Once Every Never (4 page)

And froze.

Standing right there, only a few feet away, were the darkened shapes of two men, one huge and bearlike, the other just a bit taller than Clare, with a lean athletic build. They had their backs to her and Clare couldn’t make out their features, but they both wore what looked like long, heavy cloaks. They spoke to each other in low tones. Clare strained to hear what they were saying, but the words were unfamiliar and she realized they were speaking some other language. Suddenly the big man lifted his muscle-corded arms high above his head, and Clare saw that he held an object that was shockingly familiar. It looked exactly like the bronze shield in the restoration room. Only
this
one looked brand new.

She gasped aloud and the younger man’s head snapped around. Clare felt her heart skip a beat—even in the dim wash of light from the crescent moon, he was strikingly handsome. His hair was a deep, reddish brown and his dark eyes looked almost black in the moonlight. His gaze tracked back and forth, as though he was looking for the source of the sound she’d made without being able to actually see her. He took a step forward, and in a low, musical voice, uttered a single, questioning word.

Her
name
.

In almost the very same instant, Clare heard the harsh call of a raven ring out in the night air—and suddenly she found herself back in the brightly lit room in the museum. She glanced wildly about to see how everyone else was reacting to the strange, startling occurrence …

Mr. Rent-a-Cop still posed.

The doctors still chatted.

And Al was staring at her, open-mouthed.

Clare’s heart was pounding madly in her chest. She shivered and hugged her elbows tightly, motioning Al over with a jerk of her head. “Did you
see
that?” she whispered, her breath coming in shallow gasps.

Al’s eyes were the size of dinner plates. “See
what
?” she answered in a shaky murmur. “See you flicker like a broken TV set and
fade out of existence
? Yeah. Yeah—I saw that. What’s going
on
, Clare?”

Clare glanced over one shoulder at the huddled archaeologists and then over the other shoulder at the guard. She and Al could have been in another dimension for all the attention they were being paid. And then Clare thought about what had just happened and a chill raced up and down her spine—maybe she
was
in another dimension. Or had been—a second ago …

“Clare?
” Al was about to lose it.

“Shh!” Clare tugged Al by the sleeve over behind one of the tall shelves. “What did you see?”

“I told you! You …
flickered
!” Al’s hands did a spazzy little dance in front of her face like caffeinated butterflies. “And then you went kind of hazy-looking … and then you freaking
disappeared
. You touched that shield thing and ‘zot’! How did you
do
that?”

“I don’t know.”

Al looked as if she’d bolt from the room any second.

“I
don’t
!” Clare sputtered a bit desperately. She lowered her voice again and pulled Al closer. “All I know is, one second I’m standing here and the next everything’s all tingly and sparkly and … and dark. There’s a crackle of lightning and then I look around and …”

“And
what
?”

“And I’m standing on a riverbank in the middle of nowhere, at night. And there are these guys …”

“What guys?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t speaking English. One of them was big—like
huge
—and holding that shield thing.” Clare’s gaze drifted back to the table where the artifacts lay. “It looked like he was about to throw it in the river. But the other one … was young. And … and …”

“And
what
?”

“Gorgeous.” Clare swallowed convulsively. “And he said my name. He looked at me—well, not quite at me—and he said …
Clarinet
.”

“Clare …” Al had gone milk-pale and was starting to look really angry. “This
isn’t
funny.”

“Do I look like I’m laughing?” Clare whispered back urgently. “Have you ever known me to make up a story like
that
?”

“… No.”

“You said I disappeared. You saw it yourself.”

“You did. I did. Seriously, Clare …
what’s
going on?”

“I don’t know.” Clare looked down at her hand—where her fingertips still tingled—and then back up at Al. “Okay—here’s the deal. You keep a lookout and make sure I don’t get in shit from the curator or my aunt. Or Robo-Cop. I’m going to try that again.”

“Are you deficient?”
Al hissed.

No. She was curious. Frantically, terribly,
intensely
curious. For the first time in … well, for the first time in a long time. Maybe the first time ever. But that guy. He’d said her
name
. And she had to know why.

In her ordinary life, surrounded by extraordinary people, Clare had never really taken much of a chance with anything important. Everyone she knew—everyone in her family, Al, Al’s family, Maggie—they were all so … so effortlessly competent and accomplished. So she’d learned at a young age not to risk doing anything too complicated. She could handle failing. She just couldn’t handle failing spectacularly. As a consequence, nothing particularly interesting had happened in Clare Reid’s life for a very long time. Nothing … cool. Nothing to make her extraordinary.

But now, with that single flash of
weird
, everything was different. Maybe she was special. Or maybe she was just crazy.

“You’re crazy,” Al said.

Well, there you go
.

“What if you disappear completely? What if you don’t … you know … rematerialize? I can’t believe I just
said
that!” She shook her head fiercely. “What if you’re gone for
good
?”

Clare took a deep breath. “Then you’re gonna have a better story than boring old party shenanigans to tell when you get back home to Toronto, aren’t you?”

Al glared at her best friend stubbornly and shifted slightly so that she was standing in front of the table, between Clare and the artifacts. Excitement was bubbling up in Clare’s chest at the thought of doing it again. Whatever it was she’d actually done. This was …
definitely
special. She knew that much. She could sense it. Was it normal? No. Explainable? Absolutely not. At least, not yet. And that—surprisingly—appealed to her somehow.

She pegged Al with a tight stare. “Look. You’re the scientist. Aren’t you the tiniest bit curious about what just happened?” she asked.

“Clare … you
disappeared
.” Al emphasized each syllable of the word. “‘Curious’ doesn’t quite cover it. I’m not curious. I’m freaked. I’m very seriously freaked.”

Clare was too, if she was going to be honest with herself. But for maybe the first time in her life she wasn’t going to let that stop her. Despite Al’s frantic, whispered protests, Clare stepped around her and approached the table for the second time with a kind of giddy anticipation. The image of the auburn-haired young man swam up before her mind’s eye. She felt her heart thump in excitement … and then lurch with apprehension.

Hey
, she silently encouraged herself,
why let mind-numbing fear keep you from doing something so incredibly boneheaded it would give Mikey
the Linebacker at school pause for thought?
She steadfastly ignored the fact that Mikey also liked to throw himself off his garage roof. For fun.

Come on, Clare …

What was it Milo had said to her the day before?

“‘Live a little before you die,’ right?” she murmured to herself. He’d also said, “‘Go crazy’…”

Clare smiled then in spite of her fear. Maybe the super-hot egghead had a point. Things seemed to be working out well enough for him, after all. In keeping with thoughts of Milo and in the spirit of scientific curiosity, Clare decided to conduct a control experiment on this second attempt. Instead of placing her hand on the bronze shield again, she surveyed the assortment of artifacts laid out on the table. A brush of her fingertips along the teeth of a carved-bone weaving comb did nothing. Neither did a plain bronze drinking bowl produce any effect. Chariot bits and an iron cauldron hook yielded similar non-results.

Al stood staring at her with her arms crossed tightly, and Clare started to feel a little ridiculous, surreptitiously fondling all that historical junk. But then she put her hand down on the great golden Snettisham Torc.

At least when it happened
this
time she was half expecting the sudden shift in reality—but it still didn’t make it any less shocking to find herself suddenly … wherever it was she found herself.

WHICH, IN THAT MOMENT
, was definitely
not
the restoration room.

Just like the first time, all around her was darkness. But she had no idea if it was the same night or a different one.

Clare tilted her head and stared up into a sky that, save for a pale haziness all around her, was shatteringly clear and spattered with an astonishing number of stars, brighter than she’d ever seen them, even on camping trips. The crispness of the air made it feel like early autumn, and it would have been a truly beautiful night—but in the distance, there was fire. And screaming.

She gasped and felt her lungs burn from the acrid smoke that drifted toward her. With her heart fluttering crazily like a tiny, terrified animal’s, she stared at the lurid orange glow just over a near rolling hill. She tried to concentrate. Tried to catalogue and memorize every detail of the world into which she’d tumbled—just like Alice down a rabbit hole—so that she could tell Al when she got back.
If
she got back. But back from where?

Clare looked down to see her hand still held out in front of her as if she were still touching the gleaming golden neck ring. Slowly—oh
so
slowly, so as not to break her focus, she lowered her arm to her side. A giddy, fearful thrill ran through her when she didn’t suddenly rematerialize back in the fluorescent-lit workroom. She took a tentative step forward.

… And then dropped behind a big rock so she wouldn’t be seen. The very same auburn-haired young man as before came suddenly careening over the hill in what looked to be some sort of chariot. And he was heading at breakneck speed down a path that ran right past her.

In a … chariot?
Clare blinked dumbly.
Okay. I’m not so sure this is a “where am I thing” anymore … I think this is a “
when
am I” thing!

As it got closer, Clare saw that the chariot was really more of a wicker-sided racing cart, built for speed and drawn by two sturdy, lathered ponies. The driver was definitely the same guy she’d seen the first time. He was bare-armed and lean-muscled, with skin that showed sun-bronzed even in the moonlight, and he stood with legs braced wide to steady himself as the two-wheeled cart jounced over the uneven ground. He wore a sleeveless tunic with breeches laced tight around his calves and his feet were bare. A simple silver torc encircled his neck, and from his belt on either hip hung a dagger and a short, broad sword with a leaf-shaped blade.

He must be some kind of … warrior
, Clare thought.

A warrior, maybe, but he was no brute. He was strikingly handsome in a wild, dangerous way. His long auburn hair was tied in a tail at the nape of his neck, the bones of his face were elegantly sculpted, and his eyes flashed with fierce intelligence. Clare tore her gaze away from the young man’s face long enough to notice that on the floor of the cart, tucked between his straddling legs, was something that looked like a large bundle of cloth. The shapeless thing bounced heavily as, with a sudden, violent curse, the driver hauled the reins back on his steaming charges and the wheels of the cart jumped the rutted track. Pulling the whinnying ponies up short, the charioteer was just in time to avoid crashing headlong into another chariot that came screaming around the bend in the track to meet him.

The young man vaulted over the wickerwork side of his cart, calling out a word—a name? Only it wasn’t hers this time.

This time, it was the name of the terrifying creature at the reins of the other cart.

Clare had thought she’d seen female fury before. Like the time the permanent-detention headcase three rows over from her in biology class had Krazy-Glued an entire dissection lab’s worth of dead frogs to the principal’s Lexus. To Clare, the expression on Ms. Henderson’s face was what pure wrath looked like. She’d been
so
wrong.

Pure wrath was the woman in that chariot.

With eyes rolling white like those of the horses pulling her cart and hair a wind-wild tangle of fiery red, the woman leaped to the ground before the wheels had stopped spinning and pounded down the last few yards of the track to meet the other driver. Words that Clare could not understand spilled from the young man’s lips—questioning, angry words, from the sounds of them—and the woman answered him in a harsh crow-call of a voice.

Clare stared unblinking at the scene, fascinated, with the knuckles of one fist jammed against her mouth to keep herself from making any noise. She couldn’t take her eyes off the young charioteer. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Clare was—nineteen, maybe twenty—but there was a fierce intensity about him that made her think he was more than just a chariot driver. And there was
obviously
something more to the woman than met the eye. A regal quality blazed through the rage that twisted her features into the mask of an avenging Fury. Under other circumstances, when she wasn’t so angry maybe, the woman would have been striking to look at. Not necessarily beautiful—with her strong, angular features,
handsome
was probably a better word, but not at the moment. At the moment, she was
seriously
pissed about something. Clare wondered what on earth could possibly have driven her into such a colossal freak out.

And then the woman turned around.

Below the tangled mass of her auburn hair, the material of the woman’s shirt—a kind of long, belted tunic—had been completely torn away in the back. By the dim light of the sickle moon and stars, it looked as though thick black tar stained her torso from shoulders to waist. It took Clare a moment to realize what the stains really were. Blood. The woman was covered in blood. The vicious lash marks from what even Clare could identify as a brutal whipping criss-crossed her pale flesh and blood stained the back of her long skirt all the way down past her knees.