Her other jacket pocket began to buzz. Clare pulled out her phone and read the text message Milo had sent.
Hey, Clare de Lune … Meet me at Goggles’s place as soon as you can after you’re done. Don’t worry about dinner, I’ll stop at the Rifleman and get takeaway. Have something to show you both.
She almost had to tie herself to a tree root to keep from leaping out of her gopher hole and running to the rendezvous. But if she went MIA again before the end of her shift, she’d either raise suspicions or someone just might rat her out to Ashbourne, who might even relay to Maggie that Clare was a slacker. She didn’t want that for two reasons. One, she wasn’t. If it hadn’t been for the Al crisis, Clare would still be happily, achingly, enthusiastically digging away. And two, she needed the time and space to figure out how to get Al back. So she just had to bide her work time and stay in her dig space. Until 4:45 at least, when the supervisors had knocked off and were already half-pints into the evening.
When, finally, quittin’ time rolled around, Clare headed in the direction of Gimble’s Antiquarian Shop on Chilkwell Street at a dead run. She was out of breath and gasping when she rounded the corner and saw Milo entering the shop just ahead of her. Clare bolted through the door right behind him, almost taking Milo— and Piper Gimble, who’d met Milo at the door—down in a tangled heap.
Piper directed them toward the back room. “I just have a few lookie-loos to shoo on their way,” she murmured, gesturing at a middle-aged couple who were peering into one of the cabinets.
“Good. The sooner the better.” Milo pointed to the front door. “And then lock it this time.”
Piper hesitated, then flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED.
Clare tugged at Milo’s sleeve as he stalked between the rows of curio shelves, the brown paper takeaway bag he carried wafting mouth-watering smells in his wake. She suddenly couldn’t remember the last full meal she’d eaten. Oh … yes, she could. It was the dinner she’d been unable to choke down after the lunch of the day before that hadn’t sat well. No wonder she was damn-nearstarving hungry, even with Al still MIA.
“Hey,” she said a bit breathlessly.
Milo half-turned and flashed her a warm smile. “Hey, Clare de Lune.”
Clare breathed a silent sigh of relief. She’d been wondering if Milo had begun to think a relationship with her was getting to be all just a bit too much. Especially since it had cost him his cousin.
Temporarily.
Before Piper managed to ditch the browsing couple, Clare and Milo had laid out a bit of an impromptu picnic. Milo wouldn’t tell her what he’d discovered before Piper joined them, but the tang of malt vinegar from the steaming-hot, crispy-battered fish and chips mollified her curiosity for the moment. As she wolfed it down Milo grinned at her.
“That’s my girl,” he said. “I know I always function better on a belly full of food.”
Clare grinned back and snarfed a plastic forkful of coleslaw. She had no idea where he packed it all away—he was built like a long-distance runner, all long legs and not an ounce of fat. Still, Clare wasn’t about to quibble. Not when he brought her food and called her “his girl.” She even forgot to be stressed. Then Piper Gimble, yet another pair of goggles perched on top of her head (vaguely steampunk this time, with ruby-coloured lenses; Clare was beginning to suspect they were strictly for show), rattled her way through the beaded curtain, platinum ponytails flouncing, and it was back to business.
Once Clare had cleared away the cardboard takeaway containers, Milo reached into his knapsack and pulled out his laptop, positioning it on the counter between the three of them and flipping it open. Clare tried her best to ignore the skull-shaped bulge still left in the bag.
“I’ve been in communication with a … friend of mine over the last couple of days,” Milo began.
“A friend?” Clare asked, curious about the way he’d emphasized the word.
“Well, he’s more of a … a contact, really.”
Why does that sound as if Milo’s been doing something most people wouldn’t do? Something … illegal. Or at the very least, suspect. She was staring at him, she knew.
“Just someone I know through work,” he went on, shrugging off Clare’s frown. “I mean, I’ve never actually met the guy face to face. But he’s a tech genius who works at a multinational geotech survey company. He’s seriously hooked in and I asked him to look into something for me. So he did. With some pretty spectacular results.”
Milo’s fingers danced fluidly over the keyboard as he called up a log-in screen for some kind of official-looking website. His expression set and serious, he plucked his cell phone out of its holder on his belt and punched a number on the screen. It didn’t take many rings before someone picked up. Milo murmured something into the handset that was too low for Clare to make out.
She heard the faint chatter of a terse response.
“Thanks, Dan,” Milo said. “I owe you one.”
The screen had begun to fill, seemingly of its own accord, with overlapping pop-up windows: satellite images, in dizzying variety, of Glastonbury and the surrounding area.
And they didn’t look as though they were meant for the average digital customer. Clare saw “classified” tags at the bottom of some of the windows before Milo repositioned them on the screen.
“Most of this stuff comes from oil and prospecting companies that use geomagnetic surveys for help in locating underground resources,” Milo murmured as he began to scroll around the various windows, cycling through the data to find what he was looking for.
“Most of it?” Clare asked, one eyebrow creeping up her forehead.
Milo seemed to be avoiding eye contact. “Yeah … some of it comes from military satellites. Dan’s got access to the raw data—I mean, he can’t patch me in directly to a live feed or anything, but he’s posted these latest passes from a geosynchronous bird plus a couple of orbital ones to a secure server site and given me temporary passcode access.”
“You’re totally not supposed to have that, are you?”
“No.” Milo’s mouth disappeared into a fine line. “But I needed to see something, and Dan has … flexible scruples. That’s not the point now.”
Clare wisely shut up. She knew Milo was worried sick about Al, even though he tried his best to hide it—just to keep her from worrying. If he thought the data was worth the risk, the least she could do was pay attention and try to follow the techno jargon.
Piper was close enough to the screen she almost left a nose print on it.
Clare shouldered her out of the way.
“Okay … here’s what I think is happening.” Milo’s finger hovered in a circle over one of the rainbow-hued images. “This is what the electromagnetic fields surrounding Glastonbury looked like last week. Before we got here.”
“What am I looking for?” Clare asked, leaning in. “I don’t see anything strange. I mean, other than all the strange stuff. The colours are pretty …”
“No. You’re right,” Piper said. “There isn’t anything strange. The colour gradients are fairly uniform across the spectrum.”
Clare suddenly felt like an idiot for calling them “pretty.” Stupid showoff Piper.
“There are no large-scale distortions to speak of,” Piper continued. “Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Right.” Milo nodded. “I mean … this wide inner ring of orangered indicates some substantial electromagnetic energy readings emanating from the hill, but for this region, it’s nothing too off the charts. It falls within the range of normal. Barely, but still normal.”
“Okay …” Clare frowned.
“I mean, as near as I can figure out,” he explained, seeing the confusion on her face, “the whole area surrounding the Tor is … ‘in flux’ is the only way I can describe it. But it’s usual for the area. I remember a couple of months ago—when you were still in Toronto, Clare—I was doing some topography mapping of this area and I got kinda fascinated with the quality of its emanations: bac
kground radiation levels and that sort of thing. And sure, it’s weird. But last week’s weird was the same kind of weird as last month’s. And the month before that.”
Clare worked that through. “So … uniform weirdness.”
“Exactly. Now …” Milo continued cycling through the graphics Dan had sent him until he got to the one he was looking for. “Here’s a shot of the area—taken by the same satellite as the one I just showed you—but this one was taken yesterday. At 11:45 A.M. local time.”
“That’s right around the time I left Al to go log those pot shards,” Clare noted. “Just before lunch.”
“Just about the time we figure Allie went AWOL. See anything different?”
Clare and Piper both moved in for a closer look. The image was basically the same—rainbow rings flowing out in wobbly circles from the summit of the hill—except that, in one corner of the screen, the coloured rings suddenly buckled inward. And the colour gradient shaded sharply from red to purple to indigo …
And then, like a pinprick of darkness at the very heart of the anomaly, to black.
“What …?” Clare squinted at the dot.
“I think that’s Allie,” Milo said quietly. “At least, I think that’s where she went.”
Clare’s mouth went dry.
“If that was yesterday …” Piper said, “what does it look like now?”
Milo glanced up at her over the rim of his glasses, his mouth set in a grim line. Then he clicked on another image window, enlarging it so that it filled the entire screen.
Clare gasped.
Piper sat back and said, “Whoa.”
Instead of uniform rings of colour spreading out from the Tor, streaks of darkness—angry, squiggly threads—snaked through the image like the telltale signs of blood poisoning from a wound gone bad. And what had been a dark pinpoint in the previous shot was now a small, smudgy blur.
“What the hell …?” Clare whispered.
“It begins,” Piper said quietly.
Clare’s gaze snapped up from the screen. The other girl’s expression was calm, serene. Almost cold. But her eyes glittered darkly, like chips of black ice. Suddenly there was no doubt—not a shred of uncertainty—in Clare’s mind that Piper Gimble truly was a direct descendant of Stuart Morholt. And that the yarn she’d spun about her ancestress being Boudicca’s Druidess sister was just as true.
And if this Mallora chick had been anything at all like her sibling, then …
“How do we stop it?” Clare asked.
“You don’t,” said Nicholas Ashbourne, walking through the beaded curtain from the shop. “Not yet.” The archaeologist nodded at Piper, who shifted uncomfortably on her stool. “Thanks for the tip, my dear.”
Clare turned and stared daggers at the other girl. “Don’t trust anyone, huh, Goggles? You bi—”
“Tut, tut, Miss Reid.” Bloody Nicky stepped further into the room. “Miss Gimble was only following my instructions for the betterment of all. Never mind that now. We have work to do. And I’d like to start off by having you return something that belongs to me.”
He gestured to Milo’s knapsack on the workbench. “My skull.”
As Bloody Nicky reached for the bag, Milo stood up abruptly and slapped his hand down on the hard round contour shaped by the lump of bone inside. Clare could see that Milo had just about had enough game playing. She heard the knuckles of his other hand crack as he clenched it into a fist.
“All right,” Milo said, daring the archaeologist with his glare to take the knapsack from under his hand. “I think you’d better tell us what’s going on here, Dr. Ashbourne. What do you mean we don’t stop that?” He nodded his head sharply at the computer screen with its disturbing, distorted rainbow.
“Just what I said. You don’t. You can’t.” Under one corner of the crumb catcher that festooned his upper lip, Ashbourne’s mouth quirked upward in a cold, unpleasant smile. He looked back and forth between her and Milo. “Because it hasn’t started yet.”
Clare stared at the screen. Ashbourne was clearly off his rocker: the phenomenon was in full swing.
“What I mean is that it hasn’t started yet then.” His eyes gleamed with a fevered light. “But you can make that happen, young man. You will. Two thousand years ago. And then I will take it from there, twenty-five years ago. And that’s how we’re going to get Miss McAllister back and save the lives of a lot of good men. It’s the only way. By using your … unique abilities to activate the mystical Glastonbury portal. With my help.”
“I don’t think I want your help,” Milo snapped. “I think I want your answers. Without all this cryptic bullcrap. What good men? What ‘unique’ abilities? You seem to know a thing or two about what’s going on here, Professor. Well, what I know is this: my cousin disappeared in that electromagnetic shitstorm of a spatio-temporal funhouse you call the Glastonbury portal. I don’t know how it occurred. I don’t care. But I want her back. Now. And I’m not partial about who I have to hurt to make that happen.”
Milo was dead sexy when he was all pissed off like that, Clare thought. She felt her heart flutter at the sight of his clenched jaw and the muscles standing out along the forearm above his knotted fist. But ogling opportunities aside, the whole situation was about to become something of an alpha-male debacle.
“Okaaay …” She took two steps out from behind the workbench, positioning herself between archaeologist and topographist. “I’m going to take over from Milo in the threatening department now.”
“Oh, goody.” Piper rolled her eyes. “Shall I find you another letter opener?”
“Shut it, Goggles.” Clare kept her eyes on the archaeologist. “Let me give you my unique perspective on events, Professor Ashbourne. My best friend is lost, somewhen, out there. And as Milo said, you don’t seem particularly surprised. You also said you can help us get her back. That’s great, and I’m willing to hear what you have to say.”
Ashbourne nodded graciously.
“But I swear—I swear to you—if something bad happens to Al? I will not be a happy little trowel monkey. I happen to be on speaking terms with a vengeful war goddess and I’m not above calling in a favour or two.” Okay, so that last bit was strictly for dramatic effect. Still. Whatever game Bloody Nicky and Goggles thought they were playing, Clare wasn’t about to go meekly along without getting a few things straight first. Not when Al’s well-being was at stake. No freaking way.
“I’ve met those who are on more than just speaking terms with your goddess, Miss Reid,” Nicholas Ashbourne said. “Up close and personal.”
He stepped forward to tug the knapsack out from under Milo’s hand. Reaching in, he pulled out the skull and held the grisly artifact up in front of his face. Now it looked as if they were staring at each other. Clare’s stomach heaved a bit.
“This was an auspicious find,” Ashbourne remarked. “Well, not terribly auspicious for him, poor chap …”
“How d’you know it was a he?” Clare asked.
“Hm?” Bloody Nicky seemed awfully distracted all of a sudden. Just as he’d been in the tent, with the coins. He took a moment to process the question. “Oh … oh, I know. Definitely male. Early forties. In rugged good health right up until the moment of his death. A fine specimen, really. Don’t you just wonder what it was that made someone want to go and chop the dear fellow’s head clean off?”
Piper winced. Clare and Milo blinked at each other.
Clare turned back to the archaeologist. “How …?”
“Here. You see?” he said, pointing. “At the base of the skull near this opening, where the spinal column would have joined up with the medulla oblongata—the brain stem—you can see a very distinct mark below the occipital bun, which is that slight bony protrusion there. That mark, the scar on the bone, indicates a blow made by a blade. Clean, sharp. Excellent aim. Someone who’d been well trained in the art of war did the deed. Took this fellow’s head off in one fell swoop.”
“How do you know the blow came before an
d not after?” Milo asked. “I mean, the Celts thought the head was the seat of the soul, didn’t they? Couldn’t this have been a case of head hunting? Trophy gathering after a battle?”
Clare blinked over at Milo through the wooziness that was beginning to make her feel dizzy. She supposed it was only natural that he’d done some in-depth reading on Celtic beliefs and practices. After all, as relatively normal as he seemed, Milo had spent several hours possessed by the disembodied soul of Connal the Druid back when they’d faced off against Boudicca. The experience had probably piqued his intellectual curiosity.
But Bloody Nicky dismissed Milo’s suggestion with a wave of his hand. “No. This was the killing blow.”
“So … you’re saying this was a sacrifice?” Clare asked. “Like a ritual?”
“More of an execution, really,” Ashbourne said with a trace of bitterness in his voice. “But I dare say it wound up serving the same purpose, ultimately.”
The archaeologist stared into the empty, shadowed eye sockets as if they stared right back at him. A good minute ticked by. Piper fidgeted, and then stood abruptly and went to fetch the silver hip flask she used to spike her tea. She set it down forcefully in front of Ashbourne, who blinked, grunted a word of thanks, and took a long swallow of the brandy.
“Wait …” Clare frowned. An uncomfortably morbid thought was assembling itself deep in her brain. “You said that thing belonged to you. Then how did it wind up out in that field? Did you lose it?”
“I did indeed,” the professor mused. “Almost two thousand years ago, when I ordered one of my own men to decapitate me on top of Glastonbury Tor.”
Clare glanced back and forth between the skull … and Ashbourne’s head. When he said he’d come to reclaim his skull, he meant he’d come to reclaim his skull. Suddenly, quite clearly, Clare could picture a handlebar moustache on the bone relic. The anonymous old skull wasn’t anonymous anymore.