A Murder of Magpies (20 page)

His voice. He wasn’t working me. He couldn’t.

I scooted close to the edge of his bed. His hand, pierced with IVs and wrapped with
tape, took mine. We could’ve been seven years old, standing together to watch the
black shapes of birds flock to the cottonwood tree outside our ranch in Montana. So
many of them, endless with their wings and the cacophony of their screeches, they
were mesmerizing. I couldn’t turn away then. I couldn’t turn away from Jonah now.

“I love you, Vayda,” he whispered. “You know that. You and
Dati
are the only people I love. I’m sorry I put you in a bad spot.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Something went wrong with Chloe. As soon as I’m at full strength, I’ll fix it. I’ll
make up for everything.”

“Sure you will.”

My head ached, but whether the pain was my own or Jonah’s…

I promise to God
, he vowed
. I’ll make this right.

He sent out the thought to my mind, but before he could get in further, I blocked
him with a wall, stacked brick by brick.

Vayda

For Mom, Christmas began the moment she fastened the backs on her holly earrings before
Mass and culminated in the candlelight singing of “Silent Night” in the Catholic parish
where Jonah served as an acolyte. Before I fell asleep, she’d stop in my room with
hugs and hopes for blessings on her scarlet lips. Then she’d join Dad in the hall,
laugh as he unpinned her black hair, swallowing her metal hair comb in his palm, kissed
behind her ear, and close my door with a click. I’d listen to their footfalls, the
murmur of their voices as they went off together, and then the whole house would sigh.

My father loved my mother. He loved her to death.

A month after Mom’s murder, our first Christmas in Wisconsin was buried under fourteen
inches of snow. Jonah and I took in a marathon of “A Christmas Story” and ate Frosted
Flakes because it was the only thing in the house. Rain called every few hours, saying
he didn’t like the feeling he was getting, that Dad was squirreling himself away and
desperate. Rain swore he’d keep an eye on all of us and help us through the bleak
days and night terrors. He gave us the house. He gave us a chance at a life beyond
Mom, but sometimes I wondered if Dad would have kept going if it hadn’t been for Jonah
and me.

It had taken a while, but Dad eventually came out of his study once, hair unkempt
and shirt rumpled. I’d followed him as he raided Rain’s wine collection and headed
upstairs. He didn’t know I’d spied him while he unclasped his Archangel Michael medallion
strung with a cross, a wedding gift from Mom, and dropped it inside the dresser where
it’d since stayed.

This Christmas Eve, I strummed the acoustic guitar Ward loaned me. I felt along the
frets and placed my fingers where his had pressed down on the metal strings. I could
sense him, pouring himself into his playing, into his art. All Ward wanted was escape.
Underneath him, there was someone else, someone so drugged he felt like sliding lower
and lower in a warm bath.

Drake.

He was a ghost in the guitar, one that haunted Ward and knew him. His energy lingered
in the strings. Seeking the emotion lodged in objects was to find the strongest attachment,
and what Drake attached was numbness. I could see his skeletal fingers forming chords
on the strings, his other holding a green pick, cigarette in mouth and ratty auburn
hair, so tangled like dreadlocks, hanging near his shoulders. He played while Ward
begged him to look at a sculpture he’d built, but Drake didn’t move. Nothing moved
him. Not even his son.

I put down the guitar and rubbed my temples. Jonah rolled over on the couch.

“You get a hit?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I answered.

He nodded, and I believed, at least this time, he wouldn’t invade my mind. He couldn’t.
In the nine days since the beating and two since his hospital release, my brother’s
pain was overwhelming. Too weak to work Mind Games, the energy crashed inside him
then glommed onto me as its outlet. He smelled of sweat and pressed his hand to his
ribs. A cough, and the bulb in the lamp popped.

Such a sorry sight, reduced to misguided flares of energy.

I didn’t feel bad for him.

I brought him a blanket and, after helping to steady him as he sat up, I began combing
through his hair. From my angle, he appeared wary as he took in the walls, running
from one end of the floor to the other. As I slicked his hair, I knew his paranoia.
Perhaps after his attack in Fire Sales, he’d finally wised up. We weren’t safe anywhere.

“Why do you take care of me?” he asked.

“You’re my twin. I don’t like that you’re hurt.” The answer was simple, yet I couldn’t
pretend things were okay. The half-hearted apologies—no more. “Jonah, don’t ever do
this again.”

He lay back, exhausted already. Through the curtains, I could make out the glow of
headlights on the driveway. Not moving. Parked and waiting. They’d been there almost
every day since Jonah’s release from the hospital.

“She’s out there again,” he murmured. “
Dati
doesn’t want me talking to her. He’s afraid it would make things worse.”

“She won’t listen,” I replied and pulled back the curtain to spy Chloe’s car. “Last
night,
Dati
was out there trying to reason with her. He had to call her mom to come and get her.”

Try, Vayda. Please.

How could I argue with him? We wanted the same thing, albeit for different reasons,
I was sure. I slipped on my coat and made my way down the snow-covered steps and across
the driveway. Through the car’s windows, I could make out Chloe staring at the house.
She clutched the steering wheel with both hands, eyes darting and watchful. I tapped
on the driver’s window. She only focused ahead.

Time for a different approach.

I walked around to the passenger side. The door was unlocked. If she would listen
to me at all, I had to get into the car.

“Chloe, what are you doing here?” I asked as I sat beside her.

“I don’t know.” She blew a long piece of hair from her face. Not the neat, icy blond
I knew, her hair was clipped in a ratty topknot, her matchy-matchy uniform of sweater
and skirt replaced with an oversized sweatshirt. “I don’t know why I come here, but
I have to.” She angled her face, and a million questions gleamed in her pupils. “I
don’t like you very much, do I?”

“Not anymore,” I replied.

“I really don’t like your brother.”

“No, you don’t.”

“But I did. Once. I liked both of you. Why won’t he talk to me? He doesn’t come outside
when I’m here. He won’t answer if I call. I thought he cared.”

“He did like you. He still does, but it’s not healthy for you two to be together.”

“Vayda, what’d I do wrong?”

She had no clue what’d happened, and the guilt churned in my gut because I was relieved
she didn’t know.

“Chloe, you didn’t do anything. I wish you knew that. Is this what you want? To be
outside some guy’s house waiting for him?” I opened the passenger door and eased out
of the car. “Go home.”

After a moment or two of waiting on the front step, I finally let out my breath as
Chloe put her car into reverse and drove away. Her car slithered down the driveway.
The woods crowded around it until the dark devoured even the red glow of the taillights.

I prayed she’d recover with time away from Jonah. Her mind needed healing from the
heat, to develop a layer of scar tissue. Not all her memories of Jonah and me were
wiped clean but enough that she wasn’t a threat, only a sad, bewildered shell.

A shadow moved along the perimeter of the woods. I recognized that gait. He’d come.

Ward’s tracks sank into the snow as he cut across the property, and he joined me on
the step. I reached for his cold-reddened hand. He didn’t take it.

“You should come inside and warm up,
gadjo
,” I said. “You want me to make some hot chocolate?”

“Hot chocolate, the obvious beverage for people wandering the Wisconsin woods. I might
need something stronger.” His teeth gritted and voice tight.

Inside, he stomped the snow off his boots. I reached for his coat, fingers brushing
each other, the only touch he was willing to tolerate. He coughed into the crook of
his elbow. Jonah limply waved only to lob a pair of auction catalogs from the coffee
table.

Ward ducked the magazines flying through the air. “Throwing shit at me now? Creepy
bastard. Can’t work any of that voodoo on me—I came from the Christmas Mass. Guess
even hellions can get blessed.”

Jonah snickered. “Ow. It hurts to laugh.”

I went into the kitchen to fetch his pain pills as well as the hot chocolate I’d offered.
Sweetened condensed milk, regular milk, real chocolate, I mixed it all together in
a saucepan with some vanilla, making enough for three cups. Hushed voices murmured
over the rattle of metal spoons against ceramic mugs, and I peered around the doorway.
Anything Jonah might tell Ward was a hundred times more honest than what he’d voice
aloud around me.

Ward crouched on the floor. “How’d you get so messed up? Vayda said you detect people’s
energy or something. If that were true, wouldn’t you have sensed Marty?”

“You’d think,” Jonah answered, frowning. “I was at
Dati
’s desk, tracking shipments and wearing headphones. My guard was down. My mind was
on something else, so I wasn’t paying attention.”

I leaned against the wall, a thick knot in my throat. Jonah misused his abilities
with Chloe, no doubt, but they failed him the one time he needed them.

“Danny, the guy Marty hangs out with, came up behind me,” Jonah continued in a hoarse
voice. “He told me Vayda got in a fight with Chloe. Then he said us Silvers need to
be taught a lesson.”

My neck and shoulders cramped. Marty attacked Jonah because of
me
.

Because I couldn’t stop him from using me to lash out at Chloe.

Because I made Marty into a fool.

Because I couldn’t get a grip on the Mind Games.

I wiped my nose with my wrist.
Jonah, I didn’t know.

Another sense crept in, one that refused to accept my guilt. He knew I was listening.
“I laughed at Danny. I didn’t know Marty was around, and he cracked me in the head
with a table. That son-of-a-bitch got me.”

I edged out of the kitchen and noticed his glass of water on the coffee table. The
water bubbled, and steam condensed inside the glass.

“It gets sort of sketchy after that,” he went on. “At one point, Danny got nervous,
wanted Marty to be done with me. My arm got twisted, hurt something fierce, and I
pushed what energy I could on Marty. I moved him. I wanted him to stop. Danny turned
tail and ran. I blacked out after that.”

I handed over Jonah’s pain medication. His dark eyes held mine with silent thanks.
For more than merely bringing him a couple of pills.

“Mom watches out for you,” I assured him, maybe because it seemed like the right thing
to say.

“Mom, God, something.” For a moment, his chin wobbled, though not from crying. The
water in the glass kept boiling. “Marty’s gonna wish he never messed with me.”

***

Ward and I hadn’t been alone together in over a week. His choice, not mine. Now that
we were, I didn’t know what to expect.

“What the hell was that with the water?” he asked, closing the door to my room. “How
did Jonah do that?”

“He’s mad. Anger always finds a way out. Haven’t you ever been so mad you wished something
would break?”

The question caught Ward unprepared. I held out my hand to him, but he pressed his
back against my door and reached for the knob. Too much. Step off.

“Sure. When Drake got strung out,” he answered. “I wanted to break things. Sometimes
I did.”

“Then we’re the same,” I said.

He gave a sarcastic laugh. “Oh, no, you’re different.
Really
different.”

I took my scrapbook from my curio cabinet and flopped on my bed, motioning him to
sit. He perched near me but still kept a foot between us.

I scooted toward him.

He inched away.

“I won’t bite,” I told him.

“It’s not your bite that I’m afraid of.”

“Come here, will you?”

Winding his arm around my shoulders, I sidled up beside him close enough to nuzzle
his neck. At first, his body was hard, not as he was the last time we were in his
room, but stony. Then he touched his face to the top of my head, and a breath rose
up from deep within him. Full of want in spite of himself. I sank against him where
it was easy to remain in the lapping waves of our combined energies.

“Funny how we’re both here because our parents messed up our lives,” I remarked, offering
him my scrapbook.

He scanned a few pages. “You’re not messed up, Vayda. Troubled, I’ll grant you that,
but you’re not broken. Not like me.”

We could get into a pissing contest, to use Ward-speak, over which of us was more
damaged. He had secrets, but I had more. The wind listened, my mother used to say.
The wind remembered names. Real names, not ones you faked, not ones that made you
jittery because it would be all too easy for someone to expose you for what you really
were. A fraud in your own flesh. No matter how long I lived as Vayda Silver, I always
feared someone was watching.

“Ward.”

Maybe he heard the way I said his name, maybe it was a coincidence, but he raised
those gray eyes to mine. So serious. So full of questions. He was ready.

“You need to know something about me,” I told him.

“Is it that bad?” he whispered.

“Well, for starters, my name’s Vayda Murdock.”

Vayda

Dad’s on the phone to Seattle. The weather’s ungodly humid, worse than usual for late
August in Hemlock. Doesn’t help that the A/C blew, and Dad won’t pay the weekend rates
for a repairman. The backs of my thighs are sweat-sticky as I read about the madness
of Lady Macbeth for class, but I scan the same lines over and over again as Dad’s
phone conversation grows louder.