A Murder of Magpies (29 page)

Another slap to my face, and I screamed. “Stop!”

A whimper accented each breath I released as his hands blocked my floundering arms.

“Everyone’s gonna find out you’re freaks,” Marty hissed and pried my legs apart.

“Do it, Marty!” a girl shouted.

Blood streaming down my forehead, I made out Chloe’s silhouette sauntering from underneath
the playground slide. The wind blew her blond hair, and her blue coat shielded her
from the coming storm. Her plaid skirt revealed bare, cold-red legs, but she didn’t
even seem to notice that she could get frostbite. Her hands pumped in and out of fists,
and I couldn’t help but recall Jonah and the way he shook out the energy from his
hands. Her energy, black and sour like burnt molasses, clung to her. It was identical
to Marty’s.

Danny lagged behind Chloe, his tan skin greenish under the lights. The urge to flee
from the pack pounded off him. “She’s scared enough! Can we go?”

“No!” Chloe screeched. “This bitch needs to know what it’s like to be used.”

Marty nodded at Chloe and forced his body over mine. He ripped at my coat, fingers
fumbling with the buttons on my pants. A fingernail scratched my hip as his hand stretched
below the waistband of my jeans.

“Get off me!” I wailed.

“This is going too far!” Danny yelled. “Marty, come on! You’re done, right?”

Yet he didn’t sound so sure.

Marty pushed a bloody strand of hair from my face. He lowered his mouth, his lips
against my bared teeth, his moan swallowing my sobs.

“Your brother has to be stopped,” Chloe snarled behind him. “You think I didn’t know
Jonah was to blame for what you said at the coffee shop? I told Marty to find him
at Fire Sales. He had a good time working Jonah over. Vayda, you let Jonah hurt me.
You even tried to bail him out, but, whatever you did to me, the memories came back.
It’s your time to be hurt.”

Tears on my cheeks, my hands surged with cold fire. Energy. Rising.

Marty lowered his hard chest to mine. A shock erupted from my palms. Airborne, he
sailed off me, landing far away on his back.

Motionless. Dead?

Did I care if he was?

“Oh, my God!” Chloe screamed and ran to Marty’s fallen form.

Lying on my back and crying, I saw Marty’s chest rise and fall. I swiveled my head
in the powdery snow smeared with blood. A car’s headlights burned my sight as the
vehicle careened through the parking lot. An engine idled, the chug of the Chevy.
The heaps of snow beneath me began to melt from Jonah’s fire flowing toward me and
soaking my clothing. He was here. Thank God.

Danny reached his hand to me. “Are you hurt?”

I couldn’t answer. My head throbbed, and the energy riding my palms battered my being—blood,
bones, sinew, spirit, all electrified.

“Get away from her!”

Ward shoved Danny before moving to where Chloe knelt with Marty. She shrieked and
retreated while Ward kicked Marty.

“I will break you!” Every word Ward yelled emphasized a blow to Marty’s back. “I will
fuck you up!”

“Ward, stop!” I shouted, crouching on my knees. Jonah hoisted me to my feet under
my arms. I caught his dark eyes as he forced my fingers between his, collecting the
energy bailing from me between our hands.

“Hang on, Vayda.”

Our hands interlocked. A whorl of fire smashed against glacier-cold. Waves of energy
streamed out, and a breaker of light thrust across the snow. Sightless, all I could
sense was an ice-burn slipping under my flesh. My back collided with the earth as
the force fell out across the playground. In time to see Chloe flung onto her chest,
my vision returned and shifted to Ward landing on his side, both taken out by the
expanding blast.

For sixty seconds, a paralysis deadened the playground. Tender and pummeled, I crawled
through the snow to Ward. He sat up to rub his shoulder. We helped each other stand
and leaned into one another’s bodies as the blast’s residue dissipated like a shot
of Novocain wearing off. A nudge each to Danny, Marty, and Chloe roused them enough
to know they were unhurt. Jonah balanced against the bench and caught his breath before
walking back toward the Chevy. He opened the trunk and removed the blankets Rain gave
us to keep warm during our trip from Hemlock. I wrapped a blanket around my wet clothing.
Ward climbed in the backseat beside me and covered me with his jacket.

“We should call the police,” he said.

“No,” Jonah and I both said at once. “No cops.”

“What are you gonna tell your dad? Vayda, your face is all banged up.”

I anchored my back to the seat. Every inch of me throbbed. “I’ll tell him I fell on
the ice. I don’t want
Dati
going after Marty.” I hugged myself, forcing myself not to feel the hurt where Marty
held me down. “I…I want to go home.”

Behind the steering wheel, Jonah examined the park, watching while Chloe and Marty
made an effort to stand. His shoulders vibrated. He had to be so infuriated to sit
and shake, but a tear slipped down his cheek.

“I’m so sorry, Sis. I should’ve known it was coming, but I never thought—”

“Stop it!” Ward yelled. “It’s done. A train stopped us. It was a shitty plan. It’s
done, and thank God, we got here.”

Jonah clubbed the steering wheel with his palm. “I should’ve handled Marty. There’s
no way word of this won’t get around. I’m sorry because you love my sister, but we
can’t stay.”

Love? The word neither Ward nor I had chanced saying yet it was the only word that
would do. He held his sleeve to the cut on my forehead. That was love.

Jonah turned the key in the ignition and drove away. Evergreens lined the streets,
and the ground was white, the sky was black. No stars, no moon, no clouds.

“They might not talk,” I said as Jonah steered into our driveway.

“Sis, you know that’s not true. They’ll talk, and, inevitably, we’ll run.”

Ward

A dozen or so students gathered near Vayda’s locker scratched with bubbly letters:
WITCH
.

“Real nice!”

I pivoted in time to see Vayda’s creased forehead, still yellow and green with bruises,
before she darted into the restroom. A witch’s cackle rose above the rumble of too
many people talking.

Jonah’s fist thwacked his locker. More tittering. Two weeks of relentless ridicule
had unwound him, and he held out his arms, offering himself up for a fight. Or a pie
in the face. “You want a freak show? Fine!”

Every open locker in the hall slammed shut in banging succession like falling dominos.

Then stunned silence. The other students backed away as Jonah shoved past me toward
the physics lab but not before whipping a trash bin across the hall upside-down, scattering
papers.

“Go ahead! Give them something to talk about, dumbass!” I called after him. He didn’t
swivel back around but stuck up his middle finger. I could get pissed, but honestly,
I’d be tempted to use Mind Games to shut up people if I could.

The crowd dispersed once the show ended, but Chloe hung close by. Her lips were a
self-satisfied smile as she traced Vayda’s scratched locker.

“Who the hell let you out of your cage?” I hissed and coughed. Damn thing still wouldn’t
go away.

She eyed me curiously. “Aren’t you afraid Vayda’s playing you like Jonah did me?”

“No.”

I could make some comment on how I had a brain and, thusly, was harder to manipulate,
but Chloe wasn’t worth it. Jonah messed with her. She was angry. What he did was inexcusable,
and it still surprised me that he’d ever thought it would be okay to “free” her mind.
What she and Marty planned for Vayda—that was a different level of demented.

Leaving Chloe to admire the graffiti on Vayda’s locker, I spied Jonah and Vayda outside
the lab. Vayda’s cheeks flushed, and she tugged at her hip-length hair. Drawing closer,
the scent of pine knocked me back. Her hair was stuck to her hands with some kind
of glue.

“What the hell?” I asked. “What’s in your hair?”

“Sap left over from the physics class’s viscosity experiment last week.” Jonah plucked
at a knot in his sister’s hair. “Some kid ganked it from the supply cabinet with the
other sticky gunk they tested, thought it’d be funny to pour it over Vayda.”

“How will I get this out?” she groaned. A rope of hair tore, adhered to her skin in
a tacky mess.

Chloe edged close, though keeping her distance by walking by the lockers on the other
side of the hallway. “Wow, Vayda. Shame about the rat’s nest in your hair, or maybe
a bat got tangled up in it.”

Vayda’s mouth dropped, and a silent cry was on her breath. With a strange laugh, Chloe
let herself into one of the classrooms, and Vayda wept at the torn hair stuck to her
hands.

“It’ll wash out.” I reached toward her, but she waved me off and charged down the
hall.

I took a step after her when Jonah stopped me. “Let her be.”

“She needs help,” I protested.

He rubbed his face with his arm. “You don’t have a clue what it’s like for us. No
one’s written slurs about you or filled your gas tank with sugar. Dad’s lost three
clients this week. That paper I wrote on
Jane Eyre
? I got a D. I’ve never gotten a D, but Sister Hillary Lauren gets away with it ’cause
Monsignor hates us. Now my sister’s got a scalp of pine sap, and
you’re
gonna tell her everything will be okay? Fuck that.”

He took off after Vayda.

She told me before there was a pattern to the harassment—began with jokes, became
vandalism, and eventually someone took it too far. I had to wonder if “too far” had
come.

I skipped class. During the final bell of the day, I washed my hands. Paint dust peppered
my hands. Chipping the paint was arduous, but Vayda’s locker now read
itch
with a scribbled blob over the W. Small victory.

That morning, I’d left a note for Heidi to pick me up an hour late, explaining I needed
to do research in the library. So what if it was a lie? Within forty minutes of dismissal,
the school was pretty well empty. Fifteen minutes left until Heidi arrived. This shouldn’t
be hard.

The whispered pace of my stride carried down the cavernous hall of the language arts
wing and through the arched doors into the church. I slipped past the open doors of
the sanctuary until I reached the main office where Monsignor and Sister Tremblay
worked. I peeked around the corner and spied the secretary. She hummed the Beatles’
“Yesterday” and sipped tea, thankfully distracted by the phone, and I slipped unnoticed
past the doorway. The paperclips in my pocket easily straightened. I found Sister
Tremblay’s door, shadowed in the corner of a hall within the office, and crouched
beside it. Privacy was important for a nun specializing in counseling. How fortuitous
for a delinquent with lock-picking skills.

The lock was simple, a cylinder mechanism. Line up the pins, and that was it. Despite
my shaking fingers, the paperclips finagled into the keyhole. I chewed the inside
of my cheek as the pins’ weight shifted against the paperclips. Three, two, one��got
it. I glanced at my watch. One minute-seventeen seconds. Not shabby at all for being
rusty.

The file cabinet in Sister Tremblay’s unlit office had a lock I barely needed to manipulate
before it opened. Manila folders contained transcripts, notes, information on every
student. Flip, flip, flip. Q, R, S—Silver, Vayda. Her file rustled with papers, and
my fingers snagged Jonah’s folder as well. Dozens of pages of handwritten notes, each
stating a time, place, and one sentence description of “incidents.” Mind Games. No
time to read much detail, not then, and not much in the way of school papers other
than vaccination notes and a homeschooling transcript, which Vayda already explained
was a forgery Rain concocted to smooth away any bumps from the lack of official records.
For good measure, I read over my own file. Only transcripts from Rochester and a medical
report clearing me for public school. Flipping through more random folders, none of
the other students had personal notes quite like those in Vayda and Jonah’s files.

The secretary’s chair squeaked.

I shoved the files in my backpack. My hearing sharpened, breath still. More Beatles’
humming.

With a phantom’s stealth, I ducked into the hallway, slid past the sanctuary, and
then ran toward my locker, my boots thundering on the floor. As I rounded the corner,
a cough ripped from my lungs. Heidi had taken me to urgent care last weekend when
I’d come back from Fire Sales unable to stop coughing enough to work on my own metal
sculptures. In spite of x-rays and breathing tests, my cough was still a mystery,
the doctor called it chronic. Maybe even psychosomatic. It wasn’t in my head. The
tightness in my lungs was real and had gotten worse.

“In a hurry, Mr. Ravenscroft?” Sister Tremblay asked as she stepped around a corner.

“I’m trying out for track.”

My chest gave a final cough, and I glared at her face, stoic as a statue in an abandoned
cathedral. Untouched. A chill climbed my spine.

“Do you know what you’re doing with the Murdocks?” she asked.

I half-smiled. “I don’t know any Murdocks. Do you?”

“If you’re smart, you won’t fall in with them. People with uncontrolled
talents
such as Vayda and Jonah ruin others.”

I tightened my hold on my backpack and glanced at my scar-covered knuckles. Maybe
staying with Vayda would leave me broken, but I was fractured before I ever met her.

“Why are you so hung up on them?” I asked, spinning the focus toward her.

Sister Tremblay cocked her head. “A person’s past is inescapable. Cycles repeat. Like
mother, like child. They need control, and a promise must be kept.”

“What promise? To who?”

She didn’t listen, continuing, “Instead of forcing them to be trained, Emory excuses
them. This can’t be allowed to go on.”

I moved closer to her. Even though she was taller than I was, she backed up. “What
are you gonna do?”