Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1 (5 page)

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.

The porridge in the saucepan began to burble at me and I removed it from the heat to throw in a handful of frozen raspberries.
It might be a winter breakfast, but I loved it and it was incredibly healthy – well, at least until I added half a cup of
cream. I poured green tea into the porcelain cup my grandmother had used every day for fifty years, carried bowl and cup outside
and resumed position in the canvas chair.

The day after Grigor’s arrest, my maternal grandparents, Albert and May Brennan, whom I didn’t even know existed, appeared
and took me into their home. The first months were fraught. I didn’t know who they were, I missed my father dreadfully and
I was completely uprooted. It wasn’t just the new school, new house, new food, new rules, but also the new knowledge: not
only that Grigor had done terrible things, that he was gone forever, but also the fact that he had come between my grandparents
and my mother, and me as well, for Grigor had kept them away.

I learned ‘normal’ from them. They cared for me and did their best. Some days I’d catch them looking at me as if I were awful
and fascinating, a cuckoo in the nest, and it hurt at first, but in the end I
accepted it because I realised that despite that, they did love me. I
was
awful and fascinating, but at least I wasn’t stuck with the kind of problems that plagued a lot of half-bloods, like horns
or wings or powers they couldn’t control. All I got was Grigor’s ridiculous strength, which I’ve been thankful for from time
to time, and some useful knowledge of magical practice.

Whenever I’d asked my grandparents about my mother, they’d generally just repeated darkly,
She married badly and ended worse
. How their daughter came to be married to such a man, they refused to disclose. My grandfather would change the subject without
missing a beat as my grandmother’s lips pursed in the manner particular to little old ladies that so perfectly conveyed both
politeness and extreme annoyance. They were even more tight-lipped on the subject of Grigor, except the day they told me,
gently, kindly, that he’d died. I let him fade in my memory until he became sepia and easily ignored.

It didn’t take long to learn that my grandparents weren’t appreciative of magic rituals, that even laying the simplest wards
around the house wasn’t on, let alone the baking of blood-offering loaves. With Grigor gone, my experience of strange things
also faded. The community I’d begun my life in made no contact at all.

The flow of child disappearances stopped for a long, long time after Grigor’s arrest – or at least those disappearances obviously
connected to unacceptable dining habits. Bela once told me that Grigor’s downfall had made the community a lot more alert,
a lot more security-conscious: the Weyrd had begun to realise at last that their survival depended on evolution, civilisation,
on moving forward and adapting, putting the old ways to rest once and for all.

And Grigor’s customers? Those rich, powerful people disappeared like smoke, making it look like he’d been a sole predator,
which, by the by, was exactly how the Council wanted it. The fact that he was
a
Kinderfresser
never came out, not in the press, not in the courts. And the Normals in charge were just as happy with the result – their
justice system had never been designed to cope with stuff like that; it can’t even cope with its own mundane crimes. Tell
the citizenry there’re folk with tails and abilities and strange tastes and there’d be a riot; town squares turned into pyres,
sales of garden stakes going through the roof, churches running out of holy water . . .

But now something had changed, and not for the better. A new product, moved by an unknown force, was endangering children
and putting the Weyrd community at risk of exposure once more. Something scratched at my back brain and I started to wonder
if the past was the place to start. I growled in frustration, heaved myself out of the chair and headed inside to find some
grown-up clothes, as most people frowned upon pyjamas as outerwear.

No rest for the wicked.

The State Library of Queensland resembled West End Library only in so far as they were both buildings. Located on the south
bank of the river, between the Gallery of Modern Art and the Queensland Art Gallery, it was an enormous series of rectangles
and voids, glass, tiles and concrete, all threaded through with Internet connectivity. International students sat with laptops,
taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi to Skype home. Militant gaggles of mothers used prams and toddlers as blunt weapons without
fear or favour, laying claim to café space. Determined-looking genealogists headed to the upper floors to trawl through electoral
rolls, immigration and shipping logs, convict records and rare manuscripts. Others were there to go through the music, newspaper,
film and photographic collections. Some just wandered in to get out of the wind, rain or sun, to nap in the stacks on the
appallingly patterned carpet or in one of the almost-comfortable armchairs scattered around, others to sit in the Red Box
and watch the river serenely snake past.

Inside, the air-conditioning was set to Arctic breeze. The microfiche reader made a slight hum and gave off a lot of heat
and I rubbed my hands in front of it, campfire-style. But I didn’t complain about the cold; I was too grateful that I’d been
allowed through the door. A few years ago during the floods there had been an ‘incident’ in which I might have been involved.
I was not the
cause
of said incident, but
I was there clearing up a few things and, well, some people got a bit singed, books were damaged and the teacup collection
on the Queensland Terrace was irreparably diminished. I was also grateful that old-style librarians – the sort who could turn
evildoers to ash with a single glare – were few and far between nowadays.

There was surprisingly little about Grigor’s activities in the archival newspapers; that would be down to Weyrd influence
in the corridors of power, I supposed. It was all about damage control. But there were pictures of him being taken to and
from the Supreme Court: a tall, handsome man in a bad suit, with hangdog eyes and a loose-lipped grin that showed off sharp
teeth. Though he looked Normal, I thought I could make out stains on his jacket, right where the sleeves met the body: bleed-through
from where they’d inserted the iron nails in his shoulder joints to stop him from shifting. His was the sort of crime that
couldn’t be entirely hushed up; it had created so much outrage that it could only be shut down by a very public arrest and
prosecution. My father was thrown to the wolves – not that he didn’t deserve it, but that’s how it was done: one scandal amplified
in order to cover up a worse one.

I hadn’t looked at these reports before, although Bela had occasionally shared some tidbits. I had chosen not to, to ignore
it all, as if none of it had happened. During the trial my grandparents had kept the TV off at night so I wouldn’t see the
news bulletins. If they bought papers, they read them before coming home. They acted as if, somehow, what was happening to
my father couldn’t touch me if we all ignored it; as if it was nothing to do with me. But there were days when I believed
everything I was doing as an adult, the vigil I kept over the city, was a kind of penance. Hidden somewhere in the back of
my mind was the thought that one day I’d have to pay for what my father did, and just maybe I had started making reparation.