Spirit Animals

by E. E. Richardson

  “I’m afraid if you refuse to speak even in your defence, you’re definitely not going to be leaving this place any time soon,” she said. “We have you caught red-handed on possession of a class two restricted artefact, shapeshifting without a licence, and attempted murder—and unless you’re prepared to provide evidence that proves otherwise, then you’re still in the frame for at least one other murder carried out by a panther shifter in the vicinity. You prepared to give us information on any other shifters you know of that could potentially clear your name?”

  Pierce raised her eyebrows enquiringly, but unsurprisingly, the possibility of reexamining a charge he was almost certainly guilty of anyway didn’t make for much of a carrot. Since she certainly wasn’t about to dangle an impossible offer of early release or transfer to a regular prison, there was little she could promise in return for his cooperation.

  He was still pretending absolute indifference to the fact she was even speaking—and she was still sure that he understood every word she said. But even if she was trying to persuade the man, her best route in might be appealing to the animal.

  “No? Then you’re going to be in here for the long haul, I’m afraid,” she said. “Might be a good time to start thinking about creature comforts. I’m sure you’d appreciate more exercise time—a chance to go outside, get some air.” She sat back to stretch, glancing around pointedly at the bare walls. “What do they feed you in this place? Getting enough meat? Maybe if you work with us, something could be arranged.”

  The prisoner said nothing, but he bared his teeth in a silent snarl, rattling his cuffs. Beside her Leo subtly shifted, as if reaching to check on the firearm that he no longer carried.

  Time to bring him in on things and see if the stick was any more effective than the carrot. Even unarmed and far below strength, Leo was remarkably good at exuding a sense of quiet threat.

  “Perhaps you recognise Mr Grey here,” Pierce said, tilting her head towards Leo. “Or maybe you don’t, if you weren’t quite as high up in your bosses’ confidence as you think. He’s been involved in our investigation from the start, and he’s helped bring some very interesting information to light.” All technically true statements, if misleadingly assembled. Now for the big push. She sat forward, folding her arms on the table.

  “We know your panther pelt was made by a man who calls himself Sebastian. We know it was made considerably more recently than should have been possible, given that he’s supposed to be dead. And we know that makes you a liability to the people that you’re working for, with that tattoo still on your shoulders. You think there aren’t techniques to prove who gave you that tattoo and when? Rituals that will prove that you had contact with Sebastian after his apparent death?”

  She was bluffing, but the odds were there was something to find, if they dug deep enough. It was an avenue of investigation, but a slow and risky one: cooperation from Tate had much higher odds of netting them the bigger prize.

  And maybe she was actually starting to get through; he was looking steadily more twitchy. “Now, maybe you’re feeling pretty confident in here, and fair enough—it’s a secure facility, after all. Nobody should be able to get in here to come after you. Unless, maybe, you have some reason to believe that the people you were working for have some way to compromise that?” She tried to catch the prisoner’s eye, but his head was down, his shoulders taut with tension.

  Leo huffed dismissively beside her, the first noise that he’d made since they’d entered the room. “I think it’s pretty clear that we’re wasting our time here,” he said, though it was the opposite of what Tate’s body language was suggesting. He recognised the time to apply pressure, just as well as Pierce did. “There are other sources who are far more likely to be cooperative.”

  She turned halfway towards him, making a show of setting her hands on the tabletop to stand. “Well, in that case,” she said, “we may as well just—”

  Tate lunged forward as if triggered by some unseen signal, yanking at his cuffs and snapping his teeth in a violent snarl. The sound that tore out of his throat was a hoarse, rasping cry that shouldn’t have come from any human being. Pierce jumped back from the spitting, gnashing jaws by instinct, stumbling over the bolted-down chair as she tried to push it back. He shouldn’t be able to reach her—but the silver cuffs were clanging and scraping against the chair, and she was all too aware they were made to stop magic, not brute strength.

  Leo scrambled up beside her, slapping once again at his side for the Glock full of silver bullets he no longer carried, and she heard him curse as he put too much weight on his injured leg. Tate was growling and thrashing against the restraints, his wrists already blooded from the cuffs as he mindlessly threw himself forward. The glint of alertness that she thought she’d seen in his eyes had given way to wild animal madness.

  She was turning to call for assistance, but prison officers in riot gear were already flooding in, armed with Tasers and batons and barking orders: “Outside! Out!” She and Leo were manhandled out of the interview room and the door slammed shut behind them. It wasn’t quite soundproof enough to cut off the yelling and sound of spray canisters discharging.

  The prison officer who’d first escorted them in hurried over from the CCTV station. “You need to leave this area,” he said. “Interview’s over.” It was clear they’d get nothing out of Tate in this state, but Pierce still mentally cursed as they were hustled away from the scene; the days in isolation or medical care he’d more than likely win for this stunt would give him plenty of time to collect himself and prepare for any further questioning.

  “When can we re-interview?” she asked.

  “Not my call,” her escort said tersely. “You’re going to have to leave the building. No visitors on site when there’s an incident in progress.” Never mind her DCI status or their collective years of experience dealing with magical offenders—it was clear that right now she and Leo were just inconvenient members of the public getting in the way of the staff.

  Of course, Leo actually was retired now. As they were escorted back out to the gate, Pierce glanced around to see how he was doing. The speed at which they’d been bundled out and away from the interview room didn’t appear to have done his bad leg any favours: his limp had grown dramatically worse, and his face was tight with pain as he rubbed the heel of his hand down his thigh. The February cold couldn’t be helping either; his movements were stiff as he climbed back into the car, struggling to secure his seatbelt until he gave up and twisted awkwardly to do it left-handed.

  Pierce looked away to give him some privacy as she started the engine. “Well, I’m not sure this got us anywhere that was worth the hassle,” she admitted, running a hand over her face and stifling a yawn. Between this morning’s escapades and all the driving, this had been a very long day already.

  And it wasn’t going to get any shorter if she sat zoning out here. With a sigh she flicked the headlights on, illuminating the shadowed grounds beyond the fence—and a figure in a long coat walking through them. As the man turned to glance up at the sudden light, Pierce recognised him with a jolt.

  Jason Maitland, head of the so-called Counter Terror Action Team: the man who’d interfered every step of the way in her attempts to arrest Sebastian, and one of the prime suspects for having helped fake his death.

  What the hell was that bastard doing here?

  CHAPTER SIX

  PIERCE SCRABBLED FOR her phone to take a photo, but before she could find it in her pockets Maitland was gone, heading into the building by a staff door. She didn’t know if he’d recognised her past the glare of the headlights. “Shit,” she huffed, sitting back.

  “What?” Leo asked, squinting into the darkness.

  “Maitland,” she told him. “Counter Terror fucker. How the hell did he get here so fast?” Someone at the facility must have called him in—but it was too soon for him to be responding to the security alert. He had to have been called in response to their arrival.

  �
�What’s this got to do with Counter Terror?” Leo asked.

  “Bugger all,” Pierce said grimly. Maitland’s involvement in her pursuit of Sebastian had been tenuously justified by the security threat that human-form shapeshifting represented, but if the only skinbinder who could create human skins was supposed to be dead... “The only reason for him to be here is if Tate could tell us something about Sebastian that he doesn’t want us to hear.”

  “So he’s our link back to Sebastian,” Leo said.

  She nodded. “If Maitland’s people aren’t the ones who faked his death, you can bet they’re on the trail of whoever did.” And doing their best to scrub that trail out, because to them, having control of Sebastian’s abilities mattered more than getting justice for his crimes.

  Not to Pierce.

  She flicked the headlights off again, plunging the grounds back into shadow. “We’ll see where he goes when he leaves.”

  Her previous efforts to track down Maitland had met with no luck; by the time she’d returned to work after her shoulder injury, the Counter Terror Action Team had been renamed, reorganised, and swallowed by other departments, its members shuffled away like the money card in a game of Three-card Monte. Trying to find anyone who knew anything about a man called Jason Maitland had only led to endless telephone loops, passed from one office to another without ever getting any answers.

  But now here he was in the flesh. Pierce settled in, prepared to wait him out, but before thirty seconds had passed a sharp rap on the window made her jump. One of the gate guards shone a torch in her face, bright enough to blind her. “Is there a problem here?” he asked.

  “Just making a phone call,” Pierce said. She still had the phone in her hand, but she doubted the guard really cared whether she had an excuse anyway.

  “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to move along right now,” he said. “It’s policy to completely clear the access road of civilian traffic when there’s an alert.”

  There were at least three things that set her teeth on edge there, starting with the word ‘civilian’: police weren’t military, and prison officers working for private companies certainly weren’t police. But arguing would take her nowhere useful, and it wouldn’t be wise to go out further on a limb when she had no official authorisation to even be here, following up on cases that were supposed to be closed.

  With the guard watching and waiting, there was little choice except to drive away.

  “We’ll keep digging,” Leo said. “There’s something here to find; Maitland’s arrival proves it.”

  “Yeah.” Unfortunately, it also meant that whatever there was to find was about to be more deeply buried.

  BY THE TIME Pierce got home that night, she was too exhausted to bother to tackle her long-neglected list of household chores, which meant she had to do some hasty ironing in the morning to have a shirt for work. She switched the TV news on for background noise, half-listening until the word ‘vampire’ snagged her attention. Looking up to see a reporter outside a familiar-looking graveyard, she cursed and grabbed for the remote to turn the volume up.

  “—victim has been identified as twenty-six-year-old Matt Harrison of Newark-on-Trent. So far there’s been no official statement from police at the scene, but the date and location match the profile of past murders by the Valentine Vampire, and internet reports claim that officers from the northern Ritual Crime Unit were called to the scene.”

  The camera cut to an interview with one of Harrison’s gym buddies, saying all the usual things that TV channels passed off as news. Pierce growled in disgust. Even if the news stations were still hedging their bets, the cat was clearly well out of the bag—more than likely released by some so-called professional at the crime scene who couldn’t resist sharing the gossip. Now they were going to be rushed into giving a statement before they had their facts straight.

  She was flagged down by Jill at the front desk as soon as she got to work. “Let me guess,” Pierce said. “His nibs wants a word?”

  “Got the impression that he wanted several,” Jill said with an arch look. Pierce smoothed down the front of her dubiously ironed shirt as she headed in to knock on the door of Superintendent Snow’s office.

  “Enter,” he said curtly, and it was still a kick in the gut to hear those imperious tones in place of Howard Palmer’s voice. Pierce couldn’t say she and her old boss had been close, but she’d known the man over a decade, and it didn’t sit well to think he’d more than likely died unnoticed and unmourned, an inconvenient obstacle to those behind the cover-up.

  As for Robert Snow... well, who was to say whether he was an innocent replacement filling the empty seat, or up to his neck in the conspiracy and watching her every move? Without knowing, there was no way Pierce could trust him.

  She got the impression he didn’t like her very much either, but that might just be her department’s appalling statistics.

  “Pierce,” he said, with a face like he’d just bitten into a lemon. He was a handsome silver-haired man with an aquiline nose and military bearing, and seemed to approach these meetings as if he was a headmaster lecturing a wayward schoolgirl. “This ‘Valentine Vampire’ case.” Snow picked the term out with a disdain that matched her own, though she suspected for quite different reasons. “Why exactly is it splashed all over the morning news before I’ve so much as received a report?”

  She shook her head slightly by reflex, though she knew that disavowing responsibility—however accurately—wouldn’t do her any favours with him. “We haven’t completed preliminary inquiries or got any of the forensics back yet, sir,” she said. “At this point it’s still far too soon to confirm any connection to the previous killings.”

  “And yet the media show no such compunction.” He held up a newspaper so she could read the headline: New murder sparks ‘Valentine Vampire’ fears. No doubt the tabloids were being even less constrained. “If the connection to these past murders is so tenuous, then how did it find its way out to the public so quickly?”

  “We still don’t know that, sir, but we’ll be investigating how the details of the crime scene leaked,” Pierce said. Or rather, with their lack of resources, punting it down to Nottinghamshire Police to investigate their own people and no doubt come back with nothing concrete. “All discussion of a possible connection to the Valentine Vampire murders was kept strictly between Dawson, Sergeant Mistry and myself, but it’s possible someone else at the crime scene recognised the MO and spread the word.”

  And no doubt they could thank Christopher Tomb’s bloody book for that as well. That sensationalist piece of tripe had done more to cement the public image of some blood-guzzling supernatural creature stalking the country’s young and healthy than any number of news reports.

  “Well, connection or no connection, I want you to make this case your top priority,” Snow said sternly. “The media are already discussing the past failures of the police in investigating these killings, and I’m not about to have that happen again on my watch. Whether this is a copycat or the original murderer returning, I expect to see this killer found and brought to justice.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  Easy for him to bloody say.

  BY THE TIME Pierce got into the office, Dawson had already buggered off back to Nottinghamshire with Constable Taylor in tow, apparently still under the impression that this was his case. Rather than pursue them, she opted to take her other constable off to York to revisit the scene of the failed raid fourteen years ago. “If we’re lucky, there might still be some neighbours around who can tell us something about Leo’s mystery woman.” If she was the one who’d called in the tipoff about the vampire cult living there, then maybe she knew more about them than she’d said at the time.

  They followed the satnav’s directions into the winding streets of York. “Busy,” Gemma noted, as they joined a tailback of traffic. When they arrived at their destination, a narrow terraced street with red brick houses on the right and greenery on the left, there
seemed to be an excessive number of cars parked up on the grass. Pierce cursed as she spotted a news van down the end.

  “Well, somebody remembers their local history.” Had the details of the house been in that bloody book as well? She really ought to read the thing. A headache bloomed as she saw the odds of them performing a nice, low-profile enquiry shrivel away. With the media on the scene, everybody was no doubt already racking their brains for the most sensationally gory details they could convince themselves they ‘remembered.’

  A small crowd had gathered around the news van, but Pierce could see she and Gemma still stood out in their suits. A few of the gawkers might have been neighbours who’d emerged to see what the fuss was about, but many of the others looked like what Pierce might be dating herself to call ‘goths’: dyed black hair, Victorian fashion and caked white make-up everywhere. The uniform of your average vampire enthusiast.

  And there was worse to come; Pierce held back a grimace as she got her first clear look at their destination, the house at the end of the row. No surprise it still stood empty after all these years, or that graffiti artists had taken to the chipboard that covered the door and windows, but amongst the usual tags there were some vaguely occult squiggles and less customary slogans like we are all meat and blood is life. Clustered around the low front wall were various small offerings, candles, little figurines and the like. Pierce hoped they were memorials to the victims, but suspected that she might be disappointed.

  This place had become a bloody shrine for vampire wannabes.

  Gemma drew her phone to take some photos of the house, unnoticed among a mob of others doing the same. Pierce hung well back from the news team on the corner, not wanting to take the chance that they’d sent someone who would know her as the face of the RCU. She surveyed the gathered crowd instead, looking for someone who seemed both old enough to have been here fourteen years ago and not too entranced by all the drama.