Persuasion by Martina Boone

continued with the air of someone who had already won a bet. “There’sa lodestone buried on the Colesworth property that binds the curse to the family and the family to the plantation. I need you to find it for me.”
    Barrie stared at Obadiah, taking in the too-steady way he watched her. It struck her as evasive. He was lying, or hiding something. “Did Cassie send you? Is that what this is about?”
    “No one sent me. My ancestor laid the curse on the Colesworth family. Finding the stone would let me try to break it.” Obadiah sighed and shook his head. “Dark magic rebounds on the caster. What you wish on someone else, you reap in return. The same way the curse passes from generation to generation in the Colesworth family, the karmic price of casting it has passed from mother to child in my family ever since. I’m tired of seeing them suffer.”
    A chill crawled up Barrie’s spine. “Why now?”
    “Because you’re here with your gift. You can find the stone, and when the Colesworths finally pay their debt, I can break the curse.”
    “What debt?”
    “Blood and years and lives. Which isn’t the point.” Obadiah’s voice took on a soothing tone. “You have no reason to care about the curse as long as it doesn’t affect you or Watson’s Landing. Compared to the curse, removing the spell that created the Beaufort gift would be child’s play. If you want it removed. That would be your choice. You would onlyhave to find that lodestone, too.” His smile turned oily and smooth, and he held his hands out, palms open, as if to show he was holding nothing back. “You see? I can be generous as well. I may not know where the other stones are buried, but the Scalping Tree is a landmark no one can miss.”
    Barrie turned instinctively in the direction of the enormous oak at the center of the woods where the Fire Carrier emerged and disappeared each night. Local legend said braves had once hung the scalps of their enemies on it in tribute to the ancient spirit, and she had felt the pull of something lost emanating from it the moment she’d first arrived at Watson’s Landing. That had turned out to be from the keys to the tunnel, which Emmett had hidden in a recess beneath the trunk. But she and Eight had retrieved those already.
    “There’s nothing else lost in the woods. I would feel it if there were,” she said, but even as she spoke, she acknowledged to herself that there was something . She had attributed it to the Fire Carrier himself.
    “The Watson and Beaufort lodestones aren’t lost. Thomas Watson and Robert Beaufort buried the stones themselves as part of the Fire Carrier’s bargain. I may not be able to find the others, but the area around the Scalping Tree is not so large that I wouldn’t eventually find it myself. I’m not above a bit of revenge, petite .” Obadiah’s lips twisted, and he blinked a little too slowly, as if he were seeing something about himselfhe didn’t like. “Given a choice between my family and yours, make no mistake which I’ll choose.”
    There was something in the way his eyes shifted that made Barrie not entirely sure she believed him, but the yunwi seemed to have no such doubts. Their soundless shrieks of fury made Barrie wince. They rushed at Obadiah, and the handfuls of shell and gravel they had been throwing swelled to a barrage.
    Several slivers of shell bounced off Obadiah’s cheek. His face shimmered under the onslaught, like a holographic projection losing power. For an instant, Barrie wasn’t sure what she saw there, a man Mark’s age, or someone older, different.
    He put his finger up to wipe his skin, and it came away glistening with drops of red. Frowning at the droplets, he circled his finger in the air. The flurry of pebbles and white shards stopped and hung, suspended. Then in a rush of air they swirled and spun, faster and faster, climbing skyward until they vanished.
    Barrie’s hair whipped into her face. All around her, the yunwi darted behind