Read Once Every Never for Free Online

looked like the very same one she had touched in the museum. The woman smiled grimly and took the torc, bending the ends out slightly so that she could slip it around the strong white column of her graceful neck and settle it on her collarbones. She looked as if she’d always worn it. With a nod of thanks the woman turned back to her own chariot, but then she froze. Her gaze drifted toward the blanket-wrapped bundle on the floor of the young man’s cart.
    She asked the charioteer a single, soft-voiced question.
    He hesitated, a riptide of emotion distorting the handsome features of his face, but then—as if in answer—he stepped aside and gestured, his shoulders sagging in what looked like a kind of defeat. From behind the rock Clare craned her neck, watching as the woman strode past him and leaned down to push aside the folds of the heavy woollen blanket.
    There was a moment of utter stillness. Silence. And then a high, thin sound spiralled out from where the woman stood, tearing through the fabric of the night air. The cry built to an ear-shattering howl and the red-haired woman fell to her knees, raising her fists to the night sky and throwing back her head. The grief that poured from her throat was like the cry of a wounded animal.
    Clare looked back at the chariot. She wished she hadn’t.
    The folds of the blanket, now thrown aside, had concealed the crumpled form of a teenage girl maybe a year or two older than Clare herself. With only her face and one bare white shoulder exposed, the girl looked as though she could have been asleep; dark eyelashes feathered upon the clear, pale skin and a cloud of long, deep auburn hair pillowed her head.
    But from the way her limbs sprawled under the blanket, awkwardly propped up against the sides of the chariot, it was clear that the girl was not asleep.
    As she stared at the dead girl in the cart, a profound awareness descended upon Clare—her careless actions back in the restoration room had landed her in a very dangerous place. It was a realization that was dramatically reinforced when she suddenly felt the small hairs on the back of her neck rise.
    A shiver went all the way up Clare’s spine and she turned her head very slowly …
    To find herself staring into a pair of wide blue eyes.

4
    T he blue-eyed girl crouched in the long grass behind the rock, less than a foot away. She looked to be about the same age as Clare, but the similarities ended there. There was a distance and a depth to the girl’s gaze that spoke of having seen and lived through things Clare couldn’t begin to imagine. She wore a cloak and a calf-length belted tunic of deep green wool. Her hair was strawberry blond, long and wavy, but it was tangled into knots where it had escaped from a thick plait. There were fresh, deep scrapes along one of her arms and the shoulder of her sleeveless tunic was torn. Tears ran down her cheeks and her pretty face was flushed with exertion. Her breath came in panting gasps.
    And she stared right through Clare as if she wasn’t even there.
    The girl’s blue gaze was instead focused sharply on the path and the two charioteers. Her mouth worked silently for a moment and then she whispered the word “Tasca.” Her voice broke on a sob and she raised a hand as if reaching out toward the unmoving girl in the cart.
    Clare jumped back, startled. But she wasn’t fast enough to evade the girl’s reaching hand and, as her fingertips connected with the space Clare was already occupying, there was a sudden crackling in the air like a strong electrical discharge.
    As the girl gasped and flew backward. Clare felt as if she’d been hit by lightning—a much bigger bolt than the one that had sent her there—and the night all around her grew subtly brighter, almost as if she’d turned up the contrast on a TV screen. Sounds suddenly seemed louder, too. She could hear crickets and the scurrying of small animals in the grass—and the laboured, raspy breathing of the blond girl in