Illusion Page 4

  Barrie left a message for Eight because she had no choice. She believed what she’d told Pru about fighting—and Eight was worth fighting for.

  “I promised you I wouldn’t hold anything back anymore, but I can’t keep that promise if you won’t talk to me,” she said, her voice sounding husky and needy enough to make her pause to clear her throat. “Obadiah may have a way to break the curse, but it would probably break the Beaufort and Watson gifts as well. I can’t make a decision like that without you. I feel lost, Eight. You’re the one who always knows how to figure things out. If that doesn’t prove that I don’t think you’re stupid, I don’t know what would. Also, I miss you. I miss talking to you. I miss being with you. Please call me back.”

  Opening her heart was risky and painful, but risk was part of fighting harder.

  She hung up and leaned out across the railing, watching the river and hoping the phone would ring. When it didn’t, she retrieved her sketchbook and found herself sketching his face, and Obadiah’s, Cassie’s, Pru’s. When she’d first come to Watson’s Landing, it had been the place that fascinated her, but now that it was the people who gripped her, all of them. The people and the spirits and the magic. She tried to imagine the island without the yunwi or the Fire Carrier, and she couldn’t. Her gift was more than merely an ability to find lost things, or whatever her abilities would eventually settle into when she had figured out how to use them. The guardianship of Watson’s Landing, of the magic that lived here and nowhere else that Barrie had ever heard of, that was the true gift the Fire Carrier had given the Watsons all those years ago. How could she let that go?

  She wished she had told Eight everything from the beginning, that she had trusted him with the truth. But she didn’t regret that she had fought to keep the Watson gift when Obadiah had threatened it. Her choices weren’t any easier now, and Eight wouldn’t necessarily agree with her priorities, but she had to let Eight know what was going on and give him an opportunity to weigh in.

  A half hour later, she had to admit that he wasn’t going to call.

  She needed to do something to get his attention, and of all the problems she was facing now, getting him to forgive her seemed the least impossible. It was time to fight even harder. She had to send him a message he couldn’t ignore.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The secret tunnel that led beneath the river to the Beaufort woods had been daunting every time Barrie had set foot inside it, and crossing to the other side had never ended well. At least the first time, Eight had been with her for most of the trip. The second time, it had still been daylight when she emerged.

  Yet what choice did she have except to take the tunnel? She couldn’t wake Pru, not for this. She didn’t have a boat, and she couldn’t swim, and without a driver’s license, there was no other way across to Beaufort Hall.

  Unable to find a backpack anywhere in the house, she filled two pillowcases with more of the LED light-sticks, then tied the sacks together and draped them across her shoulders. The floorboards groaned in the second-floor corridor of the abandoned wing that contained what had once been her grandfather’s bedroom. Heavy furniture mottled with a fresh coat of dust added to the oppressive atmosphere, and Barrie hurried through, looking neither left nor right. She climbed onto the bed. Flipping aside the bearded face in the carving that hid the keyhole, she unlocked the sliding panel, then she climbed over the headboard into the hidden room. Another hidden panel opened onto the musty, narrow steps that descended three floors down to the tunnel entrance. The yunwi scampered down with her but hovered on the steps to avoid the iron in the heavy door at the bottom.

  Beyond the door when Barrie had unlocked it, the walls of the underground passage curved into a sturdy arch and disappeared into the distance far beyond her flashlight beam. Darkness pressed in, closing around the light. Grit scratched on the bricks beneath her feet, and she kept her eyes averted from the memories that lay in wait. They flew at her anyway: the clang of the door her cousin Cassie had slammed to seal her and Eight inside the tunnel, the ghost that had hovered above the skeletons of Luke and Twila—the brother and ex-fiancée that Barrie’s own grandfather had murdered and kept hidden for forty years.

  As if they knew she needed them, more yunwi than usual had darted inside with her. Instead of milling around, they pressed in close as she followed the tunnel slightly downward toward the river, their insubstantial forms radiating the strange cold-warmth that she was finally getting used to feeling. The floor leveled off, signaling the invisible boundary that marked the water’s edge far overhead. Caged there by the spell the Fire Carrier renewed every night, the yunwi stopped with a howl of protest that was more a vibration in Barrie’s head than a sound in her ears.

  She wondered what they thought—whether they knew what had happened at Colesworth Place that morning. It wouldn’t surprise her. They’d hated Obadiah from the first moment he’d set foot at Watson’s Landing. That should have told her everything she needed to know, but at the same time that they’d told her to beware, her gift had pulled her toward him. It still did.

  “I wish you guys would tell me what’s going on,” she said. “Or tell me what to do. Why do you hate Obadiah? Is it because of his magic? Or because he’s going to take this place away from you? Because you’re afraid he’s going to hurt me? Please. Tell me something.”

  They circled her, pressing in and trying to hold her back with insistent, spectral fingers.

  Stay, they said, their soundless voices coming in near unison, little more than vibrations in the air around her.

  As information, that didn’t help, but something about the word held centuries of aloneness within it. Barrie recognized loneliness when she felt it. She’d spent most of her childhood feeling isolated from people her own age, from her mother. Really, from anyone except her godfather, Mark. Fighting a fresh wave of grief so strong that it bowed her shoulders, she rubbed Mark’s watch as she hurried beneath the river. She wondered if you ever got over losing someone you loved, whether it really did get better the way people said. Maybe you just got used to the ache, the same way she coped with the migraines when she was away from Watson’s Landing, by never letting her thoughts dwell on any one thing too long.

  She reached the opposite end of the tunnel at last, and turned the key to open the thick wooden door as quietly as she could. The snick of the lock still seemed too loud in her ears, and she stood on the threshold listening for anything that seemed out of place among the hum of insects, the chorus of the frogs, and the low and constant kwok, kwok, kwok, kwok calls of the night herons in the woods around her. The fact that the herons stopped as she pulled herself up through the grate in the stairwell suggested that she was there alone.

  Keeping the dome of the flashlight pressed against her palm so that the beam didn’t travel far beyond her feet, she kicked some leaves back over the grating as a hurried form of camouflage, then picked her way through the woods to the lightly sloping lawn. Beaufort Hall was lit up like a jewel box at the top of the rise, light spilling from Eight’s window and a dozen others, but there was no sign of movement. Barrie didn’t let that dissuade her. She had made up her mind to fight for Eight, and even if he wasn’t in his room right then, he would have to go there at some point.

  She worked fast, breaking each light-stick as she went so that they all glowed softly before she laid them on the grass. It was impossible to see the scale or proportion from where she stood, but the writing didn’t have to be perfect. Just legible.

  I’M SORRY

  Stepping back when she was done, she rubbed her aching head and glanced up at the window. Eight stood there, inches from the paned glass, everything about him clear and so familiar that the finding clicked in her again, puzzle pieces of his faults and strengths, hopes and fears, aligning in just the right way with her own.

  What she loved about Eight had little to do with the broad shoulders and strong arms that had wrapped themselves around her to offer comfort, the chest that had cradled he
r cheek, the stubborn jaw that had softened as he’d rested it against the top of her head. She loved the way he thought his way through problems while she leaped to conclusions. The way he was confident with people when she had no clue, and the way he had recognized long before she had that she too often wanted what others wanted instead of deciding what she wanted herself. She loved the way he argued with her and made her sharpen her wits. The way he made her laugh in the middle of an argument.

  Why hadn’t she seen that sooner? Why hadn’t she had faith in what she felt?

  When she’d first found out about his gift, she’d been afraid he was using it to make her like him—afraid that she liked him more than she wanted to like him, simply because he knew what she wanted him to say and what she wanted him to do. That had shifted to the bigger fear that once she’d wanted him to like her, to love her, he’d had no choice. The Beaufort gift had made her reluctant to trust anything between them. Now, though, she wasn’t the one retreating from what they had.

  He was still standing there, unmoving, so she tapped her heart and then pointed to the words she had spelled out in lights. She waited for a gesture of forgiveness or understanding. Instead he stepped back and walked away. A moment later, the bedroom lights went out.

  And why not? The realization that she was waiting for a gesture slid through her coldly. Gestures were easy to make and hard to live up to. Of course Eight needed more.

  How had she not realized how empty this apology must seem to him? She’d been looking for something to show him what she felt, the way he had shown her so often. Only the things he had done had always stemmed from knowing her and understanding what she needed. He’d found a turtle’s nest for her as an example of courage. Built her a tire swing as a reminder of the living they still had to do together. He’d danced with her in the rain beneath a red umbrella to show her that there was no point in being the same as everyone else when you could be something different.

  What had she shown him? Words that had no meaning most of the time when people said them.

  Barrie’s breath hitched and left a slow, rhythmic emptiness in her chest. She set to work slowly gathering up the light-sticks and taking her time putting them back inside the pillowcases, not even realizing until she was finished that some dim corner of her had been harboring hope that Eight had only switched off the light to come downstairs. He wasn’t coming.

  She couldn’t stand there like an idiot any longer. She needed to go home and do what he’d asked of her, to leave him alone. Since the first day she’d met him, he’d barely asked anything of her. She could do this much.

  Turning back downhill, she caught her first full glimpse of Watson’s Landing across the water. The garden glittered with the fairy lights strung through the trees, and the fountain at the center of the maze was lit with a glow that turned the water into liquid moonlight. On the dock that crossed the marsh grass along the river’s edge, small shadows stood waiting for her, their eyes no more than orange pinpricks in the distance and the darkness.

  As quickly as her heart had emptied, it swelled again. Not wholly. She suspected it would never be whole without the missing piece that belonged to Eight. Still, seeing the yunwi was enough to remind her that there were other things to fight for, too.

  She was halfway down the hill when her phone buzzed in her pocket. Fumbling to retrieve it, she let herself hope again.

  “Thank God,” she said. “I’ve been so worried—”

  “I’m not your responsibility to worry about. I meant what I told you. Stop calling me, Bear. Don’t come over here. Don’t think you can fix us when I’m still trying to fix myself. There isn’t an us anymore, and I can’t think when I’m finding you around every corner.”

  The pain rasping his voice dug into Barrie’s chest and clawed it open. She was sure there was something she could say, some perfect combination of words that Eight would have used if the shoe were on the other foot, but she couldn’t think what they were.

  Refusing to cry and make him feel worse, she focused on being practical. “There’s stuff you need to know. Obadiah wants me to bring him both the Beaufort and the Watson lodestones. He says that Elijah and Ayita are so weak that they could drain—”

  “God, stop!” Eight shouted into the phone. “Bear, please. I can’t care about that right now. Just stay away from Obadiah. And stay away from Kate.”

  “I haven’t even talked to your sister.”

  “Well, she’s pestering me to talk to you, and I know what she’s like. She’ll be over there whispering into your ear and wanting you to keep me from—”

  “From what?”

  “Just keep her out of this. All of it. She’s prone to getting into enough trouble on her own without you making her even crazier.”

  “That isn’t fair.”

  “If life was fair, we wouldn’t have to deal with the gifts or the bindings or any of this crap.”

  He hung up before Barrie could say another word.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Barrie slept badly, and in the morning, her head felt like it was filled with sawdust as she followed the dark aroma of coffee to the kitchen. Still dressed in her sleep shorts and the There’s no way you woke up looking like that T-shirt that Mark had given her for Christmas, she pushed through the swinging door from the dim corridor and stood blinking against the sunlight. Pru, Mary, and Daphne stopped mid-argument when they saw her.

  Already feeling guilty about Eight and Cassie, and scared for everyone at the dig, Barrie was nowhere near ready to deal with the undercurrents that vibrated through Pru’s too-chipper “Hello, sugar,” Mary’s mumbled “Mornin’,” and Daphne’s “Well, don’t you look like something the cat dragged in?”

  Hoping that Pru hadn’t brought up Obadiah without her, she held up a couple of fingers to ward off any more conversation. “Two minutes,” she said, shuffling toward the coffeepot. “Give me two minutes to start a caffeine IV drip, and then maybe I’ll feel human enough to figure out what you’re all mad about.”

  “No one’s mad, honey.” Mary flashed an unconvincing smile, and the elegant bones of her cheeks and jaw stood out tensely beneath her smooth brown skin. “Your aunt’s tryin’ to get rid of us, and she won’t listen when I tell her we’re fine.”

  “I never said I wanted to get rid of you, you stubborn woman,” Pru said, getting up from her chair. “I’m just trying to tell you that you don’t need to be here when Brit and Jackson need you.”

  Barrie paused with her cup half-filled. “What’s going on with Brit and Jackson?”

  For the first time, every one of her fifty-odd years showed on Mary’s face and in her posture. Daphne, too, was drawn and fidgety. The red ribbon wound around her braided hair seemed out of place, too aggressively bright and cheerful for her expression.

  “Brit gets muscle spasms from her cerebral palsy,” Mary said, “and the injections wear out after a while. The spasms were bad last night, and on top of that Jackson broke a tooth—”

  “Got into a fight,” Daphne said.

  “Couldn’t get himself out of a fight.” Mary tapped her pen against a stack of restaurant supply invoices. “Your brother doesn’t start things.”

  “I know he doesn’t.” Daphne’s mouth twisted up. “But he knows better than to hang out anywhere he’s liable to run into Crunch.”

  “Is Jackson okay? Was he hurt apart from the tooth? And what’s a Crunch?” Barrie asked.

  “An asshole named after the sound his fist makes breaking someone’s nose. That about tells you all you’ve gotta know.”

  “You watch your language,” Mary said. “And Jackson’s fine. Just mad, mostly, and not quite as pretty as he was before it happened, is all.”

  Barrie finished pouring her coffee and stood inhaling the steam as she held the mug between her palms while she tried to understand how Mary could be calm about that. Outside, a sheriff’s patrol boat passed on its way upriver, its motor churning milky foam onto the dark surface of the water.

>   Pru removed a platter of homemade biscuits she’d left warming in the oven and set them on the counter. Pausing beside Barrie, she leaned in close. “Tell Mary she doesn’t need to be here today, would you? Tell her you and I can handle the rest of the restaurant preparations on our own.”

  Snagging a biscuit from the platter, Barrie turned back toward the table. “Pru’s right. And honestly, there’s not that much left to do. Everything’s ordered, the ads are in, and the reservations are filling up—”

  “We’re already full for the first couple nights—I’ve been thinking we could auction off some of the seats and give the proceeds to charity,” Mary said.

  Barrie nodded. “That’s a great idea, but that can wait. The furniture appraisers are coming later today anyway, so it’s not like we’re going to get much done. Brit and Jackson are far more important—”

  “They’re more important every other day too, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to work. I can’t take time off whenever Brit has a bad turn or Jackson does some stupid thing.”

  “If it’s about the money,” Barrie began, “we can help—”

  “How many times do I have to tell you both that I’m not takin’ money I can’t pay back?” Mary said, cutting her off.

  Daphne hit the enter key on the keyboard of her laptop with an emphatic click. “It would be a loan, Gramma. I can pay it back. Eventually. It’s for Brit, so if they’re offering, we should take it.”

  “That’s enough, child.” Mary shot her a quelling look.

  “No! It isn’t. You know Brit’s getting worse,” Daphne said, turning to Pru and Barrie and hurrying on in spite of Mary’s disapproval. “There’s an experimental stem cell treatment I’ve been reading about. The trial itself wouldn’t cost anything, but if she gets in, there’d be flights and hotels, and Gramma and I would have to go with her. Our neighbor’s getting too old to keep up with Jackson after school. She sure can’t help him with his homework, so whatever happens with the trial, I’m going to have to ask if the university can defer my scholarship until he’s older.”