Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1

by Angela Slatter

  ‘You need to see for yourself.’ He had a really goofy grin now.

  I followed David into the lounge room, calculating how fast I could pull the dagger from its sheath if required. Across from the sofa was a single, wide-seated armchair, and in that armchair sat the most beautiful hobo in the world. He’d obviously been living rough and his jeans and jumper were ragged and pretty grotty – but not a trace of dirt clung to his skin. A leather coat lay on the floor beside him, neatly folded.

  I looked at him and I knew how he’d got past the wards.

  When he saw me and stood his head almost scraped the ceiling. The tips of his wings did scrape the ceiling. He had masses of black hair, and silver eyes. The air around him shimmered. He really was perfectly, exquisitely lovely, in a real ‘manly man’ kind of way. My protection spells couldn’t do much against the angelic.

  And poor David had been angel-struck. I’d learned in my research that this was a common phenomenon whenever someone had an encounter with them: men, women, children, dogs – not cats, though, never cats – all fell in love. I reached out and held my beloved’s hand. Weyrd and half-breeds generally don’t suffer from it as we’re fantastical enough ourselves, so I hoped touching him might help, willing him to take in a little of my immunity. His eyes started to clear, but he still looked punch-drunk.

  I glared at the angel. ‘Could you turn the glory down a bit, please? I don’t want him completely addled.’

  The angel blushed. ‘Sorry. I had to convince him to let me in quickly. I didn’t fancy being left outside.’

  The shimmer around him stopped and and he shrank back down to a reasonable size, which was about six foot three. David stumbled as if released. I gave him a kiss and he focused.

  ‘Where’s Lizzie?’

  ‘Asleep,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ came a little voice from under the dining room table, then a small form crawled out to sit directly across from the angel and stare at him. ‘He smells really good.’

  ‘Doesn’t he?’ I agreed.

  ‘Odour of sanctity,’ rumbled the angel.

  ‘Thought that was just saints.’ I offered a hand that got swallowed by his large palm.

  He shook his head. ‘Who are the original saints, do you think? Suffering with nothing in return.’

  ‘Good point. Tea? Coffee? Holy water?’

  ‘Beer? And maybe a sandwich?’

  ‘Right. David, you okay?’

  He rubbed his eyes, then got up to make for the kitchen. ‘On it.’

  The incongruous sight of an angel with a Corona in one hand and a hastily constructed ham and cheese sandwich in the other chased away most of my weariness. David and Lizzie sat on either side of me on the couch and we just kind of gazed at our guest until it became uncomfortable for everyone. As I’d said to Rhonda McIntyre, angels aren’t fluffy. This one looked like a warrior: a down-on-his-luck and exiled warrior, sure, but stick a lance in his hand and a demon beneath his feet, and they wouldn’t have looked inappropriate. He was obviously exhausted, with bags under his eyes and an overwhelmed kind of gaze.

  ‘So,’ I began, ‘you’re an angel. How’s that working for you?’

  He took a swig of beer, the shadow of a grin passing over his face.

  ‘I’m guessing this isn’t a social call,’ I continued.

  He shook his head and finished off the sandwich.

  ‘And I’m guessing you’re Tobit?’

  Aha! He looked surprised by that. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I heard you might be nosing around about—’

  ‘Serena Kallos?’

  His face convulsed with grief and he lowered his head. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Her heart was crushed and she was thrown off a building.’ David nudged me, but I wasn’t in the mood to be kind. Tobit remained silent, downing the last of his beer before dropping the bottle. It didn’t fall over, just neatly floated to the floor.

  ‘You’ve got a daughter. You know that, right?’

  Still the silvery eyes didn’t meet mine.

  ‘You know she’s missing? Do you care? I mean, I know your lot think you’re better than everyone else, but this is your child.’

  Tobit nodded again. David’s don’t-annoy-the-angel grimace was in full bloom.

  ‘And Teles and Raidne are both dead. They had their wings ripped off. I’m assuming they died to hide your secrets.’

  ‘Raidne said you were looking for me,’ he said. He perched on the edge of the chair, elbows resting on knees. One hand grasped the other tightly, making the knuckles as white as bone. Tobit looked as though light might shine through him. ‘She and Teles were taking care of the baby, but by the time I ran into Raidne—’

  ‘Where?’ I demanded.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where were they looking after Calliope?’

  He shrugged. ‘They wouldn’t tell me. I don’t think they trusted me.’

  Apparently not all the sirens had Eurycleia’s distaste for the angelic, but it looked like they still didn’t entirely accept him. ‘What or who have you been hiding from? Eurycleia? Ligeia?’

  ‘Serena’s mother?’ He laughed wryly. ‘Hardly. I don’t know who the other one is.’

  ‘Then what?’

  His obvious reluctance to speak was starting to really irritate me. Why would no one give me a straight answer to anything? I didn’t have much patience left. ‘Serena called me the night she died. She didn’t tell me why, just that she had a problem that needed solving. I’m guessing that problem got her killed.’

  Still he didn’t answer.

  ‘Look, if you’re just here for a free feed then you can fuck off now.’

  ‘You shouldn’t swear,’ chimed Lizzie.

  ‘You can leave now,’ I corrected, ‘because you’re no use if you won’t give me the information I need to find your daughter.’ I sat forward. ‘Who are you hiding from?’

  ‘The Arch.’

  That drew a blank from me.

  His wings trembled a little. ‘Archangels. You might know there aren’t a lot of us common-or-garden angels left. Well, there are even fewer Archs – those remaining Archangels have a hard time rallying the rest because they’ve lost the will to be good foot-soldiers. Most of us wander, but there are some zealots, those who took the desertion harder than others, and they like to organise. Any more beer?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  He sighed. ‘I’ve been around for aeons and I’ve seen a lot, but it’s been a long time since I’ve met a fanatic like this one.’

  ‘But what is an . . . Arch . . . doing over Brisbane?’ asked David.

  ‘Good question,’ I said. ‘It’s not like we’re a normal pilgrimage destination.’

  ‘Somehow he found out what I did, who I was with.’

  ‘Serena.’

  ‘All those millennia and I never loved anyone but our Lord,’ he said. ‘Then I wandered here and found her. And I got her killed.’ He paused, then said, ‘More importantly, the Arch found out about the baby.’

  ‘Why should it bother him?’ asked David.

  ‘Apart from the fact we’re not meant to have anything to do with sirens?’

  ‘Doesn’t like inter-species breeding programmes?’

  ‘To put it mildly. There’re a lot of things the Archangel doesn’t like.’

  He probably wasn’t keen on the whole angels-taking-the-daughters-of-men-to-wife thing either. ‘Is he alone?’ I asked, figuring that was too much to hope for.

  ‘I wish. He’s got half a dozen of the brothers – all but one he brought with him.’

  ‘What’s he offering them?’

  The angel snorted. ‘A new Crusade? To be honest, I haven’t got close enough to chat.’

  ‘And you don’t have any friends you can ask?’

  ‘Not amongst my kind.’

  ‘How did he know about Serena?’

  ‘I told you: Brisbane’s angel has joined him. We are, for
the most part, watchers. What’s the point in watching if you can’t tell someone?’

  Angels carrying tales. A crusading Archangel. A baby who was still lost. I hadn’t thought it possible, but my day had just got darker.

  ‘Do you have Calliope?’

  ‘Is that her name?’ He smiled, and it was like a sunburst.

  ‘Serena didn’t tell you?’

  ‘Serena and I had a disagreement and I left before the baby was born. When I heard the Arch was coming, I returned, but it was too late and I . . . hid.’

  ‘Why you? Who are you in the bigger scheme of things?’

  ‘Way to belittle the angel,’ murmured David, and I made a mental note to not let him sit in on my Q&A sessions again.

  ‘I’m no one. Just a watcher. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  ‘That’s all fine and dandy, but you’re part of this, so what’s so special about you? About Serena?’

  His wings shifted the air in a kind of augmented shrug.

  ‘Do you know where your daughter is?’ I asked again.

  ‘No, and I didn’t try to force it out of Teles and Raidne in case—’

  ‘In case you got caught.’ I scratched my head. ‘But you didn’t, and they did. Yet they managed to keep their mouths shut. Have you even been looking for Calliope?’

  The angel hung his head. ‘Hiding’s taking up all my time.’ He gave me a glance that begged pity and I wanted to slap him. Just my luck: a deadbeat dad angel. He hadn’t left to keep Serena safe; he’d left to keep himself safe. I wondered if she’d known, before she died, that she’d been in love with a coward. I wanted to turn him out, to send him back under unsafe skies, because that’s what he deserved.

  I sighed and stood up. ‘Is there anything useful you can tell me?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Is there anyone I can talk to? Anyone who might have Calliope? Anyone Serena might have trusted? I note she didn’t hand the baby over to her mother.’

  He laughed coldly. ‘Eurycleia’s more like the Arch than she’d like to admit.’

  ‘Well, you despise a people long enough, they’ll start to despise you back,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure why I was defending the woman. ‘But I take your point; she can bigot it up with the best of them.’

  ‘Sorry I can’t be more helpful,’ he mumbled.

  ‘You can sleep on the sofa. Your feet will hang off the end, but it’s more comfortable than a park bench.’

  ‘I’ve been dossing in the tunnels. Believe me, a short couch isn’t going to be a problem.’

  I shuddered. Still, if sleeping in the tunnels was the worst he’d suffered, he should consider himself lucky. I was going to tell him so when my mobile did a little jig on the kitchen bench: Rhonda McIntyre letting me know that Mrs Tinkler – or rather, the bits of her that were left – had been found in her home. She hadn’t gone peacefully, but whatever she’d had to tell me was lost. There were no shreds of garbage in evidence, but there were white feathers everywhere, some in her fists.

  Remembering the feathers that had lain around Serena in that garden bed, I suggested they be tested against those of the dead sirens. I hoped like hell the bird-women hadn’t started hunting for the baby themselves, uncaring for anyone who got in their way, but I was willing to bet that the plumes belonged to something else entirely; that Mrs T. had managed to irritate the Arch and his friends so much that they’d claimed their first Normal victim.

  I didn’t tell McIntyre – she’d started coughing again and I decided she had enough to contend with right now. That could wait.

  After everyone else was tucked in bed and the house was still, I sat out on the deck, bundled in a flannelette dressing gown that used to be my grandmother’s and could have been promoted as an aid to contraception, and tried to fit together all the bits of information that I’d gathered. But there were still too many gaps, too many pieces that were the wrong shape, and my full picture came out as a Picasso when what I needed was something photo-real, with helpful captions.

  I counted the positives: if the old siren had told the truth, Calliope was being well cared for. The Boatman, inscrutable bastard that he was, had ensured that I had a knife the golem didn’t like. It had kept me from being digested, and not being dead made me charitable, even if he was friends with Ligeia and I still didn’t know why I had said knife. I finally knew who the Winemaker was, and that was a weight off my mind too. And David and Lizzie were safe.

  When my fingers went numb with cold, I made a decision. Tomorrow, I would head back to Little Venice. There was one last Sister I needed to see. I wanted to cherish the illusion that Aspasia wouldn’t be in, but that was akin to wishing for a unicorn for Christmas.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Little Venice had two upper floors. I’d visited them once or twice in the past, but only when I’d really had no other choice. The first was the warren Theo and Aspasia shared. There were too many walls and corridors and the rooms were small and crowded with furniture and knick-knacks any decent Antiquities Department would have killed to get their hands on. The light was kept low, the windows mostly covered with thick tapestries and shawls. Underfoot, the carpets were dense, hand-woven, ancient and exotic.

  The uppermost storey was reserved for the third Sister.

  I made it to the top of the stairs, puffing only slightly after trading insults (which began as a reasonably heartfelt apology and went downhill from there) with Aspasia while Theodosia laughed. The door opened and two shaken Normal women exited. They’d come to have their fortunes told and hadn’t liked what they’d heard – apparently no one had warned them that the Sisters Norn couldn’t be trusted with the future.

  The door stayed ajar like a mouth waiting for a morsel to drop in. I let the shuddering women stumble past, back towards the light, then strode over the threshold. The atmosphere shivered around me and the woman in the middle of the room shivered too, as if her connection to the air was so intimate she could sense its every distress. She looked up with eyes like the sky and a smile as cold as a Norse winter.

  Thaïs was white-blonde and tall, but she was also large – and not just carrying a little extra weight. Theo was whippet-thin; Aspasia was voluptuous; Thaïs was fat. She might have modelled for the Venus of Willendorf; come to think of it, there was a very good chance she had. Her hair was plaited into a complicated braid: one to each side, a third at the back, and then all three woven together until they looked like nothing so much as a macramé plant-holder, like those once produced in bulk by schoolchildren and offered as gifts to unsuspecting mothers, aunts and grandmothers. Her dress, sprays of pinks and greens with a splash of white and a few spears of black, made you understand precisely what a caftan was. She was reclining front and centre on an old brown velvet three-seater, taking up roughly two-point-five seats, her legs twisted underneath her in some miraculous yoga manoeuvre. The way the couch bowed testified to this being her favourite spot. The room was thick with the scent of incense and a body that had a lot of places where sweat gathered, no matter how many showers were taken.

  Candles flickered here and there. The only enclosed space was a bathroom in one corner; the rest of the area was warehouse-spare, with a bed resting on a raised platform to one side.

  Thaïs’ sofa sat in front of a low coffee table, which was actually a chest of drawers of various sizes, filled with all the sorcerous paraphernalia she might need. The eternal four-year-old in me wanted to sit on the dusty floor and go through every compartment, just to see what was there; I imagined strewing everything around me until nothing remained hidden and I had no idea where anything went. Luckily, grown-up me stayed in charge, which was probably for the best. Three other low and equally over-stuffed sofas made up a square around it.

  Thaïs squinted across the distance, then smiled. ‘Hello, little strangeling,’ she piped in a sweet voice.

  Strangeling seemed a bit rich considering the source, but I let it pass and approached with more conf
idence than I felt. Truth was, I didn’t like being near any of the Norns without either witnesses or back-up. After so long managing to avoid having my palm read, I was especially uneasy being alone with one of them in case something got blurted out, some stray strand of the future I really didn’t want to hear. But Thaïs wasn’t an outdoors kind of girl, so everyone had to come to her. I didn’t want to know what might be in the stars for me, but if there were any answers to be had, then Little Venice was the most likely place to find them, for the Sisters always pooled their tidbits of gleaned knowledge. Thaïs might not go out, but intelligence came to her as surely as the noise of a fridge opening transmitted itself to the ears of any cat within a half-mile radius. She dipped into and out of the otherworldly streams as easily as a mermaid duck-diving in the ocean. I didn’t need the future, but some hints about the past and the present wouldn’t go astray.

  ‘Hey, Thaïs. How’s life?’ I sank deeply into the sofa opposite her and was left with my knees almost at my shoulders. Trying to stretch out, I kicked the table, then finally settled for loosely crossing my legs at the ankles.

  ‘Comfortable?’ she asked, one snowflake eyebrow raised.

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Good.’ She collected the Tarot cards that had been laid out in a Grand Cross spread on the gold-fringed purple cloth covering the table. It was a Rider Waite deck, but hand-drawn, not one of the mass-produced sets, with edges worn and soft, the colours muted from years of handling, sweat and natural oils. Thaïs moved slowly, as if the longer she left them there, the more I’d be tempted, but I remained still until she’d stacked them, making sure they were sitting flush, then wrapped everything in a square of black silk. The bundle went into a plain brown cardboard box, and thence into one of the niches on her side of the table.

  ‘And what brings you to my door, Verity Fassbinder? I’m surprised Aspasia let you in.’

  ‘Theodosia likes me.’

  She sighed. ‘Theo’s an optimist. She still thinks you’ll sleep with her one day.’