Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1

by Angela Slatter

  It was the Winemaker.

  She was younger, much younger. Her skin was smooth, unblemished, but those were her pale blue eyes, hinted at with a stroke of chalk, those were her cheekbones, the set of the head. And all of her jewellery was now a cold, hard, congealed lump in a desk drawer at home. I looked up at Bela, waved the parchment helplessly. He sat back down again.

  ‘All your yelling at the Chelmer house on Tuesday made me wonder if I wasn’t being pigheaded, and as a result, missing something important. I thought about Vadim, and then Magda. I can’t say I remember her having any dealings with Grigor back in the old days, but she always did like using go-betweens. I found that and showed it to Lizzie while your boyfriend was powdering his nose.’

  I ignored the jibe. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t mentioned it, the little monkey – that she hadn’t woken from sleep with nightmares screaming after her. She really was incredibly resilient. ‘Where’s this from?’ I whispered.

  ‘Papers from Nadasy’s office. I had to clear out his home when he disappeared. I didn’t keep much, but this was amongst them.’

  ‘It’s the Winemaker.’

  ‘It’s Magda Nadasy.’

  ‘Less dead at the time than reports would have had us believe.’ I frowned. ‘Why isn’t this erased? Everything else has been taken out by whatever spell she set.’

  He shrugged. ‘Its age? It might not be something she thought to include in the enchantment – she might not have made it far-reaching enough. It’s hard to remember every trace we leave in life, and she was probably only thinking of modern records being here. There was no reason to assume a Rembrandt sketch would be lying around her estranged husband’s discarded documents.’

  ‘Right. So if Vadim Nadasy is behind the whole golem thing, I killed his wife—’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘But again, if it’s Nadasy, then why is Anders Baker still alive? What’s he holding that’s staying Nadasy’s hand?’

  ‘Add it to the list of things we don’t know.’ Bela gave his hash browns one last unforgiving look. My pancakes could have been used to line a rubber room.

  *

  Bela gave us a lift home; Ziggi needed a break, not to mention a chance to sleep somewhere other than the front seat of a vehicle. I mulled over angelic hatred for sirens and what a mating of the two species might have produced, while Lizzie sang along to some pop earworm on the radio, a Britney or a Taylor or a Jessie, that Bela – less grudgingly than I’d expected – tuned in to for her. Calliope was presumably normal enough to go to the crèche, so no chicken legs. I wondered about her wings. Her mother must have bound them, but what happened when Serena was killed? Had her magic died with her, or was there something more tenuous about such witchery?

  ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ I said in frustration.

  ‘Mum says you shouldn’t swear,’ came a small voice.

  ‘Me in particular, or adults in general?’

  ‘You know, people.’

  ‘Uh huh.’ We drove past a school as all the kids started tumbling out onto the playground for recess. Vacation time had obviously ended with me none the wiser. We non-parents usually revelled in our ignorance of school terms, but I had new responsibilities now. ‘Hey, shouldn’t you be at school?’

  She blushed and looked away.

  ‘I’m calling your principal, young lady. Who is that, by the way?’

  Bela snorted.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘Interesting décor. A certain je ne sais quoi to it.’

  The je ne sais quoi was actually excessive amounts of chintz, doilies, hall tables, sideboards, woven rugs, wood panelling, coat racks, umbrella stands and vases containing dusty silk flowers. Essentially, it was an antique store with no cash register. Ziggi was out in the taxi, apparently not good enough to meet the Inner Circle. We waited in a small parlour just inside the front door which was dark and cool and smelled of mothballs and incense. Two large Weyrd, each roughly the size of double-door refrigerators, stood at attention in the hall; in my head I’d named them Hairy Jerry and Monobrow Mike.

  ‘We’ve only had access to this place in the last couple of years, so no one knows about it except me and the Council,’ Bela said.

  ‘And me. And them.’ I looked meaningfully at the heavies, who ignored me Coldstream Guard style; I kind of wanted to poke them but I doubted they shared the restraint of their martial counterparts.

  ‘Yes.’ Bela rolled his eyes and checked that his gold cufflinks were perfectly aligned with the pristine cuffs of his perfectly tailored shirt and his perfectly tailored Armani suit. Though my contrarian instincts had urged otherwise, I’d once again dressed as presentably as I could manage, though honestly, my wardrobe was getting a bit thin. My pinstriped trouser suit in light grey was a classic cut, so no one could really tell how old it was. The rebel in me won out when it came to footwear: black Docs with red roses embroidered on the sides.

  I looked around the room again. This was a pretty good hiding place – after all, who’d look for the Weyrd Council in a rectory? The golem had breezed through magical wards and protections, but sometimes holy ground presented barriers that things which had started out as human couldn’t – or wouldn’t – cross. Maybe it was a genuine mystical barricade or maybe it was just in the mind, playing on every bit of religious mumbo jumbo stuck in the psyche. St Barbara’s Church, located in the far-flung suburb of Waterford, ministered to a small flock of devout ageing dowagers, repentant old men and a few very enthusiastic youngsters. The house was big and creaky, once a seminary designed to hold about twenty priests. The encroachment of worldly things meant it hadn’t been able to fill its quota of blokes-in-training for a long time.

  Our host, Father Tony Caldero, had been a member of the Vatican’s adjuristine-exorcism squads. That either made him an unlikely ally, or at least the sort of man who understood there were more things in Heaven and Earth than were dreamed of in a tidy philosophy. Bela had explained the situation to him and he’d quickly realised that the golem was a threat to both Weyrd and Normal, religious and heathen alike. He stuck his head around the door, and said, ‘They’re ready for you, Zvezdomir.’

  Father Tony was a tall, thin man with bright blue eyes and iron-grey hair sticking out at all angles. White and brindle cat fur stuck to his black trousers, and his dog collar was prominently displayed above a pilled old camel-coloured jumper.

  He led us into a sitting room, the walls of which were covered with framed petit-point tapestries of flowers, no two the same, as far as I could tell. The housekeeper, Miriam, patting her shellacked lilac hair, gave a kind smile as she stood beside a rickety drinks trolley that, sadly, contained not a trace of booze.

  Eyes lit on us, but nothing was said while the priest and his housekeeper served very late afternoon tea. Miriam stroked the old priest’s hand as they distributed the floral-overload porcelain cups and I had to hide my smile.

  Once Bela and I had taken the only free seats and everyone was balancing a teacup and a scone piled high with cream and jam, they left us to it.

  Sitting across from us in an assortment of antediluvian armchairs were the remaining Councillors, glamours firmly in place so no one could tell what made them different: the thin and very nervous Mercado White; Sandor Verhoeven, corpulent and calm; Titania Banks, who looked precisely like my idea of a gypsy fortune teller, and the ever-elegant Eleanor Aviva, who gave an off-handed wave of acknowledgement. They were all well-dressed in an understated fashion, but the outfits were tailored, the kind of expensive clothing that didn’t need a label, and even Titania’s myriad Stevie Nicks skirts showed signs of designer construction. They also looked, each and every one, sleep-deprived, not just Mercado White, who shifted in his recliner, jiggling a leg; occasionally his left eye twitched. His unease was entirely reasonable given that Adriana Greenill was now no more than a few smears on a carpet square and he himself had come close to the same fate.

  My sympathy was short-lived, however, the moment
he opened his mouth.

  ‘I don’t understand why you haven’t caught this thing yet.’ He wasn’t looking at me; in fact, I appeared not to exist, which made me wonder what I was doing there at all. The Councillor stared at Bela, whose face was blank as a piece of marble. ‘Are you even taking this seriously?’

  ‘Mercado,’ said Eleanor Aviva, her tone that of a scolding mother. Her fingers, weighed down by large rings, fidgeted with the clasp of the expensive-looking handbag in her lap. ‘Be nice. What have we said about good manners?’

  He turned a fervid gaze on her. ‘Aren’t you worried? Don’t you think it’s taking a long time? Don’t you think it’s all very convenient?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Verhoeven’s chins wobbled, his voice rasping like sandpaper on old painted wood.

  ‘This thing is picking us off while he bides his time. What’s his plan? Zvezdomir Tepes takes over when we’re all gone?’

  Bela’s expression changed in a split second, became thunderous, his voice the crack of a whip. I’d never seen him get so angry so quickly, not even at me during our worst fights, not even when I was a revolting teen who thought she knew better than everyone, especially him. I could have sworn his eyes turned a little bit red. A glance at his hands, clenching the armrests of his chair, showed the fingers had grown longer, the nails sharper.

  ‘I have served this Council since before you inherited your father’s position on it. You are the only one who hasn’t earned his place here, White. You might remember that.’

  Titania giggled like a schoolgirl – if anyone wasn’t taking things seriously, it was her. Mercado spluttered his outrage but didn’t actually manage to produce any words; I thought it was probably best he didn’t, not if he wanted to stay intact.

  ‘Ahem,’ I said, and five heads turned towards me at exactly the same speed; four of them gave me precisely the same look you’d give a dog that had suddenly addressed you in fluent Chinese. ‘Yes, you. Hello. You invited me, remember?’

  Eleanor Aviva raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow as if granting permission to speak. I imagined her assiduously practising that move in a mirror.

  ‘Right. Being in danger as you are, I’ll assume you’ll be a little more forthcoming than usual. Each of you knew Vadim Nadasy?’

  Vague acknowledgements all around, although White was still stiff with umbrage. Verhoeven admitted, ‘He once sat on this Council.’

  ‘So did his wife,’ added Aviva.

  I gave Bela a sideways glare and he raised his hands, palms up: sorry.

  ‘Why did he – they – leave?’

  ‘She had to save face in light of your father’s disgrace,’ said Mercado gleefully, as if he’d been waiting for the opportunity to bring it up. The others looked away; had any of them supervised the application of iron nails to Grigor’s body to make sure he couldn’t defend himself? I hadn’t wondered about that before; I had been too busy not thinking about him and what he’d done. But now . . .

  ‘You didn’t tell me that,’ I said to Bela.

  ‘I knew about Vadim, but I didn’t know about Magda,’ he replied. ‘I swear.’

  ‘Zvezdomir – your dear Bela – was very new to his job when Grigor fell from grace. We did not tell him everything in those early days; he had yet to earn our full confidence,’ said Eleanor Aviva smoothly. ‘Magda’s involvement with your father was scandalous; it put our treaties with the Normals in jeopardy. We believed the fewer who knew about it, the better.’

  But how much did they tell Bela nowadays? How fully did they trust him? I was pretty certain he was starting to ask himself that very question. Perhaps his faith in the Council’s integrity was getting a little less solid.

  ‘As for Vadim, we had a falling-out,’ Verhoeven offered, which sounded like an understatement to me.

  Titania appeared to agree. ‘What a very polite way of putting it!’ she shrieked, and leaned towards me, saying confidentially, ‘He said we were traitors to our own kind; that we were cowards. Vadim was . . . very attached to Dusana, and very determined she be avenged.’

  ‘And you refused . . . So he probably feels he has good reason to go after you with his pet monster.’ A long game, though, and a dish served very, very cold. ‘But he didn’t do anything at the time. He gave up.’

  Titania sat back. ‘He might have stopped talking about it, but I didn’t trust him. The Nadasys never did let anything go lightly.’

  ‘You’re being hunted by a golem. We think it was created by Vadim Nadasy – out of his own grandson.’ I wished I could have seen some kind of shock on their faces when I added that last bit, but alas, not a blink, not a twitch. Some Weyrd were definitely more cold-blooded than others.

  ‘Nadasy disappeared. I believe he died,’ said White dismissively. ‘You’re wasting our time.’

  ‘I’d point out that his wife was supposed to have taken a dirt nap long ago, yet there she was, peddling wine made from the tears of children – well, she was before I pushed her into an oven. Don’t feed me shit and tell me it’s chocolate.’

  Bela cringed while everyone but White guffawed; his face spasmed – he was no poker player, this one – and he blurted, ‘How can you know—?’

  ‘—that it was her? That’s my business. But I’m willing to bet you knew who you were dealing with when you bought the wine, didn’t you?’

  It was a shot in the dark but it produced the desired effect: indignant expressions from the others and stuttering from Mercado White, who’d lost all his colour and broken out in a sweat.

  Bela gave him a look that made me wonder if White might just be about to burst into flames.

  ‘I never saw the woman – I didn’t know who the supplier was, I swear.’ That sounded about right: she’d be the sort to keep a layer between herself and her clients. After all, she’d not even trusted her identity to her sole employee. It didn’t change the fact that he’d happily quaffed the tears of dead children.

  ‘You must have suspected, surely, when something like that was offered? You must have realised it wasn’t some youngster with an interest in specialised viticulture.’

  The way his eyes slid away told the truth, but he continued speaking, ‘It was my housekeeper – he made the contact, placed the orders. There was a girl, he said, some Normal girl—’

  Good old Sally.

  ‘I’d like to talk to your housekeeper,’ I said.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘How very convenient.’

  Bela cleared his throat to tell me I was getting off track.

  ‘Right. So if the woman was alive when everyone thought her otherwise, why shouldn’t the disappeared husband be around and going after you lot?’

  No one made eye contact until Sandor Verhoeven said, ‘When Dusana died, Vadim made his demands of us, but we would not give permission for such retribution. Even had there been proof, the potential for backfiring was too great. Nadasy said we were putting the lives of insects above those of our own kind.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ I muttered. ‘No wonder he’s got no reason to like you lot.’

  ‘Nor you,’ murmured Eleanor, ‘after your treatment of his wife.’

  ‘But if it’s Nadasy,’ interrupted Titania, ‘why isn’t Anders Baker dead already?’

  ‘Lady, I have been asking myself that.’ I slumped in the overstuffed armchair, feeling a coil give and poke me in the back. That was one way to ensure good posture. I straightened up and said, ‘There has to be something Baker’s got that Nadasy wants: something that he can’t get without Anders’ help.’

  But apparently no one knew – or was admitting – what that might be; blank expressions were my only reward. I tried my luck with another topic. ‘Have any of you noticed anything angelic occurring?’

  ‘Is this about the sirens Zvezdomir has mentioned?’ asked Verhoeven.

  ‘The dead ones, yes. Has anyone heard anything about an increased presence of angels over Brisbane? Anything at all?’

  Eleanor said, ‘We cannot se
e them. They do not speak with us, not even at the best of times. And this is not the best of times.’

  ‘I’ve heard nothing,’ grumbled Verhoeven; he sounded angry that the city was changing around him, and without his permission. No one mentioned the baby, which made me think Bela hadn’t passed that juicy bit of info on, so I didn’t either. Had he been having doubts about the Council? I was happy not to discuss Calliope, because that would have to lead to the matter of Ligeia, a creature who was happily defying the Council’s decrees. I didn’t agree with her ways, but equally, I didn’t want to be the one sent to hunt her.

  So the plan was for them to stay safe and sound in the rectory and for me to continue risking my life looking for nasty things. I pointed at Mercado White, who was sitting there shaking, and said, ‘You’re going to do something about him, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sandor Verhoeven’s voice rumbled across White, who whimpered. His terror told me the fat man would be true to his word. No one liked being put at risk by a trusted colleague.

  The moment Bela and I left the room, Hairy Jerry and Mono-brow Mike stepped in. It looked like justice would be swift.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘We’ve got a visitor,’ said David as he met me at the door all dreamy-eyed, and not in a ‘he’s so dreamy’ way. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said he was high, but that wasn’t his style – even during our brief acquaintance I’d worked out he was a lightweight as far as booze was concerned. So unless someone had fed him some very special cookies, my boyfriend had been bewitched, and I couldn’t figure out how that had happened since he’d been in my ward-bound home for the last four hours looking after Lizzie.

  ‘Who is it? What is it?’ I was starting to get worried about who our guest might be, especially as Mercado White had somehow managed to give the goons the slip and was now in the wind. The guy was an idiot – he’d’ve been better off taking his chances with the Council than with the golem. I’d politely declined the chance to take part in the search for him.