Now and for Never

by Lesley Livingston

  “And that may very well be my fault. But I’m not sorry for what I did.” Ashbourne’s gaze was flinty. “It saved countless lives. That the life of one young man was made inconvenient is unfortunate, yes. Collateral damage, even. But I will not apologize for that decision. There are the needs of the many and the needs of the f—”

  “And now you’re treading dangerously close to quoting Mr. Spock in The Wrath of Khan,” Milo snapped, an angry light flaring in his eyes. “It riles up the Trekkie in me and that annoys the Druid in me and, for all I know, that makes me prone to random acts of wizardry. We all know that what we’ve been doing is dangerous. No one’s suggesting we start monkeying for fun or profit. Allie just wants to rescue a friend.”

  “Yeah, Nick.” Piper frowned. “It’s a snatch-and-grab. No big deal—”

  “It is a big deal!” Ashbourne’s face grew red with fury. “It’s an enormous deal! You’re involved now, Piper Jean Gimble— blood-tied to this … this witch!” He jabbed a finger at Clare.

  “Witch?” Clare blinked.

  “I won’t have you put in harm’s way!” he continued, his face flushed almost purple. “I made a promise to your grandmother years ago that I’d do everything in my power—everything!— to make sure no harm would ever come to you. That you’d never become tangled up in this terrible business. I don’t intend to break that promise!”

  Without warning he snatched the coin tray off the desk and stalked across the tent to where a small, sturdy safe stood underneath a worktable. He opened the safe, tossed in the tray, slammed the door shut again, and then spun the combination dial.

  Al was aghast. “You’d leave Marcus back there, condemned to an existence he never asked for?”

  “No. But he’s not my concern.”

  “And I am?” Piper said.

  “Of course you are.” Ashbourne’s words came out strangled and a sheen appeared in his eyes. “You’re my granddaughter.”

  A shocked silence descended like a swift, heavy blanket of fog.

  And into that silence walked Dr. Magda Wallace, consulting archaeologist for the British Museum and Clare’s formidable aunt.

  “Well, Nicky old chum,” she said without preamble, “if that’s the case, then you’d bloody well better hand over those coins and let Clare and her friends get about their business. Assuming you don’t want your lovely young descendant here vanishing from the pages of history as if she’d never existed.”

  “Mags!” Clare exclaimed, relieved beyond measure that her no-nonsense aunt had made such a sudden dramatic, welcome entrance. Maybe she could talk some sense into the crazy old archaeologist—

  Who just said he was Goggles’s what now …?

  The declaration registered with a heavy thump in Clare’s brain.

  Oh. Bloody hell.

  “Magda?” Ashbourne stepped out from behind his field desk, a storm-cloud glower darkening his brow. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I came when Clare called me. And it seems a good thing I did. You clearly have need of a good dose of advice when it comes to dealing with exceptional young people.” She turned to Clare while the archaeologist sputtered. “Hello, dear. Milo, Allie. I trust you’re all well? Excellent. Good to know. Now, Nicholas, may I speak to you for a moment?”

  She held open the tent flap and gestured him outside.

  Ashbourne nodded brusquely and preceded Maggie out of the tent.

  After a long moment of silence, Piper, looking as if someone had just smacked her upside the head with a good-sized trout, murmured, “Oh … my …”

  Clare felt a swell of sympathy for her, even as she realized that it all made a kind of shocking sense. Quintus Phoenius Postumus would have been the ultimate stranger in a strange land once he’d crossed over into the time fracture where Piper’s flower-child granny (in her pre-granny days) wandered the Tor, dowsing for ley lines or communing with nature sprites or whatever it was she thought she was accomplishing. Must have shocked her to the soles of her Birkenstocks when the strapping Roman commander tumbled out of a spectral light show almost into her lap.

  Clare remembered Ashbourne telling them that, in his “past” life as Postumus, he’d been born in AD 20. Which meant he’d been about forty when the time shattering sent him into the future. The past future. Probably the late seventies. Clare (surprisingly) did the math.

  “Wait. He must be in his eighties!” she blurted.

  “He’s seventy-two,” Piper corrected. “I made him a birthday dinner last week …”

  “Okay, but I mean, he looks pretty damn spry for an old guy!”

  Milo shrugged. “Look at William Shatner.”

  “No. No way. Take away the silver soup strainer?” Clare made moustache-y gestures with her fingers. “Get rid of that and he doesn’t look a day over fifty. There’s something wonky about— Hey! … Uh … Goggles?”

  Clare thrust out a hand to steady the other girl, who suddenly looked to be swaying a bit on her feet.

  “Piper? You okay?”

  “Hm?” Piper turned and blinked at Clare. “Oh. Oh, yes. I’m fine. Fine …”

  “You’re fine?” Al asked. “Bloody Nicky just told you he’s your grandfather. You did actually hear that part, right?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course …”

  “Then you’re so not fine,” she said. “Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

  “Absolutely not,” Piper snapped, a brittle edge to her voice. “Of course, if it is true, then I guess that along with ‘madman and sorceress progenitors’ I could always fold ‘lying, timetravelling Roman curmudgeon’ into the works. Suppose that explains why old Nick always took such an interest in my business, passing me artifacts on the sly. Might’ve been nice if he’d told me who he was instead …”

  Milo put a hand on her shoulder. “What are the odds he changes his mind and gives us the coin?”

  “Are you kidding? He’s Roman army down to his marrow,” Clare snorted. “And those guys were nothing if not convinced of their own supreme rightness in all matters.”

  Piper shrugged. “She’s right. He’s a stubborn old mule.”

  “Well, I guess that’s that,” Al said quietly. They could all hear the bitterness in her voice. “Unless we can find another way to go back, or dynamite the door off that safe, Marcus is stuck there for good.”

  “Hang on …” Piper got up, walked over to the safe, and knelt in front of the electronic number pad. “I’ve watched him open this thing enough times that I’ve memorized the combination. Never thought to try it out before now …” She swore eloquently when the little light on the door blinked red and the handle refused to budge. “Damn it all! He must have just changed it.”

  “Denied,” Clare sighed. But then a strange sensation washed over her. Like intuition or instinct. She walked over, knelt beside Goggles, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Let me try …”

  There was definitely a shimmer trigger locked away in there, she thought. She could almost hear it whispering to her.

  “Clare?” Milo asked. “What are you—”

  “Shh.”

  She lifted a hand just to the side of the electronic panel and, ever so lightly, placed her fingers on the cool metal of the door. It felt as if it hummed at her touch. She leaned in, concentrating on the murmur of the shimmer coin. Ever so gently, she murmured back her thoughts.

  “Are you Vulcan mind-melding with a safe?” Al whispered.

  “Shh,” Clare said. “And enough with the Star Trek references.”

  She poured every ounce of concentration she had into … whatever it was she thought she was trying to do. A long silence stretched out in the tent as everyone held their breath. And then came the sound of a small metallic object striking up against the inside of the safe door as if drawn by a powerful magnet in Clare’s hand—

  TINK!

  —and the electronic keypad blinked crazily, sparked, and went dark.

  Yes! Shimmer-fried!

  Clare rocked back
on her heels as the door opened with a whispered creak and the coin fell to the floor of the tent. She reached for it … then remembered what would happen if she touched it and drew back her hand.

  “I’ll get it, pal.” Al crouched down to scoop up the mystically ill-gotten booty.

  When Clare wobbled a bit as she tried to stand Milo reached out to steady her.

  “Way to level up the ol’ shimmer whammy, Clare de Lune.”

  “Thanks,” she said, breathing quickly with excitement at what she’d just done. “And hey, I even kept my shirt on while I did it!”

  Milo’s lip twitched in a grin. “Pity.”

  Clare grinned back and leaned down to shut the safe door, jiggling the handle to make sure it would stay closed. Hopefully Bloody Nicky wouldn’t be any the wiser until it was too late and she and Al were well on their way.

  Sailing the high seas of time …

  When the tent flap opened again and the two archaeologists ducked back inside, Clare was once more on the other side of the desk, doing her best to look non-thefty. Al was all shining innocence, Milo a study in nonchalance. Piper was the only one who still looked jumpy, understandable given the geneaological bombshell Bloody Nicky had just dropped on her head. For his part, Ashbourne was looking rather more subdued. Clare recognized the look. Her aunt was a formidable wielder of no-nonsenseness and level headitude. With any luck, she’d already convinced Ashbourne to step aside and let the Time Monkey Gang get on with it.

  Clare watched as the archaeologist’s gaze fastened unblinkingly on Goggles.

  “Piper Jean … I am your grandfather,” he said quietly. “Whether you like it or not—”

  “Bollocks!” Piper blurted. Her eyes were huge behind her goggles, which seemed to be steaming up a bit. She reached up, tore them off her face, and leaned across the table, her hands balled into fists. “I call bollocks!”

  “It’s true.”

  “It’s not!” She pointed violently in Clare’s direction. “She’s right. You’d be bloody ancient if it were and—”

  “I am.” Ashbourne’s tone was bitter. “I haven’t aged a day since I lost my head to the edge of a sword and stepped through that damned portal.” He glanced at Al and Clare. “In AD 82.”

  Clare’s jaw drifted open.

  Al whistled low under her breath.

  Milo shook his head. “Wow.”

  And Piper barked a laugh. “Well,” she said. “Bully for you. Must be awfully nice to—”

  “It’s a nightmare,” Ashbourne said in a ragged whisper. “Your grandmother Julia was almost forty when I met her, but still so beautiful and full of life.” His gaze dropped to his clenched hands on the table. “Your mother was only sixteen—and an angry, rebellious handful—when she had you. Eighteen when she ran away. I suspect she’d learned of my secret and decided I was a liar or a fraud or a freak. I haven’t seen her since and I don’t expect I ever will. I had to watch Julia grow old. I watched her die. While I remained the same.” He shook his head wearily. “Growing this ridiculous moustache, combing grey into it, hiding behind this costume, this persona, so that those around me wouldn’t look past it to see the man who wasn’t getting any older. Soon enough, I’ll have to leave Glastonbury and the dig projects behind and start all over again as someone else. Somewhere else. The only reason I’ve stayed here as long as I have is you, Piper Jean. You were all that was left.”

  Piper seemed to crumple a bit. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  Ashbourne’s shoulders sagged forward, but the stiffness of his Roman army spine seemed to hold him back.

  “What would you have had me say? That your grandmother fell in love with a supernatural accident? That your mother— that you—were the product of a union that never should have happened?”

  “I can’t see how that would have warped my adolescence any more than when I opened that diary,” Piper countered, “and learned that I exist in the first place only because a complete nutter knocked boots with a mad Druidess so that I, his eventual descendant, could one day deliver his stupid bloody diary to a crazy American girl!”

  “Hey.” Clare put up a hand. “I’m Canadian.”

  “And I’m Roman,” Ashbourne snapped bitterly.

  “And—not to go all off topic here, but Marcus is Scottish,” Al piped up suddenly. “Not Roman. And he deserves to come home.”

  The feverish spark in Ashbourne’s eyes fired up again and he tugged at the red kerchief he wore around his neck. “Does he? Did you never stop to consider that such is his fate? That he was—is—destined to remain—”

  “Don’t.” Clare stopped him with a look and the coldness of her voice.

  “I saw,” she said quietly. “I saw you in the past—back in the eighties—through one of the rifts on top of the Tor. And I saw you push Mark O’Donnell into the Roman rift. When Maggie and Stu and all the rest were mucking about with their ritual and too preoccupied to notice you were even there.”

  “What?” Maggie drew a sharp breath. “Clare—are you sure?”

  “He was totally there. Hiding in the tower ruin, waiting for the right moment … And when you and Stu and Dr. Jenkins and all the other Free Peoples were freaked out and blinded by the flash from all the time portals opening, he pushed Mark through the rift.”

  Maggie’s gaze darkened and she turned on Ashbourne. “It was you? The whole trip to Glastonbury? That bloody ritual … You were an assistant professor at Cambridge at the time. You gave Stuart the idea, didn’t you? You told him what to do and when to do it. All so you could send that poor lad back in time.”

  Al pegged Ashbourne with a baleful glare. “So you engineered the whole thing from the get-go. Wow.”

  “Only, my dear, because you told me how when you came to me in the encampment during the scathach attack,” he snapped. “And only because Miss Reid told you to tell me. Or have you two forgotten that little detail?”

  Clare had to admit he had a point.

  “And I was only able to manage it all because that idiot Morholt made it easy for me.” Ashbourne shrugged wearily. “He even made the rest of his ridiculous little club—no offence, Magda, but really, what were you thinking?—believe it was his idea.”

  Clare shook her head. “Even knowing what would happen to that skinny, unsuspecting, unprepared kid … you did it anyway.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And so did you.”

  “You’re right.” Clare nodded. “And I accept my responsibility for that. But here’s the thing: now that we’ve gotten to the point where we all knew we’d get to, there’s still that one loose end. Marcus. So I’m going to help Al bring him back, apologize, and try to explain why I did what I did. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea to you?”

  “I told you,” he said flatly. “I won’t have Piper involved in this.”

  “I don’t really think it’s up to you, Nicholas.” Maggie’s eyes had a fierce glitter.

  “Magda, I have a great deal of respect for you. I always have. But you don’t frighten me. I’ve faced barbarian hordes, defied my emperor’s direct commands, courted my own death at the hands of the young man we argue over now. He did his duty and for that I’m grateful. But I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “Marcus didn’t kill you,” Al said. “He couldn’t.”

  “Of course he could.” Ashbourne waved his hand dismissively. “How else would I be standing here before you now? I died on that hill.”

  Clare nodded. “You did. But it was your old buddy Suetonius Paulinus who did the deed.”

  Ashbourne stared at Clare in disbelief.

  “She’s telling the truth,” Al said. “Paulinus showed up just as the fireworks started. He seemed more than happy to oblige your request when Marcus couldn’t, and he had a very sharp sword. It was gross. Surgical, but gross.”

  The archaeologist’s brow was creased in a deep frown.

  “The governor didn’t like you very much, I guess,” Al continued. “Marcus, on the other hand, was fond eno
ugh of you not to kill you. Think about it.”

  “Yeah,” Clare said, “think about it.”

  She was becoming anxious to get the heck outta Dodge. They had the coin and didn’t need Ashbourne’s blessing. And if he discovered the theft while they were still there, things could get awkward. More awkward. “C’mon, guys. Let’s blow this scene. I’ve had enough Roman stoicism for one day.” Clare spun on her heel and hurried out of the tent with Milo, Al, and Piper close behind.

  As Clare went past, Maggie hesitated. She cast a long, disappointed glance at her colleague and old friend, a man she’d known for such a long time—and never really known at all. Without another word, Maggie turned and followed her niece out of the tent.

  7

  The teen time meddlers headed straight back to Piper’s shop to gather any provisions Clare and Allie might need for this, their last (seriously) shimmer trip. The quartet chattered intently as they walked along Chilkwell Street, plotting and planning and discussing contingencies and potential pitfalls.

  “If you’d like,” Maggie offered a bit reluctantly, “I can go back and talk to Nicholas and see if I can’t persuade him to give up the coin so that you can—”

  “Not necessary,” Clare said breezily. “Already got it,” Al confirmed, fishing the little disc out of her pocket and holding it up for Clare’s aunt to see.

  Maggie’s jaw dropped. “How on earth did you do that?”

  Clare shrugged. “Shimmer-fried the electric lock on Nicky’s safe.”

  “Oh. Well, that was larcenous of you,” Maggie said dryly.

  When they reached the antiquarian shop, Piper pulled an antique brass key ring out of her cargo-pants pocket, unlocked the door, and gestured them all inside. Maggie walked briskly over to the register counter and heaved her briefcase up onto the worn wooden surface. She fished around and withdrew a rumpled paper lunch bag. Whatever was in the bag made a clinking sound as she thrust it toward Clare.

  “I’ve brought the blood,” she declared.

  “You what?”

  “As per your instructions.”

  Call Maggie first tell her to bring blood … Clare remembered that line from the hastily scribbled note she’d written to herself in Morholt’s book the last time she shimmered back. “Yeah,” she sighed. “See … I actually have NO idea why I said that, or what I meant, or—”