Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1 Read online

  Aspasia spoke low. ‘Some of the old ones – they’ve still got the appetites, the customs they don’t want to let go.’

  I nodded; I knew it was true, but smart Weyrd had tried to get rid of those habits in the interests of survival. Indeed, the Council had made a point of outlawing a lot of activities the Weyrd once considered perfectly acceptable, even banning Kinderfressers, because anthropophagia is frowned upon in most circles. The not-so-smart Weyrd . . . well, they didn’t tend to last long these days.

  ‘Kids cry, right?’ she continued. ‘I mean, they’re kids, there’s always something to cry over. But enough to fill two, three, four wine bottles? Wouldn’t that be a lifetime of tears?’

  I stared at her.

  ‘I was offered a case. A case, Fassbinder. That’s a lot of children, a lot of weeping. You take that . . .’

  You take that, and you rob them of all the tears they might ever have. You steal their ability to feel joy, compassion, pain; you take their happiness as well. You remove the things that make them human. You take their lives. Not a Kinderfresser, no, but something somehow worse. You don’t simply kill them; to get the right quality tears, you subject them to the most utter and lingering despair.

  ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Who’s been offering?’

  She gave a sidelong glance towards a corner table and I didn’t turn around, but looked in the mirror. A thin girl sat there, maybe fourteen, badly made-up, her pale floss hair twisted in a clip, twiggy fingers painting patterns in the condensation on her glass. She wore a grey singlet top with an irregular pattern on the front, the design long lost, along with most of the silver sequins. Beneath the table were stickish legs, a far-too-short denim skirt and a pair of green Converse sneakers that had seen better days.

  ‘Normal? Why is she here?’

  ‘Normal. She pays,’ said Aspasia flatly.

  ‘When did she offer you the case – you didn’t take it, did you?’ I added suddenly, feeling a little sick.

  ‘Two, maybe three weeks ago.’ She looked me straight in the eyes so there could be no doubt. ‘And no, I’m not that stupid.’

  As the knowledge sank in, my stomach turned acidic. ‘You didn’t take it – but you didn’t think to tell anyone about it?’ How many lives had been lost in that time?

  ‘You said it yourself: if word gets around that I’m making nice with the authorities, there goes my business. I’ve got children to support.’

  ‘No, you haven’t.’

  ‘I might one day.’

  ‘Chances are you’d eat them at birth. Christ, Aspasia, three weeks? You waited three weeks?’

  She looked uncomfortable, but it didn’t stop her saying, ‘Fassbinder, did you come down in the last shower? You think she hasn’t offered it around to others? You think no one’s taken her up on it? You think I’m the only one keeping quiet? You think she hasn’t been to the old households, for special occasions? You think the Council—’

  ‘The Council hired me.’

  ‘No, Princess, Tepes hired you.’

  I straightened and sat back, digesting her words, trying to assess the possibility of one of the Councillors indulging in this sort of ancient practice. If that really was the case, then my problem was even bigger than missing children – but maybe Aspasia was just messing with me, seeing if I’d bite or head off in the wrong direction; she was pissy enough to try something like that. If anyone on the Council had something to hide, why on earth would they agree to Bela having me investigate? Surely they knew by now what sort of person I was? The sort who compulsively pulled loose threads on sweaters until they unravelled . . .

  I flicked my eyes back to the girl’s reflection to find she was looking at me. We stared at each other, just maybe five seconds, but that was all it took; she was up and out of her chair and haring down the long corridor before I could so much as turn around. There was no chance I’d be running after her; no way I’d even bother to try. The first step and my leg would be screaming.

  ‘What’s her name, and where do I find her?’ I asked as Aspasia casually pushed the lid on Ziggi’s takeaway latte and snapped the chocolatey chunk of mud cake into a polystyrene box. She shoved them towards me and I forked over a twenty. She obviously wasn’t feeling communicative any more. Just as she pulled back her hand, clutching the note, I grabbed her wrist and held on tight, feeling her bones grinding against each other beneath my grip. I may look Normal, but it doesn’t mean I’ve got nothing of the Weyrd about me; every now and then the half-breed blood shows through. I thought about wrapping the other hand around her throat and risking a few nips from the snakes, but I decided she might find it hard to talk.

  ‘I don’t want to do this, Aspasia.’

  ‘Sally Crown,’ she growled. ‘Lives on the streets. Sometimes she sleeps behind West End Library, sometimes in the derelict flats on Hardgrave Road. Now let me go and get the fuck out.’

  ‘You really need to work on your customer service skills. Keep the change.’ Who was I kidding? Change from a twenty at Little Venice?

  The whole way down the passageway I could feel her eyes boring into the back of my neck. I pulled out my mobile to text Ziggi, who was really not going be happy about my failure to make friends and influence people. A reminder about the earlier missed call flashed, but I didn’t recognise the number. It would wait.

  Chapter Three

  ‘I’ll see you tonight,’ Ziggi said, and waved a hand in my general direction as he drove off. We’d given up watching West End Library for any sign of Sally Crown soon after dawn crept over the horizon. We’d also tried the derelict unit block on Hardgrave Road, which had almost got me spitted on the umbrella of an especially grumpy old siren wearing a grubby frock. Her wings had unfurled in shock when she found me in the flat she was using as a squat. After a lot of swearing from both of us – I was still twitchy about strange houses at night – I apologised and backed away. As Ziggi pointed out afterwards, I’d probably have been pretty pissed off myself if I’d found someone trespassing in my living room.

  I made my way up the cracked path to my ramshackle home, a pre-war house with moulded ceilings, a huge back garden and a temperamental water heater so old that it might have come out of the Ark. Jasmine was thick on the front fence, lushly green and dotted with white-star flowers like icing. Its scent was heady, and as I felt for the keys in my jeans pocket, warm and fuzzy thoughts about bed danced in my head.

  ‘Verity? Verity! Can you get my ball?’ The voice fluted over the side fence. Between the palings was a small face, sharp-chinned, snub-nosed and wide-eyed, with a shock of mousy hair even messier than mine. A little hand pushed through the gap and pointed to a soccer ball lying under the three steps that led up to my patio. Lizzie wasn’t allowed out of her yard without Mel, her single-parent, work-from-home acupuncturist mum in tow. She hated the rule, but I told her it was a good idea every chance I got: There are bad people, baby, bad people. Some days she decided not to talk to me.

  I limped over and picked up the ball. It was new. ‘Birthday present?’

  ‘Uh huh.’ I could sense a little chill coming from her.

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t come to your party, love. I was all ready, and I really wanted to, but there were some people I had to help.’ I made a face to let her know that I truly had wanted to be with her, eating party pies and fairy bread until I was set to explode, then asked casually, ‘Did you like the book?’

  ‘I love it best of all – but don’t tell Mum.’ She smiled, defrosting. The fairy tales were the kind we had before Disney got to them: the ones with little girls who are eaten by wolves and bears with no conveniently timed rescue; boys who get lost in the forest and aren’t ever found again; the sort where your brother is a danger to you and your sister cannot be trusted; with children whose greatest enemies are their own parents. The volume I’d given her was old, with a tooled leather cover, exquisite line drawings and a long red silk ribbon for marking your place. It was beautiful, though maybe it was a little much for a
kid – Mel had frowned when I’d shown it to her a few days earlier. But I told her that forewarned was forearmed. Lizzie read like a champion and had been devouring the contents of my library like a locust. Well, not all of it; some discreet censorship had to be applied.

  I reached over the fence and dropped the ball into her waiting arms.

  ‘Thanks, Verity. Can I come and visit later?’

  I frowned. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

  She rolled her eyes at the idiot adult. ‘School holidays. So, can I come over?’

  ‘Aha.’ As a non-parent there was no need for me to keep track of such things. ‘Not today, my friend. I’ve had a very long night. Maybe at the weekend?’

  ‘Mmmmm-huh.’ She was less than impressed.

  ‘Have a good day, sweetheart,’ I said and headed to the door.

  Inside, the hot air was smothering. I passed through the front room, which contained a seldom-used asparagus-coloured velvet reproduction chaise longue, a desk with a full complement of dust to show how infrequently I sat there, a bookshelf filled with innocuous novels and a pristine waste paper bin. I generally used the room as little more than a place to store furniture, but it also acted as a safe space between the threshold and the rest of the house. I could have used it as a ward-moat, but I’d never really felt the need – or the requisite level of paranoia. And anyway, the aged wrought-iron security door did its job well enough. When I opened all the windows and the double doors onto the verandah, a breeze forced its way inside, and soon the temperature was bearable. I collected a glass of cold water and a variety of painkillers and headed out to plant myself in one of the faded green deckchairs until they kicked in.

  My home might be old, but it was comfortable. There were three bedrooms, one of which had been repurposed as a library, a kitchen, bathroom, proper lounge room, a dining room with a table covered with books that hadn’t yet found a shelf to live on, and a broad verandah out the back, where I now sat. It had been my grandparents’ home, and just about all the furniture was theirs too – I’d seen no reason to change anything when they’d died; I kind of liked it that way. Sometimes I caught the scent of Grandma’s Lily of the Valley talcum powder, or Grandy’s Old Spice, and the pipe he used to smoke out on the verandah when Grandma wasn’t home. She would pretend she couldn’t smell it, even though it somehow managed to sneak inside and embed itself in the curtains and cushions. For a long while I thought that was how relationships had to work: you ignored all the things you didn’t like, or that annoyed you, in the interests of harmony. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise then that each and every irritating thing has its own life, its own limits, its own metre and pace and depth of impact. Like an idiot, I thought I had to tolerate everything. Eventually I managed to work out that not everything is – or should be – tolerable. I’d put up with a hell of a lot more than I needed to with Bela.

  I stretched my leg out and rested it on the battered table my grandfather had cut down to kid-size for me. The top was painted green and the legs were peeling gold – it was garish and a little too short now, but I’d never been able to let it go. Soon the pills kicked in and the pain eased. An extremely fat kookaburra perched in the gigantic jacaranda tree in the middle of the yard. I gave him a nod; he stared back, unmoved.

  I needed a nap. I needed to do some research. I suspected I’d need to do other things I didn’t want to do. But most of all, I needed a nap – just a few hours. Too tired and comfortable to move, I closed my eyes, dropping my head back until there was a satisfying crack and things sat a little more comfortably on my shoulders. There was a chance I might even doze off sitting up in broad daylight.

  When you’re so tired that dreams come unbidden, when they seep through even though you’re still a little bit awake – I hate that. That’s the time when I think about my parents. Or rather my father; my mother, Olivia, was just a blur, a framed faded Polaroid on the shelf: a Normal, and dead before I ever knew her.

  But I remembered my father; I couldn’t forget him in spite of my best efforts. Grigor had no family to speak of; like a lot of Weyrd he came out here alone. There were no aunts, uncles, cousins, parents or grandparents, just him and me.

  The everyday things of my childhood were salt in the corners of rooms to soak up the curses that might come our way, blood baked into a loaf of bread and left on the front porch under cover of darkness as an offering once a week to keep the worst of the shades at bay, which were more numerous than I knew for a long while, and dust swept from the footpath towards the house in the hope it would drag wealth with it. My father gave me small lessons in magic, in creating wards and disarming them – nothing that would make me a true witch or a sorceress, for my blood didn’t run like that, but helpful for someone with a functioning knowledge of useful protection rituals. And I watched my father transform when he needed more strength, more height, lengthening his limbs and adding muscle. When I was little, I would try to do the same thing because I didn’t realise that shifting didn’t flow in my diluted DNA any more than witchcraft did. When he explained, I’d cried with disappointment. Grigor told me, Change transforms, makes things both less and more – different – and we all adapt in our own way. Be patient: you’ll find your own way.

  Though my father had no family, he had friends to spare. There were evenings when they’d come over and he’d send me to bed early. They would drink and eat and get rowdy in a language I didn’t understand, a tongue that sounded a little like German, a little like Russian. I’d sit quietly at the end of the hallway, just out of their sight, and watch as they told tales and showed off the extraordinary feats they could do: starting colourful leaping fires with a breath; creating whirlwinds that lifted the furniture, then set it back down with no more than a gentle thump; shifting like my father, changing size or shape entirely until the lounge room resembled a bizarre zoo. I suppose they were relieved for a while not to have to hide what they were, happy to have a place where they could be free.

  I was sworn not to tell anyone – certainly not the other kids at school – about these things, because they were our special secrets. Even then it took me quite some while to work out that there were two cultures and I could walk between them – and not just walk between them but more. I could fool the Normals because I looked like them, and I could step into the Weyrd world because I shared their blood, or some of it, anyway. They were wary, but polite enough, at least when I was little. Truth was, with one foot in each sphere, I didn’t belong anywhere; I guess I always knew that.

  After my father went, I lost contact with the Weyrd side of my life for a long time.

  The angle I was sitting at became uncomfortable and brought me out of my trance state. My jeans were hot and damp in the humidity. I lurched up and rubbed at my hip, then hobbled into the bedroom. I changed into a singlet and a pair of thin cotton pyjama pants that covered my scars but were infinitely cooler than denim. I hovered between taking refuge in the bed where nightmares might wait, or making breakfast and staying awake to think. On balance, bad dreams really did not appeal, so I headed to the kitchen.

  Twenty-three years ago my father was jailed as a paedophile and child-killer, but that didn’t even begin to touch the skin of what he really was. He wasn’t a child molester and he never touched me – that needs to be clear . . . but it doesn’t really matter. The lesser of two evils is still evil. What he did – what he was caught doing – cast a shadow over the whole community and left us vulnerable. Weyrd memories are long, and sins of fathers need somewhere to go. What Grigor did left me exiled from my old life.

  Most folk – both Normal and Weyrd – behaved themselves, through genuine belief in the rule of law, fear or sheer laziness. But there were always those few who didn’t care for rules, and that group was split into those who were happy enough to break the law overtly and those who were contented to simply purchase the spoils of the nefarious labours of others. There was a market for everything, and the principle of supply and demand meant that some tables
required the most tender of flesh. It was a particular taste, indulged in by the very few and the very old – a leftover from the past when stealing children was an accepted practice, hobby or habit, or sometimes a matter of survival. Back in the once-upon-a-time, children were both less guarded and more numerous in a lot of families, and with so many mouths to feed, sometimes parents weren’t too worried if a couple were sold, or went missing. The rich Weyrd who bought those children always promised they’d have far better lives serving as footmen/valets/maids/what-have-you. It was the ‘what-have-you’ their parents never thought too much about.

  In these modern times, that was precisely the kind of conduct the Council had forbidden in the interests of communal safety. Even so, small factions – very private parties, those Weyrd who really didn’t like giving up what they considered their right – still wanted to indulge, albeit in secret, and someone had to acquire and dress that flesh.

  My father: Kinderfresser. Child-eater. Butcher to the Weyrd.

  To me, he was just my dad. I didn’t know what he did when I was at school, or on those nights when he left me home alone with strict instructions not to open the door to anyone. And I never questioned the gifts he sometimes brought me: little bracelets, necklaces or rings. Occasionally there’d be a teddybear or a doll – things that looked as though someone might already have owned them.

  I was ten when the police came for him, and I have done my best to wipe the memories of that night away.

  Grigor lasted precisely how long you’d think a child-killer in prison would. The Council had made sure he couldn’t shift any more. He was a big man, but he couldn’t protect himself when six prisoners held him down and jammed jagged wooden broom handles into him. They didn’t know what he truly was; they just hated him for what he’d done. His kind of crime meant he was even lower on the societal ladder than any of the other men around him. I wasn’t taken to his funeral, nor did I go down to the river to watch my father make his journey with the Boatman.