A Murder of Magpies (33 page)

A plume of yellow and red flame burst in the dark.

Fire coursed up and down her legs. No one moved, too shocked perhaps, to understand
what happened. So much fuel for the fire devouring Chloe’s jeans. Even she stood spellbound,
lips twisted, as she burned.

“Chloe!” Jonah ripped off his coat and plowed into her, forcing her to the ground.

“Get away from me!” Her voice was a ragged shriek and tears forged trails down the
dirt on her cheeks. “I don’t need you! I don’t want what you made me become!”

Struggling against Chloe’s flailing arms, Jonah wrapped his coat around her and eased
her to the ground, patting down the flames. A paramedic pulled Jonah off Chloe. I
overheard my brother tell them she did it to herself, but they shoved him away. No
one listened. No one would believe we hadn’t hurt other people.

Quickly, policemen sequestered each of us for statements. They placed Marty in a cruiser
and paramedics strapped Chloe onto a stretcher in an ambulance. I didn’t find Dad
again until I noticed him standing before the stone house passing Bernadette over
to Ward and studying the copper awnings and slate roof, the crumbling walls and creaking
weathervane atop the barn.

“For a while, I forgot this isn’t ours,” he admitted.

“It might not be ours, but it’s home,” I told him. “I found some happiness here.”

Dad nodded at the red and blue police lights. His hands, rough from all the work he’d
done, cupped my face.

“Magpie, you and Jonah deserve better than always fearing that we’ll be found.” His
voice broke as kissed my forehead. “You need to call Rain.”

“
Dati
, don’t.” I slumped against the Chevy that brought us here from Georgia. The night
burned with raw, cold wind.

“Officer,” Dad said to a policeman, “my name is Emory Murdock. I’m wanted by the police
in Hemlock, Georgia.”

Vayda

I couldn’t sleep.

When I eventually drifted off, the dream in my mind was hot.

Full of fire.

***

A glowing ember wanders through the darkness and spirals skyward, a solitary spark
that snuffs out.

The shriek sears my mind, yanking me up from bed.

“Mom?” I call and clutch my blanket to my chest.

Silence.

A stirring at my neck freezes the baby-fine wisps at my hairline. My heart drums in
my ears, and I hold my breath while my sight digs through the darkness for light.

“A nightmare,” I whisper and sink back into the comfort of my pillow and burrow under
my blanket.

“Vayda!”

Go away, Jonah!
I cast the thought like a fishing lure toward his mind.

Reaching over to switch on my clock radio, the screen for the digital numbers is black.
In the blue-black of night, my fingers track the cord still plugged into the wall.
No power? Had a fuse blown? Happened all the time in such an old house.

“Sis, come on!” The oak door rattles on its hinges as Jonah’s fists batter the wood.
“Wake up!”

I kick off the blanket and climb out of bed, feet on the cool pine floor.
You’d best have a good reason—

Under the doorway, a curious red glow leaches into my room. I stop short. The knob
on my door, normally smooth and cool, gives off a molten-iron heat. I wind my hand
in my nightgown, pull open the door, and fall back.

The walls are swathed in amber, gold, and soot as flames whirl in my parents’ room
down the hall. I scream into a plume of smoke, “Jonah!”

I can’t track him through the blaze. My fingers stretch in search of his energy. Heat
and fire everywhere and none of it Jonah’s natural warmth.

“Where are you?”

Through the smoke, Dad’s shadow towers above a second bowed body—Jonah, thank God—and
hoists him onto his shoulder, a hunter claiming the limp carcass of a stag.

“Vayda, come on!” he yells.

Flames snake along the floorboards. I’m numb and can’t move, my mind stupid with one
question. How can the house be on fire?

Fingers clutching hard onto my wrist jolt me from my trance.

“Stay low! Get down! Below the smoke!” Dad orders and I drop to my knees. Harsh coughs
scrape my throat as I finger along the plaster wall. My eyes ache, nose stings, and
I cover my mouth with the collar of my nightgown.

“We’re near the door!” Dad’s voice cuts through the crackle of burning wood.

Cool wind strips the sweat from my skin as the backdoor opens wide to the November
night. Air! I can breathe! As I stumble to the side yard, my hands knead my eyelids
to clear away the charred grit of sleep. Panting, I catch up with Dad and Jonah, spin
toward the house, and scream from behind my smoky hands.

The night above the bungalow glimmers with auburn light. Flames sprint from the windows
to the roof, and black grunge smears the white stucco. Moss smolders, cascading from
the twisted cypress near the house, begging to ignite.

“Magpie, get back!” Dad bellows, his drawl a violent rolling.

Hacking grains of ash, I drop beside Dad and Jonah in the peach grove. I smell charcoal
and singed hair.

The smell comes from me.

Jonah coughs as he kneels on the chilly ground. Dad places his hand on my brother’s
shoulder. “Deep breaths.”

“Look!” I point to a crowd on the gravel road fifty yards from where we cower in the
dark.

Neighbors, people we know from around town, mill together and gesture to the burning
scaffold. More bodies zombie-trudge toward the house in bathrobes and ratty slippers.

“What happened?” someone calls, no more concerned than if asking whether anyone brought
marshmallows for s’mores to the beach bonfire. “What started it?”

“How about divine intervention?” a man snorts.

My vision races from one flat face to the next. I send out a probing nudge, my feelers
sifting through their thoughts. No pebbles of fear, no worry. Divine intervention?
That would mean God was against us.

A fire truck lazes in the street, its siren unheard, lights swirling. A young fireman
hops from the truck and eagerly unwinds the hose, nearly losing his helmet, but his
superior stops him with a shake of his head.

“Why won’t anyone help us?” I ask, gawking back over my shoulder at Dad. “What’s wrong
with them?”

“Shh.” He covers his lips with his finger and pulls Jonah and me farther into the
trees, whispering, “Don’t move.”

I twist away from Dad and again search the crowd. Only three of us, not four, are
huddled away from the fire-crackled wood and plaster.

Where’s Mom? Why isn’t she with us?

I shake Dad’s arm. “Mom made it out, right?”

Dad lowers his head. “I couldn’t get to her. The fire…”

A keening whimper rises from my throat. Dad’s callused palm clamps over my mouth.
His skin tastes of burnt wood and smoke. Our knees hit the unyielding Georgia clay,
and my fingernails rake his skin. Tears drop from my face to Dad’s hand, washing off
the filth of the fire where they land.

Jonah’s breathing wetly rattles, and his voice cracks. “
Dati
?”

Our father rises to his feet, his glasses reflecting the blaze. “Let’s get to Rain’s
house. He’ll know what to do.”

I take in a view of the crowd. The young fireman, the only one compelled to help us,
crosses himself.

“Burn in hell, Lorna! You thieving gypsy!” a woman damns my mother as two firemen
laugh.

The word crudely whittles into my spine, slashed onto my bones, and forever marking
me.

Gypsy.

***

Snow fell before dawn on Saturday, the day after my birthday. The wind blew so hard
snowflakes stuck to the windows. Ward and I lay in my bed with the sky creeping toward
sunrise.

He curled up behind me, his chest clammy against my bare back. I relaxed as he cradled
me in his arms. His breath wheezy, he asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” I was, at least right then. I wrapped my arms around his at my waist. I didn’t
want him to let go.

The house had been still, and his mouth gentle, shy, when we climbed into bed. My
skin pulled taut, my heart whirring. I’d loosened his belt while the humming between
my legs intensified.

“I want you,
gadjo
,” I’d told him. My voice had been hushed, the words breathless between kisses. He’d
held his breath, shaking as I unzipped his jeans. A spike of arousal had shot off
him as his tongue flicked my lip. I’d pushed away my barriers, both those as an empath
and those that claimed it wasn’t right to be with a boy like him. I knew what I wanted,
and this was my choice.

Our shirts flung to the floor, mouths hungry and hands in search of skin. He’d guided
my touch where he wanted, but mostly, his fingers tread down my arms, across my bare
abdomen, until they snuck lower on my hips.

The lamp by my bed had dimmed as I drew in curiosity and need, energy rising. I’d
listened to my skirt fluff out on the floor and the chime of his belt when his jeans
followed. His hands slid over my body, my eyelids flickering against the waves crashing
over me. He’d taken his time to kiss me everywhere, my neck, the side of my ribs,
my hips. It wasn’t fair that I loved him. I hated him for making me love someone who
could never be like me, yet I held him tight.

“I don’t want to let go,” I’d murmured.

He’d kissed my cheek and smoothed the hair on my forehead. “I’m staying, Vayda.”

He’d reached over to my nightstand to the condom he’d laid beside my clock. Another
smoldering ember sparked to life in my blood. Neither of us had breathed as he tore
open the wrapper. As much as I wanted him, I’d been scared. Of his history because
I knew I wasn’t the only girl he’d been with, so what, if anything, did that mean?
Of being “spoiled” or even too uptight. Of the change that would inevitably be felt
between us.

I’d been scared because nothing in my life was certain—except that I craved closeness,
and closeness was what I found when I lay beneath him. I’d felt him against me, then
inside me.

I’d been used to touching everything,
feeling
, but it had been all my other senses that heightened. The sweat of our bodies against
cold sheets, the creak of the bed’s frame. How my room smelled of ghosts and lace
and when the first ray of dawn bled through the curtain to glance off the steel ring
in Ward’s ear. A strange, new energy radiated through my body. I’d noticed it first
when Ward’s arms wavered, and at once, all my being escalated to drown the ache in
me as he kissed me deeply, kissed me from the inside out.

Watching the snowfall as the sun crested the horizon, I felt his breath on my neck
and his sweat on my skin.

He painted a lazy circle on my hip. His face was unlike any expression I’d seen from
him before. No sorrow pinching his eyes. Content. Peaceful.

“I wonder when it happened,” he murmured.

“When what happened?” I asked.

“When I realized I love you. There wasn’t an exact time. It’s all the moments of being
with you and your weird Mind Games and your fucked up family and how I wouldn’t take
any of it back. Not one second.”

I rolled over to lay my head against his chest. His arms around me were cool, the
energy between us dreamy, sleepwalking. “I love you, too, Ward.”

“Not calling me
gadjo
this time?”

“Not this time.”

The phone rang. For a half-second, I hoped Jonah would answer, but he was sleeping
hard in Dad’s study last I’d checked. Annoyed and slipping into my clothes, I moved
slowly as I retrieved the phone from the hall. The caller ID read Rain’s cell phone.

“Darlin’, I hope you weren’t asleep,” he said. “I’m in Milwaukee and heading straight
to the police station, gotta stop at a bank first if I need bond money for your daddy.”

Ward drew in his sketchbook as I sat on my bed. “Thanks, Rain. We owe you.”

I hung up the phone and noticed Ward was still smiling dreamily. I kissed his cheek
before heading into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. Too much to do today.
Too much filling up my mind.

There was something more.

Energy loomed not in my hands but in my core, the bony nest of my ribs. It hurt. I
grasped the sink’s edge. Cold shocks of energy pinged off every metal surface, the
light fixtures, the faucet, the towel bar.

My head ached as the muted thuds of Ward’s thoughts from the other room battered my
barriers like birds colliding with a window. My energy overflowed in a chilly gust,
freezing the water dripping from the leaky faucet. “Get out of my damn head!”

Footfalls pounded the stairs, ascending the steps two, three, at a time. The door
unlocked itself and flew open, and Jonah stood in the hall. Ward appeared beside my
brother with his jeans hastily pulled on and hair disheveled. “Vayda, what’s wrong?”

Jonah barely registered that Ward was beside him. The wariness on his face faded.
Even as flares of energy zoomed from my fingers, my brother was calm. “Give us a minute.”

Hesitantly, Ward backed away, and Jonah shut the door. On my knees, I couldn’t control
how fast my breath came. The axis of the room shifted and tilted to the right, woozy
and shaking.

“You’ll be okay, Sis,” he promised.

My forehead rested on the tile floor. The grout cracked beneath my skin. Too much
energy.

“Let it out.” Jonah’s voice was a chant, low and steady. “Don’t try to hold back.
Move it out of you.”

A white-hot flare sprang from my fingers and cracked the plaster ceiling while the
light fixtures burst with fire and smoke that quickly evaporated. I rolled to my side
and held my stomach, crying out.

Empty. My hands were empty. My body was empty. No more energy.

“What was that?” Ward shouted. He opened the bathroom door and gaped at the cracked
ceiling, the fractured tiles in the floor, and smoldering lights. “The hell did you
do? Set off an atom bomb?”

“Of a kind.” My brother sparked an orb in his palm and snuffed it in his fist. “Empaths
feed on emotion. Mom told me some events involve so much emotion our Mind Games kind
of flake out. Our energy surges. Fights. Injuries.” He cocked his brow. “Anything
intense.”