Abigail

The next morning Abigail and Elias had nothing to say to each other. Elias made himself a large mug of coffee and a salami sandwich for breakfast, using the last of both the ground coffee and the bread in the process. He then grabbed the keys to the family car and without enquiring if Abigail needed it, drove off.

Despite the silent treatment from Elias, Abigail was glad it was morning. Their fight left her too upset to sleep. She had trawled through her mother's emails and old community centre newsletters to narrow down the centre staff member she needed to speak to. Even when found someone who might be able to give her a lead, sleep didn't come easily. She slipped in and out, dreaming of twisted, inhuman faces and long, winding corridors she couldn't get to the other end of no matter how quickly she ran.

Left without a car, Abigail took the bus, then walked another eight blocks to the community centre. Abigail had been here only twice before and that had been years ago, but the three-storey building looked no different. She went in and stopped in front of the reception desk.

Should I've emailed or called? I didn't even check if she was in today.

"Hello," said the receptionist. "How can I help you?"

Abigail mulled over her words. Yes, I definitely should've emailed first and set up a meeting, this isn't the way this is done. Her instinct was to turn 180 degrees and head back to the bus station, but the receptionist would think her a loony if she did that. Abigail was already here, she had to follow through with it.

"Good day," she said, her voice quivering lightly. "I was wondering if I could speak briefly with Sofia Kovacs? My name is Abigail Fitzpatrick, I wanted to speak to her about my mother, Maria Fitzpatrick."

The receptionist reached for the phone on his desk. "Just a moment, please. Do have a seat."

Abigail plonked herself down in one of the leather chairs opposite the receptionist's desk and tried not to listen as he relayed the words to the person at the other end of the line.

"Sofia'll be out in a moment, Abigail," the receptionist finally said as he set down the phone.

When Sofia came down to the reception area, Abigail realised she recognised her broad figure and crimson-dyed hair from her mother's pictures. The number of small hoops in her left ear, however, seemed to have grown recently.

"Hello, Abigail. Good to see you," she said in a tone that suggested she meant her words. "Would you like to come with me?"

Sofia's office was in shambles. Folders and loose papers lay on every horizontal surface. Motivational posters and adverts for community centre events adorned the walls. She motioned for Abigail to sit down in the low chair in front of her desk and slipped into her own seat.

"How're you doing, Abigail? What can I do for you?"

Abigail cleared her throat. "I'm well, um, thank you. I'm here because of my mother, Maria Fitzpatrick. You knew her, didn't you?"

"I did. A lovely woman. I never expected what happened, I'm so sorry."

"Thank you." Abigail paused. She had rehearsed this moment the entire bus ride over to the centre, knowing that her words needed to sound genuine. "My brother and I are still in shock about what happened, but we've been thinking. If we ever have children of our own, we don't want them to remember their grandmother by a single act. We'll share our memories with them of course, but we would love if other people from her life would contribute some of their memories. We'd like to put together a little memorial book."

Sofia hesitated for the moment, then nodded. Abigail took her mother's phone out of her bag and searched through the photos until she found some of the Easter party. She showed Sofia the first few and made a show of writing down the names, although in her mind Abigail was simply counting down to the photo she was really after.

When they reached it, Abigail's breath caught.

"This is Jala Morrel," Sofia said. "She was here for a little while, but I haven't seen her for about two months now. Lovely woman. Such a good artist."

"Oh, that's her?" Abigail replied, forcing herself to keep her tone casual. "My mum spoke about her a bit, but I never met her. Do you happen to have her contact details? I think she lent my mum a book, I need to return it."

Sofia turned to her computer. "Just give me a moment," she said and frowned. "Uh, no phone number or email... There's an address though. I'll write it down for you."

She copied the number from the screen and handed the post-it to Abigail.

"I think this is enough to start with," Abigail said. "Thank you so much for your help, Sofia."

"No problem. I'll put down something in writing for you and your brother myself. This week's quite busy, but next week definitely. Perhaps I can email it through to you?"

Abigail shrugged and wrote down her old email address on the notebook Sofia handed to her. She left Sofia's office clenching the post-it in her hand, but didn't dare to look at it until she was out in the small carpark out the front of the community centre.

113 Covenant Street, Coogee

That was somewhere in the Eastern Suburbs. Abigail had never been to Coogee, but she was fairly certain a person living that far south could find a community centre to serve their needs without having to cross the Bridge.

She peered at the address for a few moments, then started googling directions there.

Two buses, a train and nearly two hours later, Abigail was deep in the Eastern Suburbs.

While Coogee too was a beach-front suburb, the atmosphere here was distinctly different to the Northern Beaches. Whereas the area where Abigail had grown up was a suburban sprawl nestled among patches of native vegetation, Coogee was a suburb of apartment blocks and congested streets. Since it wasn't far from Bondi, plenty of tourists were about. It was actually close to Abigail's university too, which Abigail had never realised before. She wondered if she ought to move down here. It would spare her that ninety-minute commute to class and she could enjoy the challenge of surfing on an unfamiliar beach.

She didn't linger by the foreshore however. Two months have already passed, there was no excuse for dallying further.

When the location beacon indicated that she had arrived, Abigail dubiously studied the brightly painted facade. Number 113 Covenant Street was a hostel.

She looked around for a secondary entrance — old houses were sometimes partitioned oddly, but there were none. She shrugged and pushed open the front door. Inside was cramped. Two American girls with garish headbands and backpacks bigger than a ten-year-old child were talking to the sleepy-looking hostel clerk. Seeing no other staff around, Abigail busied herself with the stand of adverts for various local attractions until the two Americans left.

"G'day. How're ya going?" the hostel clerk said in such a broad accent that Abigail had to wonder if it was an act for the tourists.

While Abigail had taken the night and most of the morning to prepare for the meeting with Sofia, she hadn't had time to come up with a strategy here.

"Heya, how's it going?" she said, trying to match the clerk's enthusiastic tone. "I'm looking for a friend of mine. She's supposed to be staying here."

"Is that so?"

"Jala Morrel, I have a picture if it helps."

The hostel clerk shook his head and rubbed his eyes. "No need, I remember her well enough. No probs while she was here, but then she vanished and left behind a bunch of crap in her room. I tried to charge her for the clean-up expenses, except her credit card bounced."

"When did she leave?" Abigail asked. It was a strain to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

"Mate, I'm not going to tell you that."

"What about the stuff she left behind? You got any of that still lying around?"

The hostel clerk crossed his arms. "Again, I can't hand out this kind of information to anyone and everyone. Ask me something I can answer."

Abigail couldn't think of a question the clerk would be able and willing to answer. The room smelled of weed and the floor was sticky from the previous night's festivities spilling over from the dining area behind the reception, but the clerk had been given just enough training to be useless to her.

"Let's skip the questions then," she said as inspiration struck her. "Fifty bucks and you give us everything she left behind."

"One hundred."

"Sixty and not a cent more."

"Fine, eighty then."

"All right, eighty. But hand over what you've got first." Abigail sighed and pulled out her wallet.

Luckily she had taken out a bundle of cash the last time she did the groceries. Less luckily, this spur of the moment outlay would wreak havoc on Abigail and Elias' weekly budget.

The hostel clerk rolled his eyes. "Just be glad the owner of this place is a hoarder. I'd have binned the lot weeks back."

He disappeared into a small office behind his desk and a minute later returned with a plastic bag. Inside were some clothes, a notebook, two USBs and several bundles of loose paper. Abigail grinned and handed over the promised cash. She was finally getting somewhere.

"Thanks for your help," Abigail mumbled on her way out.

"Cheers, mate," the clerk responded. "Have a good day."

Once she was back out on the street, Abigail poured through the bag. The loose papers were printouts of maps and what looked like academic articles, some in Spanish and some in German. The clothing seemed to be made for a woman shorter and with narrower shoulders than Abigail. Just about the right size for Jala.

When Abigail opened up the notebook, dense rows of messy sigils met her.

I'm going to need some time to get a thorough look at this stuff.

Work and the journey home afterwards were a trial that day. Abigail couldn't concentrate on anything other the contents of the plastic bag and kept reaching in to peer at one item or another. It was a relief to step through the front door, where she finally had the chance to examine Jala's belongings properly.

The clothes were modern and wouldn't distinguish the wearer from the thousands of middle-aged women out on the streets of Sydney on any given day. Abigail set the clothes aside, as she had already done with the academic articles. She had learned French in primary school and had taken only the minimum required amount of Italian in high school, but both Spanish and German were beyond her.

The maps were an assorted lot. Two depicted the entire globe, one was a star chart and half a dozen showed the vast, empty regions of rural Australia. The last one was in Spanish. Abigail peered at it for a long time, but the landmarks looked as foreign to Abigail as the landscape of Mars.

"I'm clearly no Sherlock Holmes," she muttered as she flung the maps on top of the discarded academic papers.

She switched on her laptop and while she waited for the aged beast to start up, she flipped through the notebook. Pages and pages of Enochian scribbled with a blue ballpoint pen. Previously, every sigil she had seen had been shaped with great care. Here, sigils tripped over each other and since Jala had forgone basic punctuation, the mass of text on each page was overwhelming.

Sighing, she set the notebook aside too and plugged in the first of the USBs. The only folder on the USB contained thirty images of the first anchor before it had been dismantled. Light emanating from Sariel's wings over-exposed the photos. Flicking through them, it was clear Jala had been experimenting with camera settings in an attempt to compensate and had been unsuccessful.

The second USB was also full of photos, but these looked like schematics for rituals or maybe wards — Abigail didn't know how to distinguish between the two. Then there were scanned pages of hand-written notes and diagrams in two different sets of handwriting, neither of which matched the handwriting in the notebook. Abigail scrolled through the photos, the exhilaration of having found a clue to her parents' fate fading with each tap on the touchpad.

When she tapped through the last of the photos, the screen went blank, then a video started playing.

Sun had broken through iron-grey rain clouds and bathed the valley below in sunlight. The cameraman filmed from the side of a highway. Metal barriers peered out from the edge of the shot and the whir of cars speeding by distorted all other sounds. The camera shifted and Misha appeared in the frame. Her hair had been shaved off and she looked pale, but she offered the camera a wide smile. Now that the camera had moved, Abigail could see the cars and rickety buses flying past only a couple of feet away, but Misha's proximity to certain death didn't seem to concern her.

"Dad," said Kiara off-camera. Abigail guessed she was the one filming. "Get in here, give Jala a wave."

Abigail gaped in disbelief as Najran stepped into the frame. He had traded his wings for a white T-shirt, cargo shorts and a baseball hat. Grinning, Najran pulled Misha into a side-hug and they both waved at the camera. Kiara laughed.

The video ended and Abigail stared at the blank screen for several seconds without blinking. Whatever she had expected to find on these USBs, Najran and the twins playing the happy family on holiday wasn't it.

At least this was proof Jala was somehow involved with Najran's plans and thus he was implicated in the death of Abigail's parents. Somehow. The truth might well be on one of these diagrams or on the pages of Jala's notebook.

If only I was fluent in angel scribble.

She needed help with this. Abigail glanced at the time, then shrugged. There was no point in waiting around for Elias to come home; he had made it clear he didn't want to be involved. Sighing, she took out the phone and dialled Harold's number.

"Hello?" came Harold' soft baritone after the third ring.

"Good day, this is Abigail. How do you do?" she said and before Harold had a chance to reply, she went on. "I've come across a bunch of notes written in Enochian and I can't make head or tails of them. Would you be able to have a look at them? Perhaps you'll have more luck."