Vigil by V. J. Chambers Read Free Book Online Page B

“Cecily Kane. You wrote the story about Vigil.”
    “That’s me,” I said.
    “Were you out looking for him tonight?” asked the female police officer.
    “I found him,” I said. “Well, he found me.”
    She grinned at me and nudged her partner. “You hear that? She was with Vigil. You believe that?”
    He gave her a sour look. “He said the police were all corrupt. I don’t like him.”
    “Well, he wasn’t wrong,” said the female. “You and me are a few of the only straight shooters out there. Anybody who’s trying to clean things up, well, I figure he’s on our side.”
    The male officer pursed his lips, but didn’t say anything.
    “You keep it up, honey,” said the female. “And you tell Vigil that we’re grateful. Can you do that?”
    “I can,” I said.
    * * *
    I’d created a Vigil that didn’t exist. The news stories I wrote were about a man committed to justice, who was only motivated by a desire to set things right. The real man was complicated and secretive. He wasn’t doing what he was doing out of any sense of justice. He was only obsessed with and drawn to The Phantom, his distorted mirror image.
    Perhaps I wasn’t being quite fair to him. He did have some sense of justice. After all, he was protecting women from getting killed. So he didn’t take any joy in death.
    Unlike The Phantom, who mutilated and killed for fun.
    Vigil was better than The Phantom.
    But they were the same in ways that disturbed and frightened me.
    And what disturbed me even worse was my own inexplicable attraction to this dark, complicated man. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t know why he wore a mask. I didn’t know why he felt connected to The Phantom.
    I should know things like that about a man I’d been kissing.
    But I didn’t.
    Truth be told, the mystery of him was part of the appeal. That and the fact that my interaction with him was a secret. He wasn’t like my last boyfriend, Scott, with whom I’d had a very public relationship. We’d met at a campus football game. I’d somehow gotten roped into covering it for the school paper. He was there because he actually liked football. He’d asked me on a date during half time, in front of a crowd of people.
    At the time, I’d found him and his exhibitionist tendencies charming.
    For months, I’d let Scott parade me around campus. We’d gone to parties. Gone to games. Gone to events.
    But after a while, I began to realize that Scott didn’t feel alive unless people were looking at him. He was a theater major, and he always seemed to be acting. I couldn’t tell who he really was.
    At first, that didn’t bother me. I didn’t particularly want to open myself up to anyone. My past was complicated.
    Maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe the truth was that my past was simple.
    But its simplicity was ugly and a little bit tragic. And that wasn’t the way I wanted anyone to see me. So I was glad enough that Scott and I weren’t going to be a couple who shared everything. I was happy enough to have something superficial.
    For a while, anyway.
    And then Scott got boring. And the parties got boring. And being in public got boring.
    And I couldn’t talk to him about it after Darlene died. I just didn’t know how. So, I’d broken up with him, and he hadn’t even seemed that upset.
    The sad thing was that Scott had been my boyfriend the longest out of all of my boyfriends.
    Not that Vigil was my boyfriend. I knew better than to assume that. He was definitely not boyfriend material, no matter how smoking hot his body was or how much his kisses made me tingle.
    He was something else entirely. A shadow man. His potency was dangerous. I needed to be careful, or I was going to get in over my head.
    Because I didn’t know anything about Vigil, I started to look up stuff about Hayden Barclay. The Phantom. Vigil said he was connected to him. Besides me, The Phantom seemed to be the only person Vigil was connected to.
    I’d turned