more than a tasty snack.”

“Allie's out there somewhere,” Marcus snarled.

“And most likely quite safe,” Morholt said. “I doubt whoever took her did it to harm her. They could have done that right here. They want her for something. Which means that, for the time being at least, she's probably scared and uncomfortable but otherwise fine. Take it from a seasoned kidnapper.” He shot a sideways glare at Clare, who managed to glare back. “I know whereof I speak.”

Clare looked back at Marcus and gave him a helpless shrug. Morholt had been kind of a crappy kidnapper, truth be told, but she knew he had a point. At least, she sure as hell hoped he did.