Spirit Animals

by E. E. Richardson

  She drove home slowly with the radio up loud, wary of icy roads and her tiredness. She’d had days this long far too many times in her career—even more of them when she was lower down the ranks—but they still seemed to get harder year on year. This, she knew, was where getting too old for the job was eventually going to bite her: not in the physical demands of the moment, but the need to get straight back on her feet and keep going for hours afterwards.

  Well, at least tonight she finally had her chance to sleep, though she doubted it would come easily. Her eyelids might be heavy as she let herself in through the front door, but her heart was still thrumming in her chest with the speed boost of spent adrenaline and the cup of coffee she’d blagged to keep her warm. She supposed she could try taking something that would knock her out, but she didn’t want to risk being groggy in the morning.

  What the hell time was it anyway? Pierce shouldered through the door into the dining room, squinting at the mantelpiece clock in the light spilling through from the hall as she shrugged off her coat.

  Something struck her as off.

  She couldn’t say immediately what—she just knew that the house, its contents rarely touched outside the small disturbances of her daily routine, was in some subtle way not how she’d left it.

  She was already turning towards the living room when the light inside it clicked on in a sudden, blinding blaze.

  “DCI Pierce. We need to talk,” said Jason Maitland.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PIERCE WAS ALMOST glad of the dulled reactions that meant she didn’t jump as much as she might have. Instead she finished taking off her coat and draped it over the back of a chair before reaching out to turn the dining room light on, reducing the advantage that Maitland had given himself by standing in the lit doorway.

  He looked exactly the same as he had when he’d first marched up and taken over her crime scene five months ago: bland good looks and a generic haircut in a sharp suit and a long black cashmere coat, his shirt buttoned to the collar and tie still tightly knotted despite the hour. He could have vanished into any crowd of thirty-something businessmen on a train platform without a single distinguishing feature to set him apart from the herd. She wondered if that was some kind of hiring requirement.

  Whoever it was that he actually worked for. The so-called Counter Terror Action Team that he’d previously claimed to represent might have a tenuous justification for horning in on her cases, but they sure as hell couldn’t break into her house.

  “Mr Maitland,” she said, when she was sure her voice was as steady as it was going to get. “I don’t recall inviting you in.” She didn’t recall having noticed any tampering with the front door lock, either; she could have missed it in the dark, or he could have broken in round the back, but somehow she doubted he’d gone to any such measures. The spare keys she was using had come from her desk at work: no doubt he could have had his people copy them any time that he pleased. Maybe all the way back in October when she’d been hospitalised after the skinbinder case.

  Her skin crawled at the knowledge that his people had almost certainly been in here, searching every private space for any evidence she might have secreted away from her investigation into Sebastian’s activities. The fact it had undoubtedly been a wholly impersonal search, every detail logged to make sure that things went back exactly where they’d been taken from, somehow made the whole thing worse, not better.

  “I apologise for the intrusion,” Maitland said smoothly, not a trace of any such actual apology in his tone. “I’m sure you can appreciate that it’s necessary to avoid drawing attention to any meeting between the two of us.”

  “I’m not sure I appreciate why it’s necessary for us to meet at all,” Pierce said. She would have liked to showcase her lack of intimidation by going about her routine as if he wasn’t there, but her only actual plan for the night had been going to bed; instead she moved through to the kitchen so he would have to follow and poured herself a glass of water at the sink. She watched Maitland approach her as a dim outline reflected in the darkened windows.

  “I’m afraid I have to ask you yet again to cease your investigations into the late skinbinder Sebastian and his activities,” he said. “You know as well as I do that it’s vital that no one find out he accomplished a magic feat that most believe to be impossible. Continuing to investigate a closed case after the man is dead is only going to draw attention to it.”

  Pierce turned back to face him, raising her eyebrows in challenge. “I was investigating one of his pelts that came into our possession as part of an unrelated case. Are you confirming that there’s a connection?”

  He smiled thinly, as if humouring an embarrassingly bad joke. “Chief Inspector, there’s a limit to how far you can get by being purposefully obtuse. Skinbinding is a difficult art. Those who practise it are rare, and those who are willing to skirt the legal restrictions are even more so. It’s hardly remarkable that a talented pelt-maker would have sold his creations to other criminals. As I understand it, the shapeshifter you seized the pelt from was simply playing the role of hired thug for a group whose activities had nothing to do with skinbinding.”

  “You seem to ‘understand’ an awful lot about confidential police investigations,” Pierce said. “If Sebastian is dead, what’s your justification for treating legitimate investigations into the criminal use of his pelts as a threat to national security?” If that was even the excuse he was still using this week. “And what the hell kind of authority do you have to break into my house?”

  “Sufficient,” Maitland said crisply. He held her gaze for a long moment, revealing the steel behind the polished niceties. “DCI Pierce. I appreciate that you’re a public servant working in what you believe to be the interest of the people, and therefore a certain leeway ought to be extended. But that leeway is rapidly running out. If you persist in behaving as if you believe Sebastian was anything other than a maker of animal pelts who was arrested for his crimes and later died, you risk drawing the attention of parties who must not be allowed to dig into his activities and find the truth.”

  “Like the fact he isn’t dead?” Pierce said pointedly.

  “He’s dead,” Maitland said, meeting her eyes with every appearance of sincerity. She didn’t trust it an inch. “The knowledge of how he achieved his accomplishments died with him, and it’s my job to see that it stays buried. If you continue to act against that goal, you’re forcing me to reclassify your efforts from misguided to actively hostile to security.”

  “Whose security?” she countered. “The people that Sebastian and his supporters abducted and murdered to make those skins? The family members who’ll never get closure on how or why their loved ones died and whether the killer is still out there somewhere? The innocents who were murdered to keep your precious secret buried?”

  Not all of them by Sebastian and the criminal organisation that backed him, either; the dog shifters like the one she’d seen today were Maitland’s people, she was sure, and she’d already witnessed one murder a woman for the crime of telling Pierce too much about Sebastian’s past. She couldn’t say for sure if it was Maitland’s people who’d disposed of Superintendent Palmer, but neither side of whatever secretive magical turf war was going on showed much in the way of compunction. The enemy of her enemy was definitely not her friend.

  All she knew for sure was that she trusted Maitland about as far as she could throw him.

  “Obviously the loss of any lives is an unfortunate tragedy,” he said, the words polished and perfunctory. “But closure for the existing victims has to be weighed against the probability of causing greater harm by revealing the truth. I’m working to ensure that there will be no further deaths—it’s very much in your best interest to cooperate.”

  “Or what?” Pierce said, lacing her fingers around the water glass in her hands. “I conveniently disappear? Not to toot my own horn, but I head up a major police department. There would be some pretty tough questions to face if I went mi
ssing.” The RCU might be small, but that only meant she had personal ties to everyone involved. She was the longest-serving team leader across the country’s three branches, and her disappearance from the scene would draw attention no matter what the cause. “Unless, of course,” she added, locking eyes with him, “you happen to have the means to replace me with a dead ringer.”

  To the best of her knowledge, Sebastian was the only skinbinder out there with the skill to craft shapeshifting pelts from human skin. It was a skill the world’s finest had been trying to master for centuries, with no reliable proof of success. Maitland’s determination to conceal an achievement no one else could copy didn’t make sense—unless Sebastian was alive.

  But even though he must know he wasn’t fooling her, Maitland still stuck to the official line. “I’d strongly advise you to set these melodramatic conspiracy theories aside,” he said. “You have nothing to support your claims, only wild speculation based on inadmissible tests. A word in the wrong ear, and you could easily end up losing your career over this kind of unauthorised investigation.”

  “Then that’ll give me some useful information about which ears you’re whispering into,” Pierce said, holding his gaze. The threat was a fairly empty one when she figured she was on borrowed time anyway; if she got fired, she’d still have all her contacts, along with considerably more free time and a lot less to lose.

  Maitland presumably agreed she was less trouble where she was, since he just sighed, a small flicker of humanity in his perfectly coiffed façade. “I’m quite familiar with your stubbornness by now, chief inspector,” he said. “Just as I’m well aware that you’re far from stupid. So let’s be plain. Pursuing this will cause nothing but trouble for you and those you involve in your paranoid fantasies. Don’t.”

  And there was the true threat: a matter-of-fact reminder that he no doubt knew the names and detailed backgrounds of everyone that she’d roped in to help her. Pierce stared back at him coldly, her fingers pressed white against the glass in her hands.

  Maitland gave a thin smile, a small fraction away from a sneer. “I’ll see myself out,” he said.

  She didn’t give him the satisfaction of pursuing him out to the hall to make sure that he really went. It wouldn’t be Maitland’s style to hang around for a cheap scare.

  Instead she headed into the bathroom, pretending to herself that locking the door behind her was just habit.

  But as she regarded her haggard reflection in the bathroom mirror, she had to privately admit that she was rattled. Not by whatever retribution Maitland might have planned, but by the utterly casual invasion of her private space. She should have been getting ready for bed, but she was reluctant to change, unable to shake the feeling that someone might walk in.

  It pissed her off. Pierce marched through the house turning lights on, justifying it to herself as a check to see what Maitland might have been up to while she wasn’t home, though she doubted she would find anything.

  What the hell had he been doing? How long had he been lying in wait for her to return? Walking into the living room where he’d been lurking, Pierce saw nothing that had been obviously moved, but she thought she could smell a whiff of his cologne in the air.

  Think like the suspect.

  Maybe he’d had someone with eyes on her all night, aware of exactly where she’d been and when she headed home, but he couldn’t have been certain of the timing, so he would have been here for a while, waiting; nothing messed up your aura of omnipotence quite like being caught on the doorstep when your target arrived home.

  He always looked as neatly turned-out as a Ken doll, but still, it was well after midnight and he’d probably worked a full day... why would he stay on his feet when he didn’t know how long he’d have to wait? He’d want to keep an eye on the window for the light of her car, so... the second armchair, the one that she never used herself because it got glare from the window and wasn’t in the right place for watching the TV.

  Pierce smiled in triumph. Where a man sat, he left trace evidence behind. She went to the needlework kit that had been gathering dust in the corner since her last attempt to pretend that she had time for hobbies, and retrieved the magnifying light and a pair of tweezers. She scrutinised the seat cushions until she spotted a clinging strand that was far too dark to be from her own silvering hair. Maybe one of Maitland’s hairs, a fibre from his suit or coat, even someone else’s hair that he’d tracked in with him. Whatever the source, it was a trace, a link back to wherever Maitland might have been before he’d showed up here.

  She knew she couldn’t run it through regular forensics: even if she could find someone to do it off-books as a favour, the evidence was sure to just go walkabouts again, and she doubted that Maitland was there to find in any sort of database in any case.

  But science wasn’t the only thing she had at her disposal. Sympathetic magic didn’t need lab tests and database comparisons to make a link—a piece of the whole was the link.

  So if she had one small fibre transferred from his clothes... then she had Jason Maitland.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PIERCE HADN’T BEEN convinced that she would get a wink of sleep, but she barely had the chance to lay down flat before exhaustion smothered her into unconsciousness. Unfortunately, it was only a wink that she managed to get. Her first bleary thought as the alarm trilled through her dreams was that it must be the phone or the fire alarm, because there was no way she’d slept long enough for it to be morning already.

  She huddled mutinously under the covers for several minutes before she remembered that she’d left Dawson in charge of a crime scene and two constables on a stakeout, and Deepan was probably still going to be off work. She shoved herself out of bed to stagger through the morning routine on autopilot, and hoped that nobody was going to expect her to be human, never mind alert and with it, before well into the afternoon.

  But it didn’t look like the fates were going to be that kind. She switched on the TV news to keep herself awake, the Valentine Vampire story quickly coming up in the rotation. Last night’s escapades were already the new headline.

  “Author and vampire researcher Christopher Tomb has related over social media the harrowing ordeal that he faced last night at the hands of the Valentine Vampire killer,” the anchor said. “Tomb was assisting the police Ritual Crime Unit with their enquiries when they were set upon by an attacker that he described as inhumanly strong and fast, with dead white skin, claws, and a hypnotic gaze. Police are refusing to comment on the nature of Tomb’s involvement with the investigation, but it’s believed to be connected to a suspicious death that occurred in a park on the outskirts of Leeds last night. Rachel Marston is at the scene. Rachel?”

  Pierce grimaced at the sight of the reporter positioned in front of a row of police vehicles. Crime scene tape had been strung around the trees, and figures in forensic overalls were still working in the background, searching for evidence that might have gone overlooked in the darkness. At least in a case as high-profile as this one they could count on the regional forces pulling out all the stops to assist, regardless of how much Dawson might have been antagonising them.

  There was no obvious sign of him amid all the anonymous figures in coveralls, thankfully: he had even less patience than her for the careful hedging of words required to handle the media, and a bad tendency to make bold promises they couldn’t guarantee they’d keep. But today, either he or the local DI was running a tight ship, and the on-site reporter mostly seemed to be milking the established facts and hanging around in hopes of seeing something interesting.

  Pierce supposed her own plans for the morning were really much the same: she wanted to take a fresh look at the crime scene herself now it was daylight, and frankly it didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world to delay heading into the station for a bit. The superintendent was bound to be on the warpath, and she wouldn’t be surprised if there were reporters there too.

  Dammit, who’d let Tomb run straight off to blab h
is story all over the internet? Pierce would have cautioned him herself, but she hadn’t wanted to there to be any suggestion of her influencing his statement—which unfortunately left him free to spout whatever bollocks he pleased about the supposed vampire. She’d barely been able to see a bloody thing when she was grappling with the killer, so she didn’t see how Tomb could possibly have made out any more detail. The trouble was, he might not even be telling intentional porkies: panic and preconception could sway eyewitnesses into ‘seeing’ all sorts of things that weren’t really there.

  Pierce rubbed her arm as she stopped at a set of traffic lights. She’d have an ugly bruise where she’d been bitten, but there certainly hadn’t been any skin-piercing fangs on offer. No, despite the enhanced strength she was sure it was a human being they were looking for—and human beings, no matter how clever or dangerous, made mistakes.

  As she parked outside the same pub where she’d stopped last night, Pierce patted the inside pocket that held the fibre she’d taken from Maitland’s chair. That little piece of evidence was staying on her person until she got the chance to deal with it.

  But first, the present investigation.

  She’d hoped that strolling up on foot wearing a business suit would help her sidle past the press unnoticed, but with the number of RCU cases that had made headlines—mostly bad ones—in the last year, she’d become a more recognisable face than she’d prefer. As soon as the first reporter spotted her, the others came scuttling over, scenting a possible new angle to wring more headlines from.

  “DCI Pierce!” said the lucky lad in the lead, as a camera was thrust in her face. “Is the RCU treating this murder as connected to the Valentine Vampire killings?”

  Sadly, ‘Why don’t you all sod off and let us find out?’ was never considered an acceptable answer. Pierce composed her best neutral face, trying to look neither too harassed nor inappropriately cheerful. “I’m sorry, but I can’t make any comment on the progress of an ongoing investigation,” she said, raising a hand but careful not to look like she was trying to block the cameras. “Obviously, we will consider all the angles—at this stage, we haven’t ruled anything out.”