Illusion Read online

  “There’s no such thing as too many old movies.”

  Eight cocked his head in mock consideration. “Possibly.” He leaned over and kissed her lightly. “As you wish.”

  She steeled herself to admit what she had never yet managed to say to him—not “As you wish” or “I do” or the other small, safe, and chicken ways she had hinted at it in the past. She steeled herself, not because the words needed to be said, but because Eight deserved to have her be brave enough to say them. How could it possibly be harder to tell someone “I love you” than it was to take a human life?

  “I love you, too,” she said. “I should have told you that a hundred times before.”

  “You have. You just didn’t know it,” he said, laughing when she smacked him lightly on the arm.

  It felt impossible and good for Barrie to hear that laughter. Impossibly good. Then Eight sobered and switched on the ignition and threw the Range Rover into gear. She tried to think of something to say to bring the laughter back again. To make him happy.

  “We’re getting close to figuring things out,” he said while she was thinking. “We really are. The open house will be good, and the ceremony after that will be fine.”

  “Said every movie hero ever right before disaster struck,” Barrie said.

  Eight reached over and covered her hand with his. “I’ll take the hero part, but leave the disasters out of it. I’m choosing to believe that it’s all going to go according to plan.”

  Barrie looked out the window, but as Eight turned onto the road and the sun glinted on the river across the highway, she couldn’t help seeing Ernesto’s staring eyes and the flash of the Fire Carrier’s knife. She shuddered. Then she dug through her purse, pulled out her cell phone, and opened the web browser.

  “What are you looking up?” Eight glanced over at her.

  “Scalping,” she said, typing in the letters. “I always thought it was for taking trophies, but the way the Fire Carrier pulled Ernesto’s spirit from the top of his head, I can’t help wondering if it meant more than that. And Obadiah patted the top of his head when he talked about the conscious soul.”

  “Scalping was more complicated than taking trophies.” Eight pulled the car out onto the main road shaded by overhanging oaks. “It was meant to keep the soul from haunting the living, or keep it from going to rest, or provide proof of retribution, or transfer masculinity from one warrior to another. European settlers were the ones who made it about bounties—and they took Indian scalps. Not that the practice even began with American Indians. It’s been done all over the world since ancient times.”

  “When did you even have time to look that up this morning?” Barrie asked, swiveling toward him in her seat.

  “It wasn’t this morning.” He shrugged and looked away. “I researched it a while back—after you first questioned the story about the Scalping Tree.”

  Barrie wanted to reach across the car and grab his face and kiss him. Which wouldn’t have been safe, so she grinned like an idiot instead. “And did you ever figure out where the tree got the name?”

  “No idea. It’s possible that local tribes really did come here to pay tribute to the Fire Carrier, like the story says. Or maybe it was the way the Spanish moss hung on the tree. There’s no telling. We’ve seen how stories change—and how people had different motives for telling them. When you’re stealing someone’s land and screwing them over, I guess it makes sense to paint them as savages to justify what you’re doing.”

  Barrie thought about that, and about Ernesto, nearly all the way to Colesworth Place. Every time there was a lull in the conversation, she came back to it, wondering how many other things in her life she had accepted as truth without a second thought.

  • • •

  At Colesworth Place, there were a few cars in the parking lot already. Eight pulled into the space beside Darrel from the hardware store. Standing in the back of the truck, Darrel tossed a stack of plastic trashcans over the tailgate, and then pushed a bundle of plywood sheets down to a couple of his minions, before glancing over at Eight and Barrie and dipping his chin.

  “How y’all doin’?” he asked, wiping his forehead.

  The two boys gave Barrie similar embarrassed grins as she said hello and thanked all three of them for helping. Grabbing the end of the plywood bundle, one of them navigated it backward until the other boy took the opposite end, and they waddled up the path with it like penguins, swaying to and fro. Beyond them in the distance, Seven appeared suddenly and without his usual scowl, coming back toward the parking lot from around the corner of the overseer’s cabin. He waved and increased his pace.

  “Look at that,” Barrie whispered to Eight. “He’s looking positively friendly. In fact, he’s been nice all day. What did you do, drop some valium into his coffee this morning?”

  Eight’s smile was wistful enough to suggest that he wished this kinder version of his father would stick around. “He actually apologized to Kate and me this morning before Pru called. Apparently, the argument we had last night sank in, and he spent most of the night thinking about the decisions he’s made. Thinking about what all of us have said to him the past few days.”

  Barrie leaned a hip against the fender while Eight got the crates out of the trunk. “So do you forgive him?”

  “We’ve all made a lot of mistakes. There’s a narrow line between trying to protect someone and not trusting them enough to protect themselves.”

  Barrie nodded. “And what about Kate? How’s he handling her having the gift and the binding? Can he accept that?”

  “I never said I was going to accept it, remember? But Obadiah promised you he’d break the Beaufort binding if you helped him find the lodestone. If we can’t figure out how to transfer the binding, I’m going to make him keep that promise. No matter how much Kate will hate me for it.”

  Barrie stared at him, but if he didn’t understand that that was only going to do the same thing to Kate that Seven had done to him, she wasn’t going to get through to him. She wondered if there was some overprotective gene in the Beaufort men that made it impossible for them to let others make their own mistakes. Even if the mistake wasn’t really a mistake at all, just a different point of view.

  “Kate will hate you unless you talk to her first. Ask her for her opinion and really listen to her.”

  “Trust me, we all know exactly how Kate feels. She’s never shy about sharing her opinions.”

  “And yet you’re still not listening.”

  Eight pressing the trunk closed and turned away. They met Seven a few steps up the path. He clapped Eight on the back and nodded at Barrie almost civilly. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said to Eight. “I’m going to go get Pru, and you can keep an eye on your sister, since she decided to show up to ‘help’—as she put it. You know how helpful she can be.” He squeezed back into his Jaguar and drove off with a wave.

  Barrie and Eight carried the first load of crates out to the lawn below the mansion ruins, where the open house was going to be held. Kate and her friend Blakely were already there working with Sydney and several others.

  Smoldering charcoal was spread out on several four-by-six sheets of stiff metal, and a second row of sheeting balanced on top of concrete pillars made up a giant makeshift stove. Beside it, Marie Colesworth and her mother, Jolene, looking decidedly wilted in the heat, stood stirring cauldron-size vats of potatoes and onions. Chunks of corn on the cob and smoked sausage were nearby, ready to be added later, along with crab legs keeping fresh in vats of ice. Already the scent of Old Bay Seasoning, fragrant with bay leaf, celery salt, mustard, and sweet paprika, drifted on the rising steam. Barrie picked out the scents and sorted them in her head, mentally translating everything into recipes, and the smell brought back memories from the first time she had ever come out to Colesworth Place. Somehow, every time she came, she ended up happy to escape. She hoped today would be the exception.

  “It’s about time you two showed up.” Cassie pivoted on the ste
pladder where she was fitting tea lights into old jars, bottles, and metal kitchen whisks and stringing them like minichandeliers from the branches of the overhanging oaks. “You’re the one who suggested all this stupid decorating, but then you left me to do the work.”

  Eight set down the crates and exchanged a glance with Berg, who was holding Cassie’s ladder, but the eyebrow he raised at Cassie lacked real intensity. “I wonder if they sell any kind of a filter that would keep words from falling out of your mouth before they hit your brain? You might want to look into that. We’re doing ‘all this’ to help you, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Cassie’s too embarrassed to say it, so I will.” Sydney looked up from where she and Blakely were spraying soda and beer cans with bronze and silver paint to make vases. “Thank you. Seriously. Mama, Cassie, and I all appreciate it.”

  “You and your mama are very welcome—” Eight said, breaking off with a wince as the speakers hung up in the trees and placed around the buildings gave a sudden screech.

  Behind a makeshift table, the DJ waved his hand in apology and moved the headphones from around his neck to cover up his ears. The speakers settled into the smooth rhythm of the Dells’ “Oh, What a Night.”

  Barrie waved at Andrew and the archaeology students, who stood a short distance down from Marie, snapping the heads off bushels of brown Carolina shrimp. Behind them, on top of the ruined mansion’s broken pillars, Obadiah’s ravens watched it all with apparent fascination. Obadiah himself was seated ten feet from the police tape around the excavation area, while everyone unconsciously gave him—and the dig site—a nice wide berth. He stood up on seeing Barrie and came to meet her, but stopped a few feet away and winced.

  “What have you been doing?” he demanded. “You’re bleeding energy, and it’s off balance. Completely wrong.”

  Barrie wondered if sins left scars on your soul. Maybe the blackness that had sloughed off from Ernesto’s spirit had spilled back onto her somehow and self-defense didn’t matter in the cosmic scheme of things.

  Eight took Barrie’s hand and squeezed it. “What do you mean ‘bleeding’?”

  “Radiating. As if she’s received an infusion and it’s too much for her to hold on to all at once—you have to learn to spool it up, and that’s not easy. Also, the footprint of energy in the whole area shifted earlier. So once again”—he studied Barrie—“what did you do?”

  “Well,” she said, “that’s a long explanation.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  To conserve Obadiah’s strength, they moved to the chapel, so that he didn’t have to remain invisible. Barrie brought Cassie and Berg along as well, and she gave a modified account of finding the lodestone, one that didn’t mention Ernesto or blood or the Fire Carrier. She didn’t mention hiding the lodestone, either.

  Not that Obadiah didn’t guess. “You moved it, didn’t you?” he said, pressing himself against the far wall of the chapel as far from Barrie as he could get inside the building. “And the vortex moved with it. That shouldn’t be possible.Lodestones conduct energy; they don’t control it—unless the stones are what’s creating the vortexes and causing the imbalance in the spirit path.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve used the word ‘imbalance,’ ” Eight said. “Is that dangerous?”

  “Those who know how can tune themselves to a spirit path and use it for communication, or regeneration, or travel . . . but all systems and forces in the universe require balance. Including people. Too much of an incompatible type of energy can make a person sicken or even die—physically, mentally, or spiritually.”

  “Are you trying to say that Barrie could die?” Eight’s lips went pale. He stormed across the room as if shaking Obadiah would make him unsay the word, and then he caught himself and stood there looking furiously helpless. “How do we fix it?”

  “I didn’t mean Barrie specifically. She doesn’t seem to be experiencing any adverse effects, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. As I suspected, one stone without the other is problematic. I’m having to work harder to balance myself with her around. That’s draining my strength, which is the last thing I can afford right now.”

  Eight exchanged a look with Barrie, a silent message of worry and warning, but the stone didn’t feel dangerous to her. She felt fine. Better than fine. In the back of her head, a small voice cautioned that that could have something to do with what Obadiah had said earlier about energy being addictive, while another voice argued that Obadiah could have his own reasons for wanting to pair the stones together. And what had he meant about spooling up the extra energy? How exactly did one do that, and what did it achieve?

  Leaning back against the jamb of the open doorway, she tried to drown out all the chaos in her mind and think. Unfortunately, just being inside the chapel was a reminder that death could creep up too easily. Someone had carted away the chairs and stripped the drapes of black cloth that had decorated the stark, bare walls of the structure for Wyatt’s funeral, but beyond the physical hollowness, there was something additional missing. Something less substantial. She finally realized it was the sense of peace, of comfort, that had been present in the few churches she had ever visited. Even the ruined chapel at Watson’s Landing had that.

  “You mentioned a footprint,” she prompted, trying not to let emotion crack her voice.

  Obadiah tilted his head to watch her, the gesture reminding her of one of his ravens. “Every place on earth has a unique combination of energy composed of type, frequency, strength, and polarity. That footprint is as good as a geolocator, if you know what to look for. It’s similar to how pigeons use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate.”

  “I’ve read about that,” Berg said, standing beside the wall with his hands clasped behind his back. “They have microscopic bits of iron in their inner ears and beaks, and a special protein in their eyes that makes them magneto receptive. That’s how they can tell how high they are, where they’re headed in relation to the horizon, and the direction they’re going.”

  Cassie peered through the gloom at him. “You’re making that up.”

  “Not at all. There was a time when humans could do the same thing,” Obadiah said. “A percentage of the population still can. It requires the genetic makeup as well as opening oneself, admitting you can feel things without understanding the rational reason for it.” His expression turned mildly accusing, and he raised his head to look at Barrie. “Twice today there’s been a shift in the energy coming from Watson’s Landing strong enough for me to feel it from here. You keep asking me for answers, but I can only help you if you are honest with me. What is it that you’re hiding?”

  “She told you—” Eight began.

  Barrie raised a finger to stop him from trying to misdirect. It was time to stop playing cat and mouse with Obadiah. All in or all out—except about Ernesto. No good could come of admitting that.

  “The Watson lodestone isn’t magnetite.” Closing her eyes, she took a breath before she dared to look straight at Obadiah. “Have you ever heard of an ulunsuti stone?”

  Obadiah straightened away from the wall and took two steps toward her, which brought him into the light streaming through the window. The bones in his face had all sharpened disconcertingly. “Where did you hear that word?”

  Gesturing at Eight, Barrie left him to explain about finding the reference to the Serpent Stone in Eliza’s letterbook and the research that he had done afterward. Then Barrie explained about what the Fire Carrier had given her and shown her.

  Obadiah went very still. “Describe the stone,” he said slowly. “And be exact.”

  Barrie tried not to be afraid. “It’s half of a clear crystal the size of my fist. Like a diamond, except there’s a vein of impurity in the middle that looks like a bare, twisted branch. The branch is dull silver in the shade and red gold if the sunlight strikes it right.”

  Obadiah turned to the window and stood with the sun streaming around him. “All ulunsuti are sacred,” he said, “but
most are only quartz fed with blood. There are older stories, though. Old, old stories about stones that came from the great Uktena and opened the spirit paths between the past and the future, and between the land of the living and the dead. It is said that those crystals had an impurity in them, a line that could turn red or milky.”

  “What if it isn’t just for communication with the dead? What if there’s an actual entrance to the underworld here somewhere and that’s what the bargains were meant to protect?” Barrie asked tentatively.

  Cassie drummed her fingers on her folded arms. “You realize how crazy this sounds? You’re all jumping to conclusions. And what would any of this have to do with the curse? That’s what we’re here for.”

  “Actually, the bindings and the curse are separate. We already knew that.” Still watching Obadiah, Barrie gave Cassie an impatient shrug. “The rest makes sense. What if the yunwi came here because there was a passage, and then something happened to the stone and they couldn’t open the passage to go home again? Maybe the ceremony the Fire Carrier does every night is meant to keep them alive—or keep their magic alive—until the passage opens again.”

  “But they aren’t alive,” Cassie said. “They’re spirits, so why couldn’t they get to the underworld without the stone—if that’s where they need to go?”

  “What they need can’t be that simple. All I know is that there’s something specific that the Fire Carrier wants me to do with the ulunsuti, and it has to do with the yunwi,” Barrie insisted.

  Berg’s eyes gleamed in the shadow by the wall. “Maybe this isn’t as crazy as it sounds. The fey are associated with the underground or otherworld in some way in a lot of different cultures. Or there are stories about them disappearing into the hills or retreating from the world. What if—”

  “What if,” Cassie snapped, “we go back to the reason we’re here in the first place? People are going to be arriving any minute for the open house, and we aren’t finished preparing—and don’t you dare try to postpone tonight’s ceremony after everything we’ve done to get Obadiah the energy he needs. I don’t care where your yunwi or the Fire Carrier belong, as long as it isn’t anywhere I can see them. And the same goes for Ayita and Elijah. We’re finally supposed to get rid of them and the curse tonight!”