A Murder of Magpies (19 page)

“
Gadjo
, don’t say that,” I protested. “This was never about me thinking you were stupid.
I thought you’d be afraid. You were. Are. I don’t know.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

I couldn’t. He didn’t know about Hemlock, how everyone turned against my family. Even
if Dad talked to him about the Mind Games, he would keep certain things hidden—our
old names, what Mom did, the fire. Having all those secrets spoken aloud in one breath
might drive away Ward for good.

White noise, the whooshing of blood, assaulted my ears, and static crackled in my
palms. Ward reached for me only for me to stop him. Too much energy swelled in my
fingers. I didn’t want to shock him, so I placed my hand on a sidewalk lamp’s post.
My body relaxed as the current fled from my fingers and jumped into the metal. Standing
some ten feet below the bulb, I heard the glass pop followed by a fizzle. I ducked
my face as slivers of glass rained around me.

Ward glanced at the broken light. “You done yet?”

He walked me to the Chevy and placed my backpack in the front seat. By the driver’s
side, he cupped my face in his big hands. My barriers stretched to the sky, stretched
so thin I quivered as my control threatened to let go, but I didn’t feel or listen
to anything. All the energy was quiet. Wonderfully quiet. I wanted him to say something.
He ran his fingers over my cheekbones then drew his thumb across my lower lip. A stinging
spark shocked both of us, and he backed away.

He wasn’t ready.

Vayda

The coat bunched beneath my head crinkled every time I shifted. I tried to open my
eyelids but couldn’t. Still too heavy with my dream.

“You ain’t got much time. People are gonna be coming here looking for y’all soon.”
Rain shoves some apples, the rest of a loaf of bread, and a jar of peanut butter into
a bag, which he hands to Jonah.

Still in his sweatpants and T-shirt, my brother is as grimy with ash as I am. My lungs
and throat throb as if I choked on acid. How is it only an hour ago we clambered out
of a burning house, and now Dad and Rain are figuring out how to get us out of town
before we can so much as clean up?

“I gave your daddy some money. After you’re outta Hemlock, he’ll stop and get you
some decent clothes.” Rain shakes his head, sadness tacking his blue eyes to mine.
“I’m so sorry about your mama.”

“Vayda.”

My right eyelid cracked, but the light drove me back into the dream.

“Remember now. What’s your name?” Rain asks.

Dad’s chin trembles. “Emory Silver.”

Silver because it’s Mom’s favorite metal.
Was
her favorite metal.

I slump in the front seat of Rain’s old Chevy and wipe my face. Probably some grit,
some char. I’m not crying. Right now, I’ve got too much to keep it together for. No
time to cry.

Jonah’s breathing doesn’t sound too good as he tucks under a blanket in the backseat.
How much smoke had he breathed in while he banged on my door screaming at me to get
up? He saved Dad and me.

Rain and Dad hug, my godfather promising, “I’ll get some new papers in order for you.
Stay in touch, Em, and may the angels keep their watch.”

Jonah’s voice broke through my slumber.

“Vayda, wake the hell up.”

Being in Jonah’s hospital room, being with his energy, his skull hurt so badly that
my own head brimmed with pain. The sound of my voice was like hail on a tin roof.
“I’m sleeping.”

“I mean it, Sis. Get up.”

Something in his voice, stern but frightened, I opened my eyes. Chloe stood by Jonah’s
bed. She quaked with an uneven energy. The tension I’d sensed in her at lunch had
spread into her every cell.

“You’ve been on my mind all day, Jonah,” she said. “I can’t get you out of my thoughts.”

A gray haze around her was at odds with the soothing green walls of the hospital room.
I gripped the armrests of my chair, ready to stand, and yet I stayed put. I couldn’t
be sure what would happen if I touched her or what she’d do if I moved.

Jonah’s head dropped forward. His face was a patchwork of bruises and small cuts,
one eye still too swollen to open. A sling harnessed his left arm. Veins pumped full
of painkillers, all the injuries muddling his brain—how the hell could he work a Mind
Game? Unless whatever he’d done spun out of his control.

I climbed out of the chair. Chloe took hold of Jonah’s good hand, and he gasped. He
felt something from her. I drew closer, lowering my mental walls for a better grasp.
Her disjointed energy slinked over me. Chaotic, flashing. She needed to go, get away
from my brother and whatever hold he had on her.

“Jonah can’t have any visitors but family,” I said. “You have to leave.”

Chloe didn’t budge. She clutched his wrist, her fingernails pressing white then red
into his skin. Her words wavered as they fell off her lip. “He can do things, you
know.”

I jumped and gripped the railing on the bed for stability.
Jonah, are you working her right now?
I screamed in his brain.
How could you be so careless?

He groaned. Maybe my yelling inside his skull hurt all that much more because of his
concussion courtesy of Marty’s foot. He looked like he was about to puke, and he deserved
it, no matter how painful it would be on his cracked ribs. His forehead knotted.
Mind hurts. I swear to Christ, I don’t know what’s wrong with her.

Chloe kneaded his hand, but her face twisted while thin tears rolled down her cheeks.
“I can’t leave you, Jonah, but I don’t want to be with you when my head’s clear. You
make my thoughts trick me.”

She wouldn’t let go of him.

He spoke softly. “Chloe, I never tricked you.”

Every hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

Let go of her
, I said. A Mind Game was in the room. He had to be playing one.
Stop yourself
.

God’s honest truth, I’m not working her. Not when my head’s so jacked up.

Truth, when spoken or thought, felt like dipping my hands into clear water. Jonah
told the truth. The Mind Game he began with Chloe had grown too big for him to manage.
His energy moved in disorganized trails. It came and went from him, veering off so
fast even my feelers couldn’t get a grasp. He’d built the bridge linking her mind
to his, and now he didn’t know how to burn it? He damaged her, beyond damaged. Ruined.
All because he couldn’t help himself.

Spit wet her lips, and she cried out, “Make him stop!”

This had gone on long enough. My thoughts pushed at Jonah.
This is wrong. She’s hurting.

A wail withered in her throat. The sound seized my hands, flooding them with fiery
energy. Too much, too quick. A cooling reaction came off my fingers and grabbed on
to Jonah’s energy.

Bang!

The door to the hospital room slammed hard enough to jangle the hinges, and the cheap
blinds over the window fell where they snapped closed. Chloe yelped, but her squeeze
on my brother tightened.

Despite the heaviness of his head, Jonah sighed. “Good show. And you yell at me for
showing off what I can do.”

He wiggled his fingers free from Chloe’s hand. Her aura brightened, though still wide
and terrified.

“Freaks!” she screamed.

Freaks. The word carried as much hurt as “gypsy.” Both words together pelted my mother
when the handcuffs clamped on her wrists. The crowd shouted them as Dad and Rain flanked
her when she fled the courthouse in Hemlock. Layered so thickly in paint on Fire Sales’
brick exterior that the outline remained.

My mouth fell open. Chloe did it. She broke that window, branded us, and Jonah didn’t
know it. How lucid was she when Jonah was in her head? She could take our lives, the
way he had hers, and drive us out of Black Orchard. I had to sit. The walls slanted
too close, and the floor shook as it begged to give away beneath me. I didn’t know
if the shaking streamed out of me or only in my mind.

She rocked back and forth. “What the hell are you two? Evil?”

Jonah snorted. I felt his anger scalding my fingertips, his fear chilling my blood.
“It’s not nice to call people names.”

With a lurch, Chloe repeated, “What
are
you?”

I gulped, a sound too loud in my head. Jonah kept scowling, and the anger inside him
culled together. He polished it until it was smooth and hard, and then he shoved at
me.

I needed it.

His push swallowed me and held me tight, forcing me to focus. Fear and hurt couldn’t
help me cope. “We’re ordinary people, Chloe.”

“We have unordinary abilities,” Jonah completed.

She chewed on her pinky nail. Her eyes, so wide a moment before, narrowed. She would
talk at her first chance. She already made sure everyone knew what I’d said to her
at the coffee house. She’d whisper to everybody in the hall of St. Anthony’s, pointing
toward Jonah and me, and as she’d promised, they would believe her.

Despite the banging in his head, Jonah sank into my mind.
We gotta do something. You can make her forget she was here, Sis.

You want me to do your dirty work? Did you leave every shred of decency in your soul
in Georgia?
I shook my head.
I can’t push myself on someone like you can. Even if I could, I wouldn’t.

I’m too weak to do it myself.
Another groan parted his lips. His pain was real and sharp.
You can do this, Vayda. What happens if she talks?

We would leave Wisconsin. I didn’t want to leave in the middle of the night with nothing
once again. I didn’t want to leave Ward. Jonah didn’t want to go either. Black Orchard
had become his home as well. We’d both grown to love the cold. While I might not know
how to keep Marty quiet, maybe I could stop Chloe, at least long enough to come up
with a better plan.

I’d close the doors he left ajar in Chloe’s mind. It wouldn’t be manipulating her,
it’d be freeing her.

The hand poking out of Jonah’s sling touched mine.
I’ll try to help
.

I joined my hand to his and then cupped Chloe’s shoulder with the promise, “I’ll make
you safe.”

Chloe’s sight flicked to mine, wide open and beautiful, a pond where I could dive.

I stole that glance as my chance.

Her pupils dilated until her irises were nearly full black like a hole at the bottom
of a well. The light in the room hurt. Jonah’s hand was in mine as we moved through
the dark, blind as the depth swallowed all light, until we crawled out in the hallway
of Chloe’s thoughts.

Something had wrecked the inside of her mind. My brother. Every mind had rooms of
memory, and while the hallway of Chloe’s mind was sculpted from marble, the doors
were nothing more than brittle, smoking wood. Jonah hung his head.

What do we do?
I asked.

He gestured to a doorway emitting the amber glow of fire. A fire he started.
Go there
.

I lagged, hesitant because of the paint blistering on the door, so many cracks.
By all rights, Jonah, you ignited this blaze. You should be the one to overpower the
flames, not me
.

Curse me all you want later, but get this fire out now before it spreads.

He needed me. He couldn’t do it himself.

I sucked in a cold breath. My fingers stroked the fragile doorways, and the firelight
shaded Jonah’s and my skin. As I breathed, ice rose up my stomach, through my chest,
and swirled in my mouth. A draft pushed the hair back from my shoulders. If my brother
was heat, I was the cold.

I felt calm. I felt like my mother.

Protecting our family comes before all else. Our family is our clan. We only have
each other
, I intoned in my head, in the place where Jonah would hear me loudest.
Remember that.

My breath expanded in my lungs, and I exhaled over the fire in Chloe’s memories. The
flames sputtered. Then they were nothing. Where the fire had been was a soot-smeared
room with ashes powdering the floor. Stepping out from Jonah’s hold, I scooped the
ashes and again breathed over them until they scattered.

Fire out.

There. I’ve done everything you wanted
.

I flung off my brother’s hold, severing my connection to Chloe’s mind, but an ashy
taste coated my mouth. God, I prayed this worked.

Jonah’s head lolled against his pillow, heavy, drained. Yet Chloe’s energy had a boost.
Not gluey and oozy but still denser than she used to be. What more could I do? I didn’t
know how taking out her memory would work, if it were successful, but I had to believe
she couldn’t sweep up every fleck of ash to make a solid memory.

She blinked. “How long have you been here, Vayda?”

“She just got here,” Jonah lied. “You were leaving, remember?”

“Oh. I guess I’ll be going.” She picked up her purse and lingered by the door when
she peeked over her shoulder, shuddered, then exited. Something morally bereft happened
between my brother and her, something that went well beyond any mere disapproval of
his relationship with her. Maybe I hadn’t understood why he’d want that
gadji
back after she’d humiliated him, but he cared for her. His care was broken, and I’d
been too enamored with Ward to notice the decay eating at Jonah and his powers. They
spoiled. He spoiled that girl’s mind.

I sat on the edge of Jonah’s bed and twisted the ends of my hair around my fingers.
I swear on my soul. Never again.

He extended his good arm to me. “Come here, Sis.”

“No.”

Gritting his teeth, he held his ribs and inched to the side of the bed. “I need you.”

I stepped back. It’d always been the two of us, no distance, no misgivings. Why did
he have to ruin that?

“Vayda,” he begged. “I only wanted her to care about me again. When I was with her,
it didn’t matter that we’re freaks. She made things easier, and I wanted more of that.
More of her.”

I could have spoken those same words about Ward.

“I didn’t know that would happen to her,” he confessed.