Spirit Animals

by E. E. Richardson

  “Oh, the place is always like this, I’m afraid,” he said with a rueful grin. He bumped his way backwards out of the kitchen door with the papers held against his chest. “I’ll just go and get Kate for you now.”

  Pierce breathed out as the door bumped closed behind him. Houses full of kids had never been her scene; one of many reasons she didn’t visit her sister more than she could help it. She caught Leo massaging his bad leg under the table as the two of them sat in awkward silence; she wanted to ask if it was all right after their visit to the prison, but didn’t think he’d appreciate her drawing attention to it.

  Before the wait could stretch too long, the kitchen door opened again to admit a plump woman with crimped blonde hair and a chunky orange jumper. “Oh, hi!” she said brightly. “You must be Rose’s husband—it’s Leo, right?—and this is...?” She looked at Pierce expectantly.

  “Claire,” Pierce supplied, not wanting to give her police affiliation away if her fame didn’t precede her. She’d been interviewed on the news more than a few times, but she doubted most people paid attention to the face, only the story.

  “Claire,” the woman repeated with a friendly nod, and clasped her hands together. “Well, I’m Kate Winston, and this, if you squint very hard and apply a bit of imagination, is my office, so what can I do for you?” She pulled out a chair to join them at the table. “I understand you’ve got somebody that needs tracking down?”

  “Yes.” Pierce decided they were better off giving minimal details. She retrieved the envelope with the hair that she’d collected. “I think this is one of his hairs, though it might be from his clothes.”

  Kate raised her eyebrows, but asked no awkward questions. “Well, unless your friend’s a nudist, let’s assume his clothes are somewhere near where he is, eh?” she said, grinning. “All right—hair’s always a good place to start. Is he a blood relative of either of yours?” They both shook their heads. “Pity, that would have made it easier.” She clapped her hands together with a smile. “But nonetheless, we shall make do. Back in a jiffy.”

  She nipped into the next room, and returned carrying what looked like a fabric-covered needlework box; she opened it up to reveal a collection of miscellaneous odds and sods that Pierce wasn’t sure she’d have taken for a magic kit without having been told.

  Kate rooted around in the bottom of the box for a while before coming up with an acorn-shaped wooden pendulum on a length of knotted string, which she polished on the bottom of her jumper for a moment. “This was my grandmother’s,” she said, unscrewing the top to reveal a small chamber inside. “She taught me the art of pendulum divining, just as she learned it from her mother before her. Who apparently learned it from a slightly dodgy bloke named Bob she beat at cards, but still, it’s more or less a family tradition.” She grinned briefly, and held out a hand. “If I could have the focus?”

  Pierce handed over the envelope with the hair somewhat reluctantly, wondering if this had been a big mistake. Kate used a pair of tweezers from her ritual kit to transfer the hair to the pendulum chamber and then screwed it shut. She let a foot or so of string play out and held the pendulum suspended over the table for a moment, frowning thoughtfully. “Hmm, yes, that feels like it’s got enough magical resonance... We should be able to get a good reading from that.”

  Pierce tried not to let her scepticism show as Kate delved into the box again and pulled out first a sheet of cloth embroidered with sigils that she laid out like a tablecloth, and then an elastic-banded deck of what appeared to be children’s alphabet flashcards, complete with brightly coloured pictures of things like apples, balls and cakes.

  Either she wasn’t very successful at containing her reaction, or Kate anticipated it: “Trust me,” she said, as she shuffled the deck of letter cards in her hands. “These things are just as good for divination as any set of ancient rune stones they try to sell you for six hundred quid on eBay.” She dealt them all out face down on the tabletop as if planning to play a memory matching game, set out a few crystals and other vaguely occultish knick-knacks at points around the arrangement, then took up the pendulum again. “All right. Do we have a name for this gentleman we’re looking for?”

  Pierce hesitated, reluctant to give too much away, although nothing about this display was doing much to convince her this woman was in the pay of a dangerous conspiracy. She glanced over at Leo, but he was obviously prepared to follow her lead.

  Oh, well: better to make a bad move attempting to achieve something than fail through timidity. “Maitland,” she said. “Jason Maitland. Or at least, that’s the name he gave. I’m not sure if it’s his real one.”

  Fortunately, Kate didn’t question what kind of business they might be mixed up in that involved possible false names; maybe she was used to it, if her jobs often involved tracking down wayward spouses. “Doesn’t matter if it is,” she said. “What does real even mean, when we talk about names? A thing is what we call it. If he’s gone by that name, if people know him by it, then he’s linked to it. Now, if he doesn’t use it very much, it’ll be a less powerful link than a name he goes by every day... but every little helps.”

  She began to twirl the pendulum in slow circles without further ceremony. “Right. Maitland, Jason Maitland...” she murmured to herself. “Where might you be?” She adopted a sing-song tone. “Pendulum, swing your line, give us now some form of sign, seek the truth, circle round, tell us where what’s lost is found...”

  Playground doggerel, to Pierce’s cynical ears, but she kept her mouth shut as Kate continued to chant in a low murmur, eyelids falling closed. She moved the pendulum in slow, swaying circuits over the cards, passing over each in turn—until, above one of them, the pendulum gave a sharp jerk upwards as if the string had been abruptly yanked. Despite herself, Pierce leaned forward a little as Kate turned the card over to reveal a letter H, accompanied by a cheery little illustration of a hippo.

  More passes, another jump of the pendulum and upturned card: A for apple. R for rainbow... Kate picked out five more cards by the same method before she made a final circuit with no visible twitch from the pendulum and set it aside with a sigh of released tension.

  “Hardison.” Leo tried the sequence out aloud. Too neat and logical a collection of letters to be mere random chance, but it could still be done with a stacked deck or subtly marked cards: not even necessarily malicious or deliberate fraud, but a subconscious twitch towards a letter that ‘felt’ like it ought to go next. Like eyewitness testimony, simple divinations all too often fell prey to the human mind’s tendency to prefer a good narrative to provable facts.

  “Does that mean anything to you?” Kate asked the pair of them expectantly, but didn’t look terribly troubled when they both shook their heads. “Well, never mind, that’s only the first stage of the divination. It might be the name of the house owner, of a business, perhaps from some kind of sign or billboard nearby...” This was starting to sound like the deliberate vagueness of cold-reading to Pierce’s mind. “Now we find the distance.”

  The second divination involved tossing a number of carved wooden sticks and consulting a little book to translate the pattern, giving a distance of forty-eight miles, a result Pierce found even more dubious than the first. The finale that followed turned out to involve setting up a ring of candles. Specifically, tiny pink-and-white-striped birthday candles.

  “Trust me, these are great for doing rituals,” Kate confided. “They don’t go out by themselves, and they don’t set off the smoke alarm.”

  Apparently the RCU’s research specialists were missing a few tricks.

  Kate laid a compass in the centre of the circle and set a collection of semi-precious stones around it in a star-shaped pattern mimicking the compass rose. She began to move the pendulum slowly from point to point, murmuring more simple rhymes. “North to east to south to west, seek the object of our quest; west to south to east to north, show us which way to go forth...” She spun the pendulum through an ever-quickening sequen
ce until one of the candles around the ring abruptly puffed out, then another, then a third...

  When only one lit candle was still left standing, Kate grinned and raised an arm to point in its direction. “All righty, then. If my readings don’t deceive me, your man is thataway.” She pushed the seat back and stood up. “Let me just grab you a map.”

  Fifteen minutes later and they were back out on the road with a vaguely pinpointed region of the map and the name Hardison to guide them. They drove in relative silence, Pierce uncertain whether her professional opinion of that display—she’d pin it down as somewhere around ‘well-meaning but dubiously useful’—was even worth offering. It was a long shot, but they weren’t wasting any police resources checking it out, and it seemed pointlessly harsh to puncture Leo’s renewed sense of purpose with a reality check on facts he had to be aware of already.

  Full dark had settled in by now, and once they left the A roads for narrow country lanes it became a rare event to pass another car. The only illumination aside from their own headlights came from the windows of the odd tiny village or isolated farmhouse.

  Pierce was all too conscious of the futility of their search. They weren’t here with the full might of the police behind them, going door to door to ask questions of the neighbours with a squad of uniforms and authority on their side. There were two of them, one with a bad knee and the other running on too little sleep, following a lead too vague to give them any hope of spotting Maitland even if they parked outside his home address. What were they going to do, hope he looked out of a window at the right moment?

  But conceding defeat had never come easily to her, so she continued to drive almost aimlessly, turning down each awkward little country lane and hoping something other than suicidal wildlife might jump out at them.

  It was Leo who finally spotted something, stiffening as Pierce slowed for what she thought was a turning but then realised was just a private road. “That looked like a security fence,” he said. She started to slow down again, but he shook his head. “No, keep going. You can park behind those trees over there—if this is the place, we’re better off cutting across the fields on foot than driving right up to the gates.”

  Once Pierce shut the headlights off, she could hardly see a thing; what little moonlight was on offer scarcely filtered through the cloud cover and trees. “What did you see?” she asked Leo.

  “Not sure, but it looked pretty high-security,” he said. “Military, maybe, or a prison.”

  “If they’ve built one around here, nobody sent me the memo.” Of course, it could just be some kind of business site, but the isolation and security pointed to something potentially interesting. Pierce still had her warrant card in her pocket; if they were wildly off-base and got stopped by some form of site security, it wouldn’t strictly be a lie to say they were looking for suspicious persons—though it could definitely get sticky if anybody followed it up far enough to speak with her superiors.

  All in all, probably better to avoid getting caught.

  They rounded the stand of trees and clambered over the low wall that bounded the fields. She heard Leo give a faint grunt as he dropped down on the other side. “You okay?” she asked. She could just about make out the motion of his nod.

  In spite of his bad leg, Leo moved into the lead, ingrained habit from his days in Firearms. As her night vision adjusted to the limited moonlight, Pierce could make out enough to tell that he was limping quite badly, but she kept her mouth shut.

  They picked their way across the damp grass, heading back towards the private access road that they’d passed by. Pierce could see a faint glow in the distance ahead: security lights around the top of a high metal fence. Leo was right; the setup resembled the enhanced offenders institution that they’d visited a few days ago.

  In more than one way. As they drew a little closer—Leo moving at a low crouch now despite the fact it clearly pained him to do so, and Pierce doing her best to mimic him—she could see that there were dogs roaming the inside of the fence. Big dogs: the kind that could very easily be shapeshifters.

  Big dogs that could probably sniff out wandering strangers if they drew too near. Leo nudged her shoulder, veering sideways across the field towards the road instead of getting any closer to the building. He nodded at a small, discreet sign up by the gates, and she squinted at it, struggling to make out the block letters in the dark.

  HARDISON GROUP. No more explanation of the business or its purpose than that, a conveniently meaningless name that could hide all manner of sins.

  But a name that confirmed this was the place. They’d found Maitland’s current base of operations.

  Problem was, with that fence and the shifters on patrol, they didn’t have a hope in hell of finding a way inside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THEY MADE IT back to their car apparently unseen, and drove on before they could push their luck too far.

  “If that’s where they’re keeping Sebastian, we’re going to have a job getting inside to prove it,” Pierce said. It would take a full-scale police raid, and even if she could somehow justify it to her superiors, Maitland’s people would surely know about it well before it happened. Hell, for all she knew her superintendent was one of them.

  “We’ll find a way in,” Leo said. It felt more like a declaration than a prediction, but she didn’t challenge him. Lord knew one of them should probably keep some optimism.

  As for her... she was just tired. She’d made it home, shovelled her way mechanically through a microwave dinner, and was seriously contemplating taking an early night when her phone rang. She was tempted to ignore it, but when she checked the ID it was Phil Havers calling her back. She lifted it to her ear with a sigh.

  “Phil!” She did her best to keep her exhaustion from her voice. “Anything on those animal spirit charms?”

  “Nothing in my notes, I’m afraid, but I made a few calls to my old contacts up in your neck of the woods, and I’ve found someone who thinks he might have had your sellers sniffing around. Adrian Shore: he’s an artefact dealer in Huddersfield, fairly well-known in the biz—you’ve probably heard of him, though he keeps his nose too clean to get much police attention.”

  “Rings a vague bell,” Pierce agreed. Odds were Phil had met the man back when he still worked for her, but she couldn’t dredge up any details this many years later.

  “Well, he had some people make him an offer the other day he thought was suspect—he said they seemed pretty eager to offload a set of antique charms, then got shirty and started talking about having other buyers waiting when he wanted additional expert verification. He’s a cautious bugger, our Adrian, though, so he didn’t bite.”

  “Sensible of him,” Pierce said. “But we might need him to take a nibble on it after all. We’ve made one arrest, but so far the bloke’s not talking, and we know there are at least two or three other gang members still out there. If we can get them to bring the illegal charms to an agreed meeting point, then we might be able to nab them all in one go.” She wandered through the house in search of a notepad and pen. “Right. Got a contact number for Shore?”

  Phil gave her the relevant info, and she updated him on the progress of the case so far. “Sounds like you’re close to sewing it up,” he said. “How goes the vampire hunt? Saw your DI on TV earlier—he sounded pretty confident.”

  “Oh, bloody hell, again?” Pierce winced. “The man needs a muzzle. No, it’s going... well, let’s just say it’s going.” She felt like she was chasing one of those lizards that just shed its tail and scampered off when you thought you’d finally caught it. And with the apparent acceleration of the time scale, they had even less time to get their acts together before the cult committed their third kill and went to ground for seven years again.

  Or for fourteen. Pierce pressed her lips together. That missing interval still didn’t sit right with her. Oh, Christopher Tomb could talk all the guff he wanted about vampire hibernation phases, but she was certain they were looki
ng for human beings performing a ritual—and rituals generally required slavish adherence to their patterns to build power. She sat back in her armchair, resting her feet on the footstool.

  “Hey, Phil, when was it you transferred down to Oxford? About the end of 2007, wasn’t it?”

  “Thereabouts,” he said. “Yes, it must have been, because remember they were shortstaffed after that business with the goat demon at Hallowe’en.”

  “Yeah.” Pierce cringed a little, guiltily glad that one hadn’t happened on her patch. “God. Poor old Henry.”

  “Hell of a way to go,” Phil agreed with a rueful sigh. “Sammy Sykes was never the same, either—he did stay on for a few months to oversee the transition, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Not that I blame him.”

  “No.” For a few moments they were both silent, aware of the weight of all the colleagues they’d lost over the years to injury, burnout or worse. The longer you spent in this game, the more the numbers mounted.

  Then Phil cleared his throat and audibly pulled himself back together. “Anyway, um, why’d you ask?” he said.

  “Well, I was just thinking, it must have been about the time the last set of Valentine Vampire killings was due, the one that never materialised.” She distinctly remembered arguing with Superintendent Palmer over whether they could really spare personnel to relieve Oxford with more murders on the horizon, and why London branch couldn’t do their bloody bit for once. “Since our killer cult is back in action, I have to wonder if they ever really went to ground at all. Maybe there were murders back in 2008, and we just failed to connect them to the pattern.”

  If the cult were willing to change up their methods now to keep the heat off, then maybe they’d done it before. Leaving the bodies staged in graveyards was just grandstanding, not a necessary part of the bloodletting ritual: perhaps having been spotted dumping one of the bodies had encouraged them to play safe for a while.