Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1

by Angela Slatter

  His eyes bulged, his head jerked, a panicky movement. ‘He wouldn’t hurt me.’

  ‘He’s hurt a lot of other people. If he survives, he’ll be brought before the Council – or what’s left of them.’

  ‘That bunch of freaks! My son doesn’t have to answer to them!’ His face twisted with a hatred so intense it was difficult to believe he’d once married into the Weyrd. But then, maybe he’d only learned to hate them after he’d said I do.

  ‘A Normal court won’t be able to try him, but he needs to answer for what he’s done.’ And I saw from his expression that was exactly what he’d been counting on: a Normal court, somewhere he could influence the outcome. So Dame Rumour had been correct; he’d purchased justice before. If he’d got away with murder, why shouldn’t his son?

  ‘Did Donovan contact his grandfather?’

  He looked at me blankly. ‘I told you before, my father’s dead.’

  ‘Not your father. Your wife’s.’

  He paled, his lips thinning. ‘Why would he do that? He knows nothing about them.’

  Maybe not from you, I thought. ‘You said it yourself: he was lonely. Mr Baker, how stupid are you? It’s only natural he’d seek out family members.’

  ‘I’m his family,’ he shouted, and when I didn’t answer, he felt the need to go on, ‘He didn’t know anything about Nadasy.’

  ‘Well, someone told him.’

  ‘Who?’

  I shrugged, ignoring the vibration in my pocket. ‘Look, even if your son could be changed back, he might not want to be. Whatever you know about Nadasy, you’d better share. Is he alive? Have you seen him recently?’

  He began to bawl, inconsolable as a child. Shaking his head, he cried, ‘He’s taken my son, my only boy, hasn’t he?’

  ‘In all fairness, you did kill his daughter. But I have to ask, why didn’t he just slaughter you?’

  He snorted, eyes sparking up. ‘I showed that old fucker! He’ll never see his precious little girl again, but she’s mine forever.’ He leaned forward, snakelike, and spat, ‘And that’s all you fucking need to know!’

  My back felt tingly, the way it does when something with eight legs is taking a day-trip along the spine, and I looked at him in disgust. ‘Mr Baker, a friend of mine is missing – I’m not saying you’re involved, but if I find out you or Donovan had anything to do with it, I swear I’ll send your son back in a Jiffy bag.’

  *

  As we pulled up outside David’s building, my mobile buzzed again, like a vaguely annoyed wasp. It was McIntyre, telling me she’d had the blood work from Mel’s place rushed through and, consequently, I owed her big time. The red stuff wasn’t Mel’s – she was A positive – and whatever had spilled was, well, not quite anything. It was corrupted, mixed with mud and deteriorated from age.

  After she’d finished describing the analysis, she asked if I’d had any luck on either angel or baby front. My negative answer displeased her, but I didn’t have anything else to leaven it.

  Before he took off I shared the latest with Ziggi and asked him to let Bela know. I just couldn’t face talking to my boss that evening. Then I made my way inside the complex, thinking it might be wise to set some protective spells around this place, too.

  I’d barely even knocked when the door flew open and a wide-eyed Lizzie appeared, giving a damn good impersonation of a child who’d temporarily forgotten her sole parent was missing.

  ‘Oh, Verity! You won’t believe what he’s got here!’

  ‘I probably will, honey.’

  She’d obviously been communing with the Wii. The image on the TV was paused, partially pixelated, and I raised an eyebrow at David, who was hastily trying to hide the fact that (a) he’d been playing a game in which a cartoon cat with a handbag beat up Godzilla, and (b) he’d been losing badly to an eight-year-old. I didn’t say anything. Then I noticed two mugs sitting on the kitchen bench, cold grounds in the bottom. I frowned.

  ‘You didn’t give her coffee, did you?’

  Lizzie answered for him, throwing the words over her shoulder like an ice bath, ‘Bela came to visit and the boys had es-peress-os.’ Oblivious to her bombshell, she switched to single-player mode and continued smashing Tokyo.

  I felt like someone had stuck a steak knife under one of my fingernails. I looked at David for clarification, while I auto-corrected Lizzie. ‘That’s Mr Tepes to you.’

  ‘We had a chat about guy things. He left this for you.’ David’s tone was carefully neutral; it was never easy to meet the predecessor. In my defence, we had briefly covered the topic of Bela when we’d had ‘the talk’, but still . . . also, I might have glossed over precisely how handsome my ex was. On the one hand, if Bela ruined this for me, I would kill him. On the other, if David was the kind of guy who was rattled by Bela, then I’d kill him. He handed me an off-white envelope with my name in old-fashioned cursive script scored deeply into the thick paper. I slid it into my pocket, saving any nasty surprises for later.

  ‘So.’

  ‘A bit Vlad the Impaler, isn’t he?’ David tried for flippant but the snark was there, oh, it was there, just enough to make me relax and grin.

  ‘Jealous?’

  ‘No. Judgemental. Look, I can’t say I like the idea of you working for your ex, but it’s not my choice.’ He caressed my face. ‘Besides, I trust you.’

  ‘You’re jealous.’ I was gloating a little, I admit. Then I put my arms around his neck and was relieved to feel him pull me closer. We held each other tight, watching the stars pulse and sparkle in the sky outside his window.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘So, Zvezdomir Tepes, do we need to talk about boundaries? Specifically, you not visiting my new boyfriend.’ I did my best to keep my voice level, but I wasn’t sure I’d succeeded.

  Bela’s brows went up, black caterpillars on their way towards his hairline.

  ‘How did you even know where he lived?’

  ‘Ziggi.’

  I glared, and Bela looked uncomfortable. ‘Don’t be too hard on him – I bribed him.’

  Of course: my faithful sidekick’s only weakness. How sad it wasn’t some sort of heroic weakness; instead, I’d been sold down the river for a piece of chocolate cake. Okay, so very good chocolate cake, but cake nonetheless.

  ‘Bela, listen, I need to have a life, an ordinary life outside of the work I do for you. Or at least part of one. And I need high fences around that part of my existence. Don’t screw this up for me, or so help me, I will—’

  ‘I wasn’t . . . That certainly wasn’t my intention.’ He scratched his head. ‘I wanted to check on Lizzie, to ask her a few more questions.’

  ‘Stuff you think I wouldn’t have asked?’

  We were sitting at a McDonalds, which wasn’t my first or even twelfth choice of venue, but Lizzie had begged for an Egg McMuffin and I couldn’t bear to say ‘no’ to a currently motherless kid. Lizzie, having gobbled her food at frightening speed, was now running around the play area, making friends. Bela was glaring at a pile of hash browns as if he couldn’t quite understand what they were doing on his plate and I was picking over my pancakes with not much appetite. Neither of us were drinking the black sludge.

  ‘She believes in you, you know. Utterly,’ said Bela, gazing at her as she climbed up the slide instead of using it in the more traditional manner. ‘That’s why she’s not too upset. Yet.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She told me so. She misses her mother, but she absolutely believes you’ll bring Mel back. I think she’s told herself her mum’s away, just for a bit; she has no doubt she’ll return.’

  ‘No pressure then.’ I shuffled in my seat, which gave McIntyre’s office furniture a run for its money in the discomfort stakes. ‘In other news, Baker’s seen his son and knows the boy’s not the way he used to be. His security guard is missing, too – probably another victim.’

  He was silent, but at least this time he didn’t deny what Donovan had become.

  ‘And
Bela, someone has to be helping the golem move around. There’s a fundamental lack of tunnels between here and the coast, and here and Pullenvale too. And it has to be someone confident of their hold over the creature, not scared of being eaten. Do you have any reason to think it’s not Vadim Nadasy?’

  ‘Other than no one’s seen hide nor hair of him for roughly fifteen years?’

  ‘Other than that, yeah.’ Lizzie was hanging upside down from the monkey bars, her face going red. ‘Did you look for him when he went missing?’

  ‘Of course – he’d been my friend, V. He helped me out of a backwards Eastern European country filled with people who liked to shove stakes through anything they didn’t understand. We lost contact for many years, but when he wanted to move his family here, he found me and of course I assisted.’ He sighed and looked at Lizzie again. ‘When Dusana died I tried to talk to him, but he didn’t want to listen to anyone. There was no proof she’d been murdered and the Council refused to let him go after Anders. They told him to wait, see how the inquest came out . . . he got no satisfaction there, but by the time the verdict was handed down something had changed. I don’t know why, but he let it drop.

  ‘A while after that, Vadim disappeared. All I could discover was that he’d purchased a one-way flight to Budapest. His arrival was logged by Customs there, and then he immediately dropped out of sight. I enquired about him, on and off, for a couple of years, but he was gone, and he’d left no trace.’

  ‘He could have come back, though, right? He’s loaded? So little things like international borders aren’t going to stop someone like him getting where he wants to go.’

  ‘Very true. Vadim was always very persuasive, and on the right kind of mind even the slightest mesmerist power can work.’

  ‘If he’s that persuasive and Donovan’s that weak-willed, it’s a match made somewhere creepy.’ I flicked my cardboard cup distractedly and almost upended it. ‘You didn’t know he owned the house at Chelmer? You didn’t know that when we went there the first time?’

  ‘I didn’t know, V, truly. Believe me, if I had, I’d have been more careful. Vadim was a mage of considerable force and I wouldn’t have put it past him to booby-trap the place.’

  ‘He didn’t need to; he’d brought the ’serker through. It mightn’t have been for us specifically – maybe it was just like a big fuck-off guard dog.’

  ‘You’re probably correct.’

  ‘What about Baker? Why are you working for him?’

  ‘Strictly speaking, I’m not. This isn’t – wasn’t – a Council matter until Adriana . . . I got to know Anders pretty well. I didn’t like him, but that didn’t stop me feeling sorry for him. Dusana . . . she wasn’t very nice.’

  ‘The fact he’d probably killed her didn’t annoy you a little?’

  ‘You want to hear this or not?’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ I raised my hands in surrender and buttoned my lip like a three-year-old.

  ‘There was no evidence, V. He appeared to be genuinely cut up over her death, and I helped because of the child. No matter what, Dusana loved her little boy, and he was devastated when she died. I used to talk to him. He . . . he thought his mother was going to come back. He asked me to bring her home. And I couldn’t.’ He paused, then said quietly, ‘I failed.’

  It was the gentlest, the saddest I’d ever seen him. He’d been upset about Adriana, but he’d also been angry. In that moment, he was just sad. He was dealing with losses that I’d known nothing about. Believing him to be heartless had made disliking him easier for a long while, but he wasn’t and I knew it really; he wouldn’t have set Ziggi to watch over me otherwise. He wouldn’t have kept an eye on Grigor’s daughter otherwise. I thought about how Baker’s obsession with his deceased wife hadn’t dimmed with time; maybe Bela’s sense of failure was equally tenacious.

  He added, ‘I did try to keep in contact with the boy, but his father made it pretty clear that was not desirable.’

  ‘So when Baker turned up asking for help, you saw a chance for redemption?’

  He nodded.

  I changed the subject. ‘Ever met an angel?’

  ‘V, this thing with the sirens – can’t it wait a little? The golem needs to be our priority—’

  ‘Multitasking is an essential quality, Bela. I know we have a lot to deal with, but do you really want more bird-lady corpses littering the city?’ I stared at him until he shook his head. ‘So why is the angel Tobit here? Are there more? ’Cause the way those sirens were ripped apart, I’m thinking many hands were making light work. What do you know about angels?’

  ‘I met some in Byzantium, a very long time ago. They weren’t as grumpy as they are nowadays, but back then they still had hope of being called home.’

  ‘And they’re grumpy because—?’

  ‘They lost track of their boss sometime after the Middle Ages.’

  ‘And when you say “boss” you mean “God”; and when you say “lost” you mean . . .?’

  ‘I mean lost. Fewer and fewer of the angelic choirs were getting directions from On High, and eventually they stopped altogether. The Archangels tried to maintain some kind of order, but there was no hiding the fact that the body was having trouble surviving without the head. No one’s really sure when it happened, but divinely inspired writing has been thin on the ground ever since. Whatever created them – and I’m not saying it was any kind of deity, no matter what their apocrypha may say – deserted them and left good-sized chips on their . . . wings.’

  ‘Stranded angels?’ I said, amazed. ‘As lost as the rest of us, and faith keeps declining, and so do they?’

  He nodded. ‘Don’t forget they think they’re superior, better than everyone and everything else. They can’t accept that they’ve fallen, that the world has moved on. They tend to roam, looking for meaning, for something to prop up their self-worth – quests, stuff to do. They’re looking for a god.’

  ‘And they don’t like sirens?’

  ‘Congratulations, V – you’ve mastered the art of the understatement. Angels are bound by a belief in their own mythology; their writings, rules and stories chain them inextricably to their lord and master, to his will, because they believe implicitly that he raised them above all others. They accepted the binding because they were unique. But well before the Creator got bored and went wandering there came the off-cuts, the misbegottens, the so-called mistakes from the stray enchantments flying around.’

  ‘All the making, all the magic, as if someone had forgotten to turn off the tap?’ I guessed. ‘Every mythical beast from the ancient world sprang forth: cyclops, dragons, lycanthropes, manticores, mermaids, rocs, rusalkas, unicorns, vampires, water monkeys, wendigos, zilants and zombies . . . The Weyrd things.’ There was no black and white in matters of dogma, no matter how much churches would like it to be that simple. Faith, any sort of faith, was multicoloured.

  ‘All of whom the angels found annoying and worthy of a good deal of contempt, but nothing roused their fury, their jealousy, their envy until—’

  ‘The sirens,’ I breathed.

  ‘The sirens: equal in beauty, in voice, in flight. But beings with no obligations, who recognised no rules; they served no will but their own.’

  ‘Sibling rivalry.’

  ‘Angels do not admit to envy; they think it beneath them. However, I’ve read some of their jottings and they’ve hated the winged women since Adam was a boy. The two just don’t mix at all. Though angelic numbers have dropped, the sirens have flourished, comparatively speaking. They’re arrogant, free, happy as Larry – and blessed, without any cost.’

  ‘Why would an angel fall in love with a siren?’

  ‘Not every species is filled with bigoted psychos.’ He smiled. ‘Romeo and Juliet with wings?’

  ‘And we know how well that turned out for the kids.’ I scratched tentatively at the half-healed cut on my temple. ‘If there are more than one, more than Tobit, why are they here? Would they be attacking sirens just for the fun of it?
’

  He was quiet for a moment, considering. ‘Angels aren’t really fun-focused. I think the answer is Serena’s and Tobit’s child: a rare and unparallelled thing.’

  He was right. The baby was the key, somehow. I just needed to find her. ‘They feed off faith the way you feed off people’s energy?’

  ‘Similar,’ he said reluctantly. He’d never liked to discuss the mechanics of his Weyrdness, it felt too personal, too private.

  ‘Are you related?’

  That made him laugh. ‘I’d be a very poor angel.’

  I couldn’t argue there. ‘I’d better get Lizzie home.’

  ‘And you’d better organise your babysitter for tomorrow too.’

  ‘Am I going somewhere?’

  ‘The Council – what remains of it – wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Well, that can’t be good.’

  ‘It seldom is.’ He stood. ‘Ziggi will pick you up at six p.m.’

  ‘No exhortation to behave myself?’

  ‘Would it do any good?’ he asked bleakly.

  ‘It might if you asked nicely,’ I said, which surprised us both.

  ‘Oh.’ He pushed a lock of black hair out of his eyes. ‘And did your new boyfriend give you that note, or did he burn it in case it was a love letter?’

  ‘You’re an idiot. I got it.’ But I’d forgotten, and it was still in my jacket pocket. I tore the flap open and drew out a piece of parchment, thicker and older than even the best I sometimes used, with age spots dotting its surface. I felt bad about crushing it and tried to smooth it flat on the table.

  The sketch was done in charcoal and coloured chalk: a portrait, head and torso of a young woman wearing an old-fashioned headdress, a kind of gabled cap decorated with what looked like seed pearls. The pendant at her throat was a bird-and-shield, strung on a thick black ribbon, and her earrings were baroque pearls. Her dress had a square neckline, tight bodice and tiny waist embellished with an elaborate stomacher, again the same intricate bird-and-shield design . . . and identical to the seals of the wine bottles in the Ascot house cellar. All around her had been shaded, as if she sat in shadow. She smiled, her expression mocking, as if she knew better than the watcher, better than everyone. It wouldn’t have bothered me as much if she hadn’t been so familiar.