A Murder of Magpies (17 page)

Her voice raised a half-key. “You stayed?”

“Nothing better to do,” I muttered. Yet that meant staying here. With her. I collapsed
in the chair across from her. “I want to make sure Jonah’s okay.”

She took off her boots to rub her feet. “Are you mad at me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. She moved to the chair beside me, and I leaned away. “Stay
back.”

She flinched and hugged my coat to her chest. Hearing her sniff back tears, the bones
protecting my chest crumbled. I never wanted to hurt her. More than having my nerves
rattled, I felt something else: a dread, a fear. What else could she do?

“I don’t understand what happened,” I whispered. “Obviously, this isn’t a Romani thing,
right? Otherwise, there’d be a lot more people like you. So are you a witch?”

“Don’t call me that.” The begging note in her voice stung. “You can’t know how much
names hurt.”

I wasn’t hurt? Jesus. I took another gander at the aquarium where a silver angelfish
hid in a plastic cave. It had the right idea. Did I ever truly know Vayda?

I knew nothing.

The door to the exam rooms creaked open, and Emory trudged into the waiting room.
Furrows from his crow’s feet drew shadows down his face. He straddled a chair, drained
as he reached for his daughter’s hand.

“How’s Jonah?” I asked, drawn closer to them even if a ring of uncertainty surrounded
them.

“He has a concussion, a dislocated shoulder. Some broken ribs,” Emory explained and
cleaned his glasses on his shirt. “And he needs surgery. The doctor said there’s internal
bleeding. Not much. He’ll be okay.” He frowned. “Am I speaking gibberish?”

Emory made more sense than most of what I’d witnessed that night. So much hurt for
a body. When we’d arrived at the hospital, I’d overheard a couple of attendants saying
Marty hadn’t gotten nearly as jacked up as Jonah.

Vayda popped her knuckles and hid her hands in my coat. “Can I visit him?”

“Not now, Magpie.” Emory twisted his wedding ring. “He’s lucky you found him.”

I scoffed. Luck had nothing to do with her finding him.

Emory cocked his head. “You got something to say?”

“I’m speechless,” I replied dryly.

Vayda’s voice hushed. “He knows,
Dati
.”

Emory froze as he retrieved his cigarette from behind his ear. Something strange glinted
in his glasses. That sentence could’ve meant a hundred things, but he seemed to know
what she meant. “Son, we’re going outside for a talk.”

“But it’s cold,” I argued. Like hell I was going outside. He might fling shit around
and break lights. I’d already seen what kind of destruction Vayda could unleash.

Emory stood over me. “We’re going outside. Now.”

I knew that stern look, saw it plenty of times from cops, and each time, it meant
I was going along whether I liked it or not. I followed Emory through the entrance
into the cold blast of night. As we stood in the bus shelter, better known as the
smoker’s hut, snow lingered on the wind. The cars in the lot gleamed as though preserved
in glassy coffins of ice. I coughed and burrowed my hands inside my sweater to spare
them from frostbite.

“What’d you see tonight?” Emory asked, drawing on his cigarette.

“Nothing.” Head down, crushing some rock salt under my boot. “I saw nothing.”

“Don’t lie to me, boy. Something’s fucked you up good.”

I opened my mouth only to snap my jaw shut. He flicked ash to the sidewalk. The embers
died the instant they reached the ice.

After a few minutes, I asked, “Are you like her?”

“No.”

“Is Jonah?”

He nodded. “Unfortunately. Tonight’s not the only time you saw something, only the
first time you got slapped in the face with it. This can’t be a total shock, else
you would’ve been long gone by the time I got here. Something gave you pause before
this. Could’ve been lights flickering or a case of the chills. Hell, maybe you’ve
watched those two have a conversation without speaking aloud. You ignored it ’cause
admitting anything sounds like you cracked your head and your wits spilled out.”

No. I hadn’t. Had I? What I saw inside Fire Sales seared my mind, branded it.

Emory watched a car spin its tires on the ice. “I’ve been where you are, Ward. I told
you my mother died when I was a kid. I was fifteen. My family didn’t want me around,
so I had to go find one. I was trouble, and my life needed changing.”

“Is that when you met Vayda’s mom?” I asked.

He smiled. “A couple of years later. I’d say to Lorna, ‘Tell me what’s on my mind.’
It was our game, you know. One day we were fighting, and she put the furniture in
my room on the ceiling and kept it there until she decided to put it back. Scared
me damn good. I didn’t speak to her for seven days. Guess I cared too much to run
away but needed time to wrap my mind around what she did. Lorna’s father called them
hokano,
a trick. My wife called them ‘Mind Games.’ The name stuck.”

“Mind Games,” I repeated.

My fingers jammed into my hair, my lungs pushing out a heavy sigh. Bullshit.

“Can I go?” I asked.

Smoke billowed from Emory’s clenched teeth. “Not until you get this through your head:
Vayda isn’t any different than she was yesterday. What’s different is how you see
her.”

I crushed more salt. How could the girl I saw in Fire Sales be the one who played
with my hair and picked up bird feathers when walking in the woods? She was made of
flesh and bone, hair and blood, but now I’d uncovered some secret metal, an alloy
unknown in most people.

“What I saw was crazy,” I argued. “You sound like talking about this shit is simple
and rational. It’s not. It’s fucking abnormal.”

Emory ground out his cigarette. He spoke in a low register, the deepest his voice
could manage. “Ward, I’m telling you what my late father-in-law said to me: People
die over these abilities. I’ve spent over half my life protecting Lorna and my kids
because they’re different. You’re now responsible for guarding Vayda’s secret, and
you’re decent enough that I believe you will. You have no choice. Otherwise, she could
be killed. You don’t want that on your conscience.”

The seriousness of his words was heavy and pushed down on my shoulders, but I didn’t
think he intended to scare me rather than give me the brutal truth. Maybe he took
me out in the cold to make sure I was awake. Between the wind chafing my cheeks and
the sights my mind replayed, I didn’t know when I’d sleep again.

Vayda set aside a celebrity gossip magazine as her father and I reentered the waiting
room. She didn’t balk from me, but I wished she would. Listening to Emory tell me
about the Mind Games was one thing, but being in the same room as her reheated the
confusion firing in my gut.

“Magpie, you need to rest.” Emory kissed her forehead. “Ward, get her home safely.”

I blurted, “Okay.”

What had I agreed to?

Vayda slid into my coat, and I tried not to cringe. Before all this, I gave her my
coat dozens of times. I’d
liked
giving her my coat. Now? She was supposed to be the same, but it didn’t matter what
her father said. She wasn’t. Not to me. Emory hugged his daughter and peered over
her head to give me a firm nod
.

The car slid on the ice as we left the hospital. Even after midnight, when the sky
was its darkest, the snow tinted the streets and lawns blue. The bad roads allowed
me to focus on driving and not succumb to the temptation to peek at the girl beside
me, the one breathing too loud and tugging her skirt down over her knees. The awareness
of her filled my head, and the only way to get rid of it was to keep going until I
steered onto the driveway. The woods were black. Everything was black with shadow
except for the Silvers’ house patiently waiting with a single light by the front door.
I parked the car and finally allowed myself to look at Vayda.

She wasn’t different from before.

“So”—she paused—“what are you thinking?”

I twisted the different stereo dials, but I wasn’t in the mood for music and let the
car fill with silence.

“
Gadjo
, I can do more than what you saw at Fire Sales. I can read minds.”

The hair of my neck stretched tight, and my hands froze despite the heater in the
car. My head turned until I came to her watery eyes and her fists covering her mouth.

“Are you saying you’ve listened to my thoughts?” I asked.

“Not you. Not really. Sometimes I can’t block what you’re thinking. The thoughts are
so strong they reach me by accident.”

I leaned against the car’s door and twisted, the leather seat squeaking beneath me.
Acid rolled up my throat, burning my nose, but I swallowed it back down. I hated this
trembling in my blood. Throwing open the car door, I stomped across the icy gravel.
Vayda stepped out of the car and inched toward me, but I changed paths and slogged
toward the barn.

She’d eavesdropped on my thoughts. How much had she heard? Christ, what if she knew
what I was thinking when she was in my bed? If she read my mind, then she knew shit
about Drake, things I stopped myself from thinking. If I wanted her to know something,
I’d say it. She stripped that from me.

“Where are you going?” she called.

Her voice was a kick to my back, and I wheeled around to face her. “First, you spring
on me that you’re a fucking magician, and now you’ve invaded my mind?”

She reached for me but recoiled. “You’re so mad I can’t touch you. It hurts my hands.”

I gritted my teeth and propped against the open barn door. The wind whistled through
holes in the roof, and some unseen bird flapped over the hayloft.

“What do you mean your hands hurt?”

“I’m an empath,” she said. “I feel peoples’ emotion as energy. Sounds like bullshit,
I know.” Her voice wavered as she searched the sky.

“You’re nuts,” I barked.

“Let me talk.”

I rested my head against the raw wood of the door.

Peeling away from the barn, she circled her wrists as though kneading invisible bread.
“People’s emotions emit energy. There’s something in me pulling that energy. I shut
it down as best I can unless someone reaches to me.” She sounded as if she was dictating
notes, not talking with me until she looked at me. “Most of the time, I don’t know
how or why, but it goes right through you. But then you reach to me. I responded to
what you already wanted.”

“You read my mind and then told me what I wanted to hear?” I choked on the words and
tried to close my mouth, but I was wide open and afraid that the acid I swallowed
before was about to come back up. I gestured between us. “You and me. Us. We’re a
lie! How much of us is real and not you playing me?”

“Don’t do this to me, Ward.”

“Don’t do this to
you
? I’m not the one dicking around in your head!”

I’d told her things about growing up with Drake that no one knew. She wasn’t frightened
by my baggage, but this…Good God.

“I trusted you,” I seethed.

“You still can,” Vayda pleaded. “And my telling you about the Mind Games shows that
I trust you,
gadjo
.”

I didn’t want her to call me
gadjo
right then. She’d used it before to set me apart from her, but it wound up pulling
me closer. Scowling, I found a rock and threw it as far as I could into the woods.
“You wouldn’t have told me about this if tonight hadn’t happened! You do
not
fucking trust me!” I threw another rock. “And, apparently, I can’t trust you!”

She hugged herself as her eyes shined with tears. “Are you breaking up with me?”

“I don’t know!” I punched the barn’s door, cutting my knuckles. My hand throbbed as
blood oozed into the scrapes. “Shit!”

“Here.” Vayda scooped some snow and placed it against my torn knuckles. I gasped,
the nerve endings overloaded by the cold. I didn’t know what was worse, the pain or
shock of ice.

She reached toward me, nearly running her fingers down my arm, but drew her hand back
before we connected. Her voice thickened, her head dropping forward. “I’m sorry. I
honestly am.”

She walked away and paused on the steps of her stone house. Then she vanished inside.

The wind sliced clean through me as if I had no clothes on my body, no flesh over
my bones. The cuts on my hand ached, bruises formed over my scars. I’d take care of
the mess once I got home. Right then, I had to clear my head.

The Jaguar was a fast ride to Heidi’s house where the living room glowed like a campfire.
The dashboard clock read ten to one. Over ninety minutes past curfew. Shit. As I entered
through the door off the kitchen, Bernadette was at my feet. Her tail bopped as she
snuffled my shoes.

“How much trouble am I in?” I asked, rubbing her ears.

She spun several times, dog-speak for “a hell of a lot.”

“That’s what I figured.”

I headed into the living room with my dog trotting behind. Heidi bolted up from the
glider when she saw me. Her hair was knotted, her face puffy. She reached out to grab
my arm, but I darted away from her stretching fingers. No more touching.

“Heidi, I’m not in the mood,” I cut her off. “I’ve had a bad night.”

She studied my black-and-bluing hand crusted with blood. “What happened? With the
bad roads, I kept picturing you and Vayda in a car wreck or dead. You should have
called!”

I slumped on the couch. “I’m home now, so you don’t have to worry.”

Her arms folded over her robe. “Ward, I can’t let this slide. You showed up with a
broken curfew and busted hand. This is the kind of crap Drake pulled.”

Curses tipped my tongue, but I counted arcs of the pendulum swinging in the grandfather
clock.
Calm down. Breathe. Be cold.

Heidi snapped her fingers. “I’ve bent over backwards to give you a decent place to
live. Without me, you’d be on smack or in jail. Like your dad.”

Something in my mind splintered. “You love letting me know when I fuck up, don’t you?”

Darting off the couch, I stomped up the stairs. I didn’t have to listen to this crap.
Life, as rotten as the days were in Minnesota, was simpler when left to fend for myself,
and I didn’t worry about people’s emotions or my own. I could shut down and exist.
That was that.