Despite the sweltering temperatures, Cassie was wearing jeans, and the chipped red-polished toenails peeking from beneath her sandals and the heavy fabric managed to seem both defiant and pathetic. Barrie couldn’t help seeing everything about Cassie differently now, but even the suspicion that Cassie had been through more trauma than anyone suspected didn’t make her any easier to like.
“Could you at least try digging a little bit right there?” Cassie leaned in close to peer over Andrew’s shoulder.
He shut the laptop and spoke with a show of exaggerated patience. “Archaeology is a careful process. We don’t just take a pickaxe to the ground. Dr. Feldman’s already going to kill me for breaking one radar unit, so I can’t risk even wasting the time to do a shovel test unless you can give me something concrete to go on.”
Tucking the laptop under his arm, he turned to head in the direction of the overseer’s house. That brought him almost face-to-face with Barrie. “Well, hello.” Stopping abruptly to avoid running into her, he broke into a smile. “I saw you the other day, didn’t I?”
“Barrie, tell Andrew this is where he needs to dig,” Cassie said impatiently. “You know there’s something buried here. Tell Andrew it has to be the treasure.”
Where Cassie pointed, loss billowed from the ground like smoke, pressing on Barrie’s temples. Berg Walters had the machine positioned only about a foot to the left of the claw marks in the grass. The memory of what had happened there was a cold, sharp ache like a knife that pierced Barrie’s lungs.
Eight stepped closer and slipped his hand in hers. “I think the archaeologists know their jobs, Cassie.”
Cassie’s eyes narrowed even further. “Tell them,” she said to Barrie. “Or remember that thing I said on the phone? I’ll make sure it happens.”
Behind Andrew, two black feathers still lay like smudges on the ground. Barrie stooped to pick them up. Her fingertips brushed the tips of the vanes, testing their smoothness, as soft as a sigh riffling against her skin, the fingernail texture of the hollow shafts, the stiff tiny barbs as taut as harp strings, the downy afterfeathers.
Examined by itself, a feather was a miracle of design and beauty. The sheer impossibility of a bird held aloft by something this ephemeral made Barrie think of magic. Yet the miracle of a feather was the most believable of all the things that had happened in the past several weeks.
Except the feathers, these feathers, by the very fact of their existence, made the rest impossible to deny.
She searched for something to say that would satisfy her cousin without . . . what? Admitting to the Watson gift in front of Berg and Andrew? Mentioning Obadiah? Barrie wished he were there to explain what was happening.
With a sigh, she rubbed her head, and then stiffened as she recognized the tug of pressure making her ache. Turning with a chill crawling up the back of her neck, she found Obadiah standing in the shadow of the old kitchen building.
He’d been watching her, and he smiled when her eyes caught his.
The feathers dropped from Barrie’s nerveless fingers and drifted to the grass like a plume of shadow.
Had Obadiah been there all along? Or had her wish conjured him from somewhere else? She nudged Eight with her elbow, but before she could tell him to look, Berg gave a shout. “Hey! Hold on. I’ve got a steady reading.”
“I told you to turn it off,” Andrew said.
“I did turn it off. It turned itself back on.” Berg studied the display on the ground-penetrating radar unit a moment longer, then pushed the machine forward again.
Andrew reopened the lid of the laptop, typed in the login code, and switched into a program Barrie had never seen before. With blurred red, green, and yellow areas marked against a blue background, it looked vaguely like a map of the continents, until Andrew clicked a few buttons and it separated into four distinct images marked at different depths. He bent closer.
“Stop!” he called. “Back up.” He shouted directions at Berg about where to move the radar unit, growing more and more agitated, until he was pacing ahead of Berg and turning to walk backward while he stared down at the computer screen.
“What’s he doing?” Barrie asked. “Did they find something?”
“I don’t know. He must have found something. The radar is sending back reflections from whatever’s underground,” Eight answered about the same moment that Andrew bounded back over to them.
“There is definitely a room down there. And things inside the room. See this?” Andrew pushed the computer screen toward Cassie and traced the outlines of the red and orange areas on the screen.
“I told you there was,” Cassie said, without looking at Barrie.
Andrew frowned first at her and then at the computer screen, as if it could explain Cassie to him. “I’ve at least skimmed through everything I could get my hands on about the history of this house. I never saw a reference to another section that would correspond to anything like this.”
Barrie was less worried about the find than the timing. She looked beyond Berg and Andrew to where Obadiah still stood in the twilight shade of the kitchen building.
No one else seemed to have noticed him. He looked like he had before—strong and healthy, the neck of his navy shirt unbuttoned. The whites of his eyes and the gold in his ear and on his teeth were the only relief from the strange darkness that reflected light instead of swallowing it. If anything, he seemed even younger than the first time Barrie had seen him in front of Watson’s Landing. She remembered that moment now with perfect clarity.
She remembered everything: Obadiah leaning against the wall, one knee bent while he watched her. He was different, though. Bigger than he had been. Bigger and broader and not remotely like the old man Barrie had seen lying with his eyes closed on the ground, his face all hollow and cadaverous. But there was another change, more subtle and indefinable.
He wore the same kind of clothing, another dark oil-slick suit. His dreads were the same, although he’d gathered them into a ponytail that fell to the middle of his back. The bracelet of human teeth was back around his wrist, and he made no move to hide it as he had when he’d rowed them to Colesworth Place the night the ghost house had sprung to life.
Barrie couldn’t suppress a shudder. “While you were doing your research, did you find anything about the night the house burned down?” She tapped Andrew on the shoulder. “Anything that explains why the soldiers burned it? Or what happened to the people who lived here?”
“They died,” Cassie said. “That’s what happened. The soldiers killed them.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Not all of them died.” Andrew Bey looked up from the computer screen. “Caroline, the younger daughter, survived. Her diary turned up in the library of the Hampton House this morning as part of our records search—the Hamptons were her husband’s family. I assumed you knew all that, since she would have been your grandmother seven times removed. It’s an interesting custom, by the way, having the husband take the Colesworth name when there’s no direct male descendant. You don’t see that very often.”
“Charlotte had a sister?” Barrie asked. “Where was she that night? Do you have the diary? Can I see it? Does it say what happened to Charlotte? Did you find anything else about her?”
“Berg, back up a few feet and go to the left.” Andrew tapped the computer again. “There’s nothing that explains where Charlotte went, although that’s not to say there might not be information somewhere—we’re still sifting through various records. I have photocopies of the diary on a USB drive if you want to see it, but I haven’t had a chance to do more than scan it for mentions of the tunnel, the gold, and the night of the fire. Caroline doesn’t say much about any of these, I’m afraid.”
“I’d love to see it,” Barrie said, “if you wouldn’t mind.”
Andrew nodded vaguely, and his attention shifted back to the computer. Barrie looked up to find Obadiah walking toward her.
Two ravens flew above him, circling around the columns be
fore alighting on the broken masonry. Slowly, more arrived. They landed one and two and three at a time, until the columns were full of large, black birds.
The feathers Barrie had dropped had drifted back to the ravaged grass, where the man from the woods—a ghost, a projection, an image who couldn’t physically have really been there—had left raw, physical gouges in the dirt as if someone had torn the grass away with fingers turned to claws. All traces of the chalk cross and circles had disappeared.
Stepping between Eight and Andrew Bey, Obadiah gave Barrie a feral flash of teeth. “I was hoping you wouldn’t take long to return, petite, but I assumed you would come alone.” He gave a curt nod at Eight. “I was under the impression you and I had a bargain.”
No one looked up when Obadiah moved or spoke. Not Andrew. Not Eight. It was as if he weren’t even there. He was using some kind of magic again. But on who? Her or the others? Unable to decide, she turned her back so the archaeologists wouldn’t see her seemingly talking to herself.
“We had a bargain,” she said. “I finished my end of it. I found the only powerful thing there was to find around here, which I’m assuming was the lodestone. That was what you asked me to do. Now I have a question for you. Last night . . . the house burning . . . Did any of that really happen?”
“Really happen?” Obadiah repeated the question thoughtfully. “Reality isn’t that easily defined. Spirits are no less real than you or I. They simply exist in a different state. The spirits here are powerful because they have something important they wish to protect. That same purpose keeps them locked here in this reality.”
“But what happened last night?”
“What happened? Your cousin stopped me from binding my ancestors when she interrupted the conjure before I’d finished.”
Barrie had reached back and grabbed hold of Eight’s hand and inadvertently squeezed too hard. He turned her around and loosened her grip. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Barrie’s eyes widened. “Obadiah’s here. Can’t you see him? Hear him?”
Eight peered around, then turned back to Barrie. “Where?”
With his index finger extended, Obadiah reached to touch Eight’s throat. Barrie brought her arm up to block him. It was too late, though. He’d made contact.
Eight blinked, then hastily stepped in front of Barrie. “Is this him? Where did he come from?”
Refusing to be pushed aside, Barrie moved up beside him again. Eight didn’t argue, only slid his arm protectively around her waist.
She fixed Obadiah with a determined glare. “Now that we’re all here,” she said, “explain what happened last night. Was that the lodestone I found? Did you remove the curse? Is it over? Were those actual ghosts? But houses don’t become ghosts, so how could we see the house burning and being looted—and why can’t Andrew and the others hear us? Who were the girls we saw, and what happened to them?”
“Slowly, chère Doucement. The others can’t hear us because I don’t wish them to hear, and yes, you located the lodestone. But the curse isn’t broken. As for the house burning, that was not my doing.” He spoke to Barrie, but crossing his arms over his chest, he returned Eight’s scrutiny with a careful appraisal of his own.
They stood comparing testosterone, Eight looking combative and Obadiah looking resigned, until Eight finally shifted his feet and dropped his eyes.
“The guy’s a hustler,” Eight said to Barrie. “He’s after more than the lodestone. I just can’t tell exactly what.” He seemed puzzled by that, as if it was some sort of surprise that Obadiah’s magic was stronger than the Beaufort gift.
Obadiah’s jaw relaxed fractionally, and if he had taken offense, he didn’t show it. “At the moment, I want many things.” He pointed toward Cassie and the archaeologists. “For example, I’d like to keep those fools from blundering into disaster. But you’ll have to decide who to believe. I’ve told you what I want. The boy has told you what he thinks. Your instincts tell you what you feel. Ultimately, you have to face the hardest question.”
“What question is that?” Barrie asked.
Obadiah was silent a beat or two, as if debating how to answer her. His mouth twisted into a close-lipped smile. “Whether you believe in your own gift more than you believe in the boy.”
He was twisting things, Barrie knew that. Shaping his words to distract and confuse her. At least his weapons were words this time instead of some sort of spell. Her mind didn’t feel muzzy the way it had the times she suspected he had tampered with her thoughts.
Obadiah swiveled his head to watch Berg and Andrew wrestling the radar machine over the grass. When his interest returned to Barrie, there was something about him that looked both strained and urgent, and that current of extra energy lent a growl to his voice. “You have to believe in something, petite. Listen to your gift if you won’t listen to me. There was a time when we could have turned back, but the spirits are awake and angry now, and as you saw last night, their power is immense. They don’t want the curse broken.”
“Sounds like a good plan to me. Let’s not argue with them.” Eight drew Barrie closer. “Come on, Bear. Forget I ever wanted to talk to this guy.”
“Wait.” She pulled away and looked from Obadiah to the dig site. “If you’re saying it’s dangerous for the archaeologists to excavate,” she said to Obadiah, “then you have to make them stop. Cassie won’t, and if Eight and I try to talk to them about ghosts and curses, they’ll think we’re crazy. Can’t you hocus-pocus them away?”
“Why would I make them leave, when I need them to uncover the lodestone for me?”
“Then why were you keeping the instruments from working?”
The tell was minor, almost invisible. A tightening around Obadiah’s lips and the slightest evasive shift of his eyes. But it was enough to let Barrie know she had it backward.
“It wasn’t you, was it?” she guessed. “Your ancestors were the ones making the instruments fail, and you stopped them so the archaeologists would find the buried room.” She thought back over the sequence of events, and that made sense. Yet there was still another conclusion she couldn’t escape. “You wanted the archaeologists to dig, and you wanted me to know they would be in danger. In effect, you put them in danger. Why? What’s the point?”
Obadiah drew his head back like a snake preparing to strike. There was a disturbance of air, like a rattle or a hiss of scales, and then he hunched his shoulders, the motion barely visible inside his tailored coat. He looked off to the excavation site, and although Barrie couldn’t see anything different there, something held his attention. He answered her almost absently. “You see, now?” he said. “You’re asking the proper questions.”
Barrie hated how out of her depth he made her feel. “Don’t play games.”
“I know better than you how serious this is,” he said, still not looking at her. “I promise you I’ll do my best to keep your archaeologists safe, but you saw the power of the spirits. Controlling them will take all my concentration, especially at night, when they are strongest. If I leave even briefly, anyone nearby could be in danger.”
“Danger?” A dull ache squeezed Barrie’s temples, more even than the usual pressure of being away from Watson’s Landing. Eight tried to tug her away again, but she locked her knees and stayed firmly planted opposite Obadiah.
“Why are you even listening to him?” Eight grasped Barrie by both shoulders, bending his knees until their eyes were level. “Look at me. I’ll talk to Cassie—or we’ll get her sent back to jail, and the dig will have to stop.”
Barrie looked back at him somberly, willing him to understand that she couldn’t just let it go like that. It was almost impossible to turn from Eight to Obadiah, but she did. “You already know where the lodestone is,” she said. “So what more do you want from me?”
“Very little.” Without having moved, Obadiah seemed to stumble. He put a hand on her shoulder to steady himself. “Protection magic is draining work,” he said. “I’ll need food and a cu
p of coffee now and again. Morning and night, that’s all I’m asking.”
Despite the near-hundred-degree temperature, Barrie’s arms broke out in chills at his touch. Something had altered subtly in his face, as if the bones were more prominent, as if the moisture had leached from his muscles and skin in a way that reminded her momentarily of the way he’d looked lying on the ground like a mummified corpse.
The impression was fleeting, and once again, Barrie had a sense of reality distorting like a broken mirror with pieces missing. What was real and what wasn’t? Nothing was as simple as Obadiah made it sound.
But if he was telling the truth . . .
“Decide, petite.” Obadiah let his voice grow softly menacing. “Or I can always make you the same promise we discussed before.”
“The same threat, you mean,” Barrie snapped.
Part of her still hoped it was an empty threat. Her gut said Obadiah wasn’t wholly evil. As Eight had said, everyone came in shades of gray, and Obadiah was simply grayer than most.
But that meant she had no way of guessing what he would do.
She had always been inclined to put her trust in what she hoped others would be, and when she found she was wrong, she was bitterly disappointed. That’s where she and Eight were different. What people wanted most said a lot about them, but Eight didn’t rely exclusively on his gift. He claimed that he took a lot on faith. He also looked things up, reasoned through them. Maybe that was an approach he’d learned in dealing with his dyslexia, maybe it was because he fought his gift, or maybe it was just who he was. Barrie needed to be more like that.
Her gift told her the gold wasn’t what was buried at Colesworth Place. And logic said that any spirits strong enough to fling Obadiah on his ass could do a whole lot worse to the archaeologists and to Cassie and her family.
Obadiah’s threat aside, when it came down to it, she had no choice.
“What kind of food do you want us to bring?” she asked.
“Bread,” Obadiah said without a flicker of emotion. “Two whole loaves in the morning and again at night. Apart from that, I’m not picky about what you bring, so long as it isn’t peanut butter. I never did learn to like peanut butter.”
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