Persuasion (27 page)

“Did you figure out how to find him?”

“There are things your father hasn’t told you about the Beaufort gift. About the bargains and the binding—”

“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to nag me about this anymore?” Eight’s shoulders were as tight as bowstrings. “Look, I can’t push Dad. Not when I’m already pushing him about school and things are ready to blow up. So why don’t you just concentrate on finding Obadiah? If he is telling the
truth about anything, we can get answers faster out of him than we can anywhere else. And if he can break the Beaufort gift, then none of this will matter.”

Eight came toward Barrie, his hands rising and then stopping awkwardly above his waist as if he’d started to reach for her and then changed his mind. “Think how much simpler everything would be if you didn’t have to worry about whether my motives were tangled up with yours.”

There was no denying that.

Marching around Eight, Barrie exited the building.

“Where are you going now?” he asked, jogging to catch up as she headed down the path toward the ruined chapel and the cemetery.

“I’ve got something else I want to try. The Watson gift has been getting stronger since Lula died, and I’m feeling things that aren’t actually lost.”

“You think you can find Obadiah?”

“Who knew you had such a one-track mind?” she said. “I’m not sure what I will find, but there’s something there.”

“So tell me what you mean.”

This new form of the gift wasn’t about finding as much as it was about intuition, which was a big word for something that came down to a leap of faith. Eight had been right about that from the beginning. Barrie hadn’t realized how little she trusted anyone, especially herself.

The gate around the cemetery was locked, and Eight leaped over it and held his hand out to steady her so she could climb over the fence. His touch warmed her skin, and she clung to the heat and the temporary sense of rightness, but he let go too quickly and pushed both hands into his pockets, as if reminding himself not to touch her.

Barrie suppressed a sigh. “Do you still have the keys from the library? You took them home by accident, but the key to this lock is probably on that ring as well.”

“I didn’t want you wandering around the house with Mark’s ashes after I left.”

“So you did take them on purpose?” Barrie heard her voice rising at the end of the sentence, and she closed her eyes a moment, needing to refocus. It wasn’t even worth getting mad at Eight. Both of them kept trying to do things for the other, and what they needed to do was work together.

Spotting a stone bench beside a grave, she headed toward it. The tombstone had a stone dog lying at the foot and a gray cat perched on top, and it never occurred to Barrie that the cat was real until it turned to look at her with a lazy wink of pale green eyes. Moving to pet the cat, she couldn’t help wincing at the inscription on the grave. A child. Another child.

She shuddered as a raven launched itself out of a tree and cast a shadow over her on its way toward the river. Two more
sat on a branch nearby, like vultures waiting for someone’s misfortune. Barrie sank down on the bench.

She spoke to Eight without looking at him. “How common are ravens down here? Do you see them often?”

“Not sure I can tell them from crows, to be honest.” Eight lowered himself to the bench beside her and watched the bird fly away. “You think that was Obadiah?”

“Or one of his spies, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Can’t you just call him again?”

“I didn’t
call
him before. There was never any ringing, and he never hung up. I think the phone was his idea of a joke.” Barrie pulled the phone out of her pocket and scrolled to the call history. “See? His number isn’t here. Is that technology or magic?”

Eight sidled closer on the bench to look at the call history. Body heat radiated off him, and despite the blistering outside temperature, Barrie had been craving warmth all day. Having him furious with her made her feel cold inside, and empty.

“Can you please stop being mad at me?” she asked.

“How can I not be mad at you?” He braced his elbow on his knees. “In what universe was going to Colesworth Place with Cassie and some strange voodoo guy ever going to be a good idea? You aren’t Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

“Maybe I want to be
more
like Buffy.”

“Meaning homicidally brave? Or criminally stupid?”

Barrie thought about the two children and the mother at Colesworth Place, and Alcee Colesworth, if that was who it had been, hiding in the woods like a coward.

“Meaning
strong
,” she said. “With a kick-ass superpower so I wouldn’t have to worry about whether Obadiah was good or evil.”

“How is that even a question?” Eight’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, wait. I forgot. You’re the one who went off for a night of fun and voodoo, live animal sacrifices optional, with a Raven Mocker
and
someone who you knew had already tried to kill you. Your judgment of evil isn’t exactly—”

“What did you just call Obadiah?” Barrie grabbed his arm as the words sank in. “What’s a Raven Mocker?”

“Something I found on the Internet this morning, a different kind of Cherokee witch. No one knows exactly what the Fire Carrier is or where he comes from, but Raven Mockers start off human. They eat people’s hearts while they’re still alive and steal whatever years the victim would have had left to live.” Eight rubbed his palms on his knees, as if even saying the words had made him sweat.

“You want to go find Obadiah thinking he’s one of
those
? And you call
me
criminally stupid. Hah! Have a look in the mirror, baseball guy.”

Eight frowned at her with a shake of his head. “If there’s
a chance he’s telling the truth, I have to talk to him. You don’t get how much I hate this gift. Knowing all the petty things that people think they can’t live without—”

“In which case—ding, ding, ding—the crazy-nutjob award goes to you.” Barrie hoped her voice wasn’t shaking as badly as it sounded, but her brain was starting to feel numb. “Because living like that would still be infinitely better than having your heart eaten out of your body. Not that I believe for a minute that’s what Obadiah does.” She paused to analyze that statement, then nodded. She didn’t think she could be
that
bad a judge of character. Obadiah might not be
good
, but he wasn’t pure evil, either. “Also,” she said, “Obadiah isn’t Cherokee.”

“Native Americans were slaves, too. They married.” Eight didn’t look the least deterred. “And the Savannah Indians sold a bunch of Cherokee into slavery in the West Indies about the time John Colesworth was buying slaves from there.”

“You think John bought them? That would be a hell of a coincidence.”

“Less than the idea that a slave who knew voodoo would randomly also know how to communicate with the Fire Carrier. That’s always bothered me.”

Barrie shook her head, but Eight was right. That had been a flaw in Cassie’s story about a priest helping trap the Fire Carrier that Barrie hadn’t even seen. “I was always more
worried about how the slave trapped the Fire Carrier than I was about how they communicated to arrange the bargains they made,” she admitted.

“Trapping him would have been the easy part. Didn’t you see the bottle trees on people’s lawns driving into town? Maybe not. You wouldn’t have known what you were seeing anyway, but a lot of people around here still thread bottles on sticks and branches to trap spirits who pass by at night. The spirits get stuck in the bottles, and the sunlight destroys them in the morning.”

Bottle trees sounded familiar, but Barrie couldn’t remember where she’d heard the term. “That’s like a genie and a vampire story all rolled into one,” she said.

“Vampires are stakes through the heart. You’ve circled back to Buffy again.”

Barrie grinned briefly, but then she remembered where she’d heard about bottle trees. “Mary mentioned using a bottle tree to trap the
yunwi
the night I almost fell down the stairs,” she said.

The thought of that moment, that whole night, tied her into a knot of tangled emotions. It had been the first time she’d realized the
yunwi
were trying to send her a message she didn’t understand. And there had been so many other things that night—watching Cassie’s performance of
Gone with the Wind
beneath the stars in front of the broken columns at Colesworth
Place, arguing with Wyatt, being
scared
by Wyatt, driving to the beach where she and Eight had kissed. . . . It had been a horrible night and a magical one, but the ugliness had been just beginning. When Wyatt died, she had hoped all that was over.

Now here they were, talking about witches who ate people’s hearts.

“I think Obadiah’s older than he looks,” she whispered, as though if she said it quietly, it might not be true. Or maybe in case he could hear her. “
Old
-old,” she continued, “as in old enough to want to wear a suit because it was proper to do that back when he was young, even though he looks like he’s in his twenties. After seeing the way he looked when the spell went wrong last night, I’ll bet he’s even older. Either the explosion sucked the life out of him and made him look like that, or—”

“It made him look his actual age?” Eight asked. “Told you. He’s a Raven Mocker, or something like it.”

“In which case, I repeat: Why would you want us to go and find him?” Jumping off the bench, Barrie stood with her back to Eight, looking toward the tree with the ravens in it.

It was so hard to know what to do. Her intuition, whether it had anything to do with her Watson gift or not, said Obadiah wasn’t evil, but that didn’t mean she was eager to go poking
the hornets’ nest. She’d done what he’d asked of her. She hoped that meant her gift was safe.

Obadiah himself had said that she needed to choose which was more important, Eight or her magic. That was an impossible choice.

Closing her eyes, she pushed at her finding sense and tried to feel Obadiah among the row of ravens. Then she spun slowly in a circle to search the cemetery.

“What are you doing?” Eight asked.

“Concentrating.”

All she felt was peace pressing in on her, peace and the too-muchness of Watson’s Landing that always swept over her when she opened herself to it. The timelessness and familiarity of the plantation sank into her bones. She still didn’t fully understand what the water spirit had meant about a binding, but she belonged to Watson’s Landing, and it belonged to her. The dead in this cemetery were hers to protect from Obadiah and anything else that threatened them. Good or ill, right or wrong, they were hers. They were family.

Thinking of family made her think of Mark, and what she was searching for changed there in the stillness among the dead. Wherever Obadiah was, he wasn’t in the cemetery, but Mark should have been. Mark was her true family more than any of the people in the graves around her.

She thought back to what she had seen the night before, to the ghostly echo of a young girl being used as a bargaining chip, as a demonstration of strength meant to intimidate. Barrie could imagine the fear and sense of powerlessness the girl must have felt. It didn’t require much imagination. Barrie had been helpless to stop what was happening as she’d watched.

The past was fixed. Barrie couldn’t help the child or alter the existence of slavery, or even make up for the fact that her own family had owned slaves. She could be outraged, though. For that girl, for Mark’s ancestors and presumably Obadiah’s, for the girls and women she saw in the news from all around the world. For anyone who couldn’t defend themselves.

She could try to make sure they weren’t forgotten. She would begin with Mark.

Opening her senses, she searched the rows of tombs and graves for an empty space to hold Mark’s ashes. What drew her didn’t feel like the Watson gift. There was no ache or pressure, only that same sense of rightness, of brightness, leading her toward a spot near the back wall of the chapel. She threaded her way through the rows of cherubs, angels, and weeping children, past gracefully arched headstones and chiseled marble obelisks. She stopped where a thick branch of the oak tree that grew inside the ruined chapel had stretched
across the roofless wall and cast kaleidescope shadows on the grass beneath her feet.

“This is where I’m going to bury Mark,” she said. “And I think we should bury Luke and Twila here, too. I know Twila is a Beaufort, but she should be with Luke. They were meant to be together.”

“Well, there you are,” Pru said as Barrie and Eight came into the library a few minutes later. “I hope you two have settled your differences. I hated that you were fighting.”

Barrie cast an embarrassed glance around the room. Thanks to Seven’s militant organizational skills, the library had been transformed into an operations center. Two brand-new laptops had been delivered to the house that morning, and workmen had installed an Internet connection via satellite with very little fuss. Pru and Mary were confirming the list of farm-to-table suppliers while Daphne set up the core of a website using Barrie’s stark white design on a gray background.