Illusion Page 28

  “It’s worth trying.” Obadiah snapped his fingers at Seven and Kate. “Run and get as much of that lighter fluid and kindling as you can find. And the charcoal.”

  Cassie straightened, still holding the bloody napkins she’d been pressing against Berg’s head. “You can’t burn the room! The rest of the gold is still down there—”

  “Then that’s your sacrifice, isn’t it?” Mary moved up beside her and caught Cassie’s chin between her thumb and forefinger. “Look around you, child. Look at how everyone else has come together to save a couple of lost souls, and if you can’t see that that’s worth more than any amount of gold, then money’s all you’ll ever have. That’s a poorer life than anybody deserves to live. Don’t you see what the curse is really about? It’s easier to hate than it is to forgive when someone has hurt you. For three hundred years, your family has stored up every slight and grievance and used them to justify every bit of harm you do to someone else. You end up hurting yourself more than you harm anyone else that way. You end up hating yourself.”

  Cassie looked back at Mary expressionlessly. Then her cheeks reddened and she dropped her eyes. Her shoulders trembled as she nodded and turned away.

  “I don’t want to be like that,” she said. “I am sorry.”

  Kate, Daphne, and Sydney each had brought back armloads of wood and supplies, and stopped beside Obadiah. Seven carried three partially opened bags of charcoal. “What now? Just throw everything down there?”

  “Not yet. Open the bags and hold them ready. Barrie, hand me that knife.” Obadiah took a can of lighter fluid from Seven and poured some onto both sides of the blade. Then he looked around, as if realizing he didn’t have a match. Seven held up a long-handled lighter and flicked the button. Holding the blade inside the small orange flame, Obadiah waited until the fire burned itself out. Then he gestured and the wind rose, gusting in bursts that flung Ayita and Elijah to the limit of their restraints, across to the far side of the jagged hole and just beyond the corner closest to the river. After edging around the hole to reach them, Obadiah stooped and sawed at the tether that held Ayita while he chanted.

  Ayita gave a wordless shriek, her face contorted with desperation, and stretched back to stop him. But he flicked his wrist and braced himself. Severing the connection, he set her free, whispering words that Barrie couldn’t hear or understand. Then the knife flashed again over Elijah’s tether. Eyes closed in concentration, Obadiah flung his arms toward the river.

  The air howled around him, casting both spirits away. Ayita fought, doubling over as if trying to swim against the current, but the blast of wind pressed against her chest and stomach and carried her farther and farther, the oily darkness of her rage growing lighter. Elijah had stopped fighting. He bowed his head, and his eyes locked on Obadiah with an expression of some indefinable mixture of gratitude and sorrow and fear. Then he raised his head and turned toward Daphne and Mary, and the shapelessness of his face, the intensity in his eyes, reminded Barrie of the yunwi. Mary and Daphne nodded, crying quietly, but already Elijah and Ayita were fading into the distance and the dusk and becoming as insubstantial as cirrus clouds, thinning and stretching as they disappeared.

  It was too quiet suddenly. Barrie didn’t realize at first that the wind had died down. She knew only that there was silence and stillness where before there had been too much of everything. There were no insect or bird sounds, nothing of the usual night noises, only a faint distant vibration, as if the stars that had emerged while she’d been too busy to notice were humming softly. Eight’s fingers were wrapped tight around her own, and Obadiah gathered himself in anticipation, as if he needed to be ready to fight in case Ayita and Elijah worked their way back.

  But they were gone; Barrie was sure of it. An uneasy itch across her skin had disappeared. The change was no more dramatic than that, a stilling of the air, a thing felt rather than seen. Hate was invisible, anyway.

  “Burn it,” Obadiah said without taking his eyes from the air above the river.

  Seven and the others threw the wood and charcoal down into the room on top of the splintered, rotting chests and the scattered, shining coins, and Pru and Marie Colesworth squeezed lighter fluid down onto the floor and the walls, every surface they could find. Eight retrieved another napkin that had caught on one of the grid stakes at the excavation site, and Barrie, Daphne, and Mary ran to get several more. They crumpled them tightly into balls, then set them alight and threw them down into the buried room.

  The lighter fluid caught with a whoosh. The wood and charcoal, and whatever had been down in the room, caught, sending up a thick, choking plume of smoke, pushing everyone back, but they stayed, none of them speaking. Watching.

  Finally Obadiah turned back, and in the orange glow of the flames, tears shone gold on the dark skin of his cheeks. Chanting, he pushed his hands together and lowered them, crouching down and extending them over the burning hole that had been Charlotte and Elijah and Ayita’s grave. He opened his arms in a gesture of supplication, and his chant reached a crescendo.

  The room erupted. Obadiah fell back, slapping at embers that landed on his clothes, and everyone else rushed backward from the searing heat.

  “What was that?” Mary asked, hurrying to help Obadiah. Mary gestured to Daphne, and they both helped him up and walked him to where the others waited. Barrie rushed forward, but Eight stopped her.

  “Let them be. They need healing, too,” he said.

  “So is the curse gone? Is it finally over?” Cassie asked, pressing the napkins back against Berg’s head as he sagged wearily. The napkins were red with blood.

  Obadiah held up his hand for silence and hobbled to the edge of the room again. He peered down now that the flames had subsided back to a low and steady fire. He listened while energy beaded off him like sweat.

  “Do you feel anything?” Cassie asked.

  “A disturbance that sounds suspiciously like you,” Obadiah hissed. “Be quiet.”

  Cassie clamped her mouth closed in a huff. Then after a moment, he dropped his hands.

  “The curse is gone.” Obadiah sounded surprised and, oddly, a little apprehensive. Cassie gave a gasp and dropped the napkins to hug Berg, and Daphne clapped her hands.

  But a sudden clutch of panic sent Barrie’s heart racing and made it impossible to fill her lungs. Eight took her other hand so that he was holding both of hers, holding her steady.

  “Do you still feel anything lost?” he asked. “Don’t panic. Tell me what you feel.”

  She let out a gust of breath, but there was nothing. She felt nothing at first, nothing except the usual headache that came from the binding, and beneath that a faint tug that still pulled her to Obadiah.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Eight helped Pru off the Away as Barrie unclipped her own life vest and threw it onto the seat. The sky was weepy and overcast, and that seemed somehow appropriate after what had happened the night before. Barrie’s throat was still hoarse from the choking smoke and the crying. She still wasn’t sure what she’d been crying for once she’d climbed into bed. Relief and release, and all the years of pain and hatred that no amount of fire could burn away. Obadiah had removed the spell that had held the archaeologists and the sheriff’s deputies, and convinced them all that the mess in the room had come from a freak bolt of lightning from his fictional microburst. Barrie and Pru and the Beauforts had left them all to gather up the gold, bones, and questions, while Mary and Daphne tended to Obadiah.

  But they still weren’t done.

  Stepping off the Beaufort dock, Barrie started up the long, gentle slope of the hill that Pru was already climbing. Across on the Watson side of the river, the yunwi had gathered to pace at the end of the pier, as if they were afraid to let Barrie out of their sight. She felt the same fear in reverse. Which was senseless and stupid, but maybe also a sense of premonition that she couldn’t shake.

  Eight squeezed her hand when he caught up after tying off the boat. He looked rumpled and tired
, as if it had been far too many nights since he’d slept, but there was a sense of calm about him that she’d almost forgotten he could wear like a cloak.

  “Were you up all night reading Eliza’s letterbooks again?” she asked, reaching out to brush two fingers across his cheek.

  “No. I slept some, but I was curious about a few things, so I looked them up on the computer, and then Kate came in and wanted to talk.”

  Barrie wound her fingers through his. “What about?”

  He pulled her to him, head dipping down to kiss her with a certainty that left her reeling. Her breathing was thin and shallow—too shallow, maybe, because when he pulled away, she had to fight for the strength to keep from leaning against him. He gathered her into his arms and held her, her head burrowed against his pounding heart.

  There was safety tucked in Eight’s arms that had nothing to do with him protecting her from physical danger. It was the reassurance of having someone who had chosen to stand beside her. She had never felt that before with anyone but Mark, but now she had Pru and Eight, and despite all that had happened, they had helped her discover a core of strength inside herself. She wondered if that strength had always been there waiting for her to find it. Pulling away, she started walking.

  Eight adjusted his steps to keep pace beside her. “Kate’s convinced herself that the fact that Beaufort Hall is still here and still belongs to us is only because of the bargain,” he said. “She’s afraid to lose it if we give the Fire Carrier back our half of the ulunsuti stone.”

  Barrie wondered how you could ever go back to a world without magic.

  “I know,” she said. “Last night, that first minute after the curse broke, it all came crashing down on me. How much I can’t bear the thought of losing the yunwi and this place. In theory, I know we could figure out how to make it work. Lula left money, and Pru says there’s still a lot in the Watson estate. We could invest better. She has a whole strategy we talked about on the way home last night, but lots of people have tried to keep big places like this going and haven’t been able to. Maybe Thomas and Robert were smart enough to foresee that. But if the yunwi don’t belong here, if they’re meant to be somewhere else, then Kate and I have no right to cling to the magic that’s keeping them at Watson’s Landing.”

  “I did find out something about that last night,” Eight said. “At least, it might be related. I went back to reread the stories about medicine people studying with the yunwi, and found a legend about a whole tribe of Cherokee who went to live in a ‘country’ inside Pilot Mountain and were never seen again. Also, there are references to a vortex of energy at Pilot Mountain and a ley line running through it. And there’s a sanctuary for nesting ravens at the top.”

  “Ravens?”

  “In ancient times, the high priest of war among the Cherokee was called the Raven when he scouted. I’m not sure what’s coincidence anymore, but I was hoping I’d find something about a spirit path or a ley line that connected Pilot Mountain and Blood Mountain to Watson Island. There was nothing like that. The whole concept of ley lines is so nebulous. But then I remembered what Obadiah and Berg had said about electromagnetism.”

  “What does that have to do with the yunwi?” Barrie asked as they slipped through the high hedge and emerged in the Beaufort garden.

  “Remember how Obadiah said that the ulunsuti crystals were paths to communicating between the past and the future? Pilot Mountain is made of rose quartz, and you said Berg mentioned experiments about crystals in the Stonehenge standing stones. I looked that up, and there are theories about the crystals creating an electromagnetic field and setting up some kind of harmonic resonance, a frequency of vibration that can move particles at faster than light speed.”

  Barrie came to a stop beside the French doors that led into a sunny morning room off the garden. She remembered too clearly the feeling of being broken into nothing and everything, feeling small and enormous and part of everything around her. There was also the sound beyond sound—the way the stone and the energy made her feel. The feeling of sound whenever the yunwi tried to communicate with her.

  “I don’t pretend to speak science, but are you trying to say that the ulunsuti use sound to break things into energy? And that’s how the living can pass through to the underworld?”

  “Or move around within our world, maybe.” Eight pulled Barrie up the steps. “Searching for keywords like ‘magnetism’ and ‘electromagnetism’ and ‘lines’ and anything else I could think of, I eventually found a map on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website that shows how the lines of force that a compass follows have changed over the years. If you go back to 1590, which is the earliest date they have, one of those lines ran almost between here and Blood Mountain. A few years before that, it would probably have run straight through here. And now, that same line goes directly from here to Pilot Mountain. What if that’s how the yunwi got stuck? They came here, and the line shifted. What if that line is our spirit path?”

  “It’s a lot of ‘ifs.’ ”

  Eight’s eyes darkened. “You think it’s a stupid idea?”

  “No!” Barrie grabbed his hands and held them. “I think it’s brilliant. You must have been up all night researching it— I just don’t know how we prove any of it, or how it helps us. And why wouldn’t anyone have put this together before?”

  He gave her hands a squeeze and pulled them to his lips. “We have an advantage, Bear. We know that magic is real, and we know that the Cherokee stories have a foundation of truth. We have the yunwi and the Fire Carrier, and we know about Ayita’s daughter, not to mention Obadiah bringing in the belief systems from Angola and the Congo, and Berg telling us about feng shui and pigeons and all the other pieces of the puzzle. We can see the common denominators because we’re looking for them. Maybe it’s a case of forest and trees.”

  “But even if you’re right,” Barrie said, trying to wrap her mind around it all, “if the ulunsuti stone is broken, it can’t produce the same frequency as when it was whole. Can it?”

  “Maybe that’s why the Fire Carrier wants you to bring it back together.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Sunlight through the windows struck the strands of crystals hanging from the Georgian chandelier and cast prisms across every surface of the dining room at Beaufort Hall. In contrast, the table resembled that of a war room, with half a dozen laptops and all three letterbooks, not to mention notebooks and pencils and glasses of sweet tea that stood sweating on coasters.

  Seven had donned a pair of glasses that Barrie had never seen him wear, and he looked both scholarly and protective as he and Pru sat beside each other, each with a letterbook in front of them. Barrie stole a look at Eight. She wondered if in twenty-odd years, he would look like Seven. A part of her instantly refused the thought, because Seven was too . . . what? “Narrow-minded” and “unhappy” were the best words that came to mind, but glancing at him now, with his body angled toward Pru’s as if he couldn’t help but slip closer, the sternness and rigidity that usually made him so formidable were softened. Pru, too, seemed content as she concentrated on the computer screen with a pencil tucked behind her ear.

  Mary had stayed behind at Watson’s Landing, attending to the final touches for the restaurant opening, but Obadiah sat beside Daphne. He still pulsed with leftover energy that seemed to make him fidgety. His fingers drummed, and his toes tapped, and his finger pointed too forcefully to things on Daphne’s laptop whenever he saw something of interest.

  For the seventh time in the space of an hour, Daphne pulled the laptop out of reach. “Please don’t touch the screen that hard.”

  “Well, click that link, then,” he said.

  “You want to do the searching?”

  “No, you type.” Obadiah folded his arms and tried unsuccessfully not to look impatient.

  To Barrie’s right, Berg suppressed a grin. His head was still bandaged, and according to the emergency room doctor, he was mildly concussed, but he had ref
used point-blank not to be included. Since he wasn’t allowed to read, he had logged into the university library on his own laptop, and Cassie was doing the reading for him. They were in charge of searching for crystals and magnetism and every scientific aspect they could to try to prove or disprove Eight’s idea. So far, they’d come up empty.

  Barrie had been skimming the letterbook and quietly reading aloud to Eight anything that Eliza had mentioned about Inola, or the things that the older woman had taught her. In addition to medical knowledge, Inola had given advice on planting and psychology and love and family. She had become a counselor as well as a confidante for Eliza, who had often been lonely and frustrated, especially with her brother, James, who had risen in his regiment and been too fond of the military life to give it up for the sedate life of a Carolina plantation owner. Eight scribbled notes in the shorthand style that he’d developed for himself, and Barrie was waiting for him to catch up, when Kate suddenly drew in a breath.

  “Hey,” Kate said. “I think I found something.” She waited until everyone sat back in their chairs before she picked up the book again and read:

  Memorandum.

  Fulfilled my promise to Inola, and the tunnel is completed today. I have also left a small boat on the other side of our Island, so that she or the others who belong to Daniel Colesworth can use it to escape, if the need arises. The treatment Inola receives cannot be tolerated, but what am I to do? Along with the beads for her needlework, I have gifted her a pearl necklace, which she can take apart and hide more easily than gold. She fears to keep the necklace with her, so we placed it in a sturdy box, which she hid at the base of the oak where the Fire Carrier resides. I hesitate to say that my brother, James, is such a man, but I cannot trust what he would do if faced with the choice of helping her. It is not his Bravery I question, nor his Compassion, but his sense of the rule of law above all else. Too many men hide behind laws when doing so will inconvenience them a little less.