Illusion

by Martina Boone

  It would have to do.

  Behind her, a stick cracked, as loud as a bullet. Ernesto cursed again.

  Barrie sprinted across the clearing. Half-expecting another gunshot, she darted under one of the low, heavy branches of the Scalping Tree and edged around the trunk. Her back pressed to the bark, energy enveloped her. She didn’t let herself sink into it. Every drop of her attention focused on the sounds of pursuit behind her.

  The birds had fallen quiet. Ernesto had slowed, approaching more cautiously. Either that or he had reached the clearing.

  Barrie tuned into the natural rhythms, the energy of the woods, searching for connection. Abruptly, what didn’t belong stood out in stark contrast: the brush of leaves on fabric, the snick of a twig snapping, the ground vibrating beneath a heavy foot. Blood sang a warning in her ears, but she sank deeper into the spirit path, her whole body tingling, swirling with the rush of the vortex beneath her feet. She was anchored this time, though, tied to Watson’s Landing. Tied to home. And instead of losing herself in the energy, she felt it flowing through her. Every moment made her feel bigger, fuller, less afraid.

  Scooping up a small rock from the ground, she waited.

  Ernesto’s voice was closer than she had expected it to be. “You think you’re clever, don’t you? You’re only making this harder for yourself. That big tree is the only place to hide.”

  “Yes, but your itty-bitty gun won’t shoot all the way through the trunk,” Barrie taunted.

  “I’ve got bullets that can run faster than you. They’ve got your name on them. Every bullet.”

  Energy roared through Barrie, and she let it ripple through her, let it pull her with it, stretching out into the woods, reaching up to the sky, burrowing deep into the ground. She listened as hard as she could for Ernesto’s approach, waiting for the right moment. The timing had to be perfect if she was going to have a chance.

  The sound of Ernesto’s feet was muffled, but the ground vibrated beneath his shifting weight, sending earthworms and insects burrowing away. Each leaf crushed beneath his boot produced a burst of scent. Barrie could feel him approaching.

  “You know why I put your name on the bullets?” he called.

  “Because your ego doesn’t like being beaten by a girl?”

  Ernesto’s breath hissed. “I’m having to start all over again, thanks to you, clawing my way back up from nothing. And I’ve got sixty-seven stitches in my back. Every time I look in the mirror and see this”—there was a beat of silence where she suspected he was pointing to the fresh scar on his face—“I’m gonna have to think of you.”

  The cold in his voice sank like an ache into Barrie’s toes and fingers, spread to her hands and feet until she felt like she was going numb from the outside in. The woods changed. The energy changed.

  Ernesto had almost reached her.

  Barrie threw the rock as hard as she could. It crashed through a bush fifteen feet behind her. She held her breath.

  Breaking into a run, Ernesto burst around the trunk where Barrie waited.

  Her fingers closed, rough bark digging into her skin. She barely felt it. She stepped out and swung the branch like a baseball bat, allowing herself the brief comfort of imagining Eight’s hands closing over hers, showing her where to hold it, how to grip it, how to swing.

  The branch swished through air. She felt the resistance, the disturbance, the wake it left behind.

  Then it connected.

  The moment occurred in fragments. Her arms vibrating. Ernesto’s shock. The sound, the awful sound: snap and slurp and spill.

  She had wanted him to stop. To fall. To leave her and Pru alone.

  But he fell and he lay at her feet, his eyes fixed, staring. Blood seeping into the ground. Blood trickling down the branch Barrie was still holding. Blood splattered across her fingers.

  Barrie found that she was sobbing, taking deep gulps of air that weren’t big enough to feed her lungs.

  She wanted him to twitch. She wanted him to raise his head. To moan and not be able to pick himself up until she was safe in the house and the police sirens were wailing down the driveway.

  But he didn’t move. His eyes didn’t blink.

  She flung the branch as far as she could. Her knees gave out, and she reached for the tree to brace herself.

  Something throbbed beneath her bloodied hand. A pulse and then a surge of energy that swelled and swelled and swelled. Heat seared through her. She jerked her arm away and left a smear of red against a bulge in the gray, moss-edged bark.

  A glimmer of light made her whip around. The Fire Carrier’s shape was nearly solid as he streamed from the ground beside Ernesto’s body. The black of his feather cloak melted into the hair that hung down from where it was gathered under his cap of raven’s feathers. His hands were empty, but fire seemed to crackle beneath his skin.

  “I k-killed him.” Barrie’s voice broke on the word, which was appropriate because something inside her felt broken.

  The Fire Carrier’s eyes shadowed with pain that Barrie felt like a physical thing. He reached his hand out to her, and she took it, forgetting for a moment that he wasn’t solid, that the last time she had touched him there had been only a cold resistance. The cold was still there, but briefly there was also skin and sinew and bone beneath her fingers.

  He pulled away.

  Removing a flint knife from his belt with his right hand, he crouched beside Ernesto’s body. Watching Barrie with an expression that held the stillness of regret, he raised Ernesto’s shoulders. Lips moving, chanting words Barrie couldn’t hear or recognize, he braced Ernesto against his own knee, and laid his left palm on the front of of Ernesto’s scalp. Still chanting, he pulled his palm back toward the crown.

  A mist percolated through Ernesto’s skin where the Fire Carrier touched, reminding Barrie of the way the spirits of Ayita and Elijah had drifted up through the plastic sheeting covering the buried chamber. Insubstantial and thin at first, the mist was tinged in black, the color of burning oil. As it separated from the flesh, it gathered into a shape—a figure dark with fury that writhed on a tether anchoring it to the body it had once inhabited.

  The Fire Carrier spoke again, more silent words quickly uttered. Then he blew at Ernesto’s spirit with a force that rustled the leaves and brush around the clearing.

  Barrie shivered. The mist lightened, shifting from black to gray to pale. Still tethered to the flesh of Ernesto’s scalp, it thinned and stretched toward the river as the Fire Carrier blew.

  The Fire Carrier raised his knife. With a final chant, he laid the edge of the blade above the scalp and cut the cord that tethered the soul to Ernesto’s flesh and bones. The remaining mist flew like smoke from a rifle, there and gone with another puff of breath. Barrie clutched the tree, the knot beneath her hand a reassuring warmth in a world where nothing seemed familiar.

  Spreading his hands in the air above Ernesto’s empty body, the Fire Carrier pushed downward. Energy shimmered beneath Barrie’s feet, and the body sank into the earth like Obadiah’s feathers, without so much as a ripple.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Fire Carrier straightened to his feet. Warily he stepped toward Barrie, his hands held out in a gesture of openness.

  She didn’t—couldn’t—move. Dimly, in some corner of her mind, she heard someone calling—she heard Pru calling—but the sound was distant, like something heard from underwater, and she couldn’t make out the words. She couldn’t respond.

  Hot energy poured through her from the Scalping Tree, and that was all that was keeping the shivering cold and her sense of brokenness at bay. If she severed that connection, if she let go of the bulge in the wood, she didn’t think she would have the strength to stay on her feet.

  The Fire Carrier placed his hand over hers where it rested on the tree. The sensation was like plunging cold limbs into a steaming bath. Pressure built beneath Barrie’s palm as if something in the oak was pushing her away, burrowing its way out from under the trunk.
Heat pressed against her skin, smooth stone instead of uneven bark. Her fingers curled automatically, grasping for what the tree had given her. She found herself holding a diamond the size of her fist.

  Only half a diamond. Part of it had been sheared away, leaving a flat surface that formed the base of a pyramid, and there in the center, Barrie’s finger caught on a metallic impurity, like a vein of dark silver in the shape of a bare and twisted branch. The entire stone vibrated and heated as Barrie touched it, tickling the back of her ear and making her skin hum, heating to the cusp of pain and pleasure. The energy within it felt so alive that it seemed to breathe.

  In response, the vortex changed, shifted from something outside of Barrie to something within her, spinning her into a swirl of particles so small that she saw herself as the most minuscule part of something that was larger than she could fathom. Just when she feared she would shrink to nothing and disappear, she found herself reversing course, expanding, sweeping, exploding out past the leaves and trunks and trees of the Watson woods, past the boundaries of earth and sky and skin and blood.

  The heat and vibration in the stone pulled her back to herself. She heard Pru calling to her again, more clearly this time. And she found that the hand that held the crystal, her own hand, had moved without her knowledge or consent. It was raised toward the river, her whole arm extended as if tugged toward the water by an invisible rope, as if Ernesto’s spirit were asking the stone to follow it.

  Barrie shuddered at the thought, gasping for breath. She jerked her hand back toward herself, fighting the pull, and when she had brought the crystal to her chest, she clasped it there with the force of both her hands.

  “Wh-what’s it d-doing?” she asked the Fire Carrier, her voice shaking. She tried to remember the name Eight had used. “This is the ulunsuti stone, isn’t it? The lodestone? Or part of it, at least.”

  The Fire Carrier’s eyes lit with . . . what? Joy? Relief? Smiling, he pointed to the crystal in her hand and made a chopping motion across his palm. Glancing over to make certain she was watching him, he gestured toward the river. She nodded encouragement. Next, he pointed once more at the ulunsuti and cupped his right hand as if he held it. Pretending to pick up another object from the ground, he cupped that in his left hand, and when he straightened, he mimed the sort of pull that Barrie had already experienced from the stone herself, as if the objects in his hands were drawn together by some invisible, inescapable force. Joining his hands, he nodded.

  “You want me to put the ulunsuti stone back together? Is that it? But how?” Barrie touched the rough edge of the stone again, where it had been split. “Is that what’s in the Beaufort fountain? Then how do I remove it? And why is it in two pieces? What happens when I put it together? How does it go back together?”

  The Fire Carrier only looked at her, his eyes and lips and shoulders shifting downward as if, even if he couldn’t understand her words, her doubt and bewilderment were clear. His arm fell. He stood still, no breath lifting his chest, no flutter of motion.

  Barrie’s mouth was dry, her body clenched too tight to take a step. “I’m trying to understand. Help me.” She nodded again and held out the stone. “Show me. Please?”

  Again he studied her, unmoving. Then he raised both arms and extended the index finger of one hand upriver toward the tip of Watson Island and the old rice fields, while the other hand pointed north toward the gate at the entrance to Watson’s Landing and the road that led to town—or to the mainland bridge to Charleston.

  “What does that mean? The stone doesn’t come back together?”

  The Fire Carrier’s eyes were as haunted as she felt.

  “I’m sorry. I’m trying.” She sagged back against the tree, her fingernail picking at the nub of the imperfection within the crystal. It gave a shudder in her hand, and her ears rang.

  The sound of her name. She heard it again, clearly. And it took too long—so long that it made her realize she must have been in shock—to process that it wasn’t the rock that had called her.

  “Here, Aunt Pru!” she shouted back. “I’m here!”

  She glanced back toward the house and felt the disturbance of energy as Pru entered the woods. An added warmth, rippling outward. Her fingers tightened around the stone, and when she looked back over, the Fire Carrier had disappeared.

  Her legs shook. She peeled herself off the trunk of the Scalping Tree and tried to walk, and the ulunsuti fought her as she veered away from the river.

  Tearing through the underbrush at the edge of the clearing with her shotgun raised, Pru spotted Barrie, then made a searching examination of the rest of the clearing until she was satisfied that no one else was there. Lowering the gun, she rushed forward.

  “Oh, thank goodness, sugar. What happened? I heard something that sounded like a shot and thought you had the television on. Then I came downstairs and found Miranda wandering across the lawn with a gash across her flank, and there was a bullet casing in the stable. The police are on their way—”

  “No!” Barrie’s heart fluttered like a moth in a jar, and she caught Pru’s arm. “No police. Not until I explain everything to you. Call them back. Tell them not to come—”

  “Sweetheart, you’re not making sense. Calm down. There was a bullet—someone shot Miranda.”

  “Please, I’m begging you. Call the police back right now, and tell them—I don’t know. Tell them it was the television. Then I’ll explain.” Barrie sipped panicked breaths, until her lungs ached from being stretched.

  Pru watched her and then finally—finally—pulled her cell phone from her pocket and spoke first to the sheriff’s office and then to Seven. When she hung up, she laid both palms against Barrie’s cheeks as if to reassure her, or reason with her, but then her eyes clouded again.

  “You’re burning up again, even worse than before! And you’re going to shake yourself out of your skin. Come on. Let’s get you back to the house. You can talk there, and Seven and Eight are already docking the boat. They’ll be here in a minute, so you can explain to all of us at the same time.” Wrapping her arm around Barrie’s waist, she urged her back across the clearing.

  “Is Miranda okay?” Barrie asked gratefully. “She’s not hurt badly, is she?”

  “It’s only a graze, thank goodness. A little antibiotic cream, and she’ll be fine.” Pru stopped. “Just tell me one thing—are you safe—are we safe—now? Did the yunwi or the Fire Carrier do something to scare someone off? Who was it?”

  Barrie shook her head. “The yunwi tried, but it was me. I d-did it.”

  Pru searched Barrie’s face long and hard, and then her lips tightened, and she herded Barrie toward the house. Barrie let herself be led. The ulunsuti still tried to tow her in the direction of the river, the sharp tip of the pyramid shape digging into her palm. She had to adapt her every step to counter the force of the pull. Even so, her awareness was focused outward, and she seemed to hear everything, see everything, feel everything all at once. Long before the low brush and dwarf palmettos beneath the trees gave way to grass, she sensed the yunwi waiting, weak but simultaneously afraid and eager. They backed away in a huddled line when she emerged onto the lawn, retreating an equal distance each time she stepped forward. Their silhouettes were even less visible than before, and their eyes had dimmed to gray.

  Barrie thought at first that it was Ernesto’s blood they hated, the way they had shied away from Obadiah’s. Remembering the red streak she had left on the oak, she examined her fingers, but there was almost no blood visible on her hands. The stone cast a faint glow across her palm as the sunlight plummeting through the trees set the branch within the crystal on fire. The silver inside the stone turned a deep reddish gold as if it had heated with some kind of electric current.

  “Wait. Please wait.” Pulling out of Pru’s grasp, Barrie retreated a step. The yunwi moved forward an equal step. They stopped when she stopped, advanced when she retreated, and retreated when she advanced, as if they wanted to keep their distance, the s
ame way they kept their distance from the woods.

  “What are you doing?” Pru asked, watching as if Barrie had lost her mind. Maybe she had, but that was part of being a Watson, too. Magic and sanity were not entirely compatible.

  “Watching what the yunwi do. This is the lodestone,” Barrie said, holding it up and opening her fingers enough to let Pru see the way the ulunsuti blazed in the sunlight. “Only it’s more than a lodestone—it’s a stone the Fire Carrier brought here and split into two pieces to bind the bargains to the families. There’s something about it that the yunwi don’t like.”

  “Then leave it wherever you found it.” Pru’s face was all sharp angles and bruised eyes. She stood with her back to the lawn, the shotgun drooping in her hand, and Barrie felt a wave of love so enormous that she thought she would burst with it.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Pru raised her head. “For what?”

  “For rushing out here with a shotgun.”

  Pru came and squeezed her so tightly that it made Barrie’s ribs ache. “I honestly need to start grounding you more often. There’s probably some rule in the motherhood manual about punishments for nearly getting yourself shot, but since I never got one of those manuals, we’ll have to muddle through the best way we can. That’s all we can ever do, right? Muddle through together.”

  Barrie let Pru’s love start to fill her back up again where she’d been empty. Then Eight sprinted into her line of vision at the edge of the lawn with Seven not far behind.

  Eight stalled midrun. His eyes raked Barrie’s face and traveled to the stone in her hand. Narrowed on a faint smear of blood. “Are you okay?”

  Ernesto’s face flashed through Barrie’s memories: the thud of the stick, the vibration as it hit him, the way the sound traveled up her arm. The way his eyes stared sightlessly.

  “I k-killed him. I k-killed Ernesto, and the Fire C-Carrier took his body.” The words tumbled out without planning or thought or control, and when they had spilled out into the daylight, she couldn’t take them back. She wanted to—oh, how she wanted to. She was so afraid to look at any of them.