Vigil

by V. J. Chambers

He pulled away, clearing his throat.

  I felt dizzy and disoriented.

  And embarrassed.

  What had possessed me? Was it nerves? Were more than my thoughts beginning to scatter? Were my actions becoming erratic as well?

  I looked up at him.

  His gaze darted away. He reached for the helmet that I’d set down and offered it to me.

  I didn’t take it. I only looked at it. What had just happened?

  “Let me give you a ride home,” he said.

  “I can get there myself.” My voice was at least three octaves too high.

  “It isn’t safe.”

  “I’ll call a cab.” I jumped off the bike. “I’m sorry that I…” Kissed you? Let you kiss me? Enjoyed being kissed? “I don’t know what came over me.”

  He set the helmet down. He hesitated. “All right. Call a cab then.”

  I pulled out my phone.

  He watched while I dialed. While I spoke with the cab company. While I gave my address.

  His blue eyes were cold and emotionless, and he gave me a wide berth, never allowing us to get close again.

  I wanted to die inside. What had just happened? This wasn’t like me. I didn’t go around letting strange masked men kiss me in the middle of the night. I was very careful about the kind of men I let into my life. I’d seen too much of the dark underbelly of male and female interaction not to be cautious.

  But here I was, throwing all caution to the wind.

  He still looked so good to me. And the way he’d kissed me… He’d been eager, even thorough. I remembered the iron weight of his arms as they held me in place.

  “You need to stay away from this part of the city,” he told me. “You’re no match for Hayden Barclay.”

  “You can’t stop me. I want Hayden brought to justice, and I’ll do whatever I can to make sure that happens.”

  “I think I could stop you if I needed to.” He folded his arms over his chest.

  Little thrills went through me. Something about the way he’d said that made me wish I could kiss him again.

  Stop it, I told myself. So, he’s the most attractive man you’ve ever seen. But he’s dressed up in spandex and a mask. He’s crazy. He’s bad news.

  The cab pulled up across the street. The cabbie got out. “Cecily Kane?”

  I waved. “That’s me.” I turned to the masked man. “I have to stop Hayden. It’s a personal thing for me.”

  “You think it isn’t personal for me?”

  I hadn’t given it a lot of thought, really. Everything about this masked man was making it hard for me to think properly.

  “Don’t come back to that part of the city,” he said in a voice like cold steel. He waited until I was across the street and safe inside the cab with the door shut after me.

  Then he swung onto his unique motorcycle and revved the engine.

  On impulse, I rolled down the window in the cab. I got out my phone, and I began snapping pictures of him as he drove away.

  Even captured in a photograph, he looked larger than life, too virile and enormous to be real.

  * * *

  “What are these?” said Lauren Stephens, my editor and boss. She was scrolling through the photos I’d given her to accompany the story I’d turned in that morning. I’d simply pulled all of my photos off my phone, including the ones of the masked man. There he was, riding across Lauren’s desktop in all his shimmering black glory.

  “Oops,” I said. “I didn’t mean to give those to you.”

  “Who is this guy?” Lauren raised her eyebrows. “This some kind of kinky shit you’re into?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s a guy I met last night.”

  “Dressed like that? You meet him at a weird club or something?”

  “No, he was just on the street.” I bit my lip. I supposed there was no real reason to keep the masked man secret from Lauren. “He, um, saved me when a guy was getting fresh with me. He seems to consider himself a masked vigilante.”

  Lauren’s mouth made a tiny, round O. “You’re shitting me.”

  “No,” I said.

  She laughed. “A masked vigilante? What’s he vigilant-ing against?”

  “Organized crime,” I said. “He said something about how three-fourths of the police were taking bribes.”

  Her eyes lit up. “That’s great. That’s really great. How fast can you have…” She checked something on her computer. “Five hundred words on that?”

  “What?” I said.

  “You’ve got the photos,” she said. “It’s a dynamite story. Try to remember exactly what he said.”

  Exactly what he said? Then I remembered that I’d switched on my recorder back when I thought he was Hayden Barclay. “Actually, I had my recorder on.”

  She grinned. “Even better. Make it seven hundred words. Can you have it in two hours?”

  My mouth worked. “I… I guess.”

  “Great.” She shooed me with her hands.

  That was my cue to leave her office. I wandered out back into the newsroom where the other reporters’ and interns’ desks were all set up.

  “Oh, and Cecily?” called Lauren.

  I turned.

  “See if you can think up a name for him. Something catchy.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I’d been working as an intern at The Aurora Sun-Times for two weeks now. It was the summer after my junior year at college, and—as near as I could tell—if I wanted to be successful in the newspaper business, I needed to have internships before I graduated. These days, it wasn’t easy to make a living as a reporter, what with the advent of the internet and the shrinking of newspaper circulation and the massive lay-offs of key staff at newspapers everywhere. Why pay money for a piece of paper when the news was available for free on the web?

  But, unlike some people, I didn’t believe that newspapers were going to die. For one thing, the content we were providing was still relevant. The packaging was changing from paper to digital, but the news remained relevant. As far as the loss of pay from readers, well, newspapers had always relied on advertising to make it possible to fund production. Online, the revenue was simply going to have to solely come from advertising.

  And, sure, that meant that there was going to be less money all around and that less people were going to have newspaper jobs.

  But it didn’t mean that no one was going to have a newspaper job.

  I was going to be one of the few who did.

  The way I figured it, all I had to do was make a big enough name for myself that I was relevant no matter where I chose to do my reporting. I had to make myself a brand, and if I did that, then I had it made for the rest of my career. As long as I continued at a level of excellence, and I was head and shoulders above everyone else, I’d be successful.

  Now, I guess that sounded a little arrogant. I was essentially saying that I thought I’d have a career in journalism because I could be better than everyone else.

  But I didn’t really mean better.

  I meant… driven, I guess.

  I wanted this. I wanted it bad. It was the only thing I’d ever wanted so badly for my entire life, and I knew that I would get it, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t even know who I was.

  My love affair with newspapers began when I was a very little girl. One weekend, I’d been visiting my grandparents and looking through some of their old black-and-white movies. They bought a lot of nostalgic DVDs, and one of them was for a movie called His Girl Friday.

  I liked the picture on the front, because I liked how girls always looked in black and white—their skin perfect and blemish free, their lips and eyes dark, their hair wavy and perfectly coiffed.

  And I was sucked into another world. The world of newspapers in the 1940s. I was enamored with Hildy, the brash former reporter who gave it just as good as the men in the business, and who couldn’t give up her career or her hard-boiled editor ex-husband Walter. There was something transformative about it. It was the first time in my life
I had seen someone passionate about a job.

  My mother hardly worked, and when she did, it was only at diners as a waitress or in hotels as a maid. She was on her feet all day, and when she came home, she swore a lot and hit the bottle. To be fair, my mother hit the bottle no matter what she did. I had to cut her out of my life when I left home at eighteen. It was sad, but she had become poisonous to herself and to me and everything she touched.

  I had previously thought of work as something that was only torture. It was a necessary evil, something to be endured in order to get money.

  But Hildy…

  Hildy was trying to quit the newspaper business, to settle down and have a family.

  But deep down, she didn’t want that. All she wanted was to be a reporter, to chase the news, to be part of the excitement of a story.

  I was only six years old, but I knew right then that I wanted to be like Hildy. I wanted a passion so big it consumed me. Something I couldn’t run from.

  And like Hildy, my passion became the news.

  I had never paid attention to newspapers before this, but after seeing the movie, I insisted on having a subscription to our local daily. I didn’t read all of it. Some of it bored me to tears. But I read enough of it that I began to understand intrinsically how to write a news story. My passion began to grow and grow.

  In high school, I persuaded the journalism teacher to allow me to join the newspaper staff as a freshman. Generally, only sophomores and older were allowed into the class. She told me that she was moved by the gleam in my eye. She said that when she saw me, she knew that she had to get out of my way and let me do what I loved. I had passion. She saw it.

  So, at any rate, I didn’t think that I was a better journalist than everyone out there. But I thought that I might want it just a little bit more than a lot of people did. I had already seen it amongst my fellow journalism majors at college. They had drifted into the major for various reasons. Some were aspiring novelists who thought that they’d use newspaper writing as a job until they landed a major publishing contract. Some had taken a course in high school on a whim and discovered they liked it. Still others liked sports or fashion or some other field and knew that writing about such things would keep them close to their passion.

  But there were very few other people who were passionate about the news the way I was.

  I loved newspapers.

  I felt that reporting was a noble calling. That trying to tell people the truth was important. And that struggling to remain unbiased was difficult but worth doing. It was not the newspaper’s job to tell people what to think or how to think. It was only to provide them the information to think about.

  Lauren thought it was important for the people of Aurora to know about the masked man I’d met the night before. She was probably right. The people had a right to know.

  But I wasn’t going to tell the whole world I’d kissed the guy.

  Maybe that meant I was using a bias on the story. Maybe that made me just a tad less noble.

  I was going to have to deal with the guilt.

  I sat down at an empty desk. There were quite a few of those, even with all of us summer interns wandering around. The Sun-Times had laid off its share of employees recently. Interns were plentiful, of course. Interns were cheap labor that didn’t require health benefits. At any rate, I had my pick of computers.

  I logged on, opened up a new document.

  And I began to type.

  * * *

  My roommate Airenne Newton was reading aloud from the front page of the newspaper. “This dark and powerful man is watching from the the shadowy underbelly of the city. He is keeping vigil for those who have been taken advantage of by the criminal element in Aurora.” She peered over top of the paper. “You’re a poet, Cecily.”

  I flopped down next to her. “Hardly. I can’t believe they ran it on the front page. I guess it’s a good thing that my phone takes good quality pictures.” There he was, seven inches high, sailing off into the night.

  “You named him and everything,” said Airenne. She was always complaining about her name, which sounded common to the ear, but didn’t have a typical spelling. She had to correct the way people spelled her name constantly. She hated it.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “Lauren did. She wanted me to come up with a name, and I was thinking about calling him Catman or something because he moved so quietly and precisely, like a cat. But Lauren said that cats were feminine. And then I said we should call him Pantherman or Lynxman, and that was when she looked down at my copy and circled the word vigil.”

  “Vigil,” repeated Airenne. “It’s a good name for him. ‘The mysterious masked man, only known as Vigil.’”

  “Yeah, it’s good,” I said. “Thank Lauren.”

  Airenne returned to reading. “According to the masked man, ‘the entire police system in the city is corrupt. The gangs pay off everyone. Three fourths of our fine boys in blue are taking bribes and looking the other way.’ When asked for comment, Police Chief Norman Sanders was unavailable.” She grinned at me. “You’re so ballsy.”

  “I’m not. It’s just the truth. He wasn’t available when I called,” I said. “I only had two hours to write that damned story. I called again right before we went to press.”

  “It makes it sound like the police don’t care,” she said.

  “Well, maybe they don’t,” I said. “There’s a serial killer hacking women to pieces in case you haven’t noticed. And the police don’t even have any suspects. They’re clueless.”

  Airenne folded the paper down. “You’re really into that serial killer, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. I had debated explaining to her about my friend Darlene, but the truth was that Airenne and I weren’t that close. We’d hooked up as roommates for the summer on a message board for Aurora interns, thinking it would be perfect considering that we were both journalism interns. However, Airenne was interning at Bold! magazine, which meant that she was shallow and mostly interested in clothes and celebrities. I had nothing against either, but I didn’t want to talk about that to the exclusion of everything else. She and I generally had nothing to say to each other.

  She pointed at me. “You’re going to try to out the killer in the paper, aren’t you?”

  How did she know that? “No,” I said.

  “It’s just the kind of thing you would do. You’re the most ambitious person I know.” She looked at the story about Vigil again. “You’ve been here two weeks, and you got the front page.”

  “Tomorrow, they’ll use it to line hamster cages,” I said. “It’s not that big a deal. I only did it because Lauren told me to write it.”

  “You are trying to catch the killer aren’t you?” said Airenne. She consulted the article. “Seems like Vigil is too.”

  I’d kept my theory about Hayden Barclay out of the article, even though Vigil had agreed with me about Barclay’s guilt.

  Man, here I was calling him Vigil. I guessed the name was going to stick.

  “That’s how you found him, isn’t it?” said Airenne. “You two were both tracking the serial murderer.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I fished the remote out of the couch. “You know what? I’m home, and I don’t want to think about it. I just want to veg out and watch TV.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “All you care about is the news, Cecily.”

  She was right. It wasn’t like me to avoid talking about working or the paper. But the truth was, the article embarrassed me. I felt vaguely like I’d sold Vigil out. I hadn’t asked him if I could write about him. I’d taken his picture without permission. He could make a fuss about things like that if he wanted. Considering he seemed to be hiding his identity, it wasn’t likely that he would, but still I didn’t want to upset him. I’d already pressed my lips against his for no particularly good reason. Everything about the situation made me feel like cringing.

  And now it was my first front-page story at The Sun-Times. I didn’t like it.

 
; I turned the volume up on the television.

  It was some gossip show that ran on one of the entertainment channels.

  On screen, Callum Rutherford, orphaned billionaire head of Rutherford Enterprises, was coming out of a limo, a thin, big-busted blonde on each arm.

  Airenne pointed. “You may have come to Aurora for a serial killer, but that’s why I came here. Callum Rutherford.”

  “He’s disgusting,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? He’s gorgeous.”

  He was nice to look at. He had dark hair and blue eyes, and a fit, muscular body. “He’s good looking,” I said, “but he’s always taking out three girls at once. Didn’t he have four girlfriends at one point?”

  “Maybe there’s enough of him to go around,” said Airenne. “He lives in the city. And I’m going to meet him before this internship is over. You can count on that.”

  I wrinkled up my nose. “I can’t stop you. But I don’t see why you’d bother. He seems like a rich jerk.”

  She laughed. “In a perfect world, I’d want a man who was attractive, rich, and kind. But two out of three isn’t bad, is it?”

  Really? I didn’t get Airenne at all.

  * * *

  I left Airenne swooning over Callum Rutherford and went to take a shower. I didn’t usually take showers in the evening, but Airenne hogged the bathroom in the morning, and I’d had to adjust. I didn’t like it, because sleeping on wet hair meant that I always had bed head when I woke up.

  I looked like crap, no matter what I did. I’d bought about fifteen different hair products since moving to Aurora, but none of them could contain my slept-on hair.

  It wasn’t that my hair was complicated hair. It was honey colored and a little bit wavy. Not curly. Not straight. Wavy. I wore it long. Lately, I’d had my hair stylist cut a few layers in it.

  But I was a wash-and-wear kind of girl. I didn’t usually spend a lot of time screwing around with my hair. Of course, considering I didn’t take showers in the morning anymore, I now had lots of time to play around with it.

  Tonight, I’d decided that I was going to put it in one long braid. I figured that, when I woke up tomorrow, I could re-braid it, and it would look pretty good. Braids weren’t exciting, but they were practical. And it would keep my hair back and out of the way. I could live with the idea of having to wear my hair in a braid every day for the rest of the summer.