Illusion

by Martina Boone

  The raven wasn’t lost. It didn’t need returning. As to whether it was one of the ravens that often accompanied Obadiah or the man himself, on that subject, her gift was stubbornly unhelpful.

  Taking a step toward the bird, Barrie held her hand out. “Obadiah? Is that you?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The crunch of a footstep on the asphalt behind her made Barrie turn, and she found Cassie coming up the path alongside the cemetery fence. Like Barrie, she was watching the raven that stood hunched on the branch above Charlotte Colesworth’s grave with its head cocked toward them.

  “You think the bird is Obadiah?” Cassie asked. “On the phone, you said you thought he was down by the excavation area, where Ryder and Junior shot him.”

  The raven opened its beak, but no sound came out. He hopped once on the branch, then flew away. Barrie turned to watch him fly over the excavation area and land back on top of one of the columns that overlooked the mansion ruins. “I’m not sure what I think anymore. All I know is that I noticed the police and the archaeologists walking around an empty spot on the grass where Obadiah was lying the last time we saw him, the way people walk around Obadiah when he’s hanging around not wanting to be seen. He may still be there soaking up energy from people and trying to heal, or he may have run off or flown off somewhere, or he may have crumbled into dust for all we know. I want to be sure.”

  A breeze lifted, raising the scent of tannin and pluff mud from the river and flinging Cassie’s tumbled black curls into her eyes. She wore none of her usual sass and bravado. Her beautiful face was bare of makeup, telling its own story about what she’d been through, and it felt wrong to Barrie to have even dragged her back outside after everything that had happened.

  She caught her cousin’s elbow as Cassie turned back toward the small house where she lived with her family. “If you’d rather not help with this, I can do it on my own. And if you need someone to talk to . . . I know we haven’t exactly been the best of friends, but I’m here if you need anything.”

  “I don’t need your pity,” Cassie snapped. She stared at the angel statue above Charlotte Colesworth’s grave long enough that Barrie began to wonder if Cassie was having another of the flashbacks that had started after her father’s funeral, but then Cassie turned abruptly and hurried down the path. Her long, flared jeans swished angrily around the outline of the ankle monitor the police had replaced after Barrie had smashed the first one that morning to summon help.

  Barrie walked after her with an inward sigh. “You and I need to find a way to get along if we’re going to figure out the curse situation. I was only trying to see how you’re holding up.”

  “How do you think I’m holding up? Why do people even ask that question? Am I supposed to lie to make you all feel better? Pretend Ryder didn’t rape me? I hate that everyone knows. You. Berg. The police. My family. People in town. Half of them are wondering if I made it up. Even my mother. She keeps asking me why I hid it, as if I betrayed her by not confiding in her. But she and Daddy didn’t want to know. That’s why they never asked the question. Even with Ryder’s threats, I kept waiting for them to ask. I felt so different that—” Her breath snagged on the last sentence, the way people sometimes struggle with a foreign language, as if it were still impossible to admit what had happened to her four years before.

  Barrie’s eyes stung at the pain in Cassie’s voice. She searched for something to say. There were so many words in the world, so many ways to communicate, and somehow, too often none of them were good enough.

  Cassie walked faster, her stride longer than Barrie’s so that Barrie had to jog to keep up. Beneath the oak tree at the far edge of the excavation site, the passenger door of the sheriff’s patrol car opened, and one of the deputies got out. Adjusting the utility belt that hung low on his hips, he ambled bowleggedly toward the area ringed by police tape, looped around once, stopped, and peered at Barrie and Cassie, before sauntering back to the car again.

  “Maybe your mother feels guilty,” Barrie said when he had gone. “Not only for what you went through, but for not having seen how you were suffering. She has to be thinking of all the ways she failed you.”

  “I shot the man who raped me. I shot him, and she’s worrying about her own guilt,” Cassie said.

  “Worrying about having failed you is probably normal—”

  “And then she asked me why I shot Ryder, whether it was because of that or because he tried to steal the gold.”

  Barrie herself wasn’t sure that was an “or” question where Cassie was concerned. “The police said it was self-defense,” she said softly. “They’re not pressing charges, after all, are they?”

  “Not for now.” Cassie reached the front steps of the house, and then she turned with her foot on the bottom stair. Anger crackled out of her every pore, but it was the kind of anger that was a form of armor, a way to hide her brokenness the way that Pru hid hers with quiet acceptance. Maybe everyone in the world was a little broken, pretending to others that they weren’t.

  “I just want this to be all over with!” Cassie cried suddenly. “Is that too much to ask? The curse, the archaeologists, all of it. If Obadiah’s still here waiting to steal the gold, then I want him gone. It’s mine. I can’t leave, and my family and I need the gold to keep this place. He doesn’t get to take it. But if he’s here, that means Ryder and Junior didn’t manage to kill him when they shot him. So how do we get rid of him? I couldn’t even tell the police that he was here. My throat felt stuck whenever I tried to say his name.”

  Barrie looked out toward the dig site where the police tape fluttered in the breeze that came up from the river. A single raven gathered its wings and took off from a broken column and flew a wide, lazy circle toward the woods.

  “I think we just have to take it one step at a time,” she said. “Let’s see if Obadiah’s even here. Most of all, we can’t jump to conclusions anymore. We don’t know what Obadiah was doing when Ryder and Junior interrupted him,” she said. “We don’t even know for sure that he was the one who tied us up and put us in the cabin.”

  “God, how can you still be so naïve?” Cassie’s breath was too loud as she climbed the remaining two steps toward the door. “But then you can afford to trust him. It’s not your curse or your gold he’s after. You’ve never been poor. You’ve spent your whole life locked away in your neat little corner of the world where everything’s been taken care of for you, and you’ve never been unsafe or uncertain of anything for a single minute.”

  Given what Barrie had been through over the past few weeks, what Cassie and her family had put her through, a half-hysterical laugh bubbled up in Barrie’s throat. Not that there was any point in arguing. Cassie was never going to see past the preconception of the charmed life she believed the Watsons and the Beauforts led. Maybe that was another symptom of the Colesworth curse, or maybe it was Wyatt filling his daughter’s head with poison for too many years.

  The door opened behind Cassie, and she stood back out of the way. Pru and Marie Colesworth came out with a pitcher of tea and a tray of sandwiches covered with a blue-checkered dishcloth, and a few minutes later, Barrie accompanied Cassie to the police car with the food. She stopped there only long enough to hold up the earring she had brought and to mumble an explanation about needing to search for its mate.

  At the excavation site, the neatly measured squares cleared by the archaeologists had been obliterated by the illegal digging. The soil was a torn mess of dirt and brick chips, and the datum, the piece of iron rebar used to set the measurement standards for the dig’s grid layout, lay where it had fallen when the spirits of Ayita and Elijah had thrown it, thirty feet from where they had ripped it from the ground.

  Circling around the police tape that cordoned off the circumference of the hidden room, Barrie concentrated on remembering exactly where she had seen the police and archaeologists deviate around a seemingly bare spot of lawn. She searched for a hint—some sign she didn’t even know how to look for. The
re was only the broken soil and the usual headache.

  Then something grasped her ankle. Brittle finger bones ground against her skin with a touch so cold that it sank straight to Barrie’s marrow. She felt her strength ebb away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Icy panic clogged Barrie’s veins, demanding that she run. But her body didn’t want to cooperate, and she wasn’t sure if that was fear or magic. Her heart beat too fast, too uselessly, and her chest clenched, her breath coming in and in and in, until she finally remembered she needed to exhale, too, or she wouldn’t actually be breathing.

  Bitter cold spread through her limbs. She recognized the draining sensation of Obadiah taking energy, but this was nothing like what he had ever done before. Where he had always taken barely noticeable amounts, like sips through a juice box straw, now he was gulping from an open glass, greedy and insatiable.

  She swayed and struggled to break his hold on her ankle. Stumbling, she fought to stay on her feet. Her head spun. Her vision tunneled.

  And then nothing.

  She woke to find Cassie shaking her and someone still holding her ankle. The sensation of energy draining away was gone, though, and the touch was warmer. She tried to kick free, but her limbs were heavy, as if each arm and every finger weighed five hundred pounds.

  “What happened?” Cassie asked, her face pale and her eyes dark with fear. “What are you doing? Did you pass out? Or did Obadiah do something?”

  Barrie tried to scream, but opening her mouth was too impossibly hard.

  “Hold still, petite. You’ll have some strength back in a moment.” The words came from the seeming emptiness beside her, and then the air shimmered and Obadiah flickered into sight.

  He was himself and not. Himself but forty years older: the same dreadlocks that grew past his shoulders; the same dark, shiny silk suit and black silk shirt; but his skin and flesh had shriveled like a sponge wrung out of liquid. For once, his clothes were less than immaculate, and dried blood surrounded a hole in the fabric suspiciously near his heart.

  Lying rigidly on the ground, he continued to hold her ankle and made no effort to get up himself. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I had no right to take so much energy from you—I got carried away before I could control myself. I’m giving some back. Just wait a moment.”

  Warmth slipped back into Barrie’s limbs, and with it came the realization of how cold and weak she had really been. Panting and still light-headed, she lay unmoving until he finally released his hold.

  Cassie shook her again. “Talk to me, Barrie. Are you all right?”

  Barrie wiggled her fingers, and when that worked, she held her hand out for Cassie to help her up.

  “I’m fine.” She sat up cautiously and stole a glance in the direction of the sheriff’s deputies, who were both climbing out of their car. “Go over there and tell the police that I’m clumsy and stupid, would you? Keep them from coming over here.” Raising her voice, she called out herself, relieved when her voice sounded relatively normal: “It’s all good! I tripped on a piece of brick.”

  Cassie straightened and peered down at her. “You should have seen yourself. You looked like a ghost. It was Obadiah, wasn’t it? He’s still here after all.”

  “Don’t you see him now?” Barrie shook her head. “Never mind. I’ll explain later. Just go. Get the deputies back into their car.” She waited until Cassie had gone before switching her attention back to Obadiah.

  No matter what he’d done to her, seeing him lying there, Barrie couldn’t suppress a twinge of sympathy. Which made her six kinds of a fool. Cassie had been right—she kept trusting people she had no business trusting.

  With obvious effort, Obadiah rolled to his stomach and climbed to his feet like an old, old man. Despite the energy that he had taken from her—and presumably from Cassie—his blue-black skin appeared gray and sunken. Barrie’s own limbs still felt heavy and lethargic as she wobbled several steps away from him. Not that he needed to touch her physically to take energy, but right now she felt like she imagined a battery would feel with its meter running low.

  “You owe me an explanation for what you did,” she said, her voice sounding weak and thready.

  He squinted over to where Cassie was exerting all her charm getting the two deputies back into their vehicle. “I am sorry. It’s nearly impossible not to reach for energy when you’re desperate. I stopped as soon as I realized what I was doing.”

  “Not just now!” Barrie made an impatient gesture. “Everything. Tying us up and throwing us inside the cabin. Trying to steal the gold. Did you ever think you could break the curse? Or was that just another lie to get me to help you?”

  Obadiah hobbled away toward the row of restored brick slave cabins that sat in the shade of the woods. Cabins where he himself must have worked as a slave before he ran away as the Union troops approached in search of the gold that Alcee Colesworth had stolen. Barrie shivered at the thought of going back there, remembering the horror of being tied up in the cabin even briefly, the sense of complete helplessness. She couldn’t even imagine the kind of memories the place held for Obadiah.

  “Stay here and talk to me,” she said. “All of this has gone too far.”

  “I’ll talk, but I don’t have the strength to keep us hidden from the police. We’ll have to get out of sight. Where’s the Beaufort boy? You didn’t come over here by yourself, did you?”

  “Don’t try to change the subject.”

  “Energy is the subject, chère. I had no intention of hurting you, and I very nearly killed you. I took as much from the Colesworth girl just now as I dared. But Elijah and Ayita are even more desperate than I was. They have no reason to hold themselves back. There are also two of them, and desperation and powerful spirits are a dangerous combination. The first person who gets close enough to that room is going to die.”

  Hunched and stumbling, he continued his progress toward the cabin even as he spoke, and Barrie had no choice but to follow him. “So then their spirits are definitely still there?” she asked. “What about the curse?”

  “Very much also there, but we have an opportunity now—a small one. Ayita and Elijah spent nearly all their strength bringing me back this morning when those two idiots shot me, so it will be some time before they can reach beyond the room where they’re confined again.”

  Out of sight of the sheriff’s deputies and the windows of the Colesworth house, Obadiah stopped by the overseer’s cabin at the end of the slave street to catch his breath. Barrie stopped beside him.

  “Brought you back from where?” Barrie couldn’t help asking.

  “Death. The other side.” Bracing his hands on his knees, Obadiah looked even more gray than he had before. “For the moment, Ayita and Elijah are spent and too weak to break past the magic that confines them in that underground room. They won’t have much strength to fight me if I bind them and then try to break the curse.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing? There’s a ‘but’ coming, though, isn’t there?”

  Obadiah’s dreadlocks swung forward to screen his face. “I’ll need more energy than I can get here; I learned that much this morning.”

  Feeling dizzy and speechless at his audacity, Barrie stared at him. “You don’t honestly think I’m stupid enough to fall for that a second time, do you?” she asked at last. “You’ve been saying all along that you’re not strong enough to break the curse. But you certainly tried the second the archaeologists left the property. Why don’t you just admit you’re after the gold?”

  The words fell between them like a gauntlet. Obadiah straightened and looked down at her with his eyes glittering and his expression cold. “I’ve never lied to you, petite, and I never made a secret of what I wanted. That first night, I hoped to bind the spirits, remove the curse, and then take the gold from the Colesworths to give Ayita the revenge she’s waited for all these years and leave her in peace. She’s going to require a sacrifice, one way or the other.”

  “No sacrifices.” Barrie
’s eyes flew to the bracelet around his wrist. Human teeth.

  He gave a sudden rusty laugh and shook the bracelet at her. “Do these scare you? The teeth represent pain. My pain. Magic always requires a payment.”

  He reached into his mouth. With a wrench of his fingers, he extracted a set of false teeth, several of them gold, and shook them at her. “That’s the true difference between good and evil, between light magic and darkness. Good pays the price for others. Evil forces others to pay,” he said, with the words slurring wetly. Then he placed the teeth back into his mouth before continuing. “I didn’t plan what happened this morning. If I’d had more time, I would have treated you and the Colesworth girl more gently. But Elijah and Ayita had made themselves weak destroying the dig site overnight, and I had energy available from the two of you and the Beaufort boy, and when the archaeologists left to replace their broken equipment, it was the perfect opportunity. I hoped I’d finally be able to bind the spirits and break the curse. Even now, I don’t have the luxury of shame. The situation’s only grown more dangerous.”

  Slowly, Barrie unclenched her fingers. “Why?” she asked. “You said Ayita and Elijah are confined and weak.”

  “And what if one of the archaeologists or the sheriff’s deputies step over the police tape to look around? Even if everyone stays where Ayita and Elijah cannot reach them, there are small amounts of energy everywhere: in the air, the trees, the rocks. Since she first cast the curse, Ayita has been content to let that work out her revenge, but now yet another Colesworth has tried to kill a member of her family—for all intents and purposes, Ryder Colesworth did kill me. I felt Ayita’s fury. She and Elijah have had three centuries to learn to project their influence beyond their prison, and it won’t be long before they are able to take energy from whoever is unfortunate enough to pass within ten yards, or twenty or thirty yards instead of a few inches or feet. It’s mainly Colesworth blood she and Elijah will be after, but that doesn’t mean anyone else is safe.”