Once Every Never Part 26

"This is a staggeringly bad idea," Al murmured.

"Agreed," Clare said. "Let's go watch Stu get his pompous a.s.s kicked."

"CECILEY-" Morholt put out a placating hand.

"Don't you touch me!" Dr. Jenkins turned on Morholt viciously, her face clouded with an anger that was more than just her own.

"Darling, it's me-"

"You stole my heart," she snarled. "Wretched thief ..."

"Ceciley, darling ..." Morholt tried again. "I really think you're just experiencing a touch of borrowed aggression. If you would just allow me to-"

"Worst smooth-talker ever," Al murmured to Clare.

"You stole my gold." The curator's fingertips brushed the sinewy contours of the torc around her neck.

"Er ... Boudicca?" Morholt peered at her closely.

"My husband. My daughters."

"Is Ceciley there?"

"You ... stole ... my ... land!" Boudicca's raven's-cry voice howled out of her wide-open mouth, louder than a full, crashing orchestra. The room grew even brighter and hotter, the air shimmered, and then she seemed to draw all the light and energy and heat back into herself. Beads of perspiration shone on her forehead, her face looked gaunt and strained, her limbs shook. But in the light of the now-flickering torches her eyes still glinted almost red. Shadows licked at the dense air-Clare swore that she could almost feel them tangling in her hair like bats-swooping and diving, howling like wind through a tunnel.

The curator/queen stepped toward Morholt, hands splayed wide like the talons of some great bird of prey.

She did not see Stuart Morholt.

"Thieving Roman," she screeched. "I will make you pay!" She saw Seutonius Paulinus.

"Good G.o.d, woman!" Morholt began to retreat down the pa.s.sageway, and as she advanced toward him he turned and made a run for it. He barrelled past Clare and the others as Ceciley/Boudicca followed swiftly in his wake, looking for all the world like an avenging Fury.

They heard Morholt's screams. There was a flash of fire that sent them all scrambling away from the tunnel mouth ... and then there was darkness. Clare started to panic until she remembered the safety matches in her pocket. With shaking fingers, she struck one off the cavern wall. The sting of sulphur made her eyes water, but the bright little flame was enormously comforting in the absolute blackness.

At her side, Clare heard Al take a shaky breath. On her other side, she felt Milo-or maybe Connal, it was getting a little hard to tell-help her to her feet.

"Come," he said. "Come on. Take my hand."

He led her over toward the wall where he lifted one of the ancient torches out of a sconce. It was cold to the touch and Clare wondered at the fire that Boudicca had coaxed out of it. Before the match burned down completely she touched the flame to the brittle, pitch-crusted rag and it caught, giving off an oily light from pale sullen flames wreathed in choking smoke.

"Wait here."

Milo reappeared a moment later with another torch that he'd lit from the first. Now there was enough light to see their way back into the main chamber.

Maggie and Al fell in close behind her as Clare started carefully toward the tunnel. But when she glanced back, the sight of Milo's face as he stood looking down at Comorra's bier shocked and terrified her.

It's only the shadows, Clare told herself. The shadows and your imagination.

Maybe. But for a brief instant there, in the glow from the sputtering, smouldering torch, Milo hadn't looked anything like Milo at all. He had looked exactly like Connal ... and there had been a look of something like madness in his eyes.

BOUDICCA'S CHAMBER, when they got there, was empty. Both Morholt and Dr. Jenkins were gone. So was the knapsack full of looted artifacts. And most of the plastique.

"Mags?" Clare's voice was soft in the gloomy air. "This is bad, right?"

"I'm afraid it's not good." Maggie's voice was tight. "Even if there was a sufficient amount of C-4 left behind, we haven't a detonator."

"Can we dig our way out?" Al asked. Her teeth were chattering, but Clare didn't know if it was from fear or cold. It was starting to get awfully clammy.

"The barrow walls are probably ten feet thick at their thinnest point," Milo said in his own voice.

It was weird, because he was Milo again, but he was obviously drawing on Connal's knowledge. Clare moved closer to him, trying to get a good look at his face through the pall of smoke and darkness. His eyes were a little gla.s.sy and perspiration shone on his forehead and upper lip.

"Milo? You okay?"

He nodded tersely.

"How about Connal?"

"He's ... fine. A little pushy." Milo grinned a bit crookedly at her.

"Does he know where Boudicca has gone?"

"I ... I don't know. I think-he thinks-she'll try to raise her spirit warriors again."

"Then she'll have gone to find their bodies in the museum," Maggie said.

Milo nodded. "She'll probably try another sacrifice to provide them with a leader."

"You mean Stuart."

"He's the closest thing she has to a Druid now," Milo said.

Al's breath was starting to sound raspy and Clare was feeling lightheaded. "We have to get out of here," she said. "I mean-obviously-but does anyone have any bright ideas?"

"Tell him ..." Connal's cadences took over Milo's vocal cords again. "Clarinet. Tell him I need control. Tell ... Milo ... I need him to let me be fully free in order to work the magic."

"I ..." Clare hesitated.

A hand in the darkness gripped her arm above the elbow and Milo's face appeared close to hers. The shadows under his eyes and in the hollows of his cheekbones stood out in stark contrast to his pale skin. "You must. I can get us out of here. Tell him to set me free or we will all stay here trapped forever under this hill to keep my princess company."

"Clare." Al tugged her by the sleeve of her other arm, pulling her over by Boudicca's bier and out of Connal's earshot. "Do you think that's such a good idea? He's not exactly the poster boy for mental health stability at the moment. He's almost as off-the-rails as Queen Bee."

"Yeah. He is," Clare readily agreed. "Got a better idea?"

Al sighed so deeply it sounded as though she were deflating. "For the second time today-and I think this is a first for me-I'm ashamed to say I really don't."

"Neither do I ..." Clare glanced down and saw Connal's wrist cuff-the one he'd left lying on Boudicca's bier two thousand years earlier-on the stone between the queen's skeletal feet. "But I might have a backup plan if things go totally south." Putting on the leather gloves she'd tucked in her pocket, Clare picked up the cuff and pocketed it. Carefully-so that Connal wouldn't see. The air felt like it was growing thin and she hurried back over to the others. She didn't have much time left. Ironically.

"Okay, Milo," she said quietly. "Hand over the reins to Connal. It's not a sports car anymore, it's a war chariot. And he has to be the one driving."

25.

Clare spent the ride back to London in the cramped confines of the convertible's backseat, trying not to stare worriedly. Connal had yet to relinquish his control of Milo, and he sat with his lanky frame folded awkwardly to fit behind the driver's seat and his shoulders pulled taut around his ears. His eyes kept darting about at all the unfamiliar twenty-first-century sights they pa.s.sed as though seeing everything for the first time. Which he really was.

Clare had reluctantly agreed that, until they tracked down the vengeful warrior queen who'd hijacked Dr. Jenkins, Connal's consciousness should remain at the fore.

"Are you okay?" Clare now asked for the hundredth time. Connal had used his magic to transport them out of the barrow-and he'd almost collapsed at the base of the hill as a result. He'd managed the feat, but it had cost him.

"Connal?" Clare put a hand on his knee.

For a long moment he stared at her hand, his eyes fever-bright. Then slowly, methodically, as if trying to commit it to memory, he began tracing the contours of each of her fingers. Over and over again, all the way back to London. It seemed to calm him. Clare was afraid to withdraw her hand, but by the time they reached Great Russell Street at the edge of London's financial district, she was also just a little freaked out.

Having driven Milo's Bimmer like a maniac all the way back from Bartlow, Maggie now slowed to just over the speed limit. She drove past the ornate wrought-iron fence that surrounded the grand edifice of the British Museum and turned onto a side street that led to the entrance for staff parking. All the museum's windows were dark-the place looked deserted. Something was not right. Even in the dead of night there were always floodlights illuminating the stately marble faces of the building. But on this night the building loomed up in the darkness, a dim grey shape against the storm-tossed sky.

And it wasn't just the museum. The whole neighbourhood looked as though it had blown one gigantic fuse. Not even the streetlights shone. And no one was out on the streets complaining about it. High overhead the clouds roiled and scudded across the face of the sky as though driven by gale winds, but on the ground things were utterly still. Not a leaf stirring.

Something was very not right.

Maggie stopped near a service entrance at the back of the museum, where they found Stuart Morholt's Bentley parked at a haphazard angle. She went around to the back of the car while Al tilted her seat forward so that Clare could climb out. But Connal clenched her hand in an iron grip.

"It's okay," she said, gently prying his fingers loose as he stared at her with Milo's unblinking eyes. "I'm right with you."

Maggie reappeared at the driver's side door and tilted her seat forward as well. Then she held out Milo's cricket bat, retrieved from the trunk of the car. "I think, perhaps, our warrior prince might feel more at ease if he were armed with a weapon."

Connal looked at what to him must have seemed a good, stout wooden war club and smiled. He let go of Clare's hand and got out of the car. Then he took the proffered bat, testing its heft with the a.s.surance of a trained fighter.

Maggie smiled at him and, nodding for the girls to follow, headed toward a set of utility stairs, fishing a security pa.s.s out of her pocket as she went. The indicator lights on the card reader were dark, though, and the door swung open on its hinges at a touch.

"Shimmer-fried," Al murmured, touching the dead panel with a fingertip. "I'll bet every electrical system in the building is toast. Boudicca must be pulling down some serious mojo."

Clare looked at her. "And you saw the sky outside, right?" "Yeah. I don't like storms."

"Me neither, pal."

The air inside had a sepulchral quality to it. Intermittent shafts of moonlight spilled through high windows, cutting the hallway floor into alternating strips of light and dark. Maggie hesitated on the threshold as if her familiar world had become an alien, otherworldly realm.

An eerie wail suddenly echoed toward them from somewhere in a far-distant part of the building.

"We'd best hurry," Maggie said with calm determination. They found their way in the near-darkness to the East Stairs and came out onto the upper floor's Ancient Near East Collection. Maggie led them at a clip through the Egyptian Collection, a series of connected rooms filled with sarcophagi, grave goods, and statues of long-dead pharaohs that stared at them with flat, dead eyes as they rushed past.

The room directly below the one that held the Bog Bodies display was home to an exhibit of medieval arms and armour. As they hurried through it on their way to the stairs, Clare noticed that one of the cases had been shattered and was empty. What had it contained? There was no time to stop and investigate.

They emerged onto the fifth level behind an information part.i.tion in the Bog Bodies display room. The four of them collectively paused and then slowly, silently, leaned around the part.i.tion.

At the far end of the room Stuart Morholt, duct-taped to an identification-plaque stand and dotted with taped-on bricks of grey plastic explosive, cowered before Ceciley/Boudicca, who held a detonator remote in one hand. The blinking light was alternating red and green.

The curator-turned-demon queen looked wild and weathered, thin and angular-as though the power she used was using her. Her feet were still bare, the soles now darkened with dirt. Her lab coat lay in a heap on the floor. Her pencil skirt was ripped up the side almost to the hip and she'd torn off the sleeves of her blouse at the shoulders.

Clare watched as she bent down to scoop up all but one of the dozen or more swords that lay at her feet-swords that must have come from the shattered medieval exhibit case. She stalked around the room like a prowling jungle cat, stopping to gaze hollowly at each of the Bog Body exhibits and to lay a weapon from her iron bouquet on top of every case.

Clare did a quick count of the gla.s.s cases in the room. And then she did it again. She was sure. Where there had once been thirteen, only twelve cases now held the spirit warrior remains. Clare really had changed history.

Connal hadn't died in the bog that night. Not in this timeline.

"This is what became of my spirit warriors," Boudicca murmured. "Ghosts trapped in gla.s.s cases. How I long to set them free ..." Her circuit of the room complete, she paced languidly back toward Morholt. Now she crouched down on her haunches before the last sword, her head tilted to one side and her eyes hooded like a snake regarding its prey in the moment before striking. "Do you know who I am?" She spoke as if she had no knowledge of Morholt's ident.i.ty. Dr. Jenkins must have been completely buried beneath the queen's persona.

"Wh ... uh ... which one of you?" Morholt stammered.

"Do you know what I did?" The Iceni queen placed the detonator on the floor and picked up the blade. "How many lives I ended with the edge of my sword?" She drew her hand along the length of the antique weapon, leaving a bright, crimson smear on the iron. "Or with a word?" she continued. "Or a wave of my hand?" She waved her b.l.o.o.d.y palm at Morholt.

"I ... well, um, seventy thousand was the ... the official number ..." Morholt said weakly.

"Seventy thousand." From Ceciley's lips Boudicca's husky tones drifted like smoke. The smoke of burning Celtic villages. She rolled the words around in her mouth as though her mind was trying to comprehend the number by way of its burnt taste. "Seventy ... thousand ..." The queen reached up to her throat, ran the palm of her bloodied hand across the golden torc, and began to murmur words under her breath.

In his terror, Morholt began babbling. "Seventy thousand, yes! And 'jolly good' I say ... well done! Cracking efficiency. Take that, you bunch of pansy Roman gits!"

Clare winced and rolled her eyes. She ducked back behind the part.i.tion and glanced at her companions. "We're going to have to do something fast or Boudicca's gonna turn Stu into tomato paste." Unfortunately, she had no idea what that something was. Maggie didn't look as if she had any ideas either, and Milo/Connal didn't seem up to formulating cunning plans just at the moment. His eyes were unfocused behind his gla.s.ses and there was a sheen of sweat on his brow. He looked like it was a struggle just to stay upright.

Huddled beside Clare, Al tapped her on the shoulder. "Got the time?" she whispered.

"Yeah, it's ..." Clare automatically checked her watch. "No," she whispered back, holding up her wrist. "Shimmer-fried, remember?"

"Yup."

Clare waited for the forthcoming cunning plan.

"When you shimmer, you disrupt electrical currents, right?"

"Yeah ..."

"Boudicca-Doc's detonator is electronic and, with the batteries in, it's live. The torc around her neck is a shimmer trigger. All you have to do is get close enough to touch the torc. Then ..."

"Zot."

Al grinned. "Zot, indeed."

"We need a distraction-"

A howl abruptly rang out and the sound of shattering gla.s.s exploded in the room. Shards of display cases started shooting up like crystalline geysers from all twelve of the Bog Body display cases.