Read Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1 for Free Online

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 Iaccepted 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 wasa
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