Now and for Never (33 page)

Eventually—and Marcus and Milo almost came to blows over it—they came to the consensus that Clare wasn't going to reappear on the summit of Big Hill. It was full dark as they headed back to the little rented cottage, but a harvest moon cast a silver fairyland glow on the landscape, beguiling and ethereal. None of them noticed.

Milo's shoulders slumped as he unlocked the door of the cottage and they all stepped inside. “Piper,” he said, “I wouldn't mind some tea right now …”

She dug the silver flask out of her pocket and wordlessly handed it over without even the pretense of a teacup. Milo took a long swallow—and almost choked on it when he heard a noise in the living room.

Ping.

He ran three long strides, lunged for his computer case where it lay on the coffee table, and hauled the machine out. He flipped open the top and grabbed the sides of the screen, lifting it up to his face. Allie, right behind him, peered over his shoulder and gasped. The second last image on the memory card had finally,
finally
unscrambled. It was a picture of Clare, her golden-brown hair more unruly than they'd ever seen it. There was a sad little smile on her face and she held up a sign:

I'm sorry!

Had to go back—forgot to leave the memory card with M.

My bad … I love you guys. So much. Please don't worry.

C + C will take care of me. I'll be okay. Tell Maggie. And my folks.

C.

And then, at the bottom of the canvas scrap, as if she knew how badly her friends would need to know she really was okay, Clare had jokingly written:

(Can one of you figure out how to send shampoo and Cheezies back?)

“Clare de Lune …” Milo whispered.

“That
idiot
,” Allie sobbed, her voice cracking.

“That ridiculously
brave
idiot,” Morholt said, not a hint of snark in the words.

Clare must have realized in the instant before the shimmer took hold that if the camera card didn't get left behind with Mallora, inside Morholt's diary, then nothing—absolutely nothing—would turn out the way it was supposed to. She hadn't had a choice. To save them all, to maintain the integrity of the timeline—all of it, from the very instant the Snettisham Torc had been found in 1950—she'd had to let go. Sacrifice herself. Stay behind …

“She's really gone,” Milo murmured.

“No.”
Allie shrugged out of Marcus's embrace and stepped up to stand toe to toe with her cousin, one finger pointing up into his face. “No!” she said again. “She is
not
gone. She is waiting patiently for us to figure out how to get her back. She contingencied once before. Maybe she did it again. But she needs us, Milo.”

“How?” He held his hands open to her. “What do we do?”

“I don't know yet.”

“There's still one photo left unscrambled,” Piper said. “That might be useful if it ever clears up … But I think our first step should be to go back. To Glastonbury. And Nick. And Clare's aunt.”

“She's right,” Allie said. “Maggie knows Clare better than anybody. And Ashbourne knows time travel. He also has the rest of the coins. Maybe … maybe there's another trigger. I say Glastonbury is our best bet. We can all be back there in three days' time. Meanwhile Clare has Connal and Comorra to look after her. Just as I had Marcus. She'll be fine until then.”

“Right.” Milo turned away from Allie and reached out a finger to touch the image on the screen. “She'll be fine. And if not? At least we can tell Maggie to her face that we lost her niece.”

THREE DAYS
had never seemed so long.

Sure, the place was an island paradise. But Clare had never been able to spend much time on a beach before she started to get antsy and wish for a nearby mall. The nightly bonfires were pleasant enough but pointless without marshmallows, and sleeping in a cave was starting to get old.

In the days after the mega-shimmer, Connal and Comorra, along with their hairy new pals, had seen to it that the two Roman cargo vessels were stripped of anything useful then set adrift and scuppered. Clare had watched them sink for hours, silently amazed that no one had ever found their remains. Of course, surely no one had ever thought to even look. Roman ships on the bottom of the Gulf of St. Lawrence? Yeah, right!

Too bad I'll never get to write a doctoral thesis on their discovery …

Or, y'know, my grade twelve finals …

Sitting on the beach, staring out to sea, Clare tugged her cloak tighter around her shoulders and sighed. When she'd first realized her mistake she'd been devastated. So close. So far.

So stupid.
She shook her head, chastising herself for the umpteenth time.
How could you possibly have been that stupid?

But then, deep down, she also realized that it had been sheer bloody luck that had gotten her even
that
far before she finally did something careless. Something with consequences. Real ones. And not just for her. At least she still had the memory card and the camera and so could let the others know she was okay. As okay as she could ever possibly be again … Her friends would be freaking, she knew.

Al, Maggie, her parents …

Milo.

So she'd written her farewell note and shown Connal how to take a picture. Then she'd spiralled into a two-day mopefest, curled up in her corner of the cave she now shared with Connal and Comorra. If only she hadn't had to send the last trigger back with Llassar. If only Andrasta really did watch over her, the way Comorra had said she did. If only …

God, I miss shampoo …

Almost as much as she missed Milo. And Al.

It was her third day waking up as a temporal prisoner. She lay there, curled up on her pallet of furs and blankets, pale sunlight streaming in through the mouth of the cave. Clare clutched at the little silver necklace Milo had given her just before she left. Her fingertips traced the knotted endless-spiral design, a poor imitation of the kinds of designs Llassar used to craft, but dear and beautiful because of who had given it to her. If only Llassar was there to make her a trigger …

“Wait.”

She sat bolt upright.

“What on earth do I need Llassar for?”

What indeed? After everything she'd managed to accomplish—going with the magical flow, letting the Force guide her, conducting the mystical orchestra Like. A. Boss …

I'm no Padawan learner,
she thought.
No young apprentice. I'm a freaking Time Jedi! And I'm also
seriously
going to have to deprogram myself out of all these
Star Wars
references when I get home.

Because that was where she was going.
When
she was going.

She didn't need Llassar to make her a shimmer trigger.

She had Connal's magic and Mallora's insights to help her make one on her own.

She had blood, and a silver pendant embossed—appropriately enough—with a spiral path. Boo-yah. And she now had the one thing missing that she'd needed for it all to fall into place. After a good night's sleep or three, she'd finally figured out how to get a shimmer trigger into the hands of her friends.

Stuart Morholt's Magical Mystery Diary.

Clare hopped up out of bed, made up a second sign, grabbed her camera, and went to go wake her up some Druiddyn.

TO HER CREDIT
, Maggie's emotional collapse was brief and to the point. But that was largely because Milo still carried his computer case with him everywhere he went. At the news of Clare's grim fate, Maggie's knees went out from under her and she sank down into the camp chair in Ashbourne's tent. Allie, determined to hold out hope for Clare's return, had convinced Milo not to say anything until they were face to face with Clare's aunt.

“Oh, duckling,” Maggie said, covering her face with her hands, a sob catching in her throat. “What will I tell your parents?”

“Magda,” Ashbourne said gently. “I'm so sorry …”

Milo slung the computer bag off his shoulder and handed it
to Allie before rushing to kneel at Maggie's side. He wrapped his arms around her and she collapsed a little into the embrace.

“It's okay,” he said, lying. “It's going to be okay …”

Ping.

“Milo …”

He barely heard Allie call his name.

“Milo!” she called again.
“Look!”

He lifted his head and saw that she'd fished his computer out of the case and opened it. Through the haze of disbelief, he saw that the very last picture on the memory card had descrambled at last. Maggie's breath caught in her throat as she leaped to her feet and together they crowded around Allie and the machine. The image on the screen was the most beautiful thing Milo had ever seen.

Clare. Smiling.

Standing in bright sunlight beneath the red and purple cliffs of Entry Island and holding up one last sailcloth message:

Hey guys!
Forget the Cheezies. Don't tell my parents.
Just look in the front of Stu's diary.
And shimmer me timbers! Ha!
xox, C.
(I'm kind of a genius and stuff!)

Piper already had the diary out and was flipping to the front cover. She handed it over and Milo's fingers trembled as he tried to gently pry the backing paper off the Moleskine's front cover.

“Oh, just rip the damned thing open!” Piper blurted.

“Hey now!” Morholt protested, but shut up when Milo tore through the endpaper.

There was something there all right. Something that—for the second time—had definitely
not
been there before. Milo
turned the diary upside down and shook it … and a little silver charm fell out. The silver spiral pendant he'd picked out of Piper's display case. Allie let out an ear-shattering whoop of joy and dove face-first into her messenger bag, emerging seconds later with Milo's Swiss Army knife and brandishing it like a maniac.

“Goggles!” she shouted.

“I'm on it!” Piper snatched the pendant from Milo's palm. Then she ran over to Allie and the two of them knelt on the grassy floor of the tent facing each other.

“I've got to hand it to her,” Piper said, shaking her head and holding out her thumb to the point of Allie's knife blade. “That girl is as crazy as a barrel full of monkeys, but when it comes to time travel—”

“She's the best damn monkey there is!” Allie said, watching the bright blood bead on her own thumb pad. “C'mon. Let's trigger this shimmer and bring her home. It's time.”

IT HAD TAKEN ALL DAY
. And a lot of cursing—not the magical kind. But finally Clare's
objet du shimmer
was completed to everyone's hopeful satisfaction. Even Mallora was smiling at the end of it all, and Clare was pleased to see that some of the colour had returned to the Druid priestess's cheeks.

“Goodbye, Mallora,” she said, hugging her. “At least I hope so. We'll know soon enough, I guess. There's nothing I've forgotten to do this time. I
know
it.”

She handed over the diary, which she'd double- and triplechecked, having sealed up the camera card inside the back cover and the little silver pendant—now a freshly magicsaturated shimmer trigger—inside the front. As Mallora took the journal from her hands, Clare felt a tiny, searing flash pop deep in her brain. As if she'd just closed an open circuit.
Completed a connection and repaired a temporal current. Finally. Then she left the cave, feeling light on her feet and triumphant.

The sun had set completely and a full moon was rising. A harvest moon, from the looks of it. Huge and yellow in the cloudless sky, it shone down like a spotlight on the pale, wide wings of a snow-white owl swooping out of the east. And on the gleaming indigo wings of the raven flying beside it.

“YES!” Clare shouted, throwing her arms in the air.

The raven called out once.

“Allie Freaking McAllister, you're the best!”

The owl hooted.

“Way to be, Goggles!”

The raven called again …

Clare turned just in time to see Comorra and Connal running from the cave.

“Goodbye,” she called, waving wildly to the friends she would—she hoped—never see again. “Be happy! And thanks for giving me the time of my life!”

They waved back and Clare felt herself begin to shimmer out of that world and back into her own. Her own place, her own time … her own life. She felt the blood sing in her veins and she knew, without a shadow of doubt, that Milo McAllister would be waiting when she got there. As she drifted from history, she thought of Boudicca. Of her fierceness, and her fiery spirit, and her horrible end. She wished the queen had known that her daughter lived on, happily and in love, in a fresh new world.

She thought that might have brought the tragic queen some measure of peace.

And then she heard a voice, smoky and low, whisper in her mind. “I know …”

Clare's blood, cursed and blessed, two sides of the same
coin, had done that much at least.
Take that, time monkeys,
she thought.

And shimmered away to nothing under the light of the full moon.

EPILOGUE