A Murder of Magpies (5 page)

“They’re not ugly,” I answered, “only unexpected. What happened?”

“Nothing happened. I work with metal. Sometimes it bites.”

If he was at all self-conscious about the mess of his hands, it didn’t show, nor could
I sense it, and that was a relief. I pointed him inside. The door clicked behind me.
We had a guest in the house, two if Chloe counted.

No matter where we’d lived, my parents mixed their traditions with southern hospitality.
Southern hospitality got my mother killed. I was in the north now, but southern habits
lingered like gray tendrils of Spanish moss hanging off cypress trees.

I prepared glasses of iced tea for our guests and brought them to the living room.
Jonah perched on the couch with Chloe taking the seat closest to him. She angled toward
him, and I sensed his barriers. Yet through his wall, a need to impress poked through.
Hope. “I reckon your mama’s gonna be griping tonight. Something about babysitting
her friend’s holy terror?”

She beamed and inched closer. “You guessed again! I’ve never known how you played
that game. I must be giving it away.”

“You’re not. It’s magic.” He patted her thigh.

Real nice tom-catting. My brother better guard himself.

As Chloe bid Jonah goodbye, she bent over and pecked his cheek. I pursed my lips,
my gaze meeting his silently mocking one. It seemed to be okay for Princess Perky
to get herself dirty with an outcast like Jonah as long as no one from school was
around to see, and I was sure she didn’t think of Ward as anyone important. As she
pranced down the steps to her car, a sly curl spread on Jonah’s mouth.
I’m so gonna hit that again.

Sometimes I fantasize about hitting Chloe, too. Over her head,
I joked.
I know you don’t care that she’s
gadje
, but you do remember she chose her social life over being with you, right?

Jonah ignored me. “Ward, I told you this place was a walk through the woods, but I’m
kinda surprised nothing snuck out and grabbed you off the path. Those woods are dark,
and no one really knows what’s out there. So do you not have anything better to do
or are you
killing time
?”

Jonah. Pushing his way into places he didn’t belong. I conjured the image of my palm
slapping his head. He raised his face, and a new picture awakened in my mind. Me in
my nightgown in the forest with Ward’s hands running up my body.

My dream.

You’re dead,
I promised, stifling the heat pouring into my cheeks.

Snickering, Jonah took Ward’s Tennessee Williams book and scanned the back cover before
handing it over. “I read in a biography this guy choked to death on the cap of a bottle
of eye drops.”

“Only you would remember something morbid like that.” I snorted.

“I’m saying weird shit happens. Surely, Ward here has seen something out of the ordinary
once or twice.”

What are you thinking? Are you out of your damn gourd? That
gadjo
is gonna ask questions about us.

Jonah didn’t balk while he spoke in my mind.
Take a deep breath, Sis. Everything’s golden.

“Lots of things are strange.” Ward glanced from my brother to me, his gaze so intense
that I retreated until my back met the cold wall. Every muscle in my body went tighter
the longer he watched me. “So what’s strange about you two? I mean, there’s gotta
be something.”

The rumble of the Chevy’s engine announced Dad was home. I let out my breath and relaxed.
The knob on the front door jiggled, and Ward’s glance went to the fortress of locks
on the door then peered over his shoulder to where Jonah now waited at my side.

As Dad entered the house, his attention went right to our visitor. “Are you going
to introduce yourself, son?”

“I’m nobody,” Ward replied.

“Ward recently moved here,” Jonah intervened.

My father’s appraisal was studious, if not suspicious. “One of your parents find a
new job or something?”

Ward rolled his book in his hands. “It wasn’t a planned move.”

Sort of like how we came here, though I doubted he was covered in ashes as we’d been.

Dad beckoned me to the kitchen. He couldn’t be more conspicuous. A lecture was coming,
about either fitting in or contradicting what he’d said earlier by saying we shouldn’t
allow outsiders into our home.

“Magpie, I gotta get back to Fire Sales. But I’ll stay if you want.”

“We’re fine,
Dati
. Jonah invited him. You know, this goes along with fitting in,” I assured him.

“But you just met him. He’s an outsider and not a friend. Not yet.” Then his face
softened. “I assume there’s a reason your brother invited him. Keep an eye on Jonah.
He gets lax when we’re home.”

Did he think I didn’t know my own brother? For as tired as Jonah was of hiding Mind
Games, he’d never endanger us.

With Dad heading out and the murmur of Jonah and Ward talking in the living room,
I set about creaming brown sugar and butter for cookie dough. My hand gripped the
bowl, and I stirred in flour and vanilla before raiding the cabinets for Mom’s secret
ingredient for the chewiest cookies in the South—cornstarch. Worked like a charm,
as she promised.

The hair on my neck tightened. Someone was watching me.

I whipped around to find Ward leaning against the gray granite counter with his thumbs
hooked in his pockets. “Hey.”

“Hey, yourself. I thought you were hanging out with Jonah.”

He shrugged. “Jonah can wait.”

I said nothing, returning to mixing the cookie dough. Normally, if I stared at someone
too long, I was subjected to at least a whisper of their thoughts. Energy and emotions
snarled so much in ours that Jonah and I learned to protect ourselves with barriers
before we hit preschool. It was the only way to live a semi-normal life. Yet nothing
in Ward caught me. Energy brewed but passed through like a hot knife in cold butter.

The tips of his fingers brushed mine as he checked out the cookie dough, and a flutter
of electricity breezed over my hand, a current running a clear course. Ward was bitten
by the shock and mouthed, “Ouch.”

His hand cupped my forearm, but I pulled back. “What are you doing?”

“Wondering if there’s another spark.”

Ward had no idea.

Thousands of sparks flared off him and burned through me.

Vayda

Shadows blanket Jonah and me in the hallway while Rain’s in the kitchen, lighting
one cigarette off another. Mom’s impish grin doesn’t impress him, and he covers her
hand with his. “Lorna, darlin’, this ain’t funny. These charges are real serious.”

She unfastens her hair from her French twist, setting a hair comb on the table. The
comb is silver, inlaid with green stones for leaves beside hand-painted roses. Dad
made it for her in art school years before. “I’m not worried. You and Em and I, we’ve
seen hell worse than this.”

My godfather puffs on his cigarette. “You don’t get it. They’ve been after you, and
this time, they might have gotten you.”

“Then get her off, Rain.” Dad swirls his scotch. “Lorna made your law career. You
owe her.”

Rain leans back in his chair. “I’d do anything to help y’all, but the town wants someone
to pay.”

The diamonds in Mom’s wedding rings twinkle like Christmas lights as she streams her
hand through Dad’s black hair. He rubs his cheek against her fingers, and she whispers
a hushed promise in Romani before speaking louder.

“We’ll be fine, Em. We always are.”

***

They weren’t fine.

Not since Mom pitched a fit two years ago. Not since Dad, Jonah, and I showed up at
Rain’s with smoke in our lungs and hair gray from ash. Not since Dad’s best friend
helped us disappear.

The wind scraped my cheeks, driving off my memories. The day Mom died was cool and
gray like this one, but this far north, the trees didn’t hang on to their leaves.
The branches were bare and spiked like church spires without crosses. My hands burrowed
inside my sweater for warmth.

“Want my coat?” Ward offered, coughing into the crook of his elbow.

“I’m okay. Besides, you sound like you’re coming down with something.”

“I always have a cough. It’s nothing.”

For over a week, he’d come by after school to debate books with Jonah. Most days,
I kept to the kitchen, either working on dinner or homework, eavesdropping on the
boys, noticing how Ward often came to the doorway, offering me a smile. That Jonah
had a friend, even a
gadjo
, was good, yet I still had no one. Chloe nodded at me in the hall, but she wasn’t
my friend. I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

I wasn’t alone, not right then. When Ward slid on his coat to leave, he’d tilted his
head in a silent request that I join him for the walk to his house. I’d deferred to
Jonah, expecting him to shake his head, not after the last time. Instead, he’d given
me a wave of blessing. Maybe I was a trifle overeager to go along, so excited I forgot
my coat.

While we walked, the wind blew hard from the north, and we listened to our shoes crunching
the twigs.

“You have an accent,” Ward remarked. “It’s not real strong, sort of comes and goes.”

“You can’t make me believe you wanna talk accents.” I nudged him. Seeing his pale
cheeks burn made me smile. “I was born in Georgia. My parents took us to Montana when
we were little, but we moved back to Georgia. Small town, bunch of busybodies. We
thought about moving to Vermont, but we came here. We haven’t been stable, honestly.”

“You move around a lot, like you’re gypsies or something.” A hiss passed my lips.
Ward noticed my balled hands. “I said something dumb, didn’t I?”

“Gypsy isn’t a nice word,” I explained. “People say gypsies are thieves, gyp people.”

He stuck out his lower lip. “So I guess that’s why you keep to yourself, huh?”

“Kind of. You’re
gadje
.” I tried to unknot his brow by adding, “Not Romani. There’s no one like us in Black
Orchard.”
Really
not like us, not with what Jonah and I could do.

Ward kicked a rock. “I’d never left Minnesota until I came here.”

Now it was my turn to ask questions. “Why’d you move?”

He wrinkled his nose. “’Cause I fucking hate junkies.”

Well, that was a can of worms. We walked a ways, our feet shuffling the quilt of fallen
leaves, until we neared the remains of a dried creek bed. I spotted a glittering geode
broken open. I grabbed it and tucked it in the pocket of my skirt. As I stood, an
odd frequency emanated from Ward, not emotion or tension, but a drive to know more,
more than I’d cared to know about any boy before. “So you came here to get away?”

He crossed his arms, his leather coat jostling. “I didn’t have much choice. When you’re
dealing with addicts, you cut them off or they get worse.”

“So,” I began, “the junkies, they friends you don’t want anymore?”

He chewed his lip and kicked another rock. “It’s one junkie, mostly. Drake—my father—is
messed up.”

I caught his eyes before he cast them down to his boots again.

“It’s a far cry from your charmed life, eh?” he said with a snort.

“My life’s hardly charmed,” I muttered.

“Sure. It must be hard having a nice house, nice family. You got everything you want.”

“You don’t know what I want, and if you’re gonna act like this, well, then maybe you’re
not it.”

Miles away, thunder followed a glint of lightning. We glowered at each other, neither
one of us willing to apologize. The sudden change in him reminded me of a time when
I’d been five or six. I’d been running through a field of wheatgrass, dead in autumn.
A single blackbird circled overhead and arced in graceful swoops until a gunshot cracked
against the sky. The bird guttered mid-flight, stunned, and then jerked in a hideous,
awkward fall, feathers spilling out around it. At the time, my barriers weren’t so
solid, and I chased the falling feathers until I found the bird in death spasms on
the ground. I felt its terror and pain, and I felt its release from life. I didn’t
ever wish to feel those things again.

Something inside Ward at the mention of his father was like the blackbird torn apart
by a bullet. I had to back away. The last thing I wanted was to get a hit of what
went on inside him, what he felt.

“Vayda, I’m sorry. Please stop.”

He jogged toward me and took my hand. A jolt
zinged
from his skin to mine, and I recoiled. It wasn’t that he was
gadje
and touching me, but rather I wasn’t ready for such a dose of energy. We were both
too open and sore to stop my feelers from grabbing what they found in him. I’d never
seen such sad eyes like Ward’s. Mercury-gray with a paler ring around his pupils,
breaking the darkness enough to assure me there was some warmth inside his cold soul
of iron.

Everyone had barriers to cover the doorways in their minds. Jonah and I opened them.
By touch, even by proximity. We also had to guard our own barriers. Ward was different,
at least for me. His barriers were curtains, moth-eaten and fragile. Full of holes
through which I could poke my fingers, and yet even with the burst of energy, his
head didn’t tangle me up. Maybe I could trickle in his thoughts if I tried pulling
them, but it was nice to slip through in silence.

“I’m such a prick,” he admitted.

He stood close enough that his breath condensed on my cheeks. The wind wheezed, and
he wrapped his coat over my shoulders. The leather was heavy and smelled of sweat
and rust, his scent that whispered of things elemental.

“I touched a nerve,” I said.

“Sorta.”

Like he was “sorta” an ass. I’d learned one truth: the boy couldn’t lie worth a damn.

We kept walking, and he raised his face to the bleak October trees. “I was a jerk
back there. Talking about Drake, there’s a reason I don’t.
If
he gets clean, it lasts maybe a month. It never takes.”

“What about your mom?” I asked.