Illusion Read online

  I miss you. I’ve said many things in this letter, but that’s the main thing I need to say. I miss you for a hundred reasons, in a thousand ways, in a million unexpected moments. One of the reasons—only one—is that I need your help to figure this all out.

  Love,

  Barrie

  She hesitated after writing the closing, wondering if she should change it. But it was true, and maybe Eight would take the time to wonder if or how she meant it.

  She hesitated before writing the subject line, because unless she got that right, Eight might never read the rest. She finally settled on:

  Things you need to know. For starters.

  After hitting send, she let her head fall back against the wall. Pouring her doubt, fear, and hope out onto the page had left her emptied. She sat with her eyes closed, losing herself to the river’s murmur and the other night sounds, letting the pale gold moon seep in to give her a moment of peace.

  She wondered if this sense of catharsis was the reason Lula had continued writing to Pru long after she had to have known that her father was intercepting them. Perhaps words were like energy. If you spilled them out into the universe, did they swirl around, gathering strength until someone else absorbed them? What if no one ever read them? Consequences spilling into one another, cause and effect and complication, all because people didn’t communicate, because the words didn’t reach their destination.

  She thought back to the night when she had found the letters in Emmett’s desk. What would have happened if she hadn’t run out to see the Fire Carrier and left them lying where her aunt could find them? Barrie wasn’t sure she would have ever given them to Pru. Or even read them all herself, for that matter. Possibly, tripping and cutting her hands, washing the blood off in the fountain, and getting herself bound to Watson’s Landing by the water spirit had been the only reason that Lula’s words had reached anyone.

  She sat forward as she had the thought, at the memory of that night and the water spirit, and abruptly the answer seemed so obvious: the fountain.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  If she wanted to know about the binding, Barrie had to call back the spirit in the fountain. The Fire Carrier had tried to communicate in fire images, and the yunwi seemed drained by the energy required to make Barrie hear even a single word, but the water spirit had communicated an entire sentence when she had bound Barrie to Watson’s Landing.

  Midnight came too slowly. Barrie helped Pru finish up downstairs before supper, while Daphne and Mary went home to Brit and Jackson, and then she and Pru did a bit more work on the restaurant afterward. After finally escaping to her room, she spent the last hour reading and rereading the bundle of Lula’s letters.

  As Pru had told her, the letters contained no information about the binding or why Lula had run away from Watson’s Landing in the middle of the night. They included only vague references about finding the hidden room behind the panel that led down to the tunnel. But Barrie had already known about that from the images of carvings and the hidden keyhole Lula had drawn in her sketchbook. Really, the only new information the letters provided was a sense of her mother’s state of mind, of Lula’s inability to get past her scars and her pain. Her certainty that she had nothing left to offer the world if she wasn’t beautiful.

  She had loved Barrie, though, and Mark. That was clear. She hadn’t known how to show it in her day-to-day behavior, but it flooded the pages she had filled with her shaking, painful script. So did her loneliness and longing to come home to Watson’s Landing. Lula had never given up hoping that Emmett would someday relent and let her come back if she could prove she’d kept his secret.

  Reading the letters ripped the scabs from a million tiny cuts Barrie had gathered over the course of her life and made her reexamine so much of what she thought she knew.

  Useless hope clearly ran in the Watson family. Not just her mother, but also the way Pru had kept loving Seven, hoping against hope that circumstances would change. Barrie too often let herself hope against all odds, relying so much on hope that she failed to act—and failed to accept when it was time to let hope die. Maybe she was more like her mother than she had thought. And still, no matter how many times in her own life hope had come back to hurt her, she found herself checking her email every few minutes in case Eight had written back. Even though hours had gone by since she’d sent the email, she couldn’t keep herself from hoping.

  A palmetto bug landed on the glowing screen of her laptop beside her on the balcony, and the translucent tip of the insect’s tail became silvered around the edges by the light. Barrie brushed it off and reread Lula’s final letter, but if there was any more meaning hidden in there, she couldn’t find it. Maybe that was another similarity she shared with her mother. It had been naïve—even a little arrogant—to think that she could tempt Eight with a puzzle or by tugging on his protective instincts. She had told him the truth. But not all the truth. She had risked her heart, but not all of it. She never came out and said what needed to be stated outright.

  Which was worse? Telling a person you loved them when you didn’t mean it? Or loving them and never telling them at all? Having read all her mother’s letters, she wished she had told Eight more clearly how she felt. She didn’t want to end up like Lula, full of what-ifs and regrets she couldn’t admit, things she was too afraid to say. Looking back at Lula’s life and her own childhood with a new perspective, the wasted years and wasted opportunities made her feel wrung out, as if she’d cried all the tears she had left inside her.

  When you loved someone, you couldn’t hold back. Love was a leap into the unknown, not a cautious dipping of the toe. That was true for her feelings about Eight, and it was true for her feelings about Watson’s Landing.

  Careful not to wake her aunt, Barrie eased open the door to the corridor a few minutes before midnight. She tiptoed down the stairs, into the kitchen, and outside to the porch. The yunwi found her there and followed her, unusually subdued.

  At the center of the maze beside the fountain, she picked up a sharp bit of oyster shell and held it ready until the flickering glow of the Fire Carrier’s flames broke through the trees and lit the sky above the river. The Fire Carrier waded out amid the marsh grass in the shallows and stooped to unspool his magic onto the water.

  The river turned to fire. Flames roared upstream and around the top of the island by the bridge, and downstream and across the shallow creek that cut the plantation off from the island bridge and the town of Watson’s Point. Standing thigh-deep in the water, the Fire Carrier stiffened as if he could sense he was being watched.

  He turned slowly. Beneath the mask of black-and-red paint, his eyes met hers, and as always, she felt the connection more than saw it, felt his need to communicate.

  The timing was as close as it was possible to get to what had happened the night when the water spirit had bound Barrie. She sliced both her palms with the bit of shell, and her skin slicked with blood.

  Her hands stung. A drop of red fell to the white gravel path and glistened, dark in the fire and moonlight, and she half-expected the yunwi to dart in and taste it, as they had that first night. Maybe the blood would work its magic on them again as well, and leave her even more connected to them so that they could be clear to her at last. But plunging her hands into the fountain, she was already afraid that the magic wouldn’t work more than once. She had already given her heart to Watson’s Landing and to the yunwi.

  Barely visible in the moonlight, threads of blood swirled through the water. Barrie waited, hoping for the dizziness to hit her, for the pipes to gurgle and the water to swell and gather in the uppermost of the three tiered basins.

  Nothing happened. The water stayed calm, its susurration no louder than it had been every day since the binding had given her an extra boost of clarity. Flames still crackled on the water, and the Fire Carrier stood in the sea of marsh grass with the war-drum beat of his ancient magic overshadowing the sounds of the night chorus. And that was all.

 
; Barrie tried to swallow her disappointment. After all that hope, she still had no new information, nothing to help her understand the binding or the gifts, and no way to communicate with the Fire Carrier. That was frustrating in itself. If only she could find a way to speak to him; he had all the answers she needed. For the first time, she wished she had Eight’s gift instead of her own.

  “Tell me what to do,” she said to the yunwi pressed around her as the Fire Carrier retreated back to the Scalping Tree. “I don’t understand. Why are you here, and what does it have to do with the lodestone or the spirit path? Why don’t you want to go into the woods? Why didn’t you want Obadiah around here? Were you afraid he would break the binding? What would happen to you if he did?”

  The yunwi pressed closer but kept their silence.

  “Do you know where the lodestone is hidden?” Barrie asked them.

  All together, in a single motion, they reoriented themselves and pointed toward the woods, where the wind was bowing the treetops and the cloud-cloaked moon had painted long shadows on the lawn.

  “By the Fire Carrier’s tree?” Barrie asked.

  They continued pointing. Apparently, asking one question at a time worked better, and Barrie bent closer to them excitedly. “Where by the tree?”

  Heart, they said.

  The word drifted back to Barrie on the night air, as if they were speaking from some great distance beyond a boundary that stripped sound away. The word was fainter than when they had spoken before. Their eyes had dimmed, and since the flames had vanished from the water, their shapes were barely visible at all.

  “What would happen to you if Obadiah broke the binding?” Barrie asked, feeling desperate. “Where would you go?”

  They backed away and dove beneath nearby bushes, darted behind the trees.

  They didn’t return. Which, probably, was an answer in itself.

  • • •

  Back in her room and feeling cold despite the heat that seeped into the old house, Barrie lay staring again at the bed canopy above her head. The truth about the binding and the lodestone couldn’t be lost forever. She refused to believe that Emmett, through his selfishness and jealousy of Luke and Twila, had destroyed three hundred years of family history. Maybe Berg would find something somewhere, some scrap of information that had been squirreled away. And she would check the library herself, even though Pru insisted that Lula had already looked. Or maybe Barrie could figure out some other way to wake the water spirit. Maybe she should try the fountain again. Maybe she hadn’t been faithful enough in repeating what she had done before. Maybe she had missed a step in the procedure she had followed the first time.

  Except possibly that was the key right there, that it had been the first time. Maybe because Barrie had been the new heir, adding her blood to the water had woken something that had been dormant since before her grandfather had committed murder and broken the succession.

  Barrie sat up in bed. A first time could never be repeated. That was what made a first time special. But hadn’t Kate just told her that Watson’s Landing didn’t have the only fountain? What if it didn’t have the only water spirit? Maybe each spirit could be woken only once.

  She couldn’t reach out to Eight anymore. She hadn’t put everything into the letter, but she’d put in enough that his lack of response made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with her. On the other hand, if Barrie involved Kate, she wouldn’t need to worry about the fountain giving her an aneurysm. Seven would kill her himself when he found out. Still, what choice did she have? She didn’t know where the fountain was at Beaufort Hall. She couldn’t just wander around the property, hoping no one would notice her.

  She typed out a text message to Berg:

  Please find out what you can about the fountain at Beaufort Hall.

  Almost instantly she got back an answer:

  Okay. Haven’t had much luck with anything else.

  Then she typed another message to Kate:

  Need you to show me your fountain ASAP—I have an idea.

  Dear Pru,

  My daughter turned six today. Six. Her birthdays have become the measure of my exile. Six years. 2192 days. 312 weeks. 72 months. 6 Christmases. 6 Thanksgivings, Easters, Halloweens.

  Of course, it’s been longer than that, but the time before the fire seems too much like paradise compared to what it’s been like since.

  Remember how we used to dress up for Halloween? Mark’s determined that he’s going to take Barrie trick-or-treating this year. He insists I have to let her be a child.

  The world’s no place for children. I know what’s out there. Monsters. The familiar ones I see in my nightmares, and others I don’t know.

  I can’t bear the idea of Barrie getting hurt because of my mistakes.

  I’ve begged and begged Daddy to send you out here. He says you don’t want to come. I don’t want to believe him, but I wouldn’t blame you after the way I left. If you could see Barrie, you would change your mind. She’s sweet, and kind, and generous, and stubborn. She looks like the photos of me when I was her age, but she has your eyes. Your kindness and trusting nature. I dread the day that she outgrows it and realizes that I’m one of the monsters she ought to fear.

  Her birthdays are getting harder every year.

  As much as I hate Watson’s Landing and everything it stands for, every day of my life, I regret that I ever left.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The text message from Kate popped in at seven o’clock in the morning.

  Meet me outside at the tunnel as soon as possible. Hurry.

  Barrie was already dressed, so she slid the keys off her desk and finished throwing her hair into a lopsided ponytail. Followed by a handful of yunwi, she ran down the hallway into the abandoned wing of the house.

  Emmett’s old room seemed even more oppressive this early in the morning. With its massive furniture and dark, ornate paneling, it was the sort of room built by men who deserved their nightmares. Barrie rushed through into the secret room, and then, with a courage-bolstering breath, began the descent down the steep and narrow staircase. She was shivering by the time she reached the bottom. Why didn’t she ever remember how cold it was down there?

  The yunwi waited farther away from the iron door than usual. Although their shapes had grown more substantial overnight, and their eyes burned a little more brightly again, they still seemed weaker, fainter than they had when she had first emerged from the woods after finding the vortex and the spirit path. Only a few of them braved the door once she wrangled it open and followed her to the invisible boundary established by the Fire Carrier’s nightly ritual.

  By the time Barrie stepped out into the stairwell in the Beaufort woods, Kate was already there, peering down at her through the grating. “Did you take forever getting here to drive me crazy?” Kate asked. “Dad went out for a run, but he won’t be gone long, and he’s working at home today instead of going to the office. This is going to be our only chance. So what’s your idea? You’re not going after the lodestone, are you? Because I’ve decided you don’t get to take it.”

  “I’m not taking anything.” Barrie dragged a branch over the top of the grating and bit her lip. “Eight’s still here, isn’t he?” she couldn’t help asking. “He didn’t leave last night?”

  Kate’s smile faded, and she hurriedly started walking. “He’s leaving this morning to do more paperwork at the university. He says he’s coming back, but he never finished unpacking his suitcase.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Of course Barrie was.

  They reached the edge of the Beaufort woods and headed up the lawn that sloped lazily toward the house. Beneath racing clouds, the whitewashed facade of Beaufort Hall lit and darkened, its windows glittering each time the sun emerged. But without the intricate gardens of Watson’s Landing, the house appeared bare, like Mark without his drag and makeup. Closer up, it reminded Barrie of the way Watson’s Landing had looked when she had f
irst arrived, flakes of paint peeling and the shutters hanging crookedly because the yunwi had been trying to get her and Pru to pay attention. Even a single word of communication had been beyond them then.

  “So what are we going to do with the fountain?” Kate asked, looking flushed and earnest all at once. “What’s your idea?”

  “Why doesn’t the magic scare you?” Barrie countered, studying Kate’s stubborn profile, the tenacious chin and short straight nose, never sure whether to admire Kate or shake her.

  “Watson’s Landing doesn’t scare you.”

  “I’m bound to it. You aren’t.”

  “Beaufort is still my home. I don’t want to lose it, and we don’t have yunwi like you do at Watson’s Landing. That means we need the Beaufort gift more than you do. Do you know how much it costs to keep a place like this running? And it’s not just money. The gift protected us—and Watson’s Landing—when the Union troops marched through here on their way to Columbia when they burned Colesworth Place. It’s why Beaufort Hall is standing now.”

  “I don’t have the answers, Kate, but I think there might be a way to find them. That’s why I want to see the fountain.” Barrie sighed and briefly explained about the water spirit and the night she had found herself bound to Watson’s Landing. “The spirit spoke in a whole sentence. If I can get her to come out, or if there’s a different spirit here, maybe she can explain how the binding works.”

  “I’ve never heard of a water spirit here,” Kate said, disappearing into an opening in the high boxwood hedge beside the house.

  Barrie followed her, and something yellow and furry rushed out with a muffled “Woof” and barreled into her.