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.
Chapter Five
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 overeage
r 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.
“Taos, New Mexico, in a hippie commune.”
“That’s different.”
“Or she’s a fishmonger in Seattle. Maybe she’s back in jail in Arkansas.” He jumped for a low-hanging branch, missing it. “She used to send postcards but stopped a long time ago.”
I stopped myself from touching his shoulder. Sticking my finger in a light socket would do less damage. But I wanted to. I wanted to put my fingers on him and take away the hurt, swallow it into mine. I knew the hurt of losing a mother. When I wanted to bolt from him before, I’d been afraid of his anger, but it wasn’t truly anger. It was grief. Even if he wasn’t Rom, we had this thing in common, and it was pain. Pain was something I could take. As my hand caught his shoulder, a tic in the corner of his lips jumped.
I got it, and he knew it.
The woods thinned until we reached the main road into Black Orchard. Ward led me across the road to a cobblestone driveway I passed daily. On each side, conifers like sentinels guarded the driveway, threatening to collapse and suffocate any trespassers under their weight.
I ducked into Ward’s coat and stayed close behind as he guided me down the driveway where we came to an inhospitable gate.
He grimaced as he wiped away a spider’s gauzy web tacked between the metal bars, and he wedged the gate wide enough until he could slip inside and heave it open wider. “The button in the car makes it appear so easy, but this thing weighs a ton.” He waved me forward. “After you, my lady.”
I walked around him, stopping as I came to his bowed head. His mischievous smile stretched wide, and warmth crept into my cheeks; I had to glance away. A soft laugh echoed behind me, not the mocking sounds that chased my mother, chased Jonah and me in Montana and Hemlock. A gentle tease that, because I’d blushed, knew he unraveled some tight part of me. He was gadje and utterly frustrating.
I wanted to hear his laugh again.
I walked around the driveway’s curve where his house came into view. The Victorian restoration was deep lavender with dormer windows and spindle-trim painted magenta and white. Three stories high, the distance from the ground to the tallest gable was intimidating. A lightning rod curly-cued off a turret where a Velvet Underground poster covered a window, Ward’s room I guessed. Half-dead ivy devoured the house, crawled up from the earth to reclaim the wraparound porch. The ivy pulled as if wishing to snap off pieces and drag them under the dirt after sunset.
A silver dog wandered off toward the evergreens, and Ward trotted across the grass, tucking the dog under his arm, and met me on the porch. “Bernadette wants to say hi.”
My mother’s vitsa never let her keep dogs or cats because they weren’t clean. Yet we had barn cats that my father fed with cans of tuna in Montana. I offered the snuffling schnauzer my hand. Her irises were milky, and the fat stump of her tail convulsed. “She’s cute. You bring her when you moved?”
“Like I’ve ever had a pet.” He set the d
og in a wicker basket and patted her before standing. “Bernadette’s my sister’s dog, but she likes me best.”
In the fading sunlight, the waves of his hair gleamed copper, which he pushed behind his left ear to reveal a steel-ring cartilage piercing. As he rose from settling the dog, his gaze locked on mine. I should’ve slipped away and waved him goodbye, but I stayed. His chest swelled with breath. The toes of his combat boots nudged against my blue Chucks, still I didn’t back away. Something held me because I needed to know what would happen if I stayed beside a boy I shouldn’t be near. The tip of his tongue wetted his lip. Heat melted my cold as his face inched near mine. My fingers twitched. I wanted to touch him.
“Vayda,” he whispered.
I turned my face. “I should probably go. Here’s your coat.”
“I think it’s going to rain. I’ll get it later.”
I hopped down the steps.
“Vayda,” he said again, louder.
I stalled, spying a funny twist on his mouth.
“You have the longest hair,” he remarked.
“Thanks, I guess.” Again, we said goodbye, but I pivoted to see him on the porch, arms crossing his chest. “Something working your mind, young man?”
He approached me. Our fingertips touched. A small zing, enough to make my fingers prickle. Again his mouth was close, his cheek not quite against mine. I lowered my barrier to touch him. The energy was easy and light, a tickle. I wanted more.
“It’d be cool to hang out. Without Jonah,” he said.
I wanted to see him again, but so many complications made it hard to say okay. The memory of my dream—the pine trees, his hands. Why him?
I lifted my barrier, retreating. “I don’t know if I can.”
“I see.” He trudged up the steps and held his dog, scratching her ears. I thought he was going inside with nothing to say until he swung around. “It’s the whole Romani thing. Or maybe you want someone who isn’t a wreck.”
A Murder of Magpies Page 4