CHAPTER NINETEEN
The downside to setting things in motion was how quickly they snowballed out of control. Pru was so excited about the restaurant that she insisted on calling Mary the moment she and Barrie got back to Watson’s Landing. The three of them spent forty minutes on the phone, Pru and Barrie taking turns shouting into Barrie’s cell phone while they made sheet after sheet of scribbled notes about tasks that needed to be done. Between that, a few tentative menus to be priced out, and their own dinner to prepare and eat, it was past ten o’clock before Pru retired to bed and Barrie finally managed to find some peace and quiet to call Obadiah.
Given how much the yunwi hated him, she hadn’t dared leave the disk where they could find it. Standing in the relative privacy of her own room, she pulled the disk from her pocket and made herself ignore the way the yunwi immediately darted under the canopied bed and peered at her from beneath the bedskirt. A wordless screech vibrated in the air.
“I’m doing this to protect you,” Barrie said. “So don’t nag at me. What happens to you and Watson’s Landing if Obadiah takes away the gift?”
Turning her back to them, she studied the disk and half-expected the raven to cock its head at her again, or to fly out from the disk to peck her hand. It didn’t move, and after a wary moment, she flipped the coin over and felt both relief and dread on finding that the phone number hadn’t disappeared.
She dialed, and eerily, Obadiah picked up before the phone had even rung. “You were running out of time, pretty girl. ‘Soon’ means soon. I was afraid you needed a better demonstration of why it wouldn’t pay to cross me. You don’t need a demonstration, do you?”
“No, but ‘soon’ means when it’s possible.” Barrie felt her nerves slip away, to be replaced by a strange calm at the sound of his cold, crisp voice. Obadiah seemed more human now that she was speaking to him during the semblance of a phone call. More normal.
Too normal. It didn’t pay to forget he wasn’t.
“What are you?” she asked, lowering herself onto the edge of the bed and gripping the carved post until it dug into her fingers. The slight pain helped to lighten the mist that clouded her mind, and she was able to think more clearly. “Are you a real person, or something else?”
“Once, a long time ago, I was as real as you are, the same as you are. Now? I’m not sure I know anymore. People do what they must to survive. We are forced to become things we never dreamed or asked to become. We live long enough to see things we never thought or wished to see.” His voice was subdued as he spoke, and then he took a breath that seemed to tremble over the phone line, so that Barrie would have sworn she felt it against her cheek. For an instant, she thought he was sitting beside her, but when she looked, he wasn’t there.
“What time do we go over tonight?” he asked.
“Not tonight.” Nervously, Barrie traced the carved pineapple on the mahogany bed frame with her finger. “Tomorrow at eleven thirty. That was the best I could do, and I hope you can manage to find a boat, because I’m not planning to dog-paddle across that river ever again.”
He was silent long enough that her heart gave a familiar panicked flutter, and then all he said was, “Fine. I’ll meet you on the dock.”
Barrie hadn’t realized her shoulders were clenched until they suddenly relaxed, and then partly because she had already scared herself and partly because the silence was unnerving, she dared to ask what she’d been wondering ever since Cassie had brought it up.
“When you mentioned that the Colesworths had a debt to pay, did you mean the Union gold?” she asked.
She waited, but he didn’t answer. There was no click and no dial tone, either, only silence on the phone and a pause long enough that she gradually became aware that Obadiah wasn’t there. She wondered if he ever had been, and she peered around the room, wondering if he was hidden somewhere, playing games. But the yunwi were watching her with their eyes burning steadily in their faces and their bodies unusually still. They would have been more agitated if Obadiah had actually been in the room.
“God, I wish I knew what was going on,” she said to no one in particular. She tossed the phone down onto the white embroidered quilt, and only when both her hands were empty did she realize that the green disk with the raven was gone again.
Gone.
She scowled at her hands, as if—if she stared hard and menacingly enough—the disk would simply reappear. . . . Because, who knew? It could. It might. She went hot, then cold, then hot again, shaken by fear, uncertainty, and determination, her body swinging through the emotional pendulum until she couldn’t sit still any longer. Air. She needed air.
She ran to the balcony door and let herself out into the sticky night. She half-expected to find a raven standing on the balcony railing, but air and sanity slipped back into her lungs as she stood, shivering and barefoot. Clouds were gathering quickly, but between them the stars shone brightly. Out there, ripped-from-the-universe magic like Obadiah’s wasn’t only plausible; it was inevitable.
Possibly like Obadiah himself, some of these stars weren’t even real anymore. They were suns that had long since died, leaving ghostly echoes shining through years and galaxies. How could there not be magic in a world where stars echoed through centuries and millennia?
Magic itself wasn’t good or evil. Watson’s Landing was magic at its best. Barrie was safe there; Watson’s Landing would keep her safe, and she would keep it safe.
Across on the opposite bank, butterscotch light shone warmly from Beaufort Hall, and a figure stood in an illuminated window on the second floor. Eight. For all his resemblance to his father, Barrie could not mistake him. Her heart recognized the beautiful, sane shape of him even across all the distance. She raised a hand to wave, and he waved back, then turned and walked away. The light in the room winked out.
Elbows braced on the balcony railing, Barrie turned her head downstream to where the houses of the subdivision glowed against the skyline and spilled yellow onto the Santisto’s darkling water. A pair of motorboats floated below the narrow creek that flowed into the wider river across from the Colesworth woods. She couldn’t make out who was in them, or what they were up to, but a minute or two later, her curiosity diverted to a wavering beam of light threading down through the Beaufort garden to the river—Eight holding a flashlight and carrying something large, bulky, and awkwardly shaped. He threw the object onto the floor of the sailboat, cast off the Away, and puttered slowly toward Watson’s Landing.
It never even occurred to her to move; that’s how strange the whole day had been. Later, she would blame her inertia on moonlight or an entirely different form of magic, but she stood mesmerized by Eight’s progress until he had docked and walked through the Watson garden to stand beneath her balcony and look up at her.
“I brought you something,” he called. “Are you going to come down, or are you going to make me pull a Romeo?”
“Shhhh.” Her voice broke along with her heart and the light from Juliet’s balcony window. “Of course I’m coming down.”
She listened at Pru’s door and, after hearing nothing, raced down the stairs, out the kitchen door, and through the garden. At the back of the house, she veered off onto the section of lawn protected from the maze by a series of low boxwood hedges.
Her footsteps stuttered when she saw Eight again. The sun loved his features and his coloring, but the cloud-drawn moon bathed him in shadows that were as much a part of him as his warmth. He held his arms out to her in the moonlight with an old car tire propped against his leg, and she knew she always—always—would love him at least to some degree. Some wants would never fade.
“Nice tire, baseball guy,” she said, walking into his arms. “Not sure it’s exactly the kind of GQ look you normally go for.”
“GQ? Seriously?”
“Maybe I’d be more impressed if I knew why you had lugged it all this way?” Barrie said, but she could feel herself smiling.
“When we were in the chapel yesterday,
I happened to notice there was something missing.”
“That was only yesterday?”
“Yesterday and a lifetime.” Eight picked up the tire and held his other hand out for her. “Come on. Let me show you.”
He pulled her toward him again for a lingering sideways kiss. The warmth of his lips seeped into her. Savoring the moment, she couldn’t help melting against him. Maybe his was the best approach, not to question, not to doubt.
She did doubt, though; she couldn’t help it. And she didn’t want her uncertainty to sour their relationship, which it would eventually. How could it not?
Most of all, she was determined not to let her insecurity make Eight doubt himself. She pulled her hand out of his and reached up to cup his jaw, holding him, bringing him down until he could see her eyes in the clouded moonlight. “I’m sorry I doubted you,” she said. “I’m sorry I doubted us.”
Eight caught her hand in his cooler one and pressed a kiss into her palm before pulling her with him across the lawn and to the other side of the house. Shadows scampered alongside them like barely visible knee-high guardians.
Eight didn’t say a word as they passed through the gate into the cemetery. Barrie tried to tell herself he had a reason for not acknowledging what she’d said, but it grew harder with every step.
“That’s it?” She dug her feet into the grass and stopped. “I tell you I’m sorry I doubted, and I get total silence?”
“You want to have this conversation while I’m holding a dirty tire, or you want to have it when I can give you a memory that you can dust off and hold on to whenever you’re pissed at me for something else?”
“You’re thinking about creating memories?”
“Some moments are going to be memories no matter how we make them. This is one of them.”
Was it possible to secretly smile so big inside yourself that your chest exploded from happiness? Barrie waved her hand at him with a surprising lack of care. “All right, fine. You may commence with the memory-making anytime you’re ready.”
His answering grin made her stumble. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m limited in what I can say, because you told me not to use the word. I’m just going to have to show you.” He turned on his heel before she could answer, and sauntered off whistling “Build Me Up Buttercup,” as much as any guy could saunter while carrying a giant rubber tire.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Eight removed a rope and a powerful flashlight from the cavity inside the tire and propped the latter on a thick branch of the tree that grew inside the chapel. Once the area was better lit, he threw the rope over a high branch, then lashed it around the tire in multiple loops before pulling it taut and testing his weight on the rope to make sure it held. With a sudden movement, he dove to his waist through the opening of the tire and hung suspended off the ground with his arms on one side and his legs on the other.
Barrie’s heart ricocheted off her ribs at the unexpectedness and the Eightness of it. “A tire swing?” she asked. “You didn’t seriously make me a tire swing in the middle of the night?”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Eight let his legs drop back to the ground and backed himself out of the swing, looking uncharacteristically uncertain.
“That depends on why you did it,” Barrie said cautiously.
“It seems like all we’ve done is fight lately, so I wanted something we couldn’t argue about. Also, after the one driving lesson I gave you, you said there were too many things you hadn’t done yet. You were going to give me a list so we could do them.”
“I haven’t had a chance to make a list.”
“Have you ever swung in a tire swing?”
“Not yet.”
“We’d better change that, then.” He caught her waist and lifted her into the swing. His face was shuttered as he steadied her, and then he stood in front of the swing and put his hands on her shoulders across the top of the tire and pulled her close. His eyes were focused on hers so intently, she thought he must see every neuron firing in her brain, every nerve cell jigging breathlessly at his proximity.
“Even if I go to USC and I date every girl in Southern California,” he said, “I’m not going to find another girl like you. Not in a year, or ten, or even a hundred years. I’m not stupid enough to let that go without a fight, so whatever assurances you need, I’ll figure out how to give them to you.” He tossed her one of his careless smiles. “I’ve been out with enough girls to know what I want. I know. You and me together? We’re not the same plain vanilla let’s-date-while-we’re-in-high-school, let’s-go-to-prom, let’s-promise-we’ll-talk-in-college relationship. We’re more like those fireworks on the Fourth of July that keep exploding with new bursts every time they’re done. Before we know it, we’ll be in rocking chairs side by side on the porch, holding hands and watching a houseful of great-grandchildren chasing blue ghost fireflies on the lawn.”
“Blue fireflies?”
“They’re real and they’re rare, which is the point I’m trying to make.” Eight pulled the tire swing even closer, his head tipped forward until his mouth was less than an inch from hers. “You asked me a while ago what I really want. I want time to learn to understand you, every insecurity in your brain, and every gallant, aggravating impulse.”
An imaginary orchestra had begun to play inside Barrie’s head, some golden, epic song with drums and crashing cymbals and joyful violins. She wished she could tell Eight what she was planning, tell him about Obadiah and the lodestones and trying to break the Colesworth curse. Mostly, she wished she could tell him there was a chance to give him what he wanted. But what if it didn’t work? She couldn’t bear it if he was disappointed.
“I’m a girl,” she said. “You’re not supposed to understand me.”
“Most girls are all too easy to understand. People usually want the same petty things, for the same boring reasons.” He leaned even closer until the words were whispered against her lips. “The fact that I don’t understand you may be what I love about you. I’m not going to change my mind about that. Give me credit for having a few brains in my head to go with my undeniable good looks and charm.”
“There’s that self-confidence deficit disorder again.”
“But you believe me now.”
It was starting to rain, and Barrie tipped her head up to the sky, hoping it wasn’t going to be a long or heavy shower. They couldn’t end the conversation here. She didn’t want the night to end.
“Lift up a bit. Hold on to the top of the swing.” Eight reached back into the space inside the tire and, with a flourish, pulled out a red umbrella. “You see? I came prepared. I should have been an Eagle Scout.”
Barrie laughed; she couldn’t help it. “I have to admit, you don’t seem like a red umbrella kind of guy.”
“But you are exactly the kind of a girl who needs a red umbrella.”
“What kind of a girl is that? The kind who doesn’t want to get wet?”
“The kind who ought to come with a warning label.”
Barrie opened the umbrella high above her head, liking the image of herself as a warning-label sort of girl. “So are you going to push me,” she asked, “or what?”
Eight’s teeth flashed in the beam of the flashlight, and he took several steps back, pulling her higher, until he let her go with a shove so that she flew, not too hard and not too fast, but just enough to be a little exhilarating, a little wild, flying high in a tire swing in a cemetery in the dead of night with an umbrella she had to balance to keep right-side up. She flew, and Eight pushed her higher, but never so high or so hard that she was afraid he wouldn’t catch her, rocking her physically the way he always managed to rock her emotions.
The thought sobered her, and she grew aware of the stillness, the silence broken by the distant mumble of the river and the hushed rustle of rain on leaves and stone. With that unerring sense of time she was starting to recognize, she knew it had to be close to midnight, close to the witching hour.
“Stop,�
� she commanded.
“Had enough?”
“Yes, and no, and never,” she said. “But let me down.”
He stopped the swing, leaned on it with both elbows, and kissed her again, slowly and carefully, as if she were made of sugar that might slip away through his fingers.
He took the umbrella and held the swing steady while she shimmied out onto the ground. Then he strode beside her when she hurried out the arched doorway of the roofless chapel and out into the cemetery, past grave after grave after Watson grave until she could see the river.
The Fire Carrier hadn’t reached the water yet. Already, though, the orange glow seeped through the trees and lit the low-hung weeping clouds, and whoever was in the two boats on the river had moved in closer, one of them standing up in the prow of the boat and seemingly in danger of tipping over. Barrie stopped beside a tombstone guarded by a sleeping lamb, and watched the witch’s flames wend through the trees.
“What are you doing?” Eight asked.
“Do you see him?” She nodded toward the Watson woods. The glow was so clear to her, it was inconceivable that it wasn’t visible from miles away. “The Fire Carrier is coming.”
“I see a faint light. But we’ve talked about this.” Eight watched her with that heart-piercing, breath-stealing intensity.
She turned away from the questions, the sympathy in his eyes.
The rain was still coming down, drops plummeting through the trees and smelling inexplicably of licorice. In the beam from the flashlight, they looked like liquid moonlight clinging to Eight’s eyelashes and collecting in his hair. The red umbrella seemed to hold the only color, making the night black and white and red.
“I’ve thought of something else that ought to be done at midnight when it rains.” Eight slipped his arm around Barrie’s waist and drew her closer. “You should put it on your list.”
“I think you’ve seen one too many old movies. You’re not going to sing, are you?”
Persuasion Page 13
