A Murder of Magpies (11 page)

My mom’s friends, our neighbors, they betrayed us before. Mom was rash, but none of
us hurt anybody on purpose. That didn’t mean people weren’t killed. We were different.
If Ward found out how different we were, could I be sure he wouldn’t go Judas on me?

***

The afternoon was a gloomy Sunday, over a week into November, over a week since Ward
returned to Minnesota. The sky was quilted with clouds, and the surrounding evergreens
were dark, pointy, dense. I sat outside on the steps, working in my scrapbook.

Mom’s frantic as she clings to Dad on the living room floor. His arms fold around
her as she rocks back and forth. Someone else’s blood sprayed in reddish dots on her
forearms and neck, on her face. There’s death all over her. Death she caused.

“Oh, God, Lorna!” Dad gathers her against him until she’s in his lap. “What’d you
do?”

When Mom died in the fire, all my tangible memories were lost with her—from the Snow
White costume that she sewed for my third-grade play to the lipstick I stole from
her vanity. A thousand snatches of her charred and lost. Six months ago, Rain sent
some photos he found dating to when he, Mom, and Dad were in high school, a history
of my parents’ early days through Jonah’s and my first birthday. I glued dried Spanish
moss from a craft store to the page with a cutout of peaches from a can of pie filling.
Two things I recalled best about Georgia. Next, I mounted one of Rain’s photos on
the page.

“I like that picture.” Jonah pointed to our parents’ wedding photo. They were so young,
only nineteen. It was hard to believe they were only a few years older than I was
now.

“Think
Dati
knew about her Mind Games by that point?” I asked.

Jonah shrugged. “I’m more curious if he knew we’d inherit her abilities.”

Mom’s father had worked Mind Games. So did his mother, my great-grandmother. Grandpa
Bengalo had steel-gray hair smelling of chicory hanging to his belt.
Bapo
had lived in Hemlock and died when I was seven. When you’re little, sometimes you
overhear things and not know what they mean.
Bapo
always said he couldn’t be seen with Mom, that his clan’s
baro
might bring him to a
kris
for talking to her.
Kris
were for only terrible offenses. Mom said it was fuddy-duddies gassed up on cigar
smoke and wine, casting judgment and telling people what they could and couldn’t do.
So what had she done that’d been so bad even her own father abandoned her?

We were alone with no clan. Because of Mom. Dad never discussed his
vitsa
, but Mom once let it slip after too much wine that his family disowned him. What
had they done, and why did I feel like Jonah and I were paying for it?

Jonah’s palm rested on my shoulder, and his voice slipped over my mind.
Ward wants you to meet him at Café du Chat Noir in an hour. I told him you’d be there.

I elbowed him.
Got anything else to put on my calendar while you’re at it?

Truth was I hadn’t seen Ward since the night he stayed, though we’d talked. He’d been
too tired to talk much, but even his voice over the phone had brought a welcome hush.
Still, my body hummed with electricity.

Try not to knock out the lights
, Jonah wisecracked and sat beside me.

If it happens, I’ll use your old standby: just a power surge.

He put his arm around me. The currents coming off him were relaxed. He tucked my scrapbook
under his arm and gathered my supplies.
Sister Tremblay called.

What’d she want?
I wondered.

Dati
took the call, but I’m keeping my eye on her. We’re golden, all right? Don’t worry.

Sister Tremblay stopped by Fire Sales twice. Each time, Dad leaned back and played
with his glasses. Uneasiness swelled around him even if he didn’t say anything. I
felt it. They spoke in whispers, and Dad was too good at blocking Jonah and me from
his head.

I touched Jonah’s arm.
Mind what you say to that woman. And especially mind what you do.

He mimicked my concerned face, the bunched forehead and penetrating stare, and snickered.
“Vayda girl, come on. I’m not dense.”

“No Mind Games around her. Period.”

“If the lady of the manor insists.”

Did he really think his Mind Games were immune from detection? I liked Black Orchard.
I liked the conifers and isolated roads. I even liked the cold. All it took was the
wrong person to spot him opening a door or retrieving a pencil with his mind, and
we’d be gone.

“By the way, I’m hooking up with Chloe while you’re away,” Jonah announced. “Give
me a signal when you’re coming home so I can scoot her out of here.”

“So are you two are really back together or fooling around? If you’re messing with
her head to make her be with you…”

“You gonna throw stones?” The sunset warmed his skin with its dying rays, but his
eyes remained black. “I didn’t think so. I helped Chloe. That girl was so wound up
in doing what everybody else wanted that she was miserable. Is it that hard to believe
she’s happier forgetting about them?”

“It’s not who Chloe is.”

“I haven’t forced her into doing anything. She hasn’t been hurt. Actually, she has
a damn good time with me, the way she used to. You really think what I’m doing is
wrong?”

I wrapped my arms around myself while Jonah descended the steps and strolled past
the barn to the woods, heading out for a walk. The boy was trifling with something
he shouldn’t, something twisted and, yes, wrong. All that energy he pushed onto others,
some of it had to come back.

***

As I entered Café du Chat Noir, I snuck up on the table where Ward was lost in the
beat from his headphones, his left hand working in a sketchpad. I drummed on the table,
and he yanked off his headphones. Before either of us spoke, his arms wound around
me, and my body snuggled close despite the shocks bursting between us.

“It’s good seeing you,” he said after a waitress came by to take my order.

“I missed you, too.”

As the waitress set down his coffee and my hot tea, Ward handed me an iPod along with
a makeshift booklet. The tracks he’d loaded on the iPod were an indie hodgepodge,
and ink and pencil sketches filled the booklet. My house. Me from behind in the woods
with wind tugging at a long, black skirt. Him sitting on stairs. Stacks of Tennessee
Williams’s work. Bernadette.

“Magpie’s Mix,” I read aloud. “What’s this?”

“Some songs you can’t live without,” Ward said. “I thought about calling it ‘A Flock
of Magpies’ or something like that, but I don’t know what the name for a group of
magpies is.”

“It’s called a murder.” My fingers running over the booklet, I beamed. “This is incredible,
gadjo
.”

He sipped his coffee. The currents from him whizzed through my hands. With his stormy
eyes and skewed smile, he was distinctly Ward. Except for the clinks of the baristas
washing coffee mugs and spoons and some old-time jazz on the speakers, the café was
quietly comfortable—until I faced Ward. Energy arced between us. He licked his lip
and leaned in toward me, his hand sliding across the table to cover mine. I shifted
back. Then toward him.

“How was Minnesota?” I asked.

“Same as when I left.” Ward paused while the barista brought him a second black coffee.
“Drake, strangely, had friends. Even the ones he burned came, and not one spit on
his grave.” His mouth frowned, and he coughed a few times. “The obituary read that
Drake died unexpectedly. What the fuck. He was a smackhead for years. It wasn’t just
heroin either, though that was the cheapest and easiest to get. He did laudanum, morphine,
and opium when he could find them. He was a dope fiend through and through. That he
died wasn’t unexpected.”

He ducked low, his leather coat too big on him, made for someone taller, broader.
Cold ebbed out of me. If it relaxed me, maybe this wash going over him would do the
same.

His voice grew firmer. “I don’t miss the midnight barges into my room raiding my cash
drawer for a score. I don’t miss being careful of needles in the trash. My dad died
years ago, but the body was still Drake’s, you know?”

The bitterness of his words plunged into me. I couldn’t imagine not missing Mom. Her
voice singing harmony with the radio, the messes she left in the kitchen, and the
mock-innocent look she gave Dad when he bemoaned her accounting mistakes. I hated
living without those things.

Ward tilted his head. “Why so sad?”

Few people knew Mom was dead, and no one in Black Orchard knew how she died. Ward
couldn’t really know me unless he knew about Mom.

“My mom died two years ago,” I admitted. “It changed everything.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“She was murdered.”

He almost didn’t react but for a slight rise of his brow and a whispered, “Jesus.”

There it was, out in the open.

For the first time since I’d come to Black Orchard, someone knew my mother’s death
wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t only a house fire. That Dad, Jonah, and I survived was
a miracle, but some miracles had a blood price. My mother could’ve been saved. She
deliberately wasn’t.

“I sound like such a prick,” Ward blurted. “I had no idea. I really thought your parents
were divorced.”

“To talk about the dead is to call back the spirit instead of letting it rest,
gadjo
. I let my mother rest.” He cocked his head, but I cut him off. “Before you speak,
no, what you’re going through isn’t the same. Doesn’t mean it’s any easier. It hurts.
It hurts like no other pain.”

After a while, his coffee was gone, and we left Café du Chat Noir for a walk in the
November darkness. Trinket shops lined the street, and eccentric bistros interspersed
with banks and offices. Surrounded by mock gaslights and cobblestone roads, walking
there transported me to olden times. Tiny snowflakes rambled down from the clouds,
and Ward eyed the rising moon. A brief smile etched on his lips before he swiped at
the snow in my hair. Spheres of electricity swirled in my palms as he lowered his
face. I wanted to let go and damn the consequences of blowing up every street lamp
in downtown Black Orchard.

“You’re strange,” he said. “I’m calm when I’m with you, and I don’t know why. You’re
doing something to me, Vayda.”

“No, I’m not.”

His cheek grazed against mine. “You are. I want it.”

And I know what you can do
. He reached for my hand, almost too polite, but when I laid my fingers in his palm,
he tugged me against him. I wrapped my arms around his neck and stood on my tiptoes
while his hands roamed down my sides to my hips.
And
I know what you can do.
Perhaps the wind flared my skirt. Perhaps it was the charge of our energies feeding
through me. His breath scalded my cheek as his mouth hovered over mine.

An inch apart.

A centimeter.

Less.

“You know what you can do?” I asked against his lips.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he whispered.

The whirring in my chest became a blitz as his lips pushed into mine. A flick of his
tongue deepened the kiss. His hand curled around my neck, and my fingers tugged on
his coat’s lapels for balance while my mind wound in a dizzying spin.

This was happening too fast. I was scared and wanted more and—He kissed me again,
rough, fluid, far from timid or innocent. His fingers on my hips gripped harder, and
his mouth found my neck. Snowflakes pirouetting from the clouds melted in my open
eyes.

“Stop,” I choked on the word and pushed off from him.

He winced. “Vayda, what the hell? What’d I do?”

“It’s not you. I’m sorry,” I hiccupped and dashed over the sidewalk as fast as my
blue Chucks would take me. The soles of Ward’s boots trampled the concrete behind
me. My breath flooded the air with white smoke. I couldn’t stop. If I stopped, he’d
find out what I was.

Vayda

School the following day physically hurt. My head throbbed. Light stung. All because
my barriers had shattered, and rebuilding the wall took more time than a single night.

Ward inspected the origami triangle I dropped in his lap while returning from the
restroom. He maneuvered it between his fingers before flicking it into the recycling
bin.

Damn. He even punted away my note.

I’d dreamt of kissing Ward, of his lips, rough and thrilling. Then his face, sand
dollar-pale and equally fragile, broken. A snap, dust. Running away like that, what
was I thinking? All he’d done was open up to me, and in return, I hurt him.

With a huff, Ward hunched down. He wouldn’t look at me, listen to me, or read my words.
There was no easy gliding through him today. There was nothing.

Sister Hillary Lauren scrawled a William Blake quote on the chalkboard. The walls
were inscribed with lines from his poems. On her desk, she even had a picture of herself
posing near Blake’s grave. Vanity was clearly her sin. On the chalkboard, her cursive
read, “‘I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry
with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.’”

Satisfied her penmanship was legible, she said, “Time for a pop quiz.”

The rip of paper torn from notebooks punctuated a collective groan. Sister Hillary
Lauren asked three questions to answer in three sentences. When finished, we exchanged
quizzes. Ward took my paper, and I had his. His responses were:

1: This

2: Is

3: Bullshit.

The shaking in his shoulders turned to coughing. I reached into my backpack and slipped
him a honey lozenge.

“Thanks,” he grunted, his voice hoarser than usual.

I should’ve failed him, but when Sister asked for his score I murmured, “One hundred
percent.” Across the room, Jonah scoffed. During their Othello game that morning,
they didn’t speak, moving black-and-white discs over the green squares like chess
grandmasters negotiating an endgame. For once, Ward won, and not because Jonah let
him.