“But she’s only a child.” Mick’s voice was soft and frightened and it was hard to blame him. “She doesn’t understand what—”
“Yes, Dad. I do.” We turned to see Beverly standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Her words were calm, but there was a fierceness in the set of her jaw and cold clarity in her eyes. I’d seen that face before in the mirror, and at that age. Was I a different person now than the child I’d been when I’d looked like that?
I knew. I wasn’t.
She walked forward a few steps and then stopped again to take us all in. “I do understand what this means. If I can stop that, then there’s no choice. I’ll blow the horn or do whatever the instructions say I have to.”
I stood and walked over to her and put both hands on her slim shoulders. She’d taken out the pigtails so that her bright red hair flowed like waves around her face. She looked like an adult suddenly, trapped in a body that didn’t match the strength inside those green eyes. “You could die, Beverly.”
She reached up to touch my hand and there was a hint of something in her eyes, another expression familiar from my mirror. Was it cynicism, so early? But then, I had no idea what trauma she’d had in her life. Perhaps this was just one more piece of a terrible pie that she shouldn’t have had to eat. Like me … so very like me.
She curved one side of her mouth into an ironic smile. “So could you. But us tone-deaf people have to stick together.”
That was the real key, according to Bruno. Beverly and I were old-fashioned tone-deaf. It was why the horns didn’t bother us like other people. Why we could sound them without our eardrums breaking. Yes, there might be a hundred thousand clinically tone-deaf people out there and yes, it was possible we could find others who had siren heritage and could blow the horns. But could we do it in time?
Adriana motioned from the window. “Mr. Fulbright is back. Are we ready?”
“No,” I said honestly, still staring into those bright green eyes. “But that doesn’t really matter.”
“Are you sure you want to do this, Nathan?” Standing in the small courthouse, Mick was staring at a piece of paper with a fine trembling in his hands. “I’m not positive it’s legal.”
The old man nodded once, firmly. “It gives the terms in writing, it’s signed, and Joe’s signed as notary. Once you hand me a ten-dollar bill, it’s a deed. You’ll own this land and there’s not a thing anyone can do to take it from you provided you eventually pay off the twenty-four-million-dollar note.” He shrugged. “And the first payment isn’t due for two years. If you don’t have the money by then … and we’re not dead, I or my heirs will just take back the land.”
Mick looked truly torn. Being in law, no doubt he knew how many things could go wrong. I shrugged. “Couldn’t you add in a sentence that nullifies the deal if you don’t get the bequest? In case the challenge to the Will succeeds?”
Fulbright nodded his head. “I’d agree to that. Seems fair.” He pulled the paper out of Mick’s hands and proceeded to carefully print the words and initial them. He handed it to the other man—Joe, who was acting as notary. “You need to initial it, too?”
The man nodded and did. “For a situation like this, I’d suggest the Buyer also sign.” He pushed the pen across the desk toward Mick, who was nearly as pale as me. “Then there’s no questions.” When Mick didn’t move, Joe half-stood from his chair. “Mick. Look at me.” The terrified man did. “Would I ever suggest anything that could ruin your name or family or stand you in front of me?”
There was something about the way he said it that caused me to look around the room. Ah. A brass plaque was screwed to the door behind the swinging wooden gate that separated the room. Judge Joseph Robertson. I could tell the old stone courthouse had recently gotten a face-lift to return it to its original glory. The dark wood gleamed and pale blue paint the color of robin eggs on the walls was edged with white woodwork all the way up to a hammered-tin ceiling that was nearly identical in design to the one in my office. Must have been a common pattern back in the day.
Mick picked up the pen and initialed, then handed the paper back to the judge. “I’ll trust you to get this recorded, if you don’t mind.” He pulled out his wallet and took a deep breath before opening the double fold. “May my wife forgive me if this goes badly.” He gave a nervous chuckle. “I’d ask the Good Lord’s forgiveness instead, but I’m more afraid of Molly.”
“It’ll be okay, Dad. You’ll see.” Beverly came up behind him and gave him a bear hug while he handed over the money. His eyes shut and his arm snaked around to pull her tight against him for a long moment.
He snuffled hard once. “Damned allergies. Well, we’d better get going before your mother changes her mind about me keeping you out of school for the da—”
Nausea hit my stomach hard enough to raise bile into my throat and mouth. I wasn’t the only one feeling that way, either. Bruno was heaving whatever he’d had for breakfast into a patch of cactus and Beverly was on her knees in a wide expanse of knee-high dry grass that had abruptly replaced the courthouse. She vomited noisily and even Okalani looked a little unstable. “I’m sorry, Highnesses. I tried to teleport us to the cave the princess saw in Mr. Fulbright’s mind, but we were pushed away.”
I didn’t get a chance to answer before Fulbright was spitting fire: “Damned fool know-it-all mind readers!” He was the picture of backcountry fury, shaking his walking stick at us and spewing spit with each word. “If you’d waited five minutes I woulda explained why it was so important we had to finish the deed first!”
Bruno had recovered and was waving his hand in the air in slow arcs. As I watched, symbols appeared and disappeared as though he were shining a black-light bulb past fluorescent stone. “Wow, this is very old magic. And Nathan’s right. It’s pagan … land based. Mick, see if you can walk across this line.” He picked up a wide stick and pulled it hard across the ground, creating a rough line in the grass.
Mick approached Bruno tentatively, hands stretched out like he was reaching for a wall in a dark room. Nothing stopped him and he walked forward. He shrugged and looked backward. But Bruno still couldn’t enter and I could feel the pressure of the barrier even from where I was standing, a dozen feet away.
Fulbright stepped right across, which confused Mick. The old man pointed a shaking finger at him with a self-satisfied smile. “Yep. You’re the owner, but now you know why I hold the mortgage. Till it’s paid, I still own rights in the land.” He walked forward pretty quick, a snarky laugh wheezing out of him. “C’mon then. I’ll show you what you own.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know he was going to do this.” Mick had no choice but to shrug at us and chase Fulbright. Then Mick turned in mid-jog and called back, “I’ll take pictures if I can—there’s a camera in my phone!”
I threw up my hands in frustration and looked at Bruno. “Isn’t there anything you can do to get through this barrier?”
He squatted down and then sat in the grass, patting the dirt beside him in invitation. “The only thing anyone can do at this point is pull up a rock and wait. I guess you’ve never heard of a fee-simple barrier?”
I thought back to my college classes and even my recent library acquisitions but finally shook my head. “Does that term mean something?”
“Well, it’s a big thing in real estate law, but it’s also what puts pagan magic in priority over any ritual or innate magic.” He must have seen my confusion, because he twitched his finger for me to step forward and then patted the ground again with an expression of impatience. Okalani and her mother sat on the dirt, as did Beverly, but Adriana found a relatively flat boulder to perch on.
What the hell. I sat where his hand was patting.
“Pagan magic is tied to the physical world. Father Sun, Mother Earth, Sister Moon, et cetera. Land used to belong to anyone at large … until people began to allow others to rule over them. Then the Crown became the owner by mutual consent of all. The Crown granted fee estates to people—giving them a freehold interest.”
“Wonderful history lesson on land. But does this have anything to do with the barrier?”
He dipped his head once, bemused as usual at my impatience. He always found my frustration at his calm amusing. “It does. When the Crown granted the ‘fee-simple’ freehold, it decreed that the ownership was”—and he raised fingers into the air to make quotation marks—“ ‘from the heavens above to the center of the earth.’ Magic that’s tied to the land to prevent entry follows those same markers. There is no way—and I mean no way—to cross a pagan fee-simple barrier while the owner is present. You can’t dig under it or fly over it. It’s a solid mountain of magic that passes beyond our reach.”
I shook my head. He was wrong. “But that makes no sense. If that was true, then any Pagan priest would be completely safe at home just by casting a simple spell on the ground. And we know that’s not true.”
One finger rose into the air with a peaceful, patient expression on his face. “Ahh … grasshopper. You need to listen closer. I said pagan magic. I don’t mean magic created by the Pagans, the religion with a capital P, but old pagan, with a lowercase p. It’s the land itself that’s casting us out, not a mage or witch who’s raised a circle. This barrier has been here for a very long time. It could have been cast by the original Captain Fulbright or his wife—if she was a siren witch—or even by an older group of humans or protohumans. It’s part of the land, like oil or gas or even fossils. This is a really unique thing. I hope I survive this mess so I can get Mick’s and Nathan’s permission to study it. A person could make a doctoral thesis about just this one piece of ground.”