Persuasion

by Martina Boone

  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.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “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.

  “Like it so far?” Daphne asked as Barrie peered over her shoulder.

  Black trees, draped black moss, and a round white moon. Daphne had taken Barrie’s logo idea and digitized it perfectly. She’d even made the fairy lights on the trees look as if they were glowing.

  “It’s wonderful.”

  “Oh, good.” Daphne grinned at her. “You never know if people are going to be the kind who pick at every tiny detail or if they are the kind who see the big picture.”

  “Forest or the trees?” Eight suggested.

  “Something like that,” Daphne said. “Would you two mind doing the text for the website? Pru said to leave that for y’all, but I’m at a point where it would be good to have it.”

  Pru slid a laptop across the heavy mahogany desk, and after a moment of hesitation Eight pushed it at Barrie and dropped into a chair with his feet planted on the floor and a mulish cast to his jaw that said he wasn’t happy. The expression was uncharacteristic enough that it took her a moment to remember his dyslexia. Was he reluctant to read in front of her?

  She thought about all the things he must have looked up—the yunwi, and Cherokee witchcraft, lodestones, Raven Mockers, Cherokee history, slavery, voodoo. How long had it taken him to read all the different articles and posts online in the course of the night?

  She wanted to slip her hand into his, but his arms were crossed self-protectively over his chest. Settling the computer on her lap, she scooted her chair closer to his and opened the new home page for the restaurant website and started to type while Eight watched over her shoulder with his lips moving silently.

  Come experience culinary magic amid the beauty of the magnificent plantation gardens of Watson’s Landing. Join us for a unique dining experience, eating family-style on the beautiful terrace overlooking

  “Don’t use that twice.” Eight touched the screen to point to the text Barrie was typing on her laptop. “Maybe try something about stepping into the past.”

  “I don’t want this to be about the past,” Barrie said.

  But Eight was still concentrating on the text. “Also, mentioning magic when it’s already in the name of the restaurant is too much. We don’t want to make it seem like an invitation for the crazies to come out. Half the guests are going to refuse to leave before midnight as it is.”

  “Might be worth lettin’ folks stay to see the Fire Carrier, so long as they want to pay for it.” Mary dropped the notebook into her lap and looked from Pru to Barrie. “It’s not like most of ’em would see anythin’ anyway.”

  “God, no,” Barrie said at the same time that Pru and Eight both said, “Absolutely not,” and the phone rang on the desk.

  Setting aside the recipe book she’d been thumbing through, Pru reached over and picked it up. “Hello? . . . What? No.” Her posture stiffened as she listened to whatever the caller said. She turned to Barrie, her fingers twining the cord attached to the black receiver, while the caller continued speaking. “Yes,” she said finally. “I suppose she’s here.” She held the phone four inches from her face and stared at it with a dazed expression as if she didn’t quite know what it was. Then she slowly shook her head and held it out to Barrie. “It’s your cousin. She says she needs to talk to you.”

  Barrie leaned across the desk and took the phone. Eight’s face had been wiped clean of any trace of softness, and Mary sat forward in her chair, her eyes lit with the kind of horrified gleam that people got watching a disaster unfold.

  “Hello?” Barrie said.

  Cassie’s voice held no pretense at civility, much less friendliness. “You need to get over here. Right now.”

  Barrie resisted the urge to whisper in the hope the others wouldn’t hear. They couldn’t avoid hearing. “That’s not possible.”

  “I don’t care what’s possible,” Cassie said. “Whatever ghosts you and your tame witch doctor let loose last night are messing with the equipment over here. The archaeologists have been trying to set up all day, and they’re about ready to quit, so you need to get over here and fix it.”

  Barrie hoped her voice came out sounding reasonable. “We’re in the middle of something—”

  “I don’t give a crap what you’re doing. You figure out how to get here, and bring the creepy witch doctor and get him to undo whatever he did. Do it fast, too, or you’re going to wish you’d never let me out of jail. I’ll announce your little voodoo sacrifice all over the Internet and call every tabloid paper in the country until I turn your life into a living hell. I’m betting your aunt doesn’t know anything about that yet. I don’t expect she’d like it.”

  “I’m sorry. I am. But I don’t know what I can do.”

  “Figure something out. You fix this or else. My reputation is shot to hell already, so I don’t care what I tell people. But Andrew and Dr. Feldman are the only ones who can dig out the tunnel without the columns coming down—at least the only ones willing to work for free. I don’t have time to find anyone else if they give up, and I need to find that gold.”

  Turning her back on Pru’s tight-lipped disapproval and Mary’s evil eye, Barrie couldn’t think what to say. She couldn’t mention Obadiah, and she’d already tried to explain to Cassie several times that whatever was buried at Colesworth Place was more sentimental than gold or money. Her cousin refused to listen.

  Eight pried the phone out of her hand. “What is it you want now, Cassie?” he snapped.

  Barrie couldn’t hear what Cassie answered, but Eight’s expression grew progressively darker until he seemed to recall he had an audience. Relaxing visibly, he glanced at Pru and Mary.

  “It sounds like fun,” he said, emphasizing the last word enough that Barrie caught the sarcasm. “Maybe we’ll try to make it over in a little while.” He put the phone down without slamming it, but Barrie suspected that was a close call, too.

  “I’m surprised at you.” Mary sent a scowl at him to show he hadn’t fooled her. “I can’t believe you’re goin’ to let that girl drag you into more of her mess. I figured you, at least, had a lick of sense.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Cassie had lied again. That shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone.

  Of course the archaeologists weren’t ready to leave Colesworth Place.

  After following Eight up the path leading from the burned-out Colesworth dock, Barrie paused at the top of the rise and took in the domed tents that had sprouted in front of the restored slave cabins like lime-green and yellow mushrooms. Two male college students in cargo shorts and hiking boots staggered from a Prius to the old overseer’s house, their arms laden with picks and sieves and things Barrie didn’t recognize.

  “Not over there, Jerry! Set the digging equipment in the corner, and go get the printer for me.” A blonde with
a long braid swinging from beneath a straw cowboy hat followed them as far as the doorway, wiping her hands on her shorts.

  Closer to where the tunnel had collapsed, two more students were pounding stakes into the grass. After marking each stake with fluorescent tape, they connected them with string to create a gridline of carefully measured squares. Beyond them, where the grass was still torn up from Obadiah’s ceremony and its ghostly aftermath, Cassie stood beside the grad student Andrew Bey. Andrew, his face shielded beneath a Yankees cap, held a laptop computer in one hand and tapped the keys with the other, and did his best to ignore her. Cassie alternated between fussing at him and watching Berg Walters a few feet away.

  Berg was wrestling with something that looked like a lawn mower with a computer display on the handles. After pushing it slowly along the grass another yard or so, he stopped abruptly and tapped the screen with his fist. “I’m still alternating between void and static, and the static is spiking the way it did on the other machine.”

  “I see it.” Andrew Bey looked up from the computer screen, pushed his hat back, and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. He cast a narrow glance at Cassie before turning back to Berg. “All right. Shut it down. We can’t risk a second machine frying out if there’s another pulse. This whole area was a long shot anyway, so we’ll concentrate on the tunnel the way we’d planned.”

  Cassie glared at him with her hands on her hips. “You can’t stop. This is where the gold is buried. I know it is—”

  “How do you know?” Andrew put his cap back on. “I’ve done my best to check your theory, but without the equipment working, we can’t tell what is down there, if there’s anything down there. Yesterday, you didn’t even want to tell us the gold existed. Now today, you know where it is, but you can’t tell us why? Give me some evidence, because common sense says the gold should be over there in the tunnel somewhere.” Swinging around, he pointed to where the two students had set out the gridlines.