Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1 (40 page)

Jiggling her back and forth, I peered through the walls, but the only person I could see was Ziggi, puffing up the cracked
asphalt drive, looking for me. Utter perplexity was writ large on his face.

‘Ready for this, kid?’ I marvelled at the intense colour of her eyes as she gurgled up at me. I grabbed a pink bunny rug to
wrap her in, then paused. Where could I take her? Where was safe? Maybe the Rectory—

‘Don’t,’ an angry growl pierced me, ‘or I will gut you where you stand.’

I pivoted; the pile of blankets had fallen from the bed, revealing Ligeia’s hiding place. She stood tall beside the crib,
her wings spread to make herself more threatening, brandishing her umbrella in a white-knuckled grip. She pointed her left
hand at me, grubby talons growing longer and sharper as I watched. The summer dress might be filthy beyond rescue, her feathers
scraggy and moulting, but Ligeia was a terrifying sight in her protective rage.

Trying to stop my voice shaking and summon some of the confidence I’d felt when she stalked me in the Botanical Gardens, I
said firmly, ‘I think you’d have done it by now, Ligeia, if you meant to, like when my back was turned.’ I wasn’t at all sure
of that, but I had to believe that it wasn’t just because she preferred her prey to know what was coming. This was such a
dangerous gambit: if I died here, no one could save David. Still, she didn’t move, just stared at me intently.

‘You know she’s in danger,’ I said.

‘Calliope is safe
here
. I will protect her. I promised my granddaughter.’

Serena
.

‘I know you want to – I know you’d die for her, Ligeia, but she can’t stay in here forever. How many years will you be able
to hide her? The angels aren’t going to go away; they aren’t going to stop hunting for her. They’ll keep killing people, sirens
and humans alike. It’ll mean more loss, more grief.’

‘
You
can’t protect her,’ she sneered.

‘I can protect her better than you did her mother,’ I said meanly. That was unfair, especially since I’d let Serena down too,
but I could see I’d hit home. I went on, a little more gently now, ‘Maybe not me, but I know people who can.’

I hoped that was true: Bela, the Councillors, even the Norns – somebody could at least whisk her away.

Ligeia bared her teeth and took three deliberate steps towards me.

I raised my voice. ‘There’s got to be somewhere more secure than this!’ She halted, and I added, ‘Ligeia, this baby needs
a chance
– a chance to be what she wants. She needs the opportunity to grow and choose a life for herself. She’s too small now to
make her own decisions, but she can’t stay here. I can get her to safety – we can get her out of Brisbane and away from the
Arch. We can give her the choices you didn’t have; the choices Eurycleia denied her daughter.’

Still she stayed silent and in an anger born of despair I yelled, ‘You couldn’t save Serena. You couldn’t save Teles, or Raidne.
Let
me
save Calliope.’

And finally the old siren’s shoulders slumped and her wings drooped as her hands dropped to her sides. On her ravaged face
was all the pain of defeat and loss, a look I’d been imagining on my own face at the thought of letting David down. I shook
the thought away and held the baby tighter, as if she were an anchor.

‘Ligeia, I’m taking her now. You can come with us, and I promise you can stay by her side, but you need to let me do this,
for Callie’s sake.’ I waited for her to answer, to either agree or dissent, but she did neither, just appeared crushed. ‘You’ll
find me if you need anything?’

She still didn’t speak and I risked turning my back. The nape of my neck and the spot between my shoulder blades twitched
as I stepped into the invisible barrier, but the return trip wasn’t as bad; it took less of an effort and the burning in my
lungs settled far more quickly. It didn’t bother the child at all, and as we came out into the dusk she
gave a delicate little baby fart that stank up the fresh air. What the hell had Ligeia been feeding her?

Ziggi, who’d planted himself at the base of one of the tall pine trees, saw us and smiled, dusting himself off as he climbed
to his feet. I headed towards him, then watched as his mouth slowly turned down. I didn’t have to ask why.

On the wind came the beating of enormous wings, sounding terrifyingly like a cohort of Black Hawks. A humming in my head set
alight every promise I’d made to Ligeia, every chance I had of surviving, of finding David, and turned all my hopes to ash.
Something angelic this way came.

You can’t outrun an angel; I knew that without having to be told. Ziggi’s cab was still down beside the river, and there weren’t
enough trees to duck through in the vain hope that the hordes might fly into them and come a cropper. I ran towards Ziggi
as six angels dropped into the garden in front of us. One of them was larger than the others: the Archangel, deigning to show
himself at last. I kept thinking about Serena and Teles and Raidne, with their skin branded, their wings torn off. Cut off
from the hidden room by a flanking angel, Ziggi and I backed into the front entrance of St Mary’s, a tiny covered portico,
putting the pair of padlocked doors at our backs.

The entourage landed about twenty feet away. The Arch took a few steps towards us, the sound of thunder ringing every time
his feet touched the ground. He dragged something in his wake: Tobit. His arms had been tied behind him and a bronze choke-chain
encircled his neck. The other end was being brandished nonchalantly by the Arch. ‘Worse for wear’ didn’t even begin to cover
his condition. His gaze was desolate as it slid over us, then he fell face-down into the grass, apparently out cold.

About ten feet away, the Arch paused for effect. I had to admit he was truly a thing of beauty, even more than his disciples.
Long silver hair flowed over broad shoulders; green eyes flared like the Aurora
Australis. He wore bracers and greaves that shone like jet, and his sable boots had pale pearl lacings. His chiton was black,
and in the centre of the burning heart in his breastplate was a mosaic of twelve precious stones. My chest tightened:
this
was what had been in my brain outside St Stephen’s.

The baby raised her head and burped, dribbled down the front of my jacket, then looked at the troop. Her little fists clenched.
I thought it pretty unlikely she’d sensed they were there for her, but she wasn’t oblivious to the tension crackling around
us. She didn’t cry, though, and I was proud of her.

I cleared my throat. ‘You’ve been following me?’

The Arch smiled smugly and shook his handsome head. He threw the end of Tobit’s chain to no one in particular, assuming someone
would catch it, and the ruby-hearted ginger did. ‘We did not follow you, for you would have sensed us. We followed
it
.’

He pointed to Ziggi, who appeared surprised – I wasn’t sure if it was being tracked, or being called an ‘it’. Perhaps it was
a little of both. We must have looked blank, for the Arch said impatiently, ‘Where you go, it invariably follows.’

‘My friend is not an
it
! Although admittedly he does follow me a lot.’

Ziggi said helplessly, ‘Sorry, V.’

I said, ‘You couldn’t have known.’

‘Thus we come to this meeting,’ began the Arch, and his smile slid from me to the baby and back again. Calliope shrank against
me – she
definitely
knew something was up – and I held her more tightly. ‘It appears that you have what I want.’

I took in my adversary and weighed up my chances of facing off against him or the golem. On balance I kind of preferred the
golem; the golem got straight into it. But the Arch was wasting my time,
time during which I didn’t know what was happening to David. For all I knew, the Arch was running down my clock. I needed
to speed this up. ‘Looks like it.’

He smiled again, and this time there was a real power behind it, and as that power got stronger I began to feel . . . strange
. . . a kind of awe, in the oldest sense: devotion and fear and amazement, all rolled into utter belief. In short, I started
to feel something I really shouldn’t: I was angel-struck. The small part of my mind that was still my own marvelled at the
degree of dominance this creature must have had to break through my Weyrd DNA, to affect me as easily as Tobit had David.
Maybe that was my problem: the Normal part of me was my Achilles’ heel.

I fought the influence, but it was like trying to escape from a sealed plastic wrapper.

‘Now,’ said the Archangel in a soothing and reasonable tone, ‘now, you have something I want, something I
need
. But I do not wish to take it – I do not wish to leave you
bereft
. I know how these things work, these
deals
. We have been negotiating with your kind for aeons. Therefore, Verity Fassbinder, I propose a transaction: I will give you
back your dead in exchange for the child.’

Beside him a mist formed, shifting about as if contained in a cylinder, until it resolved into a symphony of friendly brown
hues: tan trousers pulled too high at the waist, a taupe T-shirt and a nubbly chocolate cardigan with a hole in the left elbow,
one my grandmother had kept mending but which kept getting torn on the same nail on the same old deckchair. Grandy smiled
from beneath his thick thatch of silver hair, his eyes grey and kind, the stubble on his chin and cheeks just as it always
was, resistant even to the closest of shaves. I smelled Old Spice, just a hint.

Another white wisp crept up and morphed into a lavender
housedress with pink and white flowers, the apron she’d hand-embroidered as part of her trousseau, the fuchsia slippers I’d
given her on her last birthday, so bright they could blind you at twenty paces. She smiled too, blue eyes sparkling, and I
felt my heart expand. My grandparents represented safety, love. They’d been the only stable adults in my childhood, the only
people I’d known, even as a grown-up, who were exactly what they seemed to be. They had no hidden agenda, no secret shape,
and they loved me no matter what, even if I scared them a little. I felt my grip on Calliope loosen, my shoulder and arm muscles
softening in the act of surrender.

But the Arch didn’t know when to stop: a third cloud was forming, dense and thick, with none of the ethereal quality of the
others. And it was tall, not as tall as the Arch, but big and broad, and strong, yet not quite right. Standing there in an
ill-fitting suit with bloodied patches at the shoulders where the iron spikes had pierced his flesh, with a loose smile that
showed sharp teeth and a hungry gaze that darted back and forth, as if looking for something to consume, was Grigor.

‘Well? Do we have an accord?’ said the Arch in his soothing voice, unable to hide the triumphant timbre.

If only he’d been more selective about the images he’d put forth. If only he’d not overplayed his hand by showing me things
he knew nothing about. If only he’d stopped before the sight of my father had shocked me back to my senses. And although he
didn’t know it, he’d given me something to cling to: there was no sign of David amongst my dead.

Ziggi’s hand was on my arm, as if he’d sensed how much I’d been tempted, but I tightened my grip on the baby and said firmly
to the Archangel, ‘No. No accord.’

That brought him up short, but I hadn’t finished with him. ‘You
and your cheap tricks! You’re supposed to be
looking after
the mortals – you’re supposed to be
keeping watch
over us, not crying because you can’t go home, not plotting to murder innocent
children
. So, no, I will not give you this child.’

‘I demand the double-winged!’ All charm, all conciliation, all attempts at persuasion were gone now. The pillars of wishful
dust dissolved as quickly as they’d come and the Arch started taking his earth-shaking steps towards where we sheltered in
the porch. The church behind us
shifted
, just a little. I pressed my back against the unyielding doors while Ziggi, in an act of sheerest optimism, took the Taser
off his belt and sank into a fighting stance. Now
that
was brave. I touched Calliope’s head, felt the silken hair, and turned her face away. She began a whimpering cry and I made
shhhh-shhhh
sounds, even as I expected her to be plucked from me at any moment and torn apart, but the Arch came no closer.

‘He can’t
take
her,’ yelled a newly roused Tobit. ‘You have to hand her over.’

The Arch turned to glare at him and the emerald-heart angel kicked Tobit in the head. A tooth flew, landing in the grass some
way off.

‘Give me the double-winged!’ bellowed the Arch, his voice echoing all around us, even though it shouldn’t have.

‘She’s ours!’ Another voice, and a hissing to the left of it drew everyone’s attention. That hissing noise grew and grew as
Eurycleia and the conclave swarmed into the small garden. I had to give them credit: they knew what this flight had done to
their sisters, and there were only thirty of them against the Arch and his five minions. The odds of a vastly reduced siren
population seemed high. The women shivered, and as magics were undone, transformed, wings started unfurling, coming into the
light for the first time in what I suspected
was a
very
long time. The sirens fanned out, rolling their shoulders, fighters warming up their muscles. Talons grew at the tips of
manicured fingers; teeth lengthened in pretty mouths;
retroussé
noses became sharper, beakish. The hissing ceased as they came to a standstill, laying claim to their ground, waiting, watching,
mindful of the havoc the seraphs could wreak.