A Murder of Magpies

by Sarah Bromley

  I knew Marty even before I saw his face. Lying on his back, a gash in his forehead, he still wore his clothing from the coffee shop. His shirt stained with blood, but he was breathing.

  Ward set down the phone. As I moved toward him, he stepped back once. Then a second step back. His spine was inflexible, his chest swollen as though ready to strike or safeguard himself—whichever he needed.

  He knew what I could do. He put his hands on me and now knew about the Mind Games.

  Abruptly, the room swarmed with emergency help. A blond woman took Jonah’s vitals and spoke into a walkie-talkie. A second paramedic slipped a stabilizing collar around his neck. I heard myself give my father’s cell phone number to an officer, aware of his uniform and the sound of his pen scratching on his notepad, but my gaze didn’t move from Ward and his didn’t leave mine.

  “We need statements from both of you,” the officer declared as the paramedics wheeled out Marty on a stretcher.

  After I lied that I’d found Jonah while checking on the shop, the officer allowed us to leave. I clipped my seatbelt and waited for Ward to steer the car away from the curb. He didn’t drive anywhere. The car’s engine hummed, the heat drying my eyes, and Ward’s hands coiled around the steering wheel hard enough to whiten his knuckles. He stared at the dashboard, the grinding of his teeth audible.

  “What the fuck are you?” he asked. I reached out, but he blocked me. “Don’t touch me.”

  I flinched, and my face was wet with renewed tears. “Ward—I—”

  There was nothing to say. I’d succeeded in what I’d dreaded since I met him and knew he was the gadjo in my dream. I terrified him by unleashing my Mind Games, and now I was strung up in this nest of unwound thread I’d spun.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ward

  “Hell of a night.” Emory tapped an unlit cigarette against his hand. “You don’t have to stick around.”

  “Where would I go?” I asked, sinking into my seat in the emergency room’s waiting lounge.

  “You’d go home. Heidi worries about you, Ward.”

  I coughed. “Because I live there doesn’t mean it’s home.”

  He slipped his cigarette behind his ear. “There’s a saying that your home is wherever you seek shelter in a storm. Every kind of storm.”

  I was hardly in the mood for preaching, but Emory didn’t push me further. The fluorescent lights in the waiting room made his skin greenish. Few people sought help tonight—bad weather keeping everyone inside, out of trouble. Vayda dozed on a loveseat. The black make-up smudged around her eyes had dried, and where she held Jonah’s bleeding head left stains on her hands.

  Hands that opened doors without touching them.

  I smelled something sweet. Her scent, snowy and brisk, clung to my clothing and my skin. My stomach heaved. I didn’t—If I—

  Damn thinking straight.

  Vayda stirred in her slumber. The light above her sizzled.

  Tonight, I saw things that went against reality. The “shh” of the furniture drifting over the floor. My girlfriend with her arms stretched, a black-and-white bird with wings angled for flight.

  I’d had nightmares like this, whipping around, blindfolded, in a forest maze with no idea how I got inside or which path would free me. When I awakened from those dreams, my skin was always cold and sweaty.

  “Can I get you a Coke?” Emory asked.

  I grunted a response, distracted by the television where a rapper in some hip-hop group flashed a gargantuan ring. He thrust his hips with about as much sexiness as the pair of boning lemurs I’d witnessed on a class field trip to the Minnesota Zoo. Hell, at least lemurs weren’t pretentious about getting it on.

  “Mr. Silver?” an attendant called. Emory didn’t respond. The attendant called again, and he startled, realizing he’d been summoned. “We’re ready for you.”

  With Vayda’s dad gone and crap on the television, boredom came quick. Even an aquarium with one of those giant algae-eating fish couldn’t hold my attention. My head was too noisy. Vayda shuddered in her sleep, and I picked up my coat from the chair to lay it across her hips.

  In my room. The fire. Had she done that, too?

  I reached for her, my hand aching to touch her cheek, but pulled back. I couldn’t do this.

  Her eyes opened. I’d never pictured irises so light green like chips of springtime. She sat up, rotating her neck. “How long was I out?”

  “An hour.”

  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 goo
d.”

  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 t
old 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!”