Illusion Read online

  There was no reason to trust him. None at all. Barrie wanted nothing more than to turn on her heel and walk away, but instinct and her gift still stubbornly pulled her toward him for some reason that eluded her.

  “What is it that you want from me?” she asked. “You said yourself that even at your strongest it wasn’t enough to break the curse.”

  Obadiah straightened to his full height and looked down at her. “I do have a possible solution. You won’t like it.”

  “I don’t like any of this,” Barrie said.

  Obadiah’s gaze shifted away, somewhere across Barrie’s shoulder, and his eyes darkened. “There’s a spirit path, a dragon line, that runs through here and splits on Watson Island, leaving a vortex of positive energy in the woods there, and a vortex of negative energy at Beaufort Hall, before coming back together again. Depending on where the Watson and Beaufort lodestones are buried, they may have absorbed enough power to let me break the curse. I need you to bring them both to me here.”

  Barrie went still. “Why both?”

  “If either or both of the stones are too near a vortex, they might have absorbed energy of only one polarity. Magic requires balance.” Obadiah looked down at his own lined hands, the nails carefully trimmed and pinkly pale. His expression was impossible to read, as if he’d deliberately emptied it.

  Empty was how Barrie felt at that moment, too. Empty of anger or even disappointment. She knew what was coming before she asked the question. “What happens to the magic in the lodestones if you use the energy stored in them? To the gifts and bindings?”

  Obadiah shrugged, but regret, or something like it, flashed through his eyes. “I’m sorry, petite. I know how much it means to you to keep the Watson magic.”

  The emptiness inside Barrie expanded until it filled her lungs and made every organ and limb feel numb. She needed to get a grip on herself. Still, what had she expected? She had known from the beginning that Obadiah wouldn’t play fair.

  Risking her gift, the yunwi, and the future of Watson’s Landing was exactly what she’d wanted to avoid. That, and she’d been trying to make sure that removing the magic was safe for Eight and Seven.

  Every instinct in her rebelled at the thought of giving the lodestones to Obadiah. Maybe even that was the magic protecting itself. “Can you promise me that no one would get hurt if you broke the bindings?” she asked. “What if there’s some sort of self-preservation mechanism built in to protect the gifts, the way the migraines try to keep us from being away from the plantations too long?”

  “I’d have to examine the lodestones before I could begin to guess if that’s true.”

  A nightjar called its own name somewhere in the woods, and the lonely, haunted sound echoed the way Barrie felt. The sun was setting, painting the sky in smoke, soot, and crimson.

  “You’re asking me to trust you with the whole future of Watson’s Landing—not to mention Beaufort Hall—based on guesses. How do I know you’ll ever be strong enough—or skilled enough—to succeed? You let Ryder and Junior shoot you—”

  “No one else was around when I started to bind the spirits! No one to see or interfere, and I needed all my energy and concentration for the magic.”

  “That’s my point! You couldn’t keep yourself from getting shot when you were at your strongest. How am I supposed to have any confidence in you now?” Shaking her head, Barrie rubbed her arms against a sudden chill. “I’m sorry, but there has to be another way. Perform an exorcism. Never mind binding the spirits or appeasing them!”

  Obadiah leaned away from her, and his breath hissed dangerously. “Destroy them, you mean? They deserve rest after everything they’ve been through. Not more pain. John Colesworth didn’t just murder Elijah. He set his bones into the wall of the treasure room as a warning to the other slaves, and he drilled the bricks with iron stakes and mixed the mortar with salt and holy water. Later, when he discovered that Ayita had cursed him, he had her bones seared in lye and ground into dust. He mixed that with salt and scattered it into the floor, then bricked it over again. It takes more strength than you can imagine for a spirit to survive a thing like that. The kind of strength that comes with hate and pain.”

  Sickened at the image conjured by Obadiah’s words, Barrie found it impossible to comprehend the kind of evil that would do something like that—the kind of evil that took the horror of slavery from life and extended it into death. Then again, it was impossible to comprehend how someone could think they had any right to hurt or control another person.

  In the deep blue sky above the sunset colors, the moon had appeared, a pale curved shadow in the dusk. Obadiah gently pulled Barrie back to face him. “Petite, I need your help. I can keep the police and the archaeologists away from the room for a while, but only as long as the spirits can’t reach very far beyond their prison. That’s why you need to find the lodestones.”

  Barrie searched his expression. Although she found nothing that said he was lying, she couldn’t accept what he said. Somewhere, somehow, there had to be another way. She needed more information. Not just about the lodestones and the Fire Carrier’s magic, but about Obadiah himself.

  “I have to think about it,” she said. Turning her back on him before he could argue—or use whatever brand of power he had left to talk her into something—she walked away.

  “Don’t think too long,” he called after her. “We don’t have time for that.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cassie’s longer legs easily kept up with Barrie’s stride as she rushed toward the car ahead of Pru. “What do you mean you don’t know if you can give the lodestones to Obadiah?” Cassie demanded. “You have to find them for him if Ayita and Elijah are after Colesworth blood.”

  “I’m not even sure I could find them. And what happened to not trusting Obadiah? Why are you suddenly so willing to accept what he says without questioning it?” Barrie wished she hadn’t promised herself she would be honest with everyone. She’d had no choice but to warn the Colesworths about the spirits, but as for the rest? What was the point of giving Cassie hope when Barrie couldn’t do what Obadiah wanted?

  “What if Ayita and Elijah kill someone?” Cassie demanded, sounding half-hysterical. “My family or the dig crew or the sheriff’s deputies. How would we explain what had happened? The police will accuse me of having caused it. You know how everyone likes to blame me for everything. I haven’t even had the final pretrial intervention hearing, and the judge will send me back to the detention center. I can’t go back there. The migraines will kill me—and then Sydney would inherit them.”

  “First, we have a lot of things to worry about before that one,” Barrie said, hurrying past the cemetery gate. “And second, if worse comes to worst, you’re stronger than you think. Strong enough to survive a few years of migraines. People have done it. My mother did it.”

  “And how’d that work out for her?” Cassie snapped. “You think she would have bothered if she hadn’t wanted to protect you?”

  The question was tossed out defiantly, the way that Cassie navigated through so much of her life, but it sank in gradually, a brush across Barrie’s consciousness that opened more and more barbs of meaning.

  Self-sacrifice was the last thing she would ever have associated with her mother, but Pru had said something similar once, that Lula must have loved Barrie very much to keep getting out of bed every morning when it would have been easier to give up. Was it possible Lula had kept going despite the pain she’d lived with every day to keep her daughter from inheriting the binding?

  Filing that away for later examination, Barrie grasped the handle on the car’s passenger side, but Cassie braced her hip against the door. Barrie gave an exhausted sigh. The day had been too long, and all she wanted to do was crawl into bed and pull the covers up over her eyes.

  “Cassie, what do you want from me?” she asked, feeling like she was being pummeled from all sides. “Right now, there’s nothing I can do. Even if I could manage to find the Watson lodestone
, how am I supposed to get the Beaufort one? Eight won’t talk to me, so I can’t go wandering over there searching the property for it. In any case, I have to think about what happens to Watson’s Landing and to us—the Watsons and the Beauforts—if we break the bindings. Unless I know that, I can’t trust Obadiah with the lodestones, so you’ll have to help him keep everyone away from that room in the meantime. That’s the best solution I can offer.” Pushing Cassie aside, she pulled the car door open, and slid down into the passenger seat.

  Cassie grabbed the edge of the door so that Barrie couldn’t close it. “You’re the only one who can fix this. You have to fix it.”

  “Actually, I don’t.” Barrie gave up trying to wrench the door away from Cassie and sat miserably with her hands folded in her lap. “Maybe that doesn’t seem fair to you, but if it comes down to a choice between my family and yours, I’m going to choose mine. I won’t apologize for that. And you don’t get to preach to me about my decisions. You can’t even decide what you want. Quick—pick one. The gold? Or having the curse removed?”

  “If you’d help me, I wouldn’t have to choose,” Cassie said, holding the car door with white-knuckled fingers.

  “Seriously, do you even hear yourself?” Barrie lowered her voice as Pru and Marie Colesworth reached the driver’s side of the old Mercedes. “Obadiah may seem helpless now, but he won’t be once he has the kind of power he says he needs to remove the curse. What’s to stop him from taking the gold at that point? No matter what happens, you don’t get what you want without losing something else. Apparently, that’s how life works, and nothing I do is going to change that.”

  Taking advantage of Cassie’s momentary shock, Barrie yanked the door free and slammed it closed as Pru dropped into the driver’s seat. Cassie stood with her arms hugging her waist and her long hair blowing while Pru pulled the car out of the lot and into the driveway.

  Neither Pru nor Barrie spoke again until the Mercedes had turned to the right at the gate and was moving along the shaded road that led past Beaufort Hall. The last orange light strobed through breaks in the canopy of old oaks that lined both sides of the road, leaving the road bathed in gloom.

  That was fine. The gloom just made it harder for Barrie to see Pru’s worried expression.

  “From the little I heard, it seemed like you were pretty hard on Cassie,” Pru said. “Not that she doesn’t deserve it, and not that you aren’t right, but it’s not like you. I understand that you’re upset and scared. We all are, but if giving Obadiah the lodestones is the only way to stop Ayita and Elijah, we may have no choice. Don’t you think in some ways, it might even be a relief to get rid of all the magic, as long as Obadiah can do it safely?”

  Barrie stared out the window. This was exactly why she hadn’t told anyone about Obadiah’s threats before. Because no one understood.

  A small creature darted across the road, and Pru braked and swerved. Belatedly she switched the headlights on, as if she’d been too distracted before to notice that night had descended while they hadn’t paid attention.

  Barrie dropped her head back against the seat. “How do we know what’s safe, Aunt Pru? We’re still guessing and working on rumor and old stories about what happened between Thomas and the Fire Carrier. We need to know exactly what was in the bargains and how they were sealed into the lodestones, or we’re going to be relying on Obadiah to tell us the truth. I told Cassie I wouldn’t hesitate to choose my family over hers. Don’t you think Obadiah would do the same? He says he’s never lied to me before, but he hasn’t always told the truth.”

  “That’s a good point,” Pru said with a reluctant nod.

  “We don’t even know why the Fire Carrier is here. Why did he bring the yunwi to Watson Island of all places?”

  Pru gave her an odd look. “The spirits were causing mischief for his tribe, and this was the last piece of land surrounded by water as he went east. That’s what the story says.”

  “The yunwi do more good than harm as long as you treat them well. You figured that out on your own—that’s why you started leaving food out for them at night. And they stopped taking the house apart once I started paying attention to them on the night that I was bound to Watson’s Landing. They’re kind, and they take care of the garden. They do their best to help us. We’ve seen that ourselves, and all the folklore and information that Eight and I found about the Cherokee Little People says so, too.” Pulling the seat belt aside, Barrie turned in her seat to face her aunt. “We need to reexamine everything we think we know, everything you thought you knew growing up. Every story and legend people around here consider truth. Obadiah says he wants to remove the curse to save his family, and I believe him. I just don’t know what else he wants—or what he’ll do to get it. I think we have to tell Mary about him. Ask her—”

  “Ask Mary what, sugar?” Pru asked, though not ungently. “If she has a Raven Mocker in the family who steals years from his victims to keep himself alive? Mary can barely stomach knowing the yunwi are around.”

  “You know he isn’t a Raven Mocker.”

  “How do we know what he is or isn’t?”

  “We don’t—that’s why we have to talk to Mary.”

  Pru stared back at Barrie so long that the car drifted off the road onto the grassy verge. Face pale, Pru steadied the car and drove with her hands clenched on the cracking leather until she turned onto the bridge that crossed the black-water Santisto River west of Watson Island.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll ask her. It’s a shame, but there’s no information left at Watson’s Landing that would help us. Lord only knows, Lula looked everywhere trying to find something, so if there was ever anything set down in writing about the binding or the gifts, Daddy—or someone before him—had to have destroyed it.” Pru leaned forward and adjusted the vent on the air conditioner, since the heat of the day had finally begun to dwindle. Then she glanced back across the car at Barrie. “I suppose I should be glad that you’re finally questioning Obadiah. Your tendency to see the best in people is wonderful, but for all we know, the man came up with the whole idea of a race between him and the spirits to see who can get stronger faster as a way to push you into involving yourself again.”

  Barrie had to acknowledge the truth of that. “Could you ask Seven, too? He has to know something that was passed down in his family, or maybe they have family documents. Whatever is going on between him and Eight, he would tell you, wouldn’t he? He loves you. That’s one of the things that makes him such an ass—he gave up on you instead of fighting or even trying to figure out a solution.”

  Pru’s indrawn breath was almost inaudible, but her profile was strained and sharp enough to make Barrie realize what she had blurted out unthinkingly. She would have taken back the words, if she could have, but she doubted that apologizing would make things better.

  Beneath the bridge, the river flowing around Watson Island appeared colorless in the flat light of the emerging moon. Around the curve of the river, the tip of the Watson’s Landing dock was just visible across from the Beaufort one, the two stretching toward each other with no hope of coming together, much like Seven had believed Pru was out of reach. The way that Eight was out of reach. Farther downriver, beyond Beaufort Hall, the Colesworth dock looked almost intact in the distance, the charred and damaged end visible only as listing boards and a broken piling. Tonight was the first time since she’d arrived back from San Francisco that Barrie felt that the gulf between her family and the others—between her and what Eight and Cassie wanted—was as wide as the water.

  She had to find a way to get Eight to forgive her. The last thing she wanted was to have to make decisions without him and risk making things even worse between them.

  Pru braked to a stop in the circular driveway at Watson’s Landing. The knee-high shadowy figures of the yunwi darted around the car, nearly invisible but for the fiery glow of their eyes flickering in the darkness. Their antics unsettled the white peacock who had chosen to roost in the far co
rner of the portico, and he fluttered down like a ghost himself and strutted away with an affronted air. After getting out of the car, Pru linked her arm with Barrie’s, and they climbed the front steps together and then went to the kitchen.

  Pru downed a couple of Tylenol and drank a glass of lemonade. A few moments later, she excused herself to go to bed. “It’s late, sugar, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been more tired in my whole life. We ought to both get some sleep. It’s going to be a long, hard day tomorrow with Mary and Daphne coming to do the additional menus for the restaurant and the appraiser coming for the furniture in the afternoon.” She headed toward the door, but paused beside Barrie and caught Barrie’s chin between her thumb and index finger. “Don’t go thinking this is all on you, you hear me? We’re going to find a solution to this mess together, I promise. That’s what families are for, so no one person ever has to carry the weight of a burden by themselves.”

  Pru kissed Barrie on the forehead and went upstairs, but Barrie stayed awhile in the kitchen before going up herself. Lying in the four-poster bed a half hour later, she kicked aside the quilt and stared up at the underside of the embroidered canopy sleeplessly. Then she plucked up her courage and picked up her phone.

  It didn’t surprise her when Eight’s number rang several times and went to voice mail, as if he’d hit ignore. She dialed again, and this time his voice mail picked up straightaway.

  Restlessly, she moved to stand out on the balcony. Across the river, Eight’s window still shone gold against the dark lawn of Beaufort Hall. The light-sticks and AquaLeds that Barrie had sunk in the water around the Watson dock rippled like liquid fire—beautiful, but a poor imitation of the wild flames of the Fire Carrier’s magic. And below, in the Watson garden, the knee-high dark shadows of the yunwi darted back and forth across the lawn and wove around the hedges, their eyes winking in and out like fireflies.