Every Never After (32 page)

Stu drew himself up with all the unearned dignity he could muster, upper lip curled in his customary sneer. “Right. Well done then, Miss Reid,” he proclaimed airily. “I see you’ve followed my instructions adequately. Mission accomplished.”

Clare rolled her eyes and, without a word, stalked out of the tent before she plowed him one right in the kisser.

Mission Accomplished.

Sure. So far. And that part of the whole operation, from the time she’d entered the tent, had probably taken just under twenty minutes. What was it Al had once said to her—back before all the crazy Shenanigans, and, appropriately enough, in Latin? Right …

Tempus fugit.

Time flies.

When you’re having fun … it sure does.

Or, alternatively, when you’re surrounded by first-century hostiles and you kind of already know what you have to do to save your own delicate skin. Not to mention your best friend’s newly freckled skin and the blue-painted epidermis of the boy who was determined to save yours no matter how dumb an idea that was.

Speaking of which …

Once they were both outside the tent, just before they went to rendezvous with Al and Marcus, Clare pulled Milo aside. And by the light of the scathach’s fires, she called him on that very thing.

“Milo …” She looked up into his eyes—they were sapphire and sea-deep in the flame-lit gloom, and she’d much rather kiss him just then than chastise him. “No pun intended, but … what
possessed
you to pull a crazy stunt like opening up the portal without me?”

He bit his lip and shrugged. “I didn’t want you to risk going back again, Clare. So I figured out a way to change that scenario. At least I thought I had. I guess I should have known better.” He shook his head and stared at his feet, his expression rueful. “You seem to be the only one who’s any good at monkeying with the time stream. Piper was right. It’s a gift.”

Clare made him look at her again. “Why did you think I’d come back here in the first place? Without a shimmer trigger, I didn’t even think it was
possible
. How did you know?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “You think I didn’t recognize your handwriting in the back of Morholt’s diary?”

“Oh.” She blinked. “You could tell that was me?”

Milo laughed. “Don’t you remember the day I asked you to write down your cell number for me—and then I had to call Allie to figure out what it actually said? You have famously crappy handwriting, Clare de Lune. And even if I couldn’t actually decipher that code, I knew that since your chicken scratch managed to show up in Morholt’s book, you’d gone back again. I wanted to stop that from happening.”

“But … what about the whole ‘let’s not monkey with the time stream’ thing?”

“You changed the past once. You brought Comorra back from the dead. I wanted to be able to bring Allie home myself. Without you having to put yourself in danger.” Milo’s voice dropped down to a throaty whisper as he said, “Because that’s what you do when you love someone. You try, more than anything else, to keep them safe.”

“Yeah but I—”

Clare’s brain suddenly caught up with her ears and a spectacular sort of synaptic cascade failure took place in her cerebral cortex as she processed
exactly
—word for word—what Milo had just said. All of her higher cognitive functions winked out and she just stared up at him, mouth drifting open.

“Yeah …” Milo said, a soft smile curving his lips and a gleam of apprehension in his sky-blue eyes. “I do.”

A fireball slammed into the outer wall of the camp about thirty yards away—and Clare didn’t even flinch at the roar and the shower of sparks that climbed into the night sky. Scathach apocalypse or no scathach apocalypse, she wasn’t going to let that moment go by. She reached up, pulled Milo’s head down to hers, and pressed a kiss onto his lips until she felt her own start to tingle. His eyes were closed when she looked back up at him again. She waited until he opened them before she said, “I do, too.”

The look on his face melted her heart.

“Promise me, though,” she whispered. “No more saving me.”

“I promise. I’ll leave the saving to the professional. You.”

Clare was going to kiss him again, but just then a discreet throat-clearing sound came from over her shoulder. She glanced back and saw Llassar standing there.

“It is done. What you have asked of me.” He held out the tin box containing the diary.

Clare breathed a sigh of relief. Now all they had to do was get back up to the top of the Tor—and hope that Allie had somehow managed to convince Postumus to convince Marcus to lop off his Legion boss’s melon. Then, with Piper’s help and Clare’s ability and Morholt’s now-magic-soaked diary, the whole lot of them could simply shimmer away and Bob’s your uncle. No problemo.

“Speaking of problemos,” Clare murmured to herself, “where is Stu?”

“The last I saw of him, he was heading over the embankment with the rest of the freed captives.” The smith shrugged. “I do not think he is … right in the head.”

“Oh boy.” Clare snorted. “You don’t know the half of it. Well, fine. If he’s decided he digs it here, then here he can stay.”

She almost felt callous saying that. Cruel. But honestly, the dude was just insufferable. And old enough to be able to decide his own damn destiny. She should just leave well enough alone and let him go his own way. Right …? Before Clare could decide whether to
have another crisis of conscience, the Druid smith gestured to the markings on Milo’s torso and arms, where the paint had smudged and some of the swirling lines had broken.

“He should repaint the lines before the travelling,” Llassar suggested. “They will protect the Druiddyn magic he carries within him.”

Clare didn’t know if that was such a good idea—after all, the Druiddyn magic Milo carried around seemed to be part of the problem. But if it was a part of him now, then damn straight, he was going to protect it. She was going to protect
him
. She thanked the smith for his advice and he nodded, striding back in the direction of the tent to wait for them.

Clare turned and put a fingertip on one of the painted lines. “What … what is this stuff?” she asked. “I didn’t think woad had sparkles.”

“I had to use this …” Milo grimaced sheepishly as he dug in the pocket of his jeans, pulled out a little pot of blue cream eye shadow, and handed it to Clare. “I found it at the drugstore in Glastonbury. It’s not the paint so much as the symbols, but you’re right. I do feel a little like one of Katy Perry’s backup dancers …”

“Yeah … one of the ones she fell onto with her face,” Clare snorted.

Speaking of faces, she figured she should probably direct her eyes at Milo’s. Her gaze skimmed over his shirtless chest on the way up. Sort of skimmed. Her gaze wanted to linger on the contours of his torso, but her brain told her eyes firmly to mind their manners.

This is
business
shirtless, not
pleasure
shirtless.

Nevertheless, Clare was still breathing a little quicker by the time she locked eyes with him again. She unscrewed the lid of the pot and dipped her fingertip into the blue cream.

“I wasn’t even sure this part was really necessary.” Milo shrugged. “I mean … the markings are supposed to be protective, but Connal didn’t need them.”

Clare nodded. “Sure. Connal also wasn’t sending his body along for the ride when he shimmered with me into the present to help us. Just his spirit. And, for the record, I’d like to do everything I possibly can to keep your body intact. I mean … um.”

Clare, feeling her cheeks blaze crimson, forced her eyes back down to Milo’s chest as she started to retrace the designs there. “Forced” being a wholly inaccurate description of just how much (very little) effort that took. She started with a spiral that began just under his left collarbone.

“You know what I mean …”

“Yeah …” Milo agreed, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “Let’s not take any chances.”

“Exactly.”

He flinched a little. “Sorry. Tickles.”

Clare bit her lip. If they weren’t on a mission at the moment, she could have a lot of fun with this.

“Let’s face it,” Milo continued. “Connal was an
actual
Druid. I’m just a mapmaking nerd with a head full of hazy details that somehow managed to get me this far.”

Clare stopped drawing and blinked up at him. “And when does a mapmaking nerd find
this
much time to go to the gym?” She poked one of his pectoral muscles.

That made it Milo’s turn to blush. “Just … draw.”

Clare grinned, feeling better now that they were both slightly pinkish shades, and dipped her finger in the pot of makeup again. Then, as she looked back at his chest, she couldn’t help thinking she might have to appropriate part of Dr. Ashbourne’s vocabulary.

Marvellous.

23

T
he moon shone like a curved silver blade, its white light in stark contrast to the fires of Mallora’s scathach that painted the darkness with a sullen orange sheen far below. The northern rim of the Tor’s plateau was fringed with a stand of silver birch trees that were long gone by the time Allie and Clare had first set foot on Glastonbury Tor, way in the future. Now Allie stood in the shadow of those trees, counting down the moments before the horrible instant when Quintus Postumus, praefect of the Second Augusta Legion, would finally manage to goad his young protégé into lopping off his head. Because it was a “necessary thing to do.”

Because
that’s
what she’d told him it was. She felt pretty shitty about that.

Still. Clare had explained it to her—because Ashbourne had explained it to Clare, because Allie had explained it to Ashbourne— that this was the way it went down. And the evidence that Allie herself had unearthed in a farmer’s field (what seemed like a billion years ago) was pretty compelling. One big unending timeparadox circle. It made her head hurt. And her heart. Quintus Phoenius Postumus must die. So that, just like the Phoenix—the mythical, reincarnating bird his Roman name derived from—he could live.

Huh,
Allie thought.
“Ashbourne” …

Ash-born. Well, at least he’d demonstrated a sense of humour in choosing his modern name.
Posthumously. Er …

That was probably just a coincidence …

Allie shook her head before she completely disappeared into a word-game morass. Mentally shying away from grim realities was all well and good, but she needed to concentrate.
Imagine what Clare had to go through with that stupid blood-cursed torc
, she thought. She turned her attention back to where Postumus stood—tall, proud, and doing his damnedest to sacrifice himself and thus give his men a chance to make it off that cursed moor and away from that godforsaken hill.

Boudicca’s torc fuelled the curse.

Postumus’s spirit fuelled the torc.

The one had to be separated from the other.

And Allie’s erstwhile dance partner, Marcus Donatus, was the only one available to perform that deed. Allie had briefly thought about tracking down the foul-tempered centurion Junius—the one who’d expressed such contempt for his commander—and asking him to do it instead.
He’d
have likely been more than happy to perform a little noggin-lopping where Postumus was concerned. But in the chaos of the camp, Allie and Marcus had only just managed to find the commander—who’d been on his way to the gate to rally the men—and convince him of the need to head in the other direction.

“Why?” he’d asked Marcus, glancing suspiciously at Allie where she stood in the Roman finery he’d provided for her. “What kind of sorcery is this?”

Of course, Allie’s messy, cheese-grater-accented Latin (as Marcus had so delicately put it) was in no way sufficient to communicate with the praefect. So, sorcery to the rescue, she’d just lunged forward and grabbed Postumus’s arm. The physical contact activated the blood-magic linguistic bond and, after an electrifying jolt that sent them both staggering, she could speak directly to the Roman commander in English and have him understand her. It was an impressive enough display that Allie had his full attention from
that moment on. Which led, in fairly short order, to the three of them standing together on top of the hill.

Waiting for Marcus to execute his duties. In the gravest sense of the word.

Only, it seemed he couldn’t bring himself to follow the order. The sensitive nerdo-linguist really
did
still hide beneath the hardened Roman exterior. Even though Allie had explained to him that somehow, through a kind of temporal sleight-of-hand that had yet to reveal itself, Postumus
still
wound up in the twenty-first century, rolling merrily along with a pith helmet perched at a jaunty angle on his still-attached head.

Her assurances hadn’t made it any easier for him.

So Postumus decided to make it hard on him, in the hope that Marcus’s Legion training would kick in and take over. Allie winced at the excruciating exchange.

“What kind of a soldier are you?” Postumus snarled through clenched teeth, his helmet lying on the ground and his neck bared for the blow from Marcus’s sword.

Marcus blanched. “Don’t make me do this, Quintus …”