Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1 (32 page)

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 see 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.

‘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.

‘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.