Illusion

by Martina Boone

  “Thinking,” Barrie said, “seems to be your job. I work better on instinct, and listening. The gift and the yunwi keep showing me that over and over, and I haven’t been paying enough attention.” She shook her head. “So here’s what I feel. I feel that as long as you and I are talking, as long as we listen to each other, we are going to be all right, whatever comes. At some point, the bindings may break, and our gifts may be lost . . . or you’ll get the binding and the gift again, I don’t know. I may even lose the magic at Watson’s Landing. But whatever happens, you and I will still be magic together.”

  Eight lifted both hands to her face and then kissed her again. “You’re a wise woman, Barrie Watson. And now let’s finish mending fences so we can get everyone out of here. The faster they’re gone, the sooner Obadiah can try to bind Ayita and Elijah and really get the party started.”

  Clasping her hand in his, he led her back around the side of the icehouse. Briefly the scene seemed picturesque and almost peaceful, with the music playing and most of the population of Watson Island milling around the lawn dressed in their best Sunday-go-to-the-beach clothes in a bright array of colors.

  But when Barrie and Eight were halfway back to where the tables were set up, the plastic sheeting over the buried room yanked itself loose on one side, sending the bricks that held it flying with enough force that one shattered against a tree. Then the other side pulled free and the sheet hurtled away, gaining altitude until it snagged on the lights of the sheriff’s patrol car parked nearby.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The deputies were both standing beside the car when the sheeting flew at them. One of the deputies, an officer with a sunburn and the muscles of a weight lifter, reached over and grabbed the plastic, then stood looking around in consternation. Across the distance and twilight haze, it was impossible to read his lips and tell what he said to the second deputy, but Barrie expected it had something to do with the utter lack of wind anywhere else. No sooner had she had that thought, though, than Obadiah raised both arms and a hurricane-strength wind came out of nowhere, blowing across the entire Colesworth property.

  The trees swayed, and branches whipped back and forth. Mary jumped back as the stiff metal from the top portion of the improvised stove upended itself. Folding lawn chairs skittered across the grass and smashed into tables and buildings. The dig crew had packed away their tents and most of the equipment and stored it all in the overseer’s cabin, but they’d left out some of the giant sifting screens and buckets. Those blew over and smashed against the wall. People grabbed purses, bags, children, and one another and ran toward the buildings.

  But there wasn’t any shelter there, either. The wind raced along the walls and pushed them away, then abruptly changed direction and sent debris that had fallen to the ground flying back at the crowd, pushing them in the direction of the parking area. In less than fifteen minutes, the open house was over, and apart from the deputies, who had retreated into their car, and the dig crew, who had all run into the overseer’s cabin, Cassie and her family, Pru, Barrie, Mary, Daphne, and the Beauforts were the only people who remained. They huddled together inside the kitchen house.

  Obadiah had moved to stand beside the police tape, immune to the wind as if he had fashioned an invisible bubble around himself. Not so much as a single dreadlock lifted off his shoulders.

  Barrie ran to join him, with Eight right behind her. The others hesitated briefly. Then, heads down and shoulders braced, they all ran over too. The wind stopped as they reached him, just stopped, while everywhere around them the branches still lashed in the trees and churned the paper plates, bowls, and plastic cups along the ground.

  “What is this?” Seven gestured at the branches lashing above the patrol car, where the deputies sat. “Did you raise this wind to stop the party?”

  “Better that than something worse. In any case, I had all the energy I could store,” Obadiah said. “It doesn’t matter—”

  “It does,” Barrie said. “Of course it does. This wasn’t only supposed to be about the magic. We wanted it to be a real chance for people to come together at the same time.”

  “When magic goes wrong, it has to take precedence. You wouldn’t have wanted to see anyone get hurt. Seriously hurt. More than the few cuts, bumps, and bruises they’re nursing now. In any case, they’ll understand. They’ll drive five minutes, the wind will clear, and the Weather Channel will decide it was a microburst. A few people will assume it was the curse, but after a day or two or three, the people at the subdivision will have retrieved their lost window screens and the covers for their backyard grills. They’ll forget all about it and move on. Now,” he said, “let me concentrate.” Climbing over what remained of the police tape, he pulled a bag of the white clay powder from his pocket.

  “What are you doing?” Eight asked. “It’s not even dark yet. You said it would be easier to bind Ayita and Elijah and break the curse at night.”

  “We don’t have the time to wait for ‘easier,’ and whatever I lose in strength, I’ll make up by conserving the energy it would take to try to keep Ayita and Elijah contained until then. Now, where’s the girl?” He looked around and crooked a finger at a visibly reluctant Cassie. “You stand over there.” He pointed right behind the police tape. ”And you”—he gestured to Eight—“move back and let me work.”

  As Cassie and Eight took their positions, Barrie glanced back at the two sheriff’s deputies who were paying no attention to the activity at the dig site. Obadiah must have worked his magic on them already.

  Chanting softly, he dusted the white chalk onto the ground to form the cosmogram. The air rippled with energy. Obadiah glowed again, brighter than Barrie had ever seen him. The sight made her jittery and cold, and the chant and the motions pricked every hair on her body to attention.

  “You’re shivering again.” Eight slid his arm around her shoulders.

  “I’m entitled. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to go,” she whispered back.

  She looked down the row of faces beside her, all of them tense, all of them doggedly hiding their fear. Pru, Seven, Kate, Mary, Daphne, Marie, Sydney, and Berg. Seven had one arm around Pru’s waist and held Kate firmly in front of him with the other, and Mary and Daphne’s hands were clasped. Kate bounced on the balls of her feet, watching every move that Obadiah made, and Berg watched as if he was memorizing everything so that he could run off and jot it in a notebook. Around her own shoulders, Eight’s muscles were as tense as steel.

  Only Cassie and her family stood apart from the others. Cassie’s cheeks shone pale again after her earlier animation, as if being “on” all afternoon had taken its toll.

  Obadiah raised his head and lifted his hands. A swell in energy made the air heavy and resonant, as if he had pushed the atmosphere itself with the motion and left the atoms explosively charged. Eight pulled Barrie closer.

  She knew it was coming; she should have expected it. Yet her stomach still dropped when Obadiah pulled a raven from the empty sky. She braced herself when he stroked the bird with this thumb, then twisted deftly and threw it, dead, into the air, only to have it evaporate, leaving nothing but soft black feathers curling to the ground to sink into the earth and disappear.

  Was the raven real? Or a magical construct, a representation of Obadiah’s own pain?

  She was too afraid to ask the question.

  Like a kettle at full boil, a dark mist streamed through the small hole in the roof of the buried room. Where it was still anchored to the stakes, the police tape curled and snapped, the DO NOT CROSS text blurring into a tangle of illegible letters. Then, faster than before, much faster, Ayita and Elijah formed and hovered a foot above the arched bricks, tethered by the dark threads that tied them to their physical remains inside the room.

  The wind stopped. The cups, napkins, and plastic cutlery that had been flying around dropped back onto the grass, and the trees went still. Obadiah rolled his head on his neck, and his dreadlocks spilled across his shoulders
.

  “Talk,” he said to Cassie. “Apologize.”

  Ayita and Elijah looked at Cassie, then briefly at Marie, Sydney, and Barrie, before swiveling their heads back to where Cassie stood. Their forms swelled, and they surged forward, but instead of catching on the tethers the way they had before, they ran into an invisible barrier that flattened their shapes as if they’d hit a sheet of glass. That only made them more furious. Ayita’s eyes slitted, and she bared her teeth.

  Cassie recoiled, then stiffened her back and stepped forward. “I’m sorry,” she said. “On behalf of the whole Colesworth family, I’m sorry for what John did to you. It was horrible and awful, and I wish it had never happened.”

  Barrie thought Eight was going to cut off the circulation to her brain, he was squeezing her shoulders so tightly. Ayita and Elijah grew bigger, more opaque, and rushed at the barrier again, making themselves thin and thinner as they strained.

  “Tell them something genuine, girl!” Obadiah’s voice cracked like a peal of thunder. “Make an effort. I don’t want to have to destroy them because you couldn’t bring yourself to care.”

  “Why should I care?” Cassie snarled at him, her eyes white-rimmed with fear. “Mary and Daphne couldn’t talk them into giving up the curse. I don’t see why you expect that I can say something that will make a difference. Who says they even deserve to have peace in their afterlife? Just do the damned exorcism or whatever it takes to destroy them and be done with it. Remove the curse like you promised.”

  “Cassie, you don’t mean that.” Berg moved over to where she stood and turned her to face him. “I know you don’t mean it. You’re scared and you’re lashing out, but that’s not you talking.”

  Tears streamed down Cassie’s face. “You don’t know who I am. What do you all want from me? Why can’t you leave me out of it?”

  Disengaging from Eight, Barrie moved over, too. “What you said, Cassie, that’s the right question. Think. What do Ayita and Elijah want? They don’t seem to care that Mary and her family are suffering as much as they care that your family suffers. That’s why Obadiah thinks you need to be the one to try to convince them to give the curse up. So think what they need to hear. When I found the skeletons of my great-uncle Luke and his fiancée, I saw their ghosts repeating the moment of their deaths, over and over again. Once I found them and acknowledged who they were and what happened to them, that was enough to make them stop. And we haven’t seen the ghosts of Charlotte’s parents since we discovered her skeleton was down there, either.”

  Reaching out toward Cassie, she found herself wanting to grab her cousin and shake her, and she lowered her hands and clasped them in front of her. Because how could Cassie not feel the pain Ayita and Elijah had suffered, trapped down in that room for all these years? The Fire Carrier had even set Ernesto’s spirit free before putting his body underground.

  “You have to try to help them,” Barrie added, wishing she had some magic words to make Cassie understand. “Acknowledge what they want. Make an effort now, or you won’t want to live with yourself. You’ll always wonder if there was more that you could have done.”

  Obadiah was beginning to show signs of strain. Sweat beaded at his temples, and the muscles of his neck corded as he looked back over his shoulder, and Ayita and Elijah looked more solid and clear than ever, as if whatever strength he was expending was going straight to them.

  “It’s going to take more than acknowledgment,” he said. “Ayita and Elijah aren’t residual echoes or spirits reaching back from the other side. They’re sentient. They may have lost most of their humanity to their anger, but we still have to treat them as human beings. They want to know they’ve had their vengeance, and that it has been enough. Obviously, that’s the problem. It hasn’t been, or the girl would care.”

  “I do care! Of course I care.” Cassie turned to Berg, as if he were the one she needed to convince. “But I’m not the one who killed them, and they’re the ones who’ve been hurting my family. Why can’t any of you understand that? The curse is hurting us!”

  “It’s hurting Mary and her family, too, but you don’t see her complaining about it!” Kate said. “Grow up, Cassie.”

  It was instinct for Barrie to want to defend Cassie, knowing what she had been through—what Ryder had done to her. Had that been the curse? Or simply the product of Wyatt’s greed? Or was it possible to separate one from the other at all? Where did the cycle stop? So many people had hurt one another.

  “Kate’s right.” Barrie caught Cassie’s hand to get her attention. “ ‘Sorry’ isn’t a synonym for ‘guilty.’ It’s a way to say you’re listening. Think outside your own skin, and take responsibility for what you’re doing instead of wallowing in what they—or other people—have done to you. Acknowledge the good things. The rest of us have worked all day, and half the town came out here for the sake of making peace. Eight and I got you out of juvenile detention after you locked us in the tunnel. We’ve all been here trying to help you, but what have you been doing to help yourself? Obadiah claims magic always requires sacrifice. Maybe he’s been right all along about using the gold to appease the spirits. Think of it as giving up something that’s important to you for a chance to make something better. For a chance to set Ayita and Elijah free so that you can be free yourself.”

  She was looking at Ayita and Elijah as she said the words, but in her mind, she saw the image of the Fire Carrier cutting Ernesto loose, the look of regret and concern that the Fire Carrier had given her. She saw his relief as he had blown Ernesto’s spirit toward the river.

  Maybe letting the spirits go was as much about the dead as it was about those left behind. Ghosts came in all different guises, from specters to echoes to memories. The way Barrie felt at having killed Ernesto. The ghost of Watson’s Landing that Lula had re-created for herself in San Francisco. Mark’s voice in Barrie’s head. The regret she felt about not knowing her mother better, about having been angry at Lula for so long when what Barrie should have felt was pity. The dead could haunt the living in countless ways.

  “All right,” Cassie said. “Sure. I’ll give Mary some of the gold.” She turned to face Ayita and Elijah, and she gave a vehement nod.

  Her expression closed and furious, Mary put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “We don’t want your money!”

  “Take it, Mary. It isn’t Colesworth money,” Obadiah said. “It never was.”

  Cassie’s face went red. “If she doesn’t want it, then what the hell are you nagging at me for? Fine. I’ll give it to charity, I don’t care. I’ll give up half of all of all the gold that’s down there. Or all of it. There? Does that make you any happier?”

  Silence fell. Obadiah turned toward her, his hands falling and his face slack with surprise.

  “She’s lying,” Kate said. “That’s not what she wants.”

  Seven grabbed Kate’s arm, and Obadiah’s head whipped toward her. At the same time, Ayita and Elijah pitched forward, bulldozing through Obadiah’s invisible barrier with an audible pop, until they hit the end of the tethers that tied them to their bones.

  The roof of the buried chamber exploded. Bricks, shards of wood, bones, and a burst of gold and silver coins fountained upward and then fell down again in a dangerous rain. Eight grabbed Barrie’s hand and started to run. Berg pushed Cassie out of the way, shielding her body with his own and grunting as a brick slammed into the back of his head. He staggered but kept running. Seven herded Mary and Pru and Daphne in front of him to safety, jerking Kate forcibly by the collar as she strained to see what was happening.

  Obadiah moved in the opposite direction, stepping in front of Ayita and Elijah with his arms raised and shaking with strain. The glow of his skin had dimmed, where in the descending darkness it should have been brighter. He was using up energy too fast.

  Whatever new barrier he had erected against Ayita and Elijah, they hit it and flattened out, pressing against it and trying to force their way through. Obadiah’s concentration was int
act this time, though. It held.

  Berg stumbled and fell to one knee, bleeding heavily from the head. Barrie ran to help, while Eight snatched up several clean napkins that had blown off a stack and landed nearby. He handed them to Cassie. “Hold these on the wound and press down hard,” he said to her. Then he and Barrie helped Berg to sit on the ground a safe distance—or at least a safer distance—away from Ayita and Elijah.

  “How do you feel?” Eight asked.

  “I’ll be all right. Is it finished?” Berg swiveled to look behind him, where Obadiah was starting the whole ceremony over again, walking the perimeter of the cosmogram and clapping and chanting.

  Barrie felt sick, physically and in her heart. Not just at the blood and the ruins of what Obadiah had been trying to do, but at the sight of Charlotte’s bones scattered on the ground, and the dark, gaping hole where the roof of the buried chamber had been. And at the tethers that still anchored Elijah and Ayita and wouldn’t let them go.

  “Wait,” she said suddenly. Turning back to Berg, she asked, “Do you have your knife with you?”

  “What do you need it for?” He shifted onto one hip and removed the knife from his pocket. He opened the blade before handing it to her by the thick, black handle.

  Barrie shook her head and ran to Obadiah. “I read somewhere,” she lied, “that you could cut a soul free of its body and blow it toward water to set it free. Is that true?”

  “I’ve never heard of the precise practice, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Going to water is sacred or purifying in some cultures, and the river can be a path for the dead.” Shifting his attention to her briefly, Obadiah raised his brows, but then continued walking the outer circle of the cosmogram. “Still, even if it worked, there’s nothing to say Ayita and Elijah wouldn’t come back, and then they wouldn’t have anything restraining them.”

  Berg raised his eyes. “Unless we destroy the bones and the things that hold them here. That’s possible, now that the room is open, isn’t it?”