Illusion Read online

  “A week? I thought all you had to do was take the roof off.”

  “Too much risk of collapse, so it’s better to dig down and go in from the basement,” Berg said distractedly. “Look, I need to know that it’s safe. Why does she want us to leave?”

  How was Barrie supposed to answer that? She couldn’t assure Berg that the dig was safe when it wasn’t, but how could she tell him the truth? He would assume she was nuts or protecting Cassie—or both. On the other hand, didn’t the dig crew deserve to know the danger?

  She did her best to mask her doubt. “We’ve had this conversation before, haven’t we? There’s no explaining Cassie. But she didn’t drug you. I can promise you that. I’m sure you were all exhausted from working in the sun all day. Maybe you slept more soundly than usual.”

  Berg’s face tightened into stone. “I’ve had to lie prone for hours in 110-degree heat wearing body armor and then shoot a Taliban fighter from almost a half mile away. You know I like Cassie—more than I probably should—but if she’s putting the dig crew in danger, that’s a job for the police.”

  “The police?” Fabric rustled behind Barrie as Daphne stepped up beside them. “What’s wrong?”

  Barrie shook her head. “Nothing. Berg’s delusional.”

  “You’re going to have to convince me about that,” Berg said.

  “I will. Later.” Barrie’s head ached, and not just from her usual migraine. Even the thought of coming up with more excuses made her tired. “Daphne and I have that earring to find, and then she has to get home. But I’ll come back, and we’ll talk. Just don’t do anything until I’ve explained, all right? No police.”

  Extricating herself before Berg could keep arguing, she hurried toward the cemetery, keeping her head down as if she were searching the ground for her missing earring. Daphne fell into step beside her, also pretending to search.

  “What was that about?” Daphne asked.

  “More casualties of lies and half-truths,” Barrie said, deciding then and there that she didn’t care if Berg thought she was crazy. He deserved to know what was going on, and maybe if he knew, he’d be able to get the dig postponed.

  They rounded the freestanding kitchen house, and she finally spotted Obadiah. He sat with his back braced against an oak tree, light dappling his skin and picking out the low notes of green and blue and purple, the raven colors, amid the dirt on his black silk suit. He appeared more like himself than he had the night before, as if he’d rolled the clock back a decade overnight. Undoubtedly, that was because the archaeologists had arrived that morning with a fresh supply of energy for him to steal.

  He made no move to get up as Barrie and Daphne reached him, and his less than immaculate appearance as much as his stillness spoke of weakness. On the other hand, Barrie had already learned that when it came to Obadiah, appearance had little to do with fact.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Daphne’s red ribbon waved bravely in the breeze, but her footsteps slowed as she approached Obadiah. For his part, while he barely moved, barely breathed, every muscle in his body coiled with anticipation, and his eyes misted.

  He knew who Daphne was.

  Unlike the dig crew, Daphne clearly saw him. She didn’t wait for introductions, either. Finding her courage, or perhaps because necessity had overcome fear, she surged ahead of Barrie and stopped a foot away from him. “How can you be the same Obadiah who was alive in the Civil War? What kind of magic does that?”

  His gold incisors flashed as he smiled, and he used the trunk of the oak tree to pull himself to his feet. “I believe it’s customary to say hello to your elders before you pepper them with questions. Didn’t your grandmother teach you manners?”

  “Gramma also taught me to tell the truth.”

  As if he couldn’t help himself, Obadiah reached out to touch Daphne’s hair, to cup her face. His expression, his every movement, was so obviously starved to touch her, to connect, that tears stung Barrie’s eyes. “Truth is relative,” he said, looking pained as Daphne flinched away. “I can’t be the same person I was then, but I’m the Obadiah who was alive at that time. There’s more in the world than most people are willing to acknowledge. Whether you want to call it magic, or science, or a miracle doesn’t change the fact that it exists. All you have to do is make the leap of faith into believing.”

  Daphne took another step back. “So you really do take energy from people. Boo hags and Raven Mockers and things like that are real?”

  “Someone’s been doing their homework,” Obadiah said with a faint, pained frown. “There’s some truth to almost every story, but very few stories are wholly true. I’m not taking anyone’s skin or the heart from their bodies, or any other superstitious nonsense that people fear out of ignorance. Simply put, there are different kinds of energy. There’s the conscious spirit”—he patted the scalp area at his hairline—“but there’s also a more transient energy, the kind that’s stored in the heart or liver or bones and flows in and out of the world around us. I’ve learned to absorb a bit of that from other people to fuel my magic.”

  Daphne only looked back at him, wide-eyed. “Does it hurt?”

  “There’s no ill effect.” Obadiah smiled wearily. “The person I borrow from may feel a little tired, and for my part, I take in a small imprint from them . . . like a footprint of who they are, what they feel, what they dream and fear. If anything, that makes me value life more instead of less.”

  He turned back to Barrie. Then he stiffened, and his attention narrowed as if he were only really noticing her for the first time. Leaning closer, he sniffed the air around her. “Speaking of energy, yours is unbalanced,” he said, everything about him suddenly alert and eager. “You found the vortex, didn’t you? And the Watson lodestone? Did you find that, too?”

  Trying her best to look calm, Barrie suspected that she was failing miserably. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to give it to you. What if the vortex is the reason why the Fire Carrier brought the yunwi here? What happens to them in the future if the binding is broken?”

  “You’re asking me to look into the future and give you guarantees.” Obadiah raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Magic isn’t a recipe for baking cake. There are a hundred variables and complications, and however long I’ve lived, I’m still only human. I can use my strength to protect the living, or I can try to overcome Ayita and Elijah, or I can try to break the curse. At the moment, I’m trying to do all three. The lodestones are the only way to get the kind of power I need to do that successfully.”

  Barrie wished he sounded less sincere, but that didn’t change her determination. “I know you’re trying to protect your family, but I have to protect mine, too.”

  “She’s right,” Daphne said as Obadiah’s expression darkened. “And you don’t even know my family. What do you get out of this?”

  “What do I get?” Obadiah’s eyebrows rose. “I get to finally be free of this life I have had to cling to so stubbornly. I get to free my ancestors from the curse that holds them captive. I get to have you”—he pointed a shaking finger at Daphne—“and the rest of my family free to make their own choices and their own mistakes without the past hanging over them. I get to leave those people”—he waved at the archaeologists—“safe so they can keep being ignorant. So that they can keep believing that the scraps they find left behind in the dirt tell more than a fraction of any human story. I’m here because this isn’t some fairy tale to read about. It’s a story about revenge. Ayita was raised to believe a spirit couldn’t rest until vengeance was complete, that the living wouldn’t be safe until the dead had been appeased. So if the gold is what I need to buy her peace and freedom, I will claim it without a twinge of guilt. But make no mistake, the gold is the path to the end, not the end itself.” His voice slowed on the last sentence and dropped in volume, as if emotion had spent what little of his energy remained.

  “Then let me talk to Ayita,” Daphne said. “If revenge or pride or pain is the only thing keeping
everyone caught in this nightmare, let me tell her and Elijah that we don’t want it. We don’t need them to keep us safe—the curse may be the only reason we aren’t safe. Maybe if I explain what all this is doing to Brit and Jackson, to my mama and gramma Mary, they’ll let it go—”

  “You think I haven’t tried to convince them to drop the curse? I’ve come back many times over the years and tried to persuade them—”

  “All the more reason to let Daphne try,” Barrie said. “You don’t know the family well enough to make this personal, and you hate the Colesworths. Maybe deep down you feel a certain satisfaction in Ayita’s vengeance. What if she senses that?”

  Obadiah made a darting, impatient gesture. “I don’t hate the Colesworths, but I can’t forgive them, either. No one in that family has ever accepted responsibility for any of their problems.”

  “Forgiveness isn’t about others admitting guilt or you being right. It’s about being the bigger person so that everyone can move forward,” Barrie said, flushing even as she said it, aware of all the resentments she was still dragging with her. Soon, very soon, she needed to read her mother’s letters and lay her own ghosts to rest. “Isn’t it possible that Elijah and Ayita are tired of clinging to all this anger, too? What can it hurt to let Daphne try to talk to them?”

  Obadiah drew himself to his full height, though his shoulders were still faintly bowed. Then he released a sigh and studied Daphne. “Are you sure you could do it? Communicating with the dead can be dangerous if you’re afraid or vulnerable. Once the spirits have a hold on you, there can be residual effects. Dreams—nightmares—visions. You open yourself up to Ayita’s hate.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Daphne said, holding herself so stiffly that the lie was obvious.

  Obadiah opened his mouth, then shook his head and turned to plod off toward the slave cabins, motioning for them to follow. “You’ll have to do exactly what I say. This would work better at night beside the room where their remains are buried, but the cabin where they lived will have to do.”

  His gait was still slow and faltering. Barrie reached out automatically to steady him, but he winced as if something about her proximity was physically painful. She dropped back to walk with Daphne. They passed the overseer’s house, and the dig crew paid them no attention. Barrie was used to that when Obadiah was around, but Daphne stopped to wave a hand in front of Stephanie’s face. When that produced no reaction, she picked up a trowel and moved it from one end of the sifting screen to the other. She finally set it down.

  “It really is magic, isn’t it? This is actually happening, and the stories are true.”

  Barrie thought what an adjustment that had to be, learning about magic and Obadiah and the spirits all at once. “You’re sure you’re going to be all right talking to Ayita?”

  “I don’t want her hurting anyone on my account,” Daphne said.

  “It wouldn’t be your fault.”

  “Is that how you’d feel if something happened?” Daphne set off after Obadiah again, head down and shoulders forward, and she smiled grimly at Barrie’s silence. “See? I didn’t think so.”

  They approached the cabin together. Obadiah had disappeared inside already. Behind the structure and the trees beyond it, a subdivision of minimansions sat on land where Ayita and her family, maybe even Obadiah himself, had worked in the mosquito- and snake-infested water of the old Colesworth rice fields. Barrie was ashamed to realize that before she’d come to Watson’s Landing, she had never thought about what that had really been like. Even now, she knew she could never grasp the feeling of impotence and the unfairness of being treated as if you were less, and the wounds that had to leave behind. Maybe that was impossible for anyone who hadn’t been touched by it, who hadn’t felt it, to understand.

  Inside the cabin, Obadiah had removed the floorboards that hid the makeshift cellar, and he was lying prone to reach past the assortment of jars, pots, and undefinable objects that Barrie already knew were down there. Eventually, he extracted an earthenware bowl from the far reaches of the cavity. His face was tense and vulnerable as he glanced over to where Daphne had halted in the doorway, but she was staring off into the corner. He pushed himself up to his knees, then flicked up one sleeve of his suit and used his shirt to polish away the dust and grime from the bowl that he’d removed. It was more refined than the others that Barrie had seen in the cellar earlier, beautifully shaped with a lid and a rich brown glaze that shimmered in the light.

  Obadiah stood and pried up the lid of the bowl, revealing a white caked substance inside. Daphne moved in closer. “What is that?”

  “White clay,” he said. “I’ll use it to draw a cosmogram as a means of protection and communication, a way to reach from this world to the next so that I can ask the spirits for their attention.”

  Using his fingernails, he scraped loose enough powder to fill his palm, then placed the bowl on the fireplace mantel and began to sprinkle the clay onto the wooden floorboards, first in the pattern of a cross, then in a large circle to connect the points, and then in a smaller circle inside the outer one. It was the same pattern he had drawn the night he had raised the spirits, when the ghost of the Colesworth mansion had sprung into existence.

  Barrie wished she could block out the memories—pale dust sprinkled in a circle on grass faded to purple in the moonlight, a raven and feathers drifting from the sky, Obadiah thrown backward by a blast of power from below his feet. The ghosts of two girls and a woman, an officer and his soldiers, Alcee Colesworth clawing at the ground trying to reach his daughter who was locked in the hidden room as the mansion burned. The echoing death of a house and a cruel way of life. She could still smell the flames and the terror, feel the ground shake, see Obadiah lying on the grass withered to nothing but skin and bone.

  Having experienced then what happened when one of Obadiah’s spells went wrong, Barrie braced herself to pull Daphne away as Obadiah worked. He moved too slowly, as if expending the effort took all his energy, and he seemed unable to keep from looking at Daphne for more than a few moments at a time. His eyes were hungry, needy.

  In turn, Daphne seemed determined not to let him know he scared her. She wandered to the fireplace and ran her finger along the lid of the bowl he’d placed on the mantel. “Is this one of Dave the Potter’s pieces? It’s beautiful.”

  “Not every pot thrown by a slave was made by David Drake. My father, Donas, made this one.” Obadiah grunted as he straightened, and there was both pain and pride in his voice. “In his spare time, of course, because Alcee Colesworth wasn’t about to let a strong back get out of doing work in the fields. And yes, bad eyesight, long days tending rice, then fishing and keeping the corn and hogs that fed his family, and still every piece of pottery he made was beautiful.”

  For the first time, Daphne turned back to look at Obadiah directly. “What happened to him?”

  “Greed. Alcee discovered that my father was making money selling his pottery and decided that meant he wasn’t working hard enough.” Obadiah rubbed his hands together to remove the last remnants of the clay dust from them. “Everyone had a task at that time, three acres of rice in my father’s case, and he was supposed to be free to do what he wanted once that was finished. Alcee gave him four acres to tend, then four and a half, then five, until my father fell over one day, too tired to get up, and the overseer let him drown in a foot and a half of mud and water.”

  Obadiah’s back was turned, making it impossible to read his expression, but the tilt of his head and the stoop of his shoulders said enough. He began a rhythmic chant and started to move around the outer circle. Barrie’s eyes were wet and her stomach churned, and Daphne stood gripping the mantel with one hand and staring at the floor.

  The ceremony had been quiet the first time Barrie had seen Obadiah conduct it, but now his voice was fervent and loud, as if he were demanding that the spirits pay attention. He traced the circle counterclockwise, his feet shuffling, rotating outward then back in again, clapping his hand
s at each point of the cross, where he’d left small mounds of chalk. When he’d followed the full circumference, he went around six more times. Finally he stepped into the center and raised his palms.

  Barrie hadn’t stopped being afraid since the moment when she’d first discovered how badly magic could go awry. She should have been petrified now, but maybe the capacity for fear was finite.

  There was no flutter of wings from empty air, no ravens that lived and died and never existed except in the realm of magic. The air stirred as if something unseen had swept into the room.

  Obadiah tensed. Arms raised, his fingers contracted into fists, and his muscles bunched as if he were pushing against something heavy. His eyes bulged with effort.

  The temperature dropped. The atmosphere throbbed and pulsed, as if it suddenly had weight and mass. Deep in her throat, Daphne made a keening sound, and the fine hair rose on Barrie’s arms and the back of her neck.

  Obadiah’s entire body had gone rigid, and panting openmouthed, he jerked from one side to the other as if he were being pulled in different directions. Twitching and convulsing, he fought to move his foot.

  “What’s he doing?” Daphne whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Barrie said. “Maybe he’s trying to get out of the circle.”

  “Should we help him?”

  Barrie didn’t know that, either. Clearly, something was very wrong. Whatever battle Obadiah was fighting, he wasn’t winning.

  Taking a deep breath, she ran forward. She plunged her hands into the circle, grabbed Obadiah’s shoulders, and yanked him back.

  His body was lighter than she’d anticipated. Too light for a man his size, but still too large for her to carry. It was mostly the momentum that brought him back with her, and then he fell on top of her and toppled her to her knees.

  Instantly the whispering air went still. The temperature warmed back to normal.