Every Never After
Lesley Livingston
RAZORBILL
EVERY NEVER AFTER
LESLEY LIVINGSTON is a writer and actress living in Toronto. She has a master’s degree in English from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Arthurian literature and Shakespeare. She is the author of an award-winning urban fantasy trilogy for teens that includes the novels Wondrous Strange (winner of the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book Award and Ontario Library Association White Pine Honour Book), Darklight, and Tempestuous. Visit Lesley online at www.lesleylivingston.com.
ALSO BY LESLEY LIVINGSTON
Starling
Once Every Never
Wondrous Strange
Darklight
Tempestuous
EVERY NEVER AFTER
Lesley Livingston
RAZORBILL
an imprint of Penguin Canada
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2013
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)
Copyright © Lesley Livingston, 2013
Owl image © Koshevnyk / Shutterstock
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Livingston, Lesley
Every never after / Lesley Livingston.
ISBN 978-0-14-318208-5
I. Title.
PS8623.I925E94 2013 jC813'.6 C2012-905174-8
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* * *
For Cecmonster
AD 61
Stuart Morholt awoke in a bag.
All things being equal, he probably should have considered that a stroke of extreme good luck. Change one single letter in that word, and he could have just as easily woken up in a bog. Or not at all. Neither of those possibilities was even remotely a stretch at that moment. As it was, the bag was bad enough. It was made of coarse, scratchy fibres that irritated the skin of his cheek where his face rubbed against it. It bounced roughly up and down in a motion sickness–inducing fashion and it reeked, overwhelmingly, of fish.
Morholt loathed fish.
He loathed a pair of smarty-pants teenage girls named Clarinet Reid and Allie McAllister even more than he loathed fish. And that hatred was particularly relevant to his present situation because those ridiculous, meddling girls were the two reasons he now found himself bound for destinations unknown and—damn all the luck—probably about to be horribly killed.
When, finally, Morholt was unceremoniously dumped out of his bag, he almost immediately wanted to crawl right back into it. The woman standing before him was wearing what looked like a cloak made entirely of raven feathers. Her cheeks and forehead were covered in the bright blue swirls of Celtic war paint. She reached down a hand and grabbed his face. Morholt’s body jerked spasmodically as if he’d been mildly electrocuted.
“Ow! Bloody hell.” He grimaced through clenched teeth.
The woman staggered back a foot, her black gaze sharpening as if she’d understood him. Just as he understood her when she said, in her own, ancient language, “Blood … indeed. You have power. I can smell it on you.”
“I’m surprised you people can smell anything beyond your own rank emissions,” Morholt muttered, forgetting for an instant that the woman could understand him.
But she ignored the insult and leaned in, eyes closed. “You smell of blood,” she said, breathing deeply through flared nostrils. “And fire …”
“And fish. Don’t forget fish.”
“You also smell of gold.” Her hand shot out again and she gripped him hard around the throat with fingers like iron bands. “Stolen gold.”
“Oh!” Morholt gasped at the pain. “That. Yes … well—”
“My gold.”
Stuart Morholt silently cursed the names of Clarinet Reid and Allie McAllister. He figured he ought to get in just one more juicy mental profanity, because he was definitely about to be horribly killed. But the truly infuriating thing was this: not only was he about to die—at the hands of a pack of worthless barbarians at the arse end of a backwater world, no less—but he was about to die thousands of years before he was even born.
EXACTLY 1,951 YEARS LATER, Clarinet Reid picked up her cell phone and dialed a number. Cringing at the jarring double ring of the British telephone system and half-hoping there’d be no answer, she wondered frantically how, exactly, she was going to explain the situation. By the time her aunt Maggie picked up, she’d decided she might as well just come right out and say it.
“Mags?” she said.
“What’s wrong?” came the immediate response.
“Nothing!” Clare yelped. Then took a deep breath.
I thought we decided to “just come right out and say it”? muttered her brain in disgust. Shut up, Clare muttered silently back. Except she knew her brain was right. Maggie had to know. Clare would need her help, eventually. And sooner or later her aunt would find out everything anyway. Especially if she turned on BBC news to find out that all of Somerset County had been sucked into a time portal.
“Okay,” she continued. “Maybe not … nothing. More like everything. More like Al is trapped in the past, Milo thinks there’s a dangerous spatio-temporal vortex opening up all over Glastonbury Tor, Boudicca’s blood curse is alive and well, and a very angry goddess is about to unleash a screaming horde of demon warrior women out of a hell pit right in the middle of Somerset.” She stopped and took a breath.
“I see,” Maggie said dryly. “So just a typical day for you then, is it?”
Clare winced. “Pretty much. And here’s the kicker: I still don’t know how he managed it, but … somehow? Stuart Morholt is behind the whole thing.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then Maggie said, “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning.”
But Clare just shook her head, tears of frustration that Maggie couldn’t see welling in her eyes, and said, “I don’t have time.”
1
“Blog Buddies.”
Clarinet Reid tu
rned from where she stood at the open door of the van she’d just tossed her luggage into and gazed in bemusement at the slender, raven-haired seventeen-year-old girl standing next to her. “Excuse me?”
“That should be the name of our blog,” Allie McAllister said, without pausing to look up from whatever it was she was reading off the screen of the tablet computer she held in her hands. “Y’know. Like ‘Bog Bodies’ but—”
“You’re punning,” Clare silenced her with a stern tone. “I thought we agreed. No punning.”
“Technically, it’s not a pun.” Al glanced up, deadpan. “It’s wordplay.”
“No.”
“But—”
“We’re not going anywhere near a bog this time!” Clare shook her head adamantly. “At least, I don’t think we are …” She turned and called over her shoulder to her aunt, who appeared at the door to her townhouse, lugging duffle bags out to the van. “Yo, Mags. Are there bogs where we’re going?”
Maggie shrugged the canvas straps off her shoulders and dumped the bags on the sidewalk at Clare’s sneakered feet. “No, dear,” she said. “Not anymore. They drained all the marshes and turned it into arable farmland a very long time ago. And anyway, I would have thought you’d already had enough bog-hopping to last a lifetime. Or, perhaps, several.”
“Yeah.” Clare smiled at Maggie and saw the shadow of concern hiding behind her aunt’s serene gaze. She supposed she could hardly blame her; it had been there since the beginning of summer, when Clare had, quite inadvertently, messed about a bit with the space–time continuum by flinging herself to and fro between the present and the far-distant past in a series of events the girls now cryptically referred to in casual conversation as the “Time Monkey Shenanigans.”
Clare had found herself smack in the middle of a war: an epic historical struggle between the mighty Roman Empire and a particularly feisty Celtic warrior queen named Boudicca, who’d been bound and determined to withstand that might using any means necessary, which meant calling on some fairly dark forces of magic. Blood magic. And somehow, somewhere along the line, it was Clare’s blood that got tangled up in the whole mystical mess.
Hence Maggie’s concern.
But now that almost an entire month of summer vacation had gone by without so much as a spatio-temporal blip, Maggie had at least loosened up enough to let the girls head out on an excursion of sorts. She’d even been the one to arrange it.
“Okaaay,” Al mused, oblivious to Clare’s contemplative silence. “How about … Skel-e-mail Remains?”
Clare turned and raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Y’know. Like ‘skel-e-tal remains,’” she said, overemphasizing her pronunciation to make the point. “It’s more of a stretch, but …”
“Seriously. What?”
“Skeletal remains.” Al blinked at Clare. “Bones.”
“I know what skeletal remains are, Al.” Clare sighed indulgently and regarded her best friend since grade three. “I’m just not exactly sure why you’re talking about them.”
“Because we might actually find some!” Al enthused gruesomely. She tucked the tablet under her arm and mimed holding a skull up in front of her face, à la Hamlet. “Alas, poor Yorick,” she intoned dramatically, “I knew him, Horatio …”
“Put that down!” Clare waved away the imaginary noggin. “You don’t know where it’s been.”
Al pretended to toss the skull over her shoulder and grinned. After a moment, Clare grinned, too. The girls were, in fact, almost giddy with excitement. And that was something Clare would never in a million years (give or take) have thought herself capable of in similar circumstances only a few weeks earlier. They were going on an archaeological dig. With digging and everything. In dirt.
To be fair, the dig was a smallish affair, and they’d only be there for a couple of weeks, tops. The excavation was situated at the foot of the ancient hill of Glastonbury Tor, a British Heritage site as well as the locale for an annual music festival. For years, Glastonbury had discreetly hosted small, unobtrusive digs that were really more along the lines of training exercises for university students with the help of a handful of enthusiastic volunteers like Clare and Al and usually not really all that exciting.
Recently, in one of the fields around the Tor, a farmer had made a discovery of small-to-midish significance to the historical community—by deftly running his tractor over a fragment of what turned out to be an ancient Roman slave chain dated to sometime around the first or second century. The find was deemed interesting enough to round up the usual bunch of pasty-white library lurkers and send them out into the field to soak up some vitamin D. And it proved the perfect opportunity for Clare to test her new-found academic resolve, born out of her time-trippy experiences with the past. And Al was more than willing to tag along.
Maggie had wrangled the gig for the two girls using her museum and university connections, and she’d made a promise, as part of the bargain, that Clare and Al would do a video blog while they were there—a kind of running commentary that the museum would feature as a learning tool in its education outreach program. They hadn’t settled on a name for it yet.
Clare had been partial to “Clare and Al’s Magical Mystery Tor,” but then she’d always had a fondness for the Beatles. Al was leery only because she thought using the words “magical” and “mystery” might be tempting fate.
“Oh. And ‘Blog Buddies’ doesn’t?” Clare said suddenly.
“Doesn’t what?” Al straightened up from doing a gear check.
Clare realized she’d been continuing a conversation silently in her head and had only just now spoken out loud. “Nothing …” she murmured.
Al’s suggested riff on “Bog Bodies” was cute. But Clare had vivid, haunting memories of the Iceni warriors Boudicca had sacrificed— ritually killed and thrown into a bog—and even more vivid memories of those same warriors coming back to life, busting out of their glass museum cases where they’d been on grim display, all zombie-like and gross and wanting to kill her.
Al had an occasionally morbid sense of humour.
Well, whatever they decided to call it, their video commentary was their ticket to the dig, so Clare wasn’t going to be too precious about it. In truth, she’d been a little surprised that Maggie had even agreed to a Glastonbury expedition—let alone arranged for it to happen. It was, after all, the one place where Clare’s aunt had experienced her own particularly unsettling paranormal experience back in the eighties. But, not wanting Maggie to rethink her decision, Clare tried, wherever possible, to avoid bringing the matter up.
She remembered distinctly the first time her aunt—the esteemed, analytical, and not really given to flights of unnecessary fancy Dr. Magda Wallace—had ever talked about it. After Clare had confessed to her own bouts of paranormal activity, Maggie had talked about her experience at Glastonbury Tor. The place was supposed to be some sort of magical, mystical hub of arcane energies. A gateway to the Otherworld or a portal to hell. Or even— and this both amused and unsettled Clare—a vortex into the past. But, as Maggie had more recently explained, it was the only dig she could wrangle volunteer positions for that summer and so Clare had enthusiastically agreed, cancelling out trepidation with excitement. Mostly.
In some ways, she wished the dig had been anywhere but Glastonbury Tor. Even somewhere in Norfolk, Boudicca’s erstwhile stomping ground. At least she was familiar with the history around those parts. Intimately familiar.
Yeah … okay. Maybe digging around Good Queen Bonkers’s old ’hood isn’t such a great idea.
Let sleeping Druids lie. Surely Boudicca’s blood curse wasn’t as far-reaching as Somerset. And anyway, Clare and Al had done some reading in preparation for their little excursion and there was virtually no written record of anything catastrophic happening in the immediate Glastonbury area around the turn of the first millennium, which was whenabouts Clare had wound up during the Shenanigans.
They were good to go.
The only
thing that put any kind of damper whatsoever on the whole affair was the thought that Clare would be away from Milo for a few weeks. Milo McAllister was Al’s cousin. He was also Clare’s … she didn’t quite know what. But definitely something. Something tall and blond and over-the-top genius-level smart in a way that somehow didn’t make Clare feel dumb. Also, he’d wilfully allowed himself to be temporarily possessed by the spirit of a Druid warrior prince named Connal—all so that he could help Clare find Queen Boudicca’s hidden tomb, right a couple of historical wrongs, and save Clare from being trapped forever in the past. And he’d done it in a manner that made it look like it was all in a day’s work. Even when Connal’s spirit refused to be evicted and they’d had to fight tooth and nail to keep Milo’s own soul from being trapped and lost forever.
He’d done it for Clare.
Since that time, Clare and Milo had been almost as inseparable as Milo and Connal had been—although in a much less scarymystical-rampaging-Druid sort of way. Clare had initially worried that Milo’s feelings for her might have been a byproduct of all the excitement—even though Al had repeatedly, eye-rollingly assured her that he’d been pretty much crushing on her since he was a kid. But Milo seemed just as keen on spending as much time together as possible as she did. And so the thought of being separated from him for any length of time, so near the end of her summer tenure in Britain and just when they were on the verge of becoming … whatever it was they were on the verge of becoming, was a downside. Even though Clare totally understood that Milo had a job to do in London and he couldn’t just up and go gallivanting around the Somerset countryside on a whim.
Milo made maps. Complex digital maps for the Ordnance Survey, Britain’s venerable mapmaking agency. Somehow, Milo made mapmaking sexy. Clare couldn’t quite wrap her head around that fact, but as a girl who’d recently discovered that she could mystically travel into the distant past, Clare was willing to just roll with things. Most things. It was easier that way.
