Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1 Read online

  ‘Ms Fassbinder, I’m—’

  ‘I know who you are, Mr Baker. This is unexpected.’ I made sure my foot was wedged firmly behind the door to keep it in place. ‘Did Tepes speak to you?’

  Anders Baker smiled as if about to offer me candy. ‘He did. He said I should present my case to you.’

  ‘I’m fairly sure he didn’t say to do it today.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I know you’re worried about your son, and I’ll help if I can, but let me be clear: at the moment, your case isn’t my top priority.’

  ‘I’ve employed three separate private eyes but they’ve had no success,’ he said. ‘The police are worse than useless. I will pay whatever you ask, just forget your other cases.’ He smiled again, as if there was no argument to be had. Presumably Bela hadn’t bothered to give him any hints about how to best approach me.

  ‘Sir, from what Zvezdomir said, I’d say the chances that he’s gone off on a trip of self-discovery are pretty good. That, or he’s making an overdue bid for freedom.’

  ‘Any delay you make will recklessly endanger my child,’ he snapped, but I had the distinct impression that the moral high ground was more like a slippery slope for him. And he was a guilt-trip amateur – he hadn’t grown up with my grandmother. ‘I demand—’

  I held up my hand to stop him. ‘For a start, the word demand does not work with me. Your son is eighteen, he’s not a child.’ I spoke through gritted teeth, but made a point not to raise my voice, which made me feel very virtuous indeed. ‘Mr Baker, I don’t believe you need me. Any PI worth her or his salt will be able to find your son, but you must give them more time. However, if you do want my help you need to be patient.’

  ‘I told you, I can pay whatever you—’

  I grabbed his right pinky finger and twisted it, ever so slightly until he started to gasp and do a little cha-cha-cha on the spot. ‘You’re insulting me, Mr Baker. I am not for purchase and I don’t care what privilege you think your money gives you.’

  ‘I’m . . . sorry,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘Sometimes I can be too pushy.’

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that (a) the apology was going to cost me, and (b) Mr Baker was less upset about his son’s disappearance than my refusal to spring into action immediately. When I released him he shook the injured hand while reaching with the other into his pocket to draw forth a rectangular white card. As I reached for it, there was a scraping sound as someone pushed the gate half open. A thin, dirty face peeked through the gap.

  I’d thought her gone for good.

  ‘Sally!’ I yelled, and Baker turned. Her expression flickered from timidity to active fear as she saw him; she turned and bolted. I threw myself out of the door, my recovering muscles protesting enough that I had to slow down, but it didn’t matter. By the time I got to the footpath there was no sign of her. For a malnourished urchin she could sure make a fast getaway.

  I returned slowly, relieved to see that my unwelcome guest hadn’t taken the opportunity to step inside.

  Baker was staring at me, looking decidedly perplexed, still proffering the business card. Unless he was a really good actor, he didn’t know Sally. But she’d obviously recognised him, and something about him had scared her.

  ‘Friend of yours?’

  ‘I’ll be in contact,’ I said and closed the door, none too gently. After a few moments there was the sound of something being slipped under the thin gap where a draft excluder belonged, and the white rectangle appeared. Then footsteps moved down the stairs and back along the garden path. A motor started quietly, something expensive and highly engineered. I barely heard it pull away as I picked up the card and threw it on the desk.

  Back at the dining table the parcel sat in a three-foot-square section where the mess had been cleared away – by ‘cleared away’, I mean, made vertical rather than horizontal. I stared at the Boatman’s gift for a while longer, then pulled on my big girl pants. Gingerly, I undid the frayed red ribbon that was keeping everything together and gently flipped open the edges of the parchment-coloured cloth.

  The knife lay in a sheath of intricately tooled, age-darkened leather. Its handle of ebony wood was studded with gold rivets. I bent close and sniffed, but couldn’t make out anything except maybe some kind of lanolin. Old though it was, the weapon had been looked after. I hesitated, then picked it up, still sheathed. It was a weighty thing. I drew the blade to find it was double-edged, about twenty centimetres long and engraved with swirls and curlicues. Gold’s a pretty soft metal and it didn’t look like this’d had too much hard usage. Then again, it might have been an alloy and tougher than it appeared.

  Even without the sheath, the dagger was heavier than it should have been, which made me wonder about its core. The thing had started vibrating against my palm and now a humming rose from it. I wasn’t stupid; I quickly jammed it back into the sheath. The noise subsided, but I could still feel the reverberation on my skin.

  Okay: so not a harmless gift, not an ornament, definitely not a steak-knife-free-with-purchase sort of blade but something that I was pretty sure needed to be hidden – or kept very close – until I worked out what I was supposed to do with it. The sheath had sturdy straps top and bottom, so I could either worry about finding a secure hiding place, or be sure I knew where it was at all times. I tied it to my ankle. I’d have to get used to the weight, but otherwise it felt relatively comfortable. I looked at the wall clock. Time for bed; a few more hours of rest would do the trick before I had to go out again.

  I slept like the dead, and if anyone came knocking, I didn’t hear them.

  *

  Sitting on a bench at one end of the Kangaroo Point cliff walk, book on my lap, I watched the sun set, throwing orange fire on the water in its last moments, some of the tendrils reaching the Botanical Gardens on the opposite bank. Not far from me, just over the other side of a broad stone wall, people with helmets and far too much energy were climbing up and down the cliff face as if it was a good idea. The spotlights at the base of the cliffs flickered on, then streetlamps followed as the dark crept in, but it was officially now too hard to read in my shadowy patch.

  I owned a lot of books, a collection built up over the years. Of course, there was heaps of information online but it wasn’t the real stuff; besides, I didn’t trust the Internet. It might give useful hints about where to go when I was researching something, but those were simply leads, and whilst some turned out to be useful, many were completely unreliable. The World Wide Web was just anarchy in a virtual container – there was no knowledge there, only data in ephemeral and frequently unsound form. But a book, a nice solid book, a thing you could touch and hold and, more importantly, own – that was solid. That was tangible.

  Books had shown me that although I was different, I wasn’t alone.

  My father’s library disappeared after his arrest and was probably still mouldering in an evidence locker somewhere. My grandparents had cleaned out Grigor’s house, my old home, and disposed of anything that wasn’t suitable to be left next to Women’s Weekly, which covered pretty much everything. They turned out to be very particular about reading material where I was concerned, at such pains to give me a Normal childhood, but I started spending my pocket money on questionable investments such as compendiums of tales about the occult and ghosts, myths and legends . . . weird stuff that would later become Weyrd. I hid my illicit purchases under my bed, behind the old suitcase stuffed with the toys I’d outgrown but couldn’t bear to throw away.

  My adolescent rebellion might have been nerdier than most, but I found myself hanging out in the sort of bookstores that didn’t look like proper shops, the ones hidden down dark alleys, with doors with peeling paint and strangely sturdy locks, or behind hidden trapdoors in the storerooms of shiny new book chain-stores, under which would be the rest of the inventory: books as old as breathing, covered in everything from tightly woven hair to human skin, from shaved bone shards to glass, from beaten bronze to blood-dyed silks.

  I wasn’t li
ke other kids. I knew things they didn’t; I’d seen things they never would – and I was strong, so strong. Grandma warned me over and over: No pushing, no shoving, no fighting, no matter what – you don’t know your own strength, Verity. I really did, though, and I was careful not to use it against anyone – or at least, not until I was older and started recognising and encountering the Weyrd again.

  That’s where the bookshops came in: I didn’t feel as if I was playing dress-up or wearing a suit of armour there. Around the books, I didn’t have to be anyone but me. That was where Bela first found me – or maybe ‘made contact’. He knew who I was. Now I realise that, of course the Council would have kept an eye on Grigor’s daughter, but when I was fifteen I was flattered and naturally, I developed a fierce schoolgirl crush. He wasn’t interested then (not until I was well into my twenties), but in those early years he showed me my heritage, pointed me towards tomes filled with disguised versions of the truth of where we came from, and others not so disguised. He taught me not to be afraid of what I was.

  It’s no wonder I loved him for so long.

  He’d also been a great giver of books while we were together – a great forgetter of anniversaries and birthdays, too, but random books-for-no-reason helped to smooth that over. Despite those gifts, I’d grown my library mostly on my own, though I only ever bought those volumes I could afford to pay for. Some could be had for a lot of cold hard cash, others for a lock of hair, a tiny square of skin, a vial of blood or a whisper of breath, but Bela had taught me that it was unwise to give up any part of yourself, even for knowledge. You never knew what someone would do with something so personal.

  The bestiary on my lap was written in bad Latin, which had made it a little cheaper, but it’d still cost me the better part of a month’s salary. My Latin was even more atrocious (needless to say my language studies grades had not been stellar), but it had good pictures, which I could ‘read’, and armed with a dictionary and a basic primer, I managed. Shame about all that effort. The entry on sirens told me nothing I didn’t already know.

  The winged women with the legs of birds had not been sea-going to begin with. One particular branch of the family had started that tradition, and had also started mating with men. Their appetite for flesh had also increased, and over the years they’d evolved, losing their aerial abilities and morphing into water creatures. The other branch, the older one, stayed aloft and kept their wings – they didn’t hold with all that reclining on rocks and serenading their dinner, although they still liked the seduction, the chase. Some liked the murderous habits so much they couldn’t or wouldn’t give them up; some just liked to tease and flirt, to break a heart or twelve.

  I closed the book and contemplated what could kill a siren. Bullets, arrows, decapitation, they’d all do it. Poison wouldn’t work – maybe because their own blood was already so toxic. It’s difficult to catch something that can fly away unless you’re a dab hand with nets. They had fangs and claws, so they could defend themselves pretty effectively. And then there was that whole hypnotic effect: some idiots, men and women both, were dumb enough to fall victim to their lures, rather like a bird being mesmerised by a snake. On the whole, siren bodies were as frail as humans’, but unless violence was visited upon them, they simply outlived us. Hell, they’d outlived whole civilisations.

  And there had been no marks on the dead siren, whoever she was, apart from the standard fell-from-a-great-height-and-went-splat kind.

  The autopsy might show something, but I wasn’t going to bet on it. Whoever – or whatever – had murdered the siren had probably been smart enough to clean up after themselves. So if there was anything there to be found, I’d have to wait for McIntyre to call once the chopping-up-and-cataloguing part was done. Oddly, I’m squeamish about that kind of thing.

  The city’s sirens had a regular meeting place: they got together once a month, at the full moon, and fortuitously, we were due a full moon that very Sunday. Sometimes they sang, not the nasty, lure-you-to-your-death sort of singing, which is never conducive to maintaining a low profile, but a nice ladies’ choir thing. They gathered together for the same reasons humans do: for companionship, to be surrounded by their own so they didn’t feel so alone. Of course, there are edgy loners in every species, and I really hoped that whoever the victim was, she hadn’t been one of those, not only because that would make my task more difficult, but because it would mean she wasn’t mourned or missed, and that always made me sad.

  *

  Mindful of Ziggi’s etiquette tip to ensure my continued good health – it was fairly basic: don’t be rude, because sirens have a very strict view of what constitutes good manners – I tucked the bestiary into my bag, rose and walked along the cliff path towards the park with its herd of BBQ pergolas sitting in pools of artificial light. Maybe on a non-siren night David and I would go there, bring some Thai food, talk into the wee hours.

  The full moon turned the landscape silvery-ash. Everything – buildings, cars, city lights, trees, people, the river below – was washed of colour, rendered ghostly and limned with a strange sort of shine in the winter air. Soon enough I stopped noticing that because I heard the melody, seeping in through my pores and making my belly tingle.

  As I got closer the singing got clearer, splitting into lyrics, a version of Greek from before time and history were recorded. I caught the words for moonlight and grace and mother, which was as far as my dodgy translation skills allowed. I figured it for a hymn, the open sky their church. The power was pitched low, so as not to entrance anyone, but I could see figures gathered on balconies in the apartment complexes across the road, and evening picnickers scattered along the cliffs listening, quite still, food momentarily forgotten.

  The women were clustered on one of the grey- and white-tiled lookouts, the one closest to the tiny garden of St Mary’s Church, at the farthest end of the park. A glass and steel wall kept land and empty air apart. About thirty of them stood in a loose arrow formation, hands by their sides, faces lifted to the moon, mouths moving in unison. They were all dressed differently – anything else would have screamed ‘cult’ – but without exception each was beautiful. Just behind every one I could see a sort of shimmer effect: the hidden wings.

  As I neared, I focused on the woman at the tip of the arrow. She was older than her companions, although still enduringly lovely, ageing gracefully with high cheekbones and a firm jaw. Others looked like extremely well preserved forties, a few in their thirties, but the majority of them appeared to be young, late teens, early twenties. Many of these creatures were ancient enough to have seen the Fall of Troy, but this was a relatively new nest, just over a hundred years old, in a small community, owing to a general exodus when the proscription against human hors d’oeuvres came into effect.

  I stopped a courteous distance from them and waited for the song to finish. Slowly the notes dropped away like leaves fallen from a height, and as the music died, so the colour was restored to the cityscape. Then thirty heads turned to pin me with luminous stares until one broke from the group, a glaring adolescent, and approached me.

  ‘You’re not welcome. This time is private.’

  Mindful of Ziggi’s advice, I dipped my head respectfully. ‘I understand, and I wouldn’t interrupt if it were not important.’ I turned and locked gazes with the oldest. ‘I’m Verity Fassbinder. May I speak with you?’

  She didn’t answer immediately and I tugged a sheet of paper from between the pages of the bestiary. McIntyre had emailed me the photo, which I’d printed off in black and white, hoping it might not look so bad. ‘I think you might be missing someone.’

  A long moment passed before she assented and I loosed a relieved breath. The crowd parted with reluctance; they were nervous, no doubt about it, and there was something they couldn’t hide. Their fear had a smell, a scent of warm wet feathers.

  I reached the matriarch and handed her the photograph.

  It was just a headshot, and the face had been cleaned up as well as
they could. She almost seemed to be sleeping, but it was a leaden, hopeless kind of slumber. The woman looked at the image, her expression contorting, and pushed a fist against her mouth to stop any sound. Two of the older females supported her to a bench and I kept pace, refusing to surrender my position to the press of bodies, and hustled my way onto the seat next to her. Shaking, she stared at the photo.

  Her child?

  ‘She was found early this morning at Waterfront Place,’ I said, gently. ‘She’d fallen.’

  ‘No siren falls!’ At least three voices joined in outrage until the woman beside me held up her hand for silence.

  ‘We know of you. What is your interest in this?’ she asked, amethyst eyes fixed on my green ones.

  It’s always a bit nerve-wracking when your reputation precedes you.

  ‘Well, if you know of me, then you’ll know it’s what I do.’ I cleared my throat. ‘The Normals call me in when things are a bit strange, and the Council expects me to help keep the peace among our kind.’

  ‘We’re not your kind,’ she said, her voice low with contempt. Sirens might like to hold themselves apart, but they are just a subset of the Weyrd. However, opening that particular can of worms wasn’t going to get me very far, so I swallowed the urge to correct her.

  ‘I know that and you know that, but the Normals, not so much. So I have been given the job of finding out who she was and what happened to her. I’d appreciate any help you could offer.’