Illusion Read online

  “No you aren’t,” Mary said.

  “Yes I am.” Daphne looked back at Pru and Barrie. “If I work here and at the SeaCow, and I do some website work and graphics from home, I could start paying you back right away.”

  Mary bowed her head, appearing as close to defeated as Mary was ever likely to come. “You’re supposed to be the first person in the family to go to college,” she said softly. “And you’re supposed to set an example for Jackson. Give him something to work toward. You let me worry about the money. I’ll find it and figure out all the rest. The Lord doesn’t give anybody more than they can handle.”

  The last sentence came from Mary defiantly, as if she could make it true simply through her own insistence. Barrie lost whatever appetite she had left. Because what if Brit’s bad night and Jackson’s tooth didn’t have anything to do with God? Obadiah had explained that as a result of casting the Colesworth curse, there’d been some sort of karmic blowback that had fallen back onto his family. What if Brit never got into the stem cell trial because of that? Or if the curse was the source of Jackson’s problems? Who even had a name like Crunch? Who was proud of hitting people and scaring them?

  For the first time, it struck Barrie that she was the kind of person who found it easier to accept a world that had curses and magic, spirit paths, and vortexes of energy than it was to think of having to protect someone she loved from a guy named after the sound of a breaking nose. How did Mary send Jackson off to school every day not knowing if he’d be safe? How did she accept it when the doctors said there was nothing they could do for Brit? Or that Daphne would have to beg to postpone her merit scholarship while baseball and the Beaufort name had made it relatively easy for Eight to switch schools to stay in South Carolina instead of going away to school in California?

  Pru was still leaning against the counter by the sink, and she gave a scant, helpless lift of her shoulders and shook her head when Barrie caught her eye. Crumbling her biscuit, Barrie studied the swirl of unreadable thoughts and emotions that chased each other across Daphne’s narrow face. There was always something hard to grasp about Daphne, as if she kept herself hidden away, and the quiet she wore was like a cloak—or armor against the world.

  Barrie pushed her plate aside. “Mary, have you ever heard of someone named Obadiah? Someone related to you.”

  Mary nearly dropped the newly printed menu she was inserting into one of the empty plastic cases that Pru had ordered. “Where’d you come across that name?”

  “He showed up here—”

  “Here? When?” Mary’s breath hissed between her teeth. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. You stay clear of him if he ever comes again. You stay far away.”

  Daphne’s forearms thudded onto the table, and she leaned forward with interest, glancing from Mary to Barrie and back again as if she didn’t know where to look. “Who is he?” she asked. “And what did he want? What did he do?”

  “He’s a shaman, or a magician—or something between the two,” Barrie replied. “His magic is real, though. I’ve seen it. Felt it. At least some of it. And he’s a descendent of Elijah and Ayita, but he says he’s also related to you.”

  “People can say whatever they like,” Mary said tartly. “A boo hag can call itself a king, but that’s not going to make it one.”

  Barrie suppressed a sigh. “Obadiah isn’t a boo hag. Or a Raven Mocker or a vampire. He’s a person, and whatever he does to keep himself alive doesn’t hurt anyone else. He knows your history. Our history. He’s told me more about the Colesworth curse and the gifts than anyone else ever has, and he’s here because he’s desperately trying to help you.”

  She explained how she had met Obadiah, and everything that had happened since, including how she had used the names in Caroline Colesworth’s diary to figure out that Mary’s family was the one Obadiah had come back to save from the blowback of the curse—because they were his family, too.

  Daphne grew more rigid as Barrie talked, and Mary grew more jittery. The shadows beneath Mary’s eyes had grown pronounced enough to remind Barrie of when she had first arrived at Watson’s Landing and found Pru crying on the steps outside, too paralyzed by emotion and fear to bring herself to leave Watson’s Landing long enough to pick Barrie up at the airport. Helplessness was a more desolate kind of pain than any physical ailment could inflict.

  “Are you trying to say that this Obadiah is the same Obadiah who was a slave before the Civil War?” Daphne asked when Barrie had fallen silent.

  “That’s what I suspect,” Barrie said.

  “He could be.” Mary picked up Barrie’s plate and took it to the sink. The fork clattered on the porcelain as she scraped off the biscuit crumbs. Then she turned back around, holding the plate in front of her like a shield. “My gramma used to tell stories about the family. Back in the war, when the Federals took Port Royal and the islands, the Colesworths threatened to send any slave who didn’t stay and work across to Cuba. Your”—she waved a finger in Daphne’s direction—“seven-times-great-grandfather or thereabouts, Donas, had already died by then, and his wife thought the children were too young to risk tryin’ to run away. Obadiah, the oldest, was the only one who went, and he got himself shot in the fightin’ up north. By the time he made it back here, the whole family was dead except for Daphne, the youngest girl. She had a baby to take care of, and both of them were sick.

  “Obadiah refused to let them die. There wasn’t any money for doctors, but the family’d always made root medicine as far back as anyone could remember. Obadiah went from one conjure man to another, learnin’ whatever he didn’t already know about healin’. The way my gramma told it, the magic took hold of him. He went off to study in New Orleans, then Haiti, Africa, Tibet, China. Anywhere and everywhere, and when he came back, the magic had done somethin’ to him so that he didn’t change. Didn’t age. Eventually, he stopped tryin’ to come back, but he sent packages of money and all sorts of strange odds and ends, each with foreign stamps and no return address—”

  “Packages like the ones you hide when you think we aren’t looking?” Daphne asked.

  Mary’s lips went flat. “Packages we don’t need or want. All that money has ever brought is misery—”

  “How much money?” Daphne’s forearms thudded on the table. “And where is it?”

  “Never you mind. I’ve given it away ever since your mama came back and handed me Jackson to raise. Didn’t matter how much I ever sent her, it wasn’t enough. I hoped she would stay with you—with us—if I told her it wasn’t comin’ anymore. But that’s the problem. Found money is never free, so you tell Obadiah that the Colesworths can keep their gold—we don’t want any part of it. Look at all the folks who win the lottery! Or actors. Basketball players. Musicians.” Spots of color stained Mary’s cheeks as her gaze locked with Daphne’s. “Not one of them ends up happy. The money makes them lose their way.”

  “We could be using it to make Brit better—to get help for Jackson. Or for school.” Jaw tight with shock, Daphne stared back at grandmother, and she shook her head as Mary nodded. “Didn’t it ever occur to you to tell me before you gave the money away? I’m the one who’s got to take care of Brit for the rest of her life.”

  “She’s your sister—”

  “I’m not saying I mind! I’m saying that it’s going to take money. A lot of it. And if the curse is making Brit the way she is, or making her worse, or taking away good luck that could maybe make her better . . . It doesn’t matter if this Obadiah is that Obadiah. Or if he’s a boo hag or a Raven Mocker or whatever else. I want to meet him.” Daphne turned back to Barrie. “Will you take me over to see him?”

  “Of course,” Barrie said, ignoring the looks cast at her by both Pru and Mary. “But he’s going to ask me about the lodestone, if I do, so I’d better figure out whether finding it is even an option first.”

  “Are you going out to the Scalping Tree?” Daphne asked. “I’ll go with you.”

  Mary folded her arms across her chest. “
The hell you will, child. You stay right here in this kitchen or I’ll tan your hide with a wooden spoon. You’re not too old for me to put you across my knee.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Pru brought along her shotgun. The pocket of her coral sundress bulged with a load of extra red-cased shells, making the hem hang askew against her thin knees and her stiff rubber Wellingtons. She led the way across the lawn like a woman on a mission, but she deflated when she and Barrie reached the first rank of mingled oak and cypress surrounded by bristling, low palmettos. At the same spot, and right on schedule, the yunwi refused to go any farther, either.

  Barrie pushed on ahead into the shadowed woods, watching the ground for snakes and alligators and pits of squishy ground. Partly as a distraction, but mostly because it was long overdue, she promised herself that she was going to make time to go online and order her own pair of rubber boots. Borrowing Pru’s spare pair was getting to be a regular occurrence, and somewhere there had to be a website that had them in something other than ugly green. A nice flower print, or stripes, or cute little polka dots. Did Louboutin make rain boots? Maybe she’d buy two pairs and give one to Pru.

  “You be careful, sugar. Don’t charge on ahead of me,” Pru called out.

  Glancing back, Barrie found Pru was lagging behind, her footsteps slowing and her head turning this way and that as if she expected something to jump out at her from behind every tree. For the first time, Barrie remembered that Pru had never actually been in the woods before. Emmett had beaten both his daughters the night Lula had defied him and followed her finding gift inside. He’d been afraid they would find the key to the tunnel where he’d hidden it at the Scalping Tree, so he’d convinced them both that the Fire Carrier was evil and the woods were dangerous.

  Barrie stopped and waited for her aunt. “The Fire Carrier isn’t going to hurt us, Aunt Pru. What your father told you was a lie.”

  “I know that now, but knowing something in your head and knowing it deep down where fear lives are two different things.” There was no bitterness in Pru’s voice, only a wistful note that made Barrie wish Emmett Watson were still alive so she could string him up by the thumbs. Or better yet, lock him in the tunnel and see how he liked dying in there with the ghosts of his crimes.

  She opened her mouth to tell Pru to go back, to tell her that she didn’t have to come, but she suspected Pru had something to prove to herself. Pushing through fear was what eventually set you free.

  Brushing aside a clump of Spanish moss, Barrie took Pru’s hand and stepped deeper into the woods, winding through the trees and gnarled, low-hanging branches. Sparse light filtered through the canopy overhead, playing tricks on her eyes as the shadows shifted. Even in the gloom, though, she knew the way to the Scalping Tree. The Fire Carrier himself tugged on her senses. It was the same odd connection that let her know whenever he began his nightly walk to the river to renew the island’s protective magic, but the pull was more elemental than a simple sense of loss. It was another of those pieces of the expanding magic that she didn’t understand well enough. As with Obadiah, it was impossible to say whether the Fire Carrier was a question or an answer.

  The underbrush grew sparse, and a short while later, there was a dappled clearing surrounding an enormous oak. The tree’s limbs stretched out for hundreds of feet, some of them so heavy that they sagged onto the ground. Outlined in sunlight, strands of moss dripped from the tree’s twisted branches like the scalps that legend—probably incorrectly—said had once been left there in tribute for the Fire Carrier.

  Blotched spots of color appeared high on Pru’s pale cheeks. “I can’t believe it. People come from all over the world to see the Devil’s Oak in town, and this is right here. It’s been here all my life, and I’ve never seen it.”

  Barrie pushed back a fresh surge of fury at Emmett Watson and a wave of pity for the girls and young women his daughters had been. Lula had tried to escape, and maybe if Emmett had told her the truth about the magic and the Fire Carrier, she might have had the information she’d needed to survive and be happy. But Pru had believed what she was programmed to believe. She hadn’t known any better.

  Well, it was time to break the cycle.

  Letting go of Pru’s hand, Barrie focused on her gift, except that instead of looking for something lost, she concentrated on anything that fell outside the ordinary sounds and scents and smells of Watson’s Landing. Nothing felt out of place among the natural rhythms—the wind creaked in the branches, a dove muttered somewhere to her right, the creek bubbled across the rocks. Then, burrowing deeper, she connected to a steady hum of energy.

  Too much energy. It jolted through her. Barrie tried to pull away and close herself off again, fighting as the current sucked her down. But she might as well have grabbed hold of an electric fence.

  “Feel something?” Pru watched her with a pulse tapping in her throat.

  Barrie felt everything.

  Sensation filled her past overflowing, beyond her own boundaries, as if she had disintegrated into a million fragments and was being swept down and around and around and around, then flung out again in a fresh burst of energy. The temperature, likewise, had gone from lukewarm to searing hot, then freezing cold, and back to hot again, but she felt it all simultaneously, as if a part of her stayed in each spot and she bounced between them so that she had only to reach out and become aware of one thing or another to feel it, to be there, to go anywhere. Places were visible in a stream that hurtled by yet remained curiously still: a warm lake with stands of cypress and a town drowned beneath the water; ranks of wind-bent pines on rows of meandering hills; two boulders stacked on top of each other on a wooded slope; a tree-topped granite dome rising out of the surrounding forest as if pushed out of the earth by a giant thumb.

  She fell deeper. Faster. Less and less anchored to herself, less certain not just of where she was but when. There was ground below her, and fire, and earth, and sky, and space, darkness, then more light, blinding light. Above her, blue turned to black, and stars and universes spun past. Effervescent, soaring life flowed all around her, and voices . . . There were voices, indistinct and out of range, but she wanted to hear them, needed to get closer. Opening herself more, she strained for clarity, following the energy and gulping it down as if she had been dying of thirst her entire life.

  “Barrie! What are you doing? Are you all right?”

  Pru’s voice floated down to her from far, far away. An unwelcome interruption. Barrie brushed it aside and concentrated on the sense of hurtling through time and space, searching . . . searching for what, she wasn’t certain. Then she remembered.

  The voices.

  Like the yunwi, they called to her in vibrations and resonance instead of words. She couldn’t understand them but felt she should be able to. If she could simply get past some unseen barrier, get a little closer, or if she could tune to the right frequency, then they would at last be clear.

  Something crashed into her. Knocked her sideways. Barrie stumbled and came back to herself with her cheek stinging and her body half-fallen into a brush clump that had torn the skin on her palm and wrist.

  “Ow.” She shook her head, feeling flushed and breathless and bereft, as if she’d lost something deeply important. At the same time, every part of her still throbbed with energy and awareness, leaving her oversensitized.

  “Thank God.” Pru eyes were drawn and dark. “I’ve been shaking you for ten minutes, and you haven’t even looked at me. Didn’t you hear me calling you?

  It couldn’t possibly have been that long.

  Could it?

  Barrie released a shuddering breath. “I think I found the energy Obadiah was talking about.”

  Pru’s back went stiff. “The vortex? What did it do to you? You scared me.”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe I should try again—”

  “No! Barrie, for heaven’s sake. What if I hadn’t been able to snap you out of it? You don’t understand—you weren’t here.”

 
Barrie struggled to find a way to explain what she couldn’t begin to understand, all that sensation, all that power, the whirlpool of energy that had drawn her down and down and then spun her out into a world both smaller and larger than anything she had ever imagined. Would she have been able to swim back to the surface if Pru hadn’t been there to help her?

  Her hand came up before she even realized it, her fingers reaching toward the trunk of the oak. Reaching . . . then she stopped.

  Fingers clenched into tight little balls of self-control, she shook with the temptation to go back, to let go of herself. But she felt good. Full and more awake than she had felt, certainly since Obadiah had taken energy from her. More awake than she’d felt in days or maybe ever.

  “Did you find the lodestone?” Pru took Barrie’s hands and gently uncurled the fingers. “Lord, your skin’s burning up! Do you see how dangerous all this is? That man sent you out here and never even warned you what would happen.”

  “To be fair, I didn’t tell Obadiah that I was going to look for it.”

  “It seems to me there’s an awful lot he doesn’t know and too much he doesn’t share.” Rubbing Barrie’s hands between her own, Pru herded her out of the clearing and back toward the edge of the woods.

  Barrie thought of the voices, of the similarities between what she’d heard just then and the way the yunwi spoke to her on the rare occasions when they communicated at all. Were the two related in some way?

  The yunwi hated Obadiah. They hadn’t wanted him at Watson’s Landing, so maybe the energy wasn’t something he was supposed to touch. In which case, did it matter whether she ever found the lodestone?

  If the stone held even a small portion of the energy that had swept her away with it, how could she give that to someone she wasn’t positive she could trust?