Illusion Read online

  “Don’t you touch her!” Rage rekindling, Seven pulled Kate out of Barrie’s grasp and folded her against him. “Just leave, and I don’t want you coming back here or calling. As far as you’re concerned, my children don’t exist. You understand?”

  Barrie had nothing to say in her own defense. Her actions had left both of Seven’s children hurt and bleeding.

  She turned to go . . . but . . . no. She had to fix things. Seven had to be afraid for Kate. He had to feel responsible, and she hated the thought of adding to his pain right then, but more pain would come unless they found the answers that they needed.

  “I’m not leaving until you tell us how this works,” she said. “Why didn’t you know that the binding couldn’t be transferred back once Kate took it? Why didn’t you know this was a possibility? If there’s a ceremony that passes the binding from one person to another—”

  “This wasn’t a ceremony,” Kate said.

  Barrie studied the fountain, which appeared entirely peaceful again. No trace of blood or spirits. “Then what was it?”

  “It’s none of your concern, that’s what it is! It’s a Beaufort family matter.” Seven reached for her arm as if he wanted to spin her around and physically push her out of the garden.

  Eight stepped between them. “You’re wrong, Dad. Barrie and Kate are the ones most concerned right now. And if you’d told me what you knew in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened. You didn’t just lie and withhold information; you asked Barrie to keep secrets from me. How can you not see what kind of damage you’re doing? You act like what you want is the only thing that matters, like you know what’s best for everyone. You’re so busy trying to control everything—”

  “I can’t control anything about this!” Seven cried. “Don’t you understand? None of this is logical, and it’s all dangerous.” He stood toe-to-toe with his son. Then his shoulders finally loosened, and he looked away. His voice was suddenly flat as he spoke. “The problem isn’t what I know. It’s what I don’t. I never told you this would happen because I had no idea that it could.”

  • • •

  They moved to the library inside the house, but Pru refused to come over when Seven called and demanded she come deal with Barrie. Barrie wanted to stand up and applaud. But the decision was practical as much as it was Pru asserting herself. The movers were scheduled to arrive with Lula’s furniture in a matter of hours, and Pru didn’t want to risk leaving in case they showed up early.

  “Put me on the speakerphone and tell me what happened,” she told Seven. “Then we can all figure it out together.”

  Seven mashed the button with his thumb and started the long explanation. On one end of the leather sofa across the room, Eight sat with his head in his bandaged hands, while down on the other end, Kate couldn’t stop shivering, despite the hot cocoa she was sipping and the blanket wrapped around her.

  Barrie’s shivers were all internal.

  How was it possible that Seven had never been bound? He had the migraines. Were there different ways of binding? Different degrees? There had to be. Lula had never had the ceremony and yet she’d felt the pull to return to Watson’s Landing. Barrie’d had the migraines, too, even before she had given blood and the spirit in the fountain had appeared.

  Rubbing her temples, Barrie prowled the room while Seven talked. Hundreds of small pings of loss called out from all around the room, and she filled the time retrieving those things closest to her, long-forgotten notes, bookmarks, letters, and receipts left in books no one had opened in decades or maybe even centuries. None of these types of lost items existed at Watson’s Landing, where up until Luke’s murder, the family gift had found anything the moment it went missing. Even without the gift, things would have been easier to find on the orderly shelves. Here at Beaufort Hall, shelves crammed with books ran floor to ceiling on three walls of the room, and files of papers, notebooks, and stacks of old yellow legal pads, their pages curled and fading, were stuffed into every cranny. Ancient leather-bound volumes and modern paperbacks were thrown together without obvious connection.

  It didn’t occur to Barrie at first that “modern” was a misnomer. The newest books were from the 1940s, as if decades before Seven’s time someone had decided that they had run out of space for books and didn’t need any more.

  Glancing over to where he was still pacing beside the desk, Barrie wondered what his childhood must have been like. Maybe in its own way, growing up at Beaufort Hall had been as confining for him as Watson’s Landing had been for Pru and Lula.

  The gifts hadn’t treated anyone well in the recent past.

  “Are you saying you never had any idea it was possible to transfer the binding to someone else?” Pru’s voice came through the phone’s speaker sounding thin and frightened. “Your father didn’t warn you?”

  “He died before he had a chance to tell me anything. I went to talk to him when it became clear that Lula wasn’t coming back,” Seven said.

  Eight looked up. “What did Lula have to do with it?”

  After shoving aside a stack of current law books and legal files, Seven leaned tiredly against the desk, as if all the pacing, or perhaps the question, had worn him out. “I asked my father what would happen if Pru inherited the binding and then came to live at Beaufort Hall. Or what would happen to me if I tried to live somewhere other than at Beaufort.”

  His voice throbbed with remembered pain, and Barrie felt like an intruder, listening to what should have been a private conversation between him and Pru. A private confession, because he was as good as admitting what Barrie had suspected, that he had given Pru up because of the binding.

  Hearing him say that now made Barrie wish that she could blink herself across the river to go hug Pru and hold her. Pru shouldn’t have had to be alone while she heard what Seven had done and how many years he’d wasted.

  “Can you repeat what you just said?” Pru asked in a shaking voice.

  Seven glanced self-consciously around the room and leaned closer to the speaker. “I asked my father what would happen to you if you came to live at Beaufort Hall after you inherited the binding—or what would happen to me if I tried to live with you at Watson’s Landing. It had never been an issue as long as Lula was going to inherit.”

  Pru was silent so long that he bent in even closer. “Pru, did you hear me that time?”

  “I heard you the first time,” Pru said. “I just wanted you to have to say it again.”

  Seven stiffened. His profile reddened. Then he smiled sheepishly, an unself-conscious smile that transformed him, and for the first time in, well, ever, Barrie could see what drew Pru to him.

  “I suppose I deserved that,” he said.

  “You deserve worse,” Pru agreed, “but we can discuss that later. What exactly did your father tell you?”

  “He gave me the only example he knew of a Beaufort who had left. His great-uncle—Four, that would have been—who enlisted in World War I with his best friend and was still in France when Three died unexpectedly. Because of the war, Four couldn’t get home, and the migraines grew so bad that he couldn’t function. He miswrote a message and got his unit shelled by friendly fire in the Argonne Forest. A lot of the men died, including his friend, and he blamed himself. He committed suicide once the battalion was finally rescued.”

  “That’s horrible,” Barrie said.

  “But that was your great-great-uncle? Not your great-grandfather?” Kate asked.

  “I never knew that,” Eight said.

  “My great-grandfather was his brother, Robert Somerset Beaufort,” Seven said, looking at Eight instead of his daughter. “Once he inherited, he named his son after his brother and called him Five to keep up the tradition. But the sudden disruption in the family line meant that most of what Three and Four had known about the binding died with them, and by the time it got to my father, all he knew was that we were meant to protect the fountain in the rose garden, in the same way that the Watsons were meant to protect the t
ree in the center of the Watson woods, and that it had something to do with a guardian.”

  “A guardian for what?” Eight asked.

  “Or from what?” Kate said. “Where’s the danger?”

  Seven sat down on the edge of the desk, drawing in on himself like a cornered animal, as if the reminder of all the things he didn’t know was too hard or painful for him.

  “What happened to your father?” Desperate to keep him talking, Barrie asked the question even though she already knew the answer. “How did he die?”

  Seven fidgeted with the files on the desk, remaining silent so long that she was afraid she had pushed him into silence instead. But then he raised his head. “When he realized what the binding would mean for me and Pru, he went out and attacked the fountain with an axe. I don’t know what he was thinking, but he collapsed as soon as the blade struck, and they said later that an artery had ruptured in his brain. The binding had killed him.”

  The raw pain in Seven’s eyes stole Barrie’s ability to breathe.

  It was Pru who finally answered him. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ll bet you’ve been scared and guilty about that all this time, haven’t you?” Pru’s voice sounded like she wanted to crawl through the telephone to reach Seven, and Barrie wished so hard—again—that the two of them could have been together for this conversation instead of having to do it on the phone. Barrie wished they hadn’t been apart for twenty years because of a misunderstanding. She wished so many things . . . Glancing over at the sofa, she found Eight looking back at her. She wondered what he was thinking.

  Kate brushed all that aside with an impatient wave. “So what you’re telling us is that you never knew about putting blood into the fountain? And your daddy didn’t know, either? I just got the binding, but I can already tell you that everything feels different.”

  “She’s right,” Barrie said, nodding. “You see and smell and sense the land more intensely. You feel the connection with it as if it flows through your veins. I think you’d understand better if you could experience it. The binding is a trust, not a burden.”

  Seven and Kate both looked over at her, and Eight hadn’t stopped looking. Pru was silent on the phone. Barrie knew she should have been sorry that Kate was bound at sixteen, stuck before she’d been anywhere in the world or discovered who she was. Yet Kate, for all that she seemed more frivolous than Eight on the surface, knew herself. She had depth. Maybe that had been there all along, or maybe the binding was bringing it out the way a stonecutter revealed the facets of a gem.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Eight offered to take Barrie home. She tried not to read anything into that, but she couldn’t help it. He held the French door to the porch open for her, and she passed beneath his outstretched arm with Waldo bounding along behind her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pausing on the steps outside. She wasn’t sure what she regretted most, that he’d been hurt or that she had been the one to hurt him. She regretted that he would never know how the binding felt. But she couldn’t regret that Kate had given him back his life. Kate had made that decision knowing and accepting that her whole future was at stake.

  Kate had given him a gift. Now Eight could finally choose his future. He could sail the Away anywhere he wanted. He could study in California or travel to Rome. He could set his sights on being a major-league pitcher and spend every other day in a different city. The thought poured over Barrie like ice water, the realization that he had the choice to escape Watson Island if he wanted to go, and that she couldn’t stop him. All she could do was hope there was a chance he would choose to stay. But every relationship began with nothing except a chance.

  Eight adjusted his long stride to hers as they walked down toward the Beaufort dock. Waldo loped on ahead and then bounded back and bowed at them, tail wagging as she invited them to go faster. Eight veered toward the woods and found a stick to throw. Despite his bandaged hands, he sent it spinning through the air.

  The familiarity of walking beside him made Barrie’s breath catch—the way his hands burrowed into his pockets; the easy grace of his long, lean muscles; the way the sun spun strands of gold through his hair. Her hands ached to touch him, though she wasn’t sure whether that was to reassure him or to reassure herself.

  “I really am sorry, Eight. For everything.” Two-thirds of the way down the hill, Barrie stepped in front of him so he couldn’t avoid looking at her.

  He edged around her and threw the stick Waldo had brought back to him, sending it hurtling out impossibly far onto the middle of the dock. “Can we just drop it? I heard you the first several times. And I got your email.”

  “Then let me say just one more thing. I need you to understand that I never meant the ‘baseball guy’ nickname to be a comment on your intelligence. At first, it was more of a reminder to myself that you were out of reach, and then maybe it was a way to jab at you a little bit for wanting to leave Watson Island. Eventually, it simply suited you—it’s who you are.”

  Eight shifted back to face her. “That’s not how it felt the other day. It seemed more like proof that you were agreeing with Dad. That you thought I wasn’t smart enough to make my own decisions if you told me about the binding. I know I’m sensitive about the dyslexia, and I guess that’s my own insecurity. I projected it onto you, but I’ve always imagined a relationship would be two people who put each other first. I put you before baseball. I wanted to do that. Your binding will never let you do the same for me. That’s what happened, isn’t it? You didn’t tell me the truth because you were afraid you couldn’t have both me and the gift, and you didn’t want to choose.”

  Barrie couldn’t deny it. “That was only part of it. I knew how much what your father had done was going to hurt you, how betrayed you were going to feel. I wanted him to tell you himself so you could resolve your relationship, but I also wanted to have Obadiah break the curse so I could see what would happen—so I would know whether I could tell you there was a chance of breaking the binding safely. I didn’t want you to have to be afraid of the future if I could give you hope, if there was any hope available. I should have trusted you to handle it— What?” Eight’s shoulders and expression had stiffened as if she’d hit him. “What is it?” she asked. “What did I say?”

  Eight’s throat worked as though he were choking on unsaid words. He’d gone pale beneath this tan. “I guess I can understand not wanting to worry someone if you’re not positive there’s anything to worry about. It seems pointless and hurtful, and you want to protect them.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” Barrie said, wondering if they were still talking about the same thing.

  “The bindings change things, though. Don’t you see that? As long as you have the binding, a relationship between us could never be equal. I would always come in second place, and that’s a hard thing to live with.”

  “It’s more of a tie really,” Barrie said, feeling helpless.

  Waldo brought the stick back, and Eight threw it again, into the river this time so that Waldo bounded through the marsh grass, sending a brace of ducks rushing into the air. “The thing about life,” Eight said, speaking very slowly, “is that we all need to lose once in a while. Otherwise we can’t grow up. You’ve changed me since I met you. You’ve made me think. You’ve made me want to be better. Not only a better pitcher or better at something. You make me want to be a better someone.”

  To avoid bursting into tears, Barrie concentrated on Waldo bounding up the slope. Ears flopping, water dripping, and tongue lolling from the side of her mouth, the dog pressed the stick into Eight’s hand and wagged her tail hopefully.

  Barrie was afraid to hope. “It’s the things we’ve been through together that have made you change. They’ve changed us both.”

  “I finally understand why you have such a hard time distinguishing between what you want and what you think you should want. You don’t see responsibility as a sacrifice, do you?”

  “I just accept that sometimes sacrifice is necessary.
Do you still feel your gift now that Kate took the binding?”

  Eight started walking down the hill again. “I’m not sure yet. Back in the library, there was too much emotion from too many people I care about. Things get muddled. And now? I’m not sure if it’s the binding or something else that’s changed about you. There’s an electric hum that I never noticed before, and everything is muted. I can feel you wanting me not to be upset and wanting Kate to be okay, but it also feels as if what I want is more separate than it was before. More accessible.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You.” He didn’t look at her. “Still. Probably always. I’ve spent the last couple of days telling myself that you’re the last person in the world I should want. Last night, I was so sick of all this that I nearly drove the hour to Columbia to stay with a friend until the dorms opened, and like I told you, I was considering not coming back at all. But then I read your email. It wasn’t even that cryptic ‘Love, Barrie’ that got to me. It was the fact that you still couldn’t manage to say ‘love’ any other way. You’re not afraid of anything, but you’re afraid of that.”

  “I’m afraid of everything,” Barrie said, her throat clogged with all her insecurities, as if they had congealed into a solid mass, like bacon grease, and gotten caught in a place where she couldn’t swallow them away.

  They reached the dock, and Eight pushed her curls out of her eyes with his thumb, slowly, as if he was reluctant to touch her but couldn’t help himself. “Perfection is a lie, Bear, and we’re all born with built-in bullshit detectors. Humans are hardwired to love people because of their flaws, not in spite of them. I think we spend our lives searching for someone who is warped in a way that we can accept, maybe even admire. Someone whose quirks and angles fit our own.”

  “Are you saying I’m twisted in the same way you are?” Barrie tipped her face to look up at him.

  He bent his knees so that their eyes were level. Embarrassed at the intensity that swept between them too suddenly, she turned her head away.