Persuasion (21 page)

At nine thirty, after several hours of debating a thousand details for the restaurant and the website with Pru and Mary and Daphne and all three Beauforts, Barrie closed her sketchbook and stood up from the kitchen table.

“I think I’m done for the night.” She beamed a what-I-really-really-want-most-is-to-go-to-my-room vibe at Eight, which was as close to what she really wanted as she could get.

The uncertain success of trying to fool Eight was one of the worst aspects of having him know what she wanted. And she had stupidly told him to keep what he felt from her to himself when what she should have done was test him to find a way to work around the gift. As it was, all she knew for certain was that Eight couldn’t tell
why
she wanted something.

“You’re not getting a migraine, are you? Or coming down
with a bug?” Pru laid the back of a hand across Barrie’s forehead. “It’s no surprise. All this stress.”

“This planning is making my brain hurt, and you look tired, too, Aunt Pru. What we both need is a good night’s sleep.” Tipping her head in Pru’s direction, Barrie bugged her eyes at Seven,
wanting
him to let Pru go up to bed.

Pru crossed toward the sink. “I’ll get you a couple of Tylenol and some water. We should probably all get some rest. It’s going to be another long day tomorrow.”

“I still think it’s a bad idea,” Seven said.

“What’s a bad idea?” Barrie looked from Seven to Pru and back again.

Pru rounded on Seven, her hands moving to her hips and her gray eyes flashing. “Are you too stubborn to ever stop arguing?”

Seven stepped forward and put both hands on her shoulders. “I know this is important to you, but you can’t make up for twenty years in a week. Why don’t you give it some more time until things settle in? A month. Thirty days. That’s not long to wait.”

“What isn’t she waiting for?” Barrie asked as Pru pulled away from Seven and filled a glass with water from the tap.

“It was meant to be a surprise,” Pru said. She extracted a small bottle of medicine from the junk drawer under the kitchen counter. “You and I have a date in the morning to see Alyssa Evans about a couple of horses.”

“Really?” Barrie clapped her hands before she remembered she was supposed to have a headache. Sobering, she took the glass of water and the small white tablets that Pru handed her.

“Yes, really. So you’re going to want to feel your best. We’ve got a solid start on the restaurant, and the rest of these details will keep. As far as waiting goes”—she darted a look at Seven—“I’m through waiting. For anything. Watson’s Landing has had horses for three hundred years, and I want to pass that down to you and your future children.”

“I thought we needed the stables for when the movers deliver Lula’s furniture,” Barrie said.

“I’ve arranged for the auction company to be here again when the movers arrive. They’ll take away any of Lula’s things we decide not to keep right as the pieces come off the moving truck. The more I think about all this, the more I love the idea of clearing out this whole house and starting fresh without all the dents and history.”

Barrie thought it would be both a shame and a relief to let all that history go. The past could be a burden that weighed you down. At the same time, it provided ballast. Amid the scratches and scars at Watson’s Landing, Barrie knew who she was far more than she’d ever known in the too-perfect replica of the house that Lula had recreated in San Francisco.

Throwing out all that history was a pity, but in the end,
furniture—things—didn’t matter. If letting the furniture go and bringing the horses back was what Pru needed, then Barrie would help make that work.

“Can I come with you to Alyssa’s?” Kate splayed her elbows on the table and glanced hopefully from Pru to Barrie. “I know her horses pretty well from the local shows.”

Pru’s faint smile was shadowed beneath the yellowed bulbs of the kitchen chandelier. “Of course. I was hoping you would help us out here until the horses settle in and everything calms down again.”

She nodded insistently at the pills in Barrie’s palm. Cornered by her own duplicity, Barrie swallowed them and set down the glass. She looked up to find Seven Beaufort watching Pru with a mixture of pain and sadness that he wiped away when he caught Barrie’s scrutiny.

“In theory, Kate is grounded from horses until she applies herself to her schoolwork, but since it’s summer—and you need the help—I won’t press the point.” Seven stopped beside Kate and gently tugged a strand of hair that had escaped from her barrette. “But all right. Let’s leave Pru and Barrie to get their rest.”

Kate’s grin reminded Barrie very much of Eight as Seven managed to herd both his offspring out the door. Barrie stood at the railing waving good-bye as Seven and Kate went down the steps together.

Eight leaned in to her for a quick stolen kiss. “Whatever you’re up to,” he said into her ear, “don’t do it.”

“Don’t do what?” Barrie asked, thinking,
I want to go to bed. I want this headache to stop. I want to go to bed. I want this headache to stop. I want to go to bed. I want this headache to stop. . . .

“Anything crazy or stupidly courageous. I know you’re up to something.”

“I don’t have a clue what you mean.”

“Sure you don’t.” Eight’s eyes were bright and too intelligent. He cupped both hands at the back of her neck and pulled her closer for a softer kiss, the kind that lingered and made the backs of Barrie’s knees soften into noodles.

She waited until he reached the bottom of the stairs, and when she turned, Pru was standing just inside the kitchen. Edging past, Barrie went to gather the remaining plates off the table.

Pru locked the door, carefully set the chain, and punched in the code to the new alarm system that had been installed that morning. “Frustrating, isn’t it?” she asked. “I remember that feeling so well.”

The stack of plates wobbled in Barrie hands. “What feeling is that?”

“The ache of wanting a Beaufort, and the frustration of knowing that he knows exactly what I want. Go to bed, sugar. I’ll take care of the cleanup here.”

Upstairs, Barrie waited in bed fully clothed, with the sheets huddled up to her chin, half-expecting the door to open and Pru to pop her head in to check on her. The previous night, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been caught sneaking out. Tonight it would.

There was only silence in the corridor, and the sound of doubt inside Barrie’s head. It had never occurred to her that uncertainty could sound like cymbals crashing, like hearts cracking, while certainty was as silent as a thief. She had no choice about trying to break the Colesworth curse. So why did she doubt so much?

She’d taken the precaution, earlier that day, of unlocking the doors to one of the bedrooms farther down the balcony. At eleven ten, she rolled a batch of winter sweaters inside an extra blanket into a human shape and tucked the bundle under the covers on her bed.

Across the river at Beaufort Hall, a light was on downstairs, but Eight’s room was dark. Hoping that meant he was asleep, Barrie slipped out onto the balcony and then back inside through the unlocked door. After creeping through the house, she punched in the security code so the alarm would let her exit and then rearm itself.

Unlike the previous night, no clouds ringed the moon or kept the stars from cutting through the darkness. Recently installed spotlights made the exterior walls of the house shine
like a wedding cake trimmed in glitter dust and formed pools of gold beneath the trees.

The
yunwi
milled around Barrie, clutching at her jeans and pulling the orange laces of her hot pink Kate Spade sneakers, trying to pull her back. She half-expected Obadiah to be waiting beside the fountain, but he wasn’t there. Nor was he at the dock. She sat at the edge and waited, her legs swinging above the water. Frogs sang, and the occasional splash of a fish or small creature sounded above the shush of the river, but that was all. The two boats still floated downstream—or maybe they were different boats. It was impossible to tell. There was virtually no movement until a flashlight bobbed on the bank at Colesworth Place and Cassie wound her way down the steep bank toward the river.

Fog sprang up from nowhere, billowing from the water and eddying around the marsh. Barrie barely had time to wonder at how quickly it had risen, before a splash beside the dock made her startle.

“The girl is late.” Obadiah appeared in a boat that Barrie would have sworn hadn’t been there a second earlier. He grasped the wooden post to pull himself the final foot to the dock.

The
yunwi
ringed Barrie in a protective circle. A few darted in to kick at Obadiah’s hand, and he drew back as if he felt them, but then his lips twitched with amusement.

“Control your pets,
petite
,” he said, “or I shall do it for you.”

“Don’t,” Barrie said, not sure whether she was speaking to him or the
yunwi
.

She shouldn’t have been surprised at anything Obadiah did or said, but her heart did its best impression of a jackhammer anyway. With his black dress shirt open at the throat, he looked less formal than he had before, but not by much.

“Is there a special school where you go to learn creepy entrances and exits?” she asked, pretending to be brave. “And why are you wearing a suit to row across a river?”

He bared his teeth at her benignly, light flashing on the gold incisors. “You really will say anything, won’t you?” He sounded amused, and his dark skin seemed to absorb the moonlight. “There was a time when people wore suits instead of blue jeans and shorts.”

“When was that?” Barrie watched him carefully.

But he gave nothing away. “All these questions will make me think you don’t trust me,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you think less of me if I did?”

“Yet here you are anyway. Why is that, I wonder?”

“Maybe because between the blackmail and the hocus-pocus you didn’t give me any choice.”

“Only because you want both your Beaufort boy and your magic. You’ll have to figure out for yourself which is more important.” He grinned at her again. “I ought to dislike you, but I find that I don’t. You should learn to trust me.”

Barrie packed as much loathing as she could convey into a single look, and wished the
yunwi
had something they could throw at him. “Trust is not something you can ask for. It’s like faith; you either have it or you don’t.”

“I don’t believe I’ve done a single thing to lose yours,” Obadiah said.

Yet.

The word wasn’t spoken, but it rang in the darkness just the same.

Obadiah held his hand out to Barrie, and she lowered herself into the rowboat. A soundless cry went up from the
yunwi
, but she couldn’t do anything to reassure them.

Shrouded in the unnatural fog, the Santisto was surreal as Obadiah rowed them across. There was a sense of waiting, of time or motion held in abeyance, and the absence of the common sounds Barrie had come to recognize sent up its own cadence of alarm. Where had the frogs gone? The humming insects? Why was there no occasional leap of a fish or the drum of an alligator’s tail? None of those things broke the steady splash of the oars slicing into the water and emerging again dribbling liquid silver.

Despite the fog, Obadiah had a glow that came from his skin and illuminated the boat around him, as if he had dipped himself in phosphorescence. Sitting on the narrow bench, Barrie rubbed her temple and took the opportunity
to study his face. How had she ever, even for a moment, thought he reminded her of Mark? Now that she thought about it, though, he seemed younger than she’d thought at first. He rowed with his back and legs, cutting through the water easily, and she felt tired just watching him. Then the strain of the oars exposed a half inch of wrist below the long black sleeve, and a gleam of white drew her eye to a bracelet made of teeth.

Human teeth.

A hiss of breath escaped her. But while she watched, the bracelet vanished. There, and then gone, as if it had never been.

Her eyes met Obadiah’s, and his held only an open and defiant measuring, daring her to react. She sat rigid, not even realizing they had reached the other side of the river until the boat ran aground.

The Colesworth dock wasn’t entirely derelict; only the last ten feet or so had burned. Obadiah hadn’t stopped to tie up there. Instead, he dragged the small craft up the bank. Barrie glanced down at her Kate Spade sneakers, then shrugged and pulled them off before getting out. She shuddered at the squishy mud, remembering Ernesto shoving her down into it, Ernesto’s fingers digging into her skin the night of the explosion, his fist slamming her down into the water.

“This is the guy?” Cassie flicked a glance at Obadiah as she emerged from the fog to meet them.

Barrie allowed herself an eye roll to conceal her nerves as she stepped up on the bank and slipped her shoes back on. “No. I’m rowing across the river in the dead of night with a guy who is
not the guy
,” she said.

“That’s funny. I never realized you had a sense of humor.” Cassie stepped back to let Barrie pass. “I guess you’re feeling a little full of yourself now that you’ve killed my father. Was that a boost of self-confidence for you? Do you feel less like a weak little girl?”

Cassie’s words slammed Barrie in the chest. She couldn’t draw in air, as if her lungs had squeezed themselves shut and refused to re-expand. She wondered if this was how a fish felt when it was dying.

What Cassie said was technically true.

By calling for the Fire Carrier, she had caused the explosion.
She
had killed.

How had that not dawned on her until this moment? She might not have killed them directly, but she had reached for the Fire Carrier, called to him, and all he had done was answer. The flames he had spilled onto the water had shot straight to Wyatt’s speedboat from Watson’s Landing, and if Barrie hadn’t seen it coming and jumped into the water, if she hadn’t
known
, would she have been incinerated, too?

Or was she immune to the Fire Carrier’s flames because she was a Watson?