Persuasion (24 page)

Off to the side of the house, where Obadiah had drawn the circle and the raven feathers had disappeared into the ground, the man in the waistcoat collapsed to his knees. Another bullet hit him, and then another. He dragged himself forward, bare fingers digging into the dirt, scrabbling at the ground as if he had something buried there he had to reach. Another bullet hit him, in the neck this time.

Windows exploded around the mansion, ceilings collapsed, floors buckled.

The two girls clutched each other, their eyes clinging to the door where the woman had disappeared.

The second floor caved, throwing up a fresh burst of flames and sparks. The officer walked to the man, who was still furiously clawing at the dirt. Placing the pistol to the man’s head, the officer pulled the trigger.

Then nothing.

Nothing at all except the ringing in Barrie’s ears and the cold—the bitter, biting cold that made her shake so hard that her stomach heaved and heaved, long after there was anything
in it. Finally, she let go of her hair and braced her forehead on her knees. She felt empty, as if seeing the horror or its echo had stripped her of some portion of her own humanity and left her diminished.

How could people do that to one another? Threaten a child with rape and watch a woman burn?

The rape of a child was the ultimate act of selfishness, the mark of a person who had divorced himself completely from the empathy that bound humanity. Had these soldiers not had children? Sisters? Mothers? Was there some convenient door in their minds they could slam shut on their ability to put themselves in another’s shoes?

Barrie wiped the cold sweat that had beaded on her forehead. Around her, the mansion had vanished. The flames were gone—no, they were different. The air filled with the sweet scent of burning sage and the fire on the river crackled magical and blue.

Across the river and barely visible, the Fire Carrier stood thigh deep in the water. Barrie couldn’t tell where he was looking, whether he was aware of her, whether he had seen or felt the events playing out or felt the explosion that had sent Obadiah flying backward.

Obadiah.

Barrie spun, wary and confused. Furious. But he was still nowhere. Not lying on the ground, not standing nearby.
Maybe he had escaped the vision, the ghost house, the horror. Maybe it hadn’t happened.

“Did you see it?” Barrie moved back to Cassie, her voice a whisper.

Cassie didn’t answer. She lay curled in a ball, hands wrapped around her knees, shivering so hard that her teeth rattled. Her breath was shallow and ragged, and her eyes stared, glassy and unseeing.

If this was a flashback, if it was real, then it was worse than the one in the cemetery. And if it wasn’t real—why would Cassie bother? There was no one around to be impressed by her performance. Even Cassie wouldn’t—couldn’t—fake this.

“Cassie.” Barrie shook her gently, then pulled back when Cassie flinched. “Look at me. Listen to me. You’re all right.”

Remembering what Berg had done, she kept talking even though Cassie didn’t seem to register the words. She had no idea what she was even saying, though. Her mind kept skittering off to think of other things: the house, the girls, the thing—Obadiah?—she had seen lying on the ground that might have been Obadiah, a mummy of a man shrunken so that he was dwarfed by Obadiah’s black silk suit.

She thought back to what Obadiah had said about how once he had been like her. How long ago had that been? How old
was
he? But none of those questions mattered as much as where he had gone and what had happened. What was it that
Barrie had seen, and what had Obadiah done to the curse?

Across on the other bank of the river, the Fire Carrier was moving back to the woods, the orange reflection off the water fading as he retreated, and it finally hit Barrie what that meant. It had been eleven thirty when Obadiah had rowed her to the Colesworth dock. The Fire Carrier always came at midnight.

Whatever had happened had the weight of an hour, at least an hour, but it had taken place in the span of minutes, as if ghost time ran at a different pace.

What else had changed in that time? Anything?

The pull of lostness still called to Barrie from beneath the ground. Whatever had happened with the curse, that hadn’t changed. If anything, it seemed worse. More alive, more raw. Deeper slashes of darkness marked the spot where the man had died. Torn grass and gouges in the dirt exposed fresh chunks of blackened bricks, the damage far more extensive than anything Obadiah had done. The chalk cross and circles had all but disappeared.

A flash of light, a flashlight, from down near the river in the woods between Colesworth Place and Beaufort Hall pulled Barrie around, her heart kicking in her chest like a drowning swimmer at the memory of Ernesto and Wyatt . . . at the thought of facing anyone who was wandering around at midnight.

“Cassie. Get up. We have to go.” She tried to shake her cousin out of the stupor, but Cassie flailed at her touch, rolling away and scrambling backward with her eyes wide and panicked. Cassie’s mouth opened as if to scream, though no sound came out, just sobs and whimpers. She was still shaking, and sweat had beaded at her temple and on the tip of her nose.

Barrie wasn’t calm. She didn’t want to be calm.

She wanted to run. Her own heart was beating a retreat, the rhythm so fast that she could barely breathe, but she couldn’t leave Cassie. Searching for a weapon, she scooped up a fist-size piece of brick that had been gouged out by the murdered ghost. She forced herself to look back toward the woods.

The light was bobbing closer, weaving in between the trees like a weaker, bleached-out version of the glow from the Fire Carrier’s flames. Whoever was carrying it was moving fast.

“Cassie. Get
up
!” Barrie reached for Cassie again, then thought better of it, and instead of grasping her, slapped her, not gently, but not hard, either. “You’re safe, Cassie, but you won’t be unless you get up. Come on. You have to go home.”

Cassie blinked. Shook her head. Shook herself and looked back at Barrie with dead, flat eyes. “D-did you just h-hit me?” she stuttered, climbing to her feet.

“There’s someone coming up from the river through the
woods with a flashlight. It’s after midnight. There can’t be any good reason for that. We have to leave.”

She reached for Cassie to pull her along, but Cassie had wrapped her arms around herself and stood shivering, the tears spilling even more freely and the words so full of snot and water that they were barely recognizable. “Shit. Did you see? They were going to— She was a little girl. A k-k-kid . . .”

She broke down sobbing, taking deep gulps of air. Barrie wanted to throw up all over again. “I know.”

“Men are
pigs
. You think you know them—you think you can trust them. You can’t. None of them.” Cassie turned her face toward Barrie’s, and her knees buckled so that Barrie had to reach out and hold her up. “What
was
that? Did that really happen?”

“I don’t know,” Barrie said, her throat filling with tears at Cassie’s words, and her heart breaking even more at the sudden cold suspicion that her cousin’s opinion of men had as much, if not more, to do with Cassie’s own experience as with what she and Barrie had just witnessed.

“Where’s the raven’s body?” Cassie raised her hand, which was still wrapped around a fistful of feathers. “Maybe it was all a trick. The whole thing. Just feathers without the bird, and the rest was some kind of hallucination. It would be nice to have something turn out to have been nothing more than a nightmare. No, a dream,” she said mournfully. “Nightmares hurt.”

“Cassie! Come on, speculate later. We have to go!” Barrie slapped her cousin again, harder.

Cassie slapped her back. “What are you hitting me for?”

“Because you need to snap out of it and MOVE.” Barrie turned to look behind her in the direction of the woods, but the flashlight had already cleared the trees.

Barrie’s hands shook, and she searched the ground for another weapon, something more substantial than the crumbling piece of brick she was crushing in her fingers. There was nothing, though, not unless she left Cassie.

Turning, she blinked against the beam of the flashlight. Recognition swept over her, followed by slack-shouldered relief. Even obscured behind the light, there was a certainty about Eight’s figure that made her calm. Calm
er
. Because “calm” was a relative term. Barrie wasn’t sure she would ever see the world in a way that would let her be calm again.

She sprinted past the carcass of the Colesworth mansion toward Eight, and he started jogging, too, the white beam of light bobbing over the grass, fracturing into a thousand prisms inside her tears. He caught her as she threw herself at him.

“What is it, Bear? What happened? What did Cassie do to you?”

His arms closed around her, and that was enough. The last of her self-control shattered, and Barrie slumped against him, waiting to feel warm again, burrowing into his chest to inhale his steadiness.

“It wasn’t Cassie’s fault.” She forced her head up, but as she spoke the words, handfuls of feathers drifted through her mind, an image of the sky filled with black feathers falling like charcoal snow. Black feathers on the pale skin of Cassie’s palm, like the contrast of two hands clinging to each other, the callused fingers of the slave child entwined with the soft, white fingers of the older girl as they huddled together on the ground.

She began to shake again, looking past Eight’s shoulder to the river because she couldn’t bear to see his expression change to disappointment or anger instead of worry. “I started something, and I’m not sure what happened,” she said. “Or what’s going to happen next.”

“What did you do?” Eight stepped in front of her so she had to look at him. “What happened? Why are you so upset?” His voice grew more gentle. “You scared the crap out of me. I felt something explode. Although ‘explode’ isn’t the right word, exactly. It was more like a sonic boom without any sound. And what’s wrong with her?” He nodded to where Cassie stood.

Cassie was still looking fixedly at the raked-up patch of ground, but she didn’t seem to be shaking anymore. Or crying. Still, there was something bruisingly vulnerable about the bowed line of Cassie’s neck. Barrie wished she knew how to help.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked Eight, not exactly avoiding the question, only giving herself a bit of additional time to answer.

He was staring at Cassie, too, and answered almost absently, “For future reference, if you want me to believe that you want something, you have to want whatever it is more than you want me to believe you want it. I figured it had to be something to do with Cassie, or you would have told me.”

Barrie’s eyes slitted. “So you were spying on me?”

“Watching over you. From a distance. To give you space. Although with the fog, I clearly did a lousy job. Jesus, you’re still shaking.” He moved closer and rubbed her arms, as if that would warm her up. “Now, do you want to tell me what’s going on? One minute you were alone on the Watson dock, and the next minute there was a fog on the river so thick that I couldn’t hear anything or see my own fingers in front of my face. Then a minute later, boom. The air shook and the fog was gone, and now you’re trembling and the Wicked Bitch of the Obsessed is standing over there like someone took away her favorite toy.”

“Be nicer to her. She’s not what you think.” Barrie checked behind her, but the ground where Obadiah had disappeared was still as bare as before. “You didn’t happen to see anyone besides me and Cassie around?” she asked. “No one down by the dock earlier?”

“Who else was with you? You don’t know anyone else well enough to talk them into— Oh no.
Shit
.” Eight shoved a hand through his hair and glared at her. “It was that guy, wasn’t it? The one from the flower bed. You’ve been secretive since you saw him. Pretending you couldn’t remember him . . . I should have known—you went out to meet him, didn’t you? That’s why you were so evasive about him all along. Who is he?”

He waited expectantly for Barrie to answer, but her brain wouldn’t engage. Trying to think of words was like trying to push a car uphill. She looked back with tears in her eyes, wondering why people ever thought you could explain when they stared at you like that, when they had to know they weren’t going to like anything you had to say.

Feeling light-headed, she sank to the grass and laid her head on her knees.

Eight squatted down beside her. “I’m sorry, Bear. Christ, you’re horrible for my health, you know that? You could have been there with half the drug smugglers in Columbia, and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. And that weird fog. It came out of nowhere and felt like it was there for
only a minute, but it was almost half an hour when I looked at my watch. I know I didn’t fall asleep, so I don’t understand what happened.”

He was watching her again, waiting for an explanation. But what could Barrie say that would make it past whatever spell Obadiah had put on her and keep from violating the bargain she had made with him? But hold on. Thinking about speaking Obadiah’s name didn’t come with its usual accompanying tightness in her throat.