Persuasion

by Martina Boone

  “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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  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. Calmer. 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.

  “The fog was Obadiah’s doing.” She tested the name as calmly as she could, waiting for her lungs to seize and her ability to breathe to vanish.

  Nothing happened. Nothing, as if whatever Obadiah had done to himself when he’d flown backward had short-circuited any spells or mind games he had put on her. Slowly she filled her lungs, and let out a sigh. “He’s got a lot of different ways to make himself disappear,” she said.

  Eight’s face took on an ominous stillness. “Are you trying to say that you’ve seen him multiple times and never told me?” He waited for her to give a reluctant nod, and then he shifted his weight back onto his heels. “Dammit, you can’t keep charging off on your own. That guy could have been anyone—a stalker, a murderer.”

  Barrie remembered the way Obadiah had wrung the raven’s neck, as if the motion had been practiced and familiar.

  “Hold on. You think the guy actually killed someone?” Eight asked.

  “No! Well, not a person. A raven. Maybe.” Barrie shook her head. She put a hand on Eight’s arm as his nostrils flared, needing him to understand so much that it made an empty ache in her chest. “It might have been part of the spell.”

  Eight’s jaw clenched. “What spell?” he asked. “Why don’t you try starting at the beginning?”

  Barrie buried her face against her forearms, bracing herself for him to start yelling. Only, he wasn’t Lula. He didn’t throw Lula’s tantrums. Swallowing painfully, she raised her head.

  What had Obadiah warned her about? He had told her not to tell Eight about their bargain. But he had never made her promise not to tell about the curse. Maybe he had counted on his spell for that. Hell, for all she knew, maybe he was dead, and she didn’t need to worry about any of it.

  He couldn’t have been dead, though. Not dead-dead. There was still some kind of magic at work, or his body would have remained where it had fallen.

  “Obadiah’s ancestor was the slave who helped trap the Fire Carrier,” she explained. “He was also the one who put the curse on the Colesworths, which makes more sens
e than the Fire Carrier cursing them, when you think about it. But since the curse is bad magic and multigenerational, Obadiah says that his family has been paying some sort of karmic debt for it ever since. He wants to remove the curse, but he needs me to find a rock that’s been buried here all these years. If I find that lodestone, he can remove the magic anchored to it. He might even be able to remove your gift.”

  “My gift? You were going to let him take away the Beaufort gift without at least talking to me about it?” Eight stared at her as if she’d grown a second head.

  “I was going to see what happened with the curse, and then—”

  “How could you not tell me?”

  Disbelief and disappointment settled onto Eight’s features, and the expression was worse than Lula’s screaming. Barrie fought to keep her lip from trembling.

  “I figured I would find out more before I got your hopes up,” she said. “I don’t even know if he’s telling the truth.”

  “You don’t know.” Eight shook his head. “That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? You don’t know, but I would know—and here you are, putting yourself in danger without me.” He stood up. His eyes had grown bleak and so full of hurt that Barrie couldn’t stand it. “I can’t believe you didn’t trust me enough to try to let me help you,” he said. “Give me credit for having some intelligence. You don’t need to do everything on your own. Any relationship is a two-way street. You want to be loved so badly, but at the same time, you’re afraid you don’t deserve it. You aren’t giving us any kind of a chance. You were mad about me not telling you about the tearoom. But you danced with me outside last night when you already knew you were going to do all this.” He swept his arm around the lawn and up toward the broken columns of the house.

  “That’s not how it was.” Barrie was shivering uncontrollably now, but not with cold.

  “It’s exactly how it was! Don’t you think I wonder if you want me for the same reason that you can’t let Mark’s ashes go? Because you need something to hold on to? You’re wounded and vulnerable, and I’m here and convenient. I know all that, and yet I’m still here. I’m willing to trust that we have something that will grow. I’m willing to give us time to find out what we could be together, and you aren’t willing to give me five minutes of explanation because you don’t give me credit for thinking things through.”

  Every word Eight said was a barb dug into Barrie’s skin. The dread feeling that he was right about her fear left her no room for reaction, and she stood up slowly, numb, aware of his growing disgust but unable to think where to start in her own defense.

  He shook his head when she didn’t answer, and shoved his hand through his hair again as if she made him want to tear it out. “Jesus Christ, Bear. What am I supposed to do to make you understand?”

  There were so many things she needed to say to make him understand, but his anger made her numb and stupid. She stood there trembling.

  Eight finally gave a sigh. “Where is this Obadiah guy anyway?”

  “Something went wrong, and then he disappeared.”

  “What about Cassie? What’s wrong with her?” Eight gestured behind Barrie to where Cassie was walking back toward the small house, without looking back, without stopping to talk about what had happened, without anything.

  Then again, Cassie didn’t like to talk about things that were real. Maybe that was why she made things up. Barrie had a feeling Eight wouldn’t understand that, though.

  “Cassie is complicated. Let’s go back to Obadiah first.”

  Carefully, she explained the ceremony, the explosion, and the horror of what she’d seen, without mentioning the threat to the Watson gift. She finally told Eight about the spell Obadiah had put on her, but that didn’t make him any calmer.

  “You think the explosion and the ghosts were related to Cassie taking the feathers? Or was it something to do with the curse?” Eight stooped to examine the raked-up patches of grass—more than the two handfuls that Obadiah had pulled up himself—and the faint remnants of the chalk.

  “I’m not sure,” Barrie answered. “Obadiah told me he needed to bind his ancestors before they woke up and realized we were trying to break the curse. I would guess they’re awake now. It looked like he was fighting something—or someone. Maybe Cassie distracted him. Or maybe the feathers were part of the magic and her taking them changed something. I don’t even know if the curse is still there. Maybe nothing has changed.”

  That was the worst kind of wishful thinking, though. Whatever had happened with the curse, Eight was still looking at her with his eyes turned as sharp as oyster shells, and his cheekbones standing out like scars beneath his skin. There was an absence of softening in him that said Barrie had broken whatever it was that had been trying to grow between them.

  Was there any way to repair that kind of damage? Barrie’s eyes stung as she realized she didn’t know that, either.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  There was an exquisitely painful aloneness in sitting next to someone and knowing they were too far away to reach. Buckling herself into the passenger seat as Eight settled behind the steering wheel of Pru’s car the next morning, Barrie had no idea how to begin to bridge that distance. With both Pru and Kate in the car, she couldn’t even bring up what had happened at Colesworth Place. She suspected that Eight was counting on that. He hadn’t answered her calls or texts that morning, and he and Kate had shown up at the last minute for the trip to see the horses, leaving no time to talk.

  Sneaking a glance at his profile as he steered the car between the double row of oaks in the direction of the gate, Barrie noted the shadows smudged beneath his eyes as if he hadn’t slept. There was a tightness about him, too, that only added to the sense of distance. Not for the first time, she wished that Pru hadn’t insisted on sitting in the back with Kate and having Eight drive. At least in the backseat, Barrie wouldn’t have had to see Eight’s anger as well as feel it.

  “Are you two fighting?” Kate scooted to the center of the backseat to peer forward at them with an innocent expression that made Barrie want to kill her. “When did you have time to fight?”

  Pru’s eyes had also quickened with speculation. Which was awesome, because it wasn’t enough to have Eight furious. Now Barrie was going to have to manufacture a reason for his anger that had nothing to do with the truth. Why hadn’t he just stayed home?

  “We’re not fighting, Frog Face.” Eight squinted his eyes at his sister in the rearview mirror. “And why don’t you have your seat belt fastened?”

  “God. Shut up!” Kate said, flouncing back against the seat and fumbling for the latch.

  “Frog Face? Seriously?” Barrie said. “That’s awful.”

  “Well, she was an ugly baby. You should have seen her.”

  Kate shook her head at Barrie and rolled her eyes. “I made some unfortunate choices when I was a poor, orphaned child. I’ve been paying for them ever since.”

  “She went around everywhere sticking her tongue out as far as it could go every few minutes. The kids at school still call her Frog.”

  “In my defense,” Kate said, leaning forward to punch him in the shoulder, “Daddy told me that being able to touch your nose with your tongue was a genetic trait. Since he and Eight could both do it and I couldn’t, I convinced myself it meant that they weren’t my real family, and with Mama dead, I didn’t want to be a total orphan, so I convinced myself I just had to practice.”

  Barrie could picture them, the whole broken family. Eight huddled in his closet so no one would see him cry over losing his mother, Kate wandering the halls at school, sticking out her tongue like a frog, and Seven holed up in his office with a combination of guilt and helplessness. How had Pru felt? Had Pru hoped Seven would come and see her? Had she stared across the river and waited for him to come?

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” Kate said, scrunching her nose at Eight. “And stop trying to distract me. You only call me Frog Face when you want to start an argument. W
hich is ironic, because you want to argue so that you don’t have to talk about why you and Barrie are fighting.”

  “For the last time, we aren’t fighting!” Eight slammed a hand on the steering wheel.

  The sun outlined the swags of Spanish moss dripping from the live oaks overhead. Beneath the trees, the light turned green and misty, and along the verge of the grass, shadows raced the car.

  Eight’s jaw did its best impression of being chiseled out of granite, and he leaned over and cranked the dial on the stereo volume, his usual method of avoiding conversation. “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs was playing. The high falsetto begging, “Come on, come on, come on, stay,” made Barrie wince, but Kate and Eight both took up singing.

  “Sing with us,” Kate said. “Please? It’ll cheer you up.”

  Barrie glanced at Pru, who was looking back a bit too intently. She decided Kate was right. Singing was better than explaining. And if she was really lucky, maybe singing would help pause the unending replay in her head. Every time she blinked, she saw the black child huddled in the dirt with the soldier standing over her, the woman running into the burning house, the man scrabbling at the dirt, trying to reach something. . . . Eight’s accusations, too, echoed on a constant loop.

  And where had Obadiah gone? More importantly, had she done what he’d told her so that now his threat was over? Or did the fact that something had gone wrong last night mean she wasn’t off the hook yet? Had she broken the bargain by telling Eight what she’d already told him? She’d spent half the night trying to figure out what she should safely be allowed to say, what she shouldn’t, and how much would change if she told.

  Still singing, Eight nosed the car off onto a side road before reaching Watson’s Point. Occasional weathered houses straggled beside a river of marsh grass on their left, and on the right, the ground sloped gently into a pasture with a series of low jumps set up. A trio of muddy horses had clustered around an old bathtub that doubled as a water trough in the far corner, while a mare ambled away, lashing her tail at unseen flies. At the end of the driveway, a blue-and-white barn sprawled cheerfully beneath a clump of trees, and a woman emerged from it before Eight had even stopped the car.