Spirit Animals

by E. E. Richardson

  Or maybe Pierce was just reading too much into tiny movements that she wouldn’t even have noticed without the effects of the spirit charm. She forced herself to focus. “You said you had some information for us?” she said, still wary of talking too directly, with the woman at the counter listening in.

  Violet either noticed or she’d had the same thought. “Can I get that coffee now?” she asked, and the woman left the counter with what seemed a rather sullen lack of response, heading through into the kitchen behind to set some whistling, burbling coffee machine noises in motion. Pierce grimaced, the headache she’d only just shaken off digging its claws in again.

  But at least the noise of the machine gave them a moderate degree of privacy. If Violet truly had something too important for public consumption to share, then they’d have to talk fast to persuade her to come into the station.

  Pierce tried to concentrate on the woman before her, and not the noises from the other room. “You said in your phone call that you could tell us about the vampire cult,” she pressed.

  Violet nodded, fiddling with the bat necklace again and looking down at the plastic-covered café table. “I... was very young when they found me,” she said in a low voice. “They made promises: eternal life, strength and speed beyond your wildest dreams, and freedom—freedom to be whatever, do whatever you wanted. They made it sound like something very beautiful.” Her pale eyes gazed into the distance.

  “Till it got ugly,” Dawson said bluntly.

  She gave him a sidelong look that seemed almost annoyed, as if she didn’t appreciate having her monologue hurried along. “They... made me do things I’m not proud of,” she said finally, returning her gaze to the tabletop. “I wanted to get away, but I didn’t know how. Until the police came, and the vampire disciples fled and left everything behind. Left me behind. I thought it was over and I was safe. Until I saw on the news that they’d killed someone else...”

  She was painting them a picture, but one frustratingly lacking in detail, and Pierce couldn’t help but worry that the woman making her coffee was going to come back in and cause her to clam up before they’d even got anywhere.

  Dawson had even less patience for faffing about than she did; Pierce let him take the lead so she could step in to play good cop if needed. “These disciples. You got names? Descriptions? Addresses?” he pressed.

  “The disciples took new names when they were reborn in service,” Violet said. Typical cult bollocks, and Pierce tuned her out for a moment as a stray noise from the kitchen caught her ear over the cappuccino machine. No, not the kitchen: a wooden creak that could have come from the stairs. Was there someone else in the building after all?

  Or it could have been the roof or the gutter shifting. Dawson didn’t seemed to have heard a thing: probably couldn’t, with the coffee machine burbling away. Or maybe there was just nothing to hear. Pierce tried to drag her attention back to the here and now.

  “What about the ringleader, this so-called vampire?” Dawson demanded. “What name did he go by? Could you describe him to a sketch artist? Give us something to work with here. You said you had information that could help us.”

  Violet gave a private smile, looking at the tabletop. “I could give you a description, but it wouldn’t help you find him,” she said, shaking her head. “He has the power to mesmerise his victims—he can look however it suits him to look.”

  “Yeah?” said Dawson, unimpressed. “Can he mesmerise cameras?”

  Before Pierce could decide whether to rein his sharp tone in or back it up, there was another sound from the floor above, this time the distinct click of an opening door. She snapped her head back as if her charmed sight would somehow allow her to stare right through the ceiling. “Who’s upstairs?” she demanded.

  Dawson hadn’t reacted to the noise, but he followed her lead, pushing up from his chair. “Who else is here?” he asked Violet sharply.

  “Just Melissa,” she said, her face creasing with a fractional frown of confusion. “Unless her husband is home...?”

  Dawson strode over to the kitchen door and shoved it open. “She’s not in here,” he said.

  “Perhaps she needed something from upstairs,” Violet said. She still seemed oddly, almost serenely calm, considering the way she’d bolted the last two times Pierce had seen her. Pierce felt her nerves kick up a notch.

  “Check it out,” she told Dawson. He shot her a sceptical look, probably thinking she was paranoid, or trying to get him out of the way, but he didn’t argue, heading through the kitchen to the stairs. The silence left in his wake was oppressive, Pierce disregarding Violet for a moment to listen intently. Something didn’t feel right here... Was that another sound, hidden under the noise of Dawson climbing the stairs? She reached for her radio, just in case.

  “I’m sure it’s just Melissa,” Violet repeated, distracting Pierce from her efforts to listen. Something about that name nagged at her: Melissa, Melissa... The name of the café had been Melanie’s, not Melissa’s.

  Which meant nothing, of course. Shops changed hands, names acquired reputations worth hanging on to, Melissa wasn’t necessarily even the owner...

  But something smelled off. Literally off: above and beyond the smell of coffee emanating from the kitchen, the rancid odour underneath seeped through. A mix of butcher’s shop with a slight hint of decay; she’d thought it was her enhanced senses overreacting to sandwich meat and food waste from the bins, but the longer she sat here...

  A definite scuffling thump from the floor above, and Pierce was on her feet without a thought, lifting the radio towards her mouth. “All units to Melanie’s Café on—”

  Motion at the corner of her eye. With the enhanced reflexes from the charm, Pierce was moving even before it had fully registered.

  Which was the only reason her throat wasn’t slashed open as Violet leapt across the table, knife in hand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE KNIFE FLASHED past her cheek, close enough to shave if she’d had the whiskers to lose. A part of Pierce’s brain inanely registered that it was probably the same blade that had killed Jonathan.

  He might have been questioning his association with the cult, but it was clear the woman Pierce was facing now had done no such thing. She’d lured them right into a trap.

  There was a violent crash from above, and a masculine grunt of pain: Dawson, either hurt or getting the better of his attacker. Pierce didn’t have the time to work out which: Violet was coming at her with supernatural speed. Even with the lingering magical boost from the cat spirit charm, Pierce could barely stay ahead of the slashing blade.

  She ducked a swipe at her face, but it was a feint. The backhand blow that followed it just clipped her shoulder, but still sent her staggering across the room to crash into a table. As Violet leapt after her, Pierce tried to scramble out of the way, legs tangling with a chair. She shoved it into Violet’s path, but she just leapt up onto the seat, grabbing a handful of Pierce’s coat to yank her back with steely strength.

  She was too fast, too strong... and this struggle was all too familiar: not just the unnatural strength, but the skinny frame that produced it. The attacker from the park. Pierce cursed as she realised that despite everything, she’d let unreliable eyewitnesses lead her astray. She’d known enough to disdain Tomb’s description, but still echoed his unthinking assumption they were looking for a man.

  This woman had been right there at the scene of Jonathan’s murder, she’d been at the base in York when it blew up; Alan Waite had even seen her when he’d witnessed the body dump. She was no mere disciple of the killer: she had to be the Valentine Vampire herself.

  But Pierce wasn’t going to get the chance to share that revelation with anyone if she didn’t get out of here alive. She twisted to wrench her coat free from Violet’s grip, but the move left her off-balance as she jerked back to avoid a lightning knife strike, and she went crashing to the floor. The last gasps of the spirit charm’s enchantment gave her the flexibi
lity to kick out at the legs of Violet’s chair and knock it over, but the effects were fading fast. Her field of view was narrowing, shades of red and green flowing back into the world as the shadows deepened.

  Even as she tried to push herself up from the floor, her body seemed to grow massively heavier, joints locking up as if the stiffening of years had set back in all at once. Violet leapt sideways from the falling chair to land on her feet, and it was all Pierce could do to scramble to her knees in time to meet her. Another backhand slap sent her reeling across the shop.

  She blundered into the door and grabbed for the handle, but Violet was back on her in a heartbeat, narrowly missing her with a swing that ripped through the paper menu on the door behind her head. Pierce yanked the door open and tried to duck around it, but she was only halfway out when Violet grabbed her arm to haul her back in. The move wrenched on her bad shoulder and she cursed, shoving the door at Violet to try to force her back.

  The blow from the door’s metal frame didn’t seem to faze her, but then a crash from the floor above distracted them both. The pained-sounding curse that followed it could have been Dawson’s, but with her hearing back to normal Pierce couldn’t quite be sure.

  She was in no position to run to his rescue either way. Pierce took advantage of the distraction to rip her arm free and pull it back through the door, slamming it shut after her. The sound of sirens wailed loud in her ears, and she risked a frantic glance over her shoulder to see the backup car just screeching up.

  But she couldn’t spare much thought for the pair of wide-eyed coppers scrambling out to join her. She was on the wrong side of the door to keep it closed by leaning on it, and she couldn’t hope to win a tug of war contest—but as Pierce looked back through the glass, Violet only smiled coldly and reached up to shoot the bolt across.

  “Shit!” Pierce immediately reversed course, trying to shove the door open, but it was too late. Violet stepped back from the glass, disappearing back into the building towards the stairs.

  And Dawson was still trapped inside.

  Pierce stepped away from the door as her backup, Sergeant Horton, reached her side. “Need to get through that door right now, sergeant,” she said urgently, bracing her hands on her thighs as she tried to catch her breath. “My DI’s still in there with our ritual killer and at least one of her cultists.” She looked up at the upper windows of the building, but couldn’t see a bloody thing from here.

  “Shit,” said Horton, a ruddy-faced man of few words. “Right, put that window in,” he ordered the constable beside him. He turned back to her as the PC broke out his baton. “There’ll be another car here in two minutes.”

  “I don’t think he’s got that long,” she said, grimly shaking her head. “Suspect’s armed with a knife, and has enhanced speed and strength.” Dawson was a big lad, still carrying plenty of muscle along with the middle-aged spread; but while he might hold his own against a couple of cultists if they weren’t magically enhanced, there was no way he could face off against Violet alone.

  She wasn’t sure that she and two uniform coppers would exactly do much to swing the balance, but all the same, they had no choice—no time to wait for more backup.

  Pierce shielded her face with a flinch as the blond constable—Nicholls, that was his name; probably best to remember it if they were going back in there together—smashed his way through the toughened glass of the door with his baton. He knocked the window in and groped around for the bolt. “Got it, sarge,” he said after a moment, and slid it back across. He pushed the door open, baton held at the ready as he scanned the corners of the shop’s front room. “No one down here, looks like.”

  He and Horton led the way through past the cramped kitchen and to the narrow staircase at the back. “Police!” Horton yelled as they thundered up to the flat above and slammed through the door. Pierce gagged immediately at the stink of death: a woman’s blood-soaked body, poorly wrapped in a sheet, had been carelessly dumped on the sofa. The shop’s unfortunate real owner, probably.

  With her eyes drawn to the corpse, it took her a second more to spot the woman Melissa crouched behind the sofa. Pierce opened her mouth to shout a warning to the others, then realised she was chained to the pipes by Dawson’s silver cuffs. “Not our main target—go, go, go!” she ordered the men with her.

  “Stay down!” Horton barked at the woman as they passed. She snapped her teeth like an animal, spitting curses at them.

  As they reached the door at the far side of the room, it flew open, and a man charged out towards them with a snarl. Pierce glimpsed a bald head and deep-set eyes before the man threw himself at Horton, screaming and scratching and trying to headbutt and bite him. Horton staggered backwards and PC Nicholls dived into the fray, the two of them bearing the man to the ground.

  Pierce shoved her way past the struggle and into the room beyond. Violet had Dawson cornered, slumped on the floor behind the bed; he still had his arms raised weakly in self-defence, but she could see that his shirt-sleeves were stained with blood.

  “Drop the knife!” Pierce barked as Violet spun away from Dawson to face her. In answer, the killer hurled the knife at her: a tumbling, unaimed throw with little chance of striking home, but Pierce ducked away from the flashing blade by instinct. Violet turned towards the bedroom’s end window and slammed her palms against it, smashing the frame right out of the brickwork to crash down onto the street below. With an easy leap she swung herself out through the gap, reaching up for the gutter to pull herself onto the roof.

  “Shit!” Pierce rounded the bed, but by the time she got to the window Violet was already out and away. “Suspect’s escaping over the roof!” she shouted over her shoulder. But from the crashing and cursing behind her, the others still had their hands full trying to restrain the bald cultist. The wail of distant sirens told her more backup was coming, but there was no way it would get here in time.

  “Go after her,” Dawson gasped behind her.

  “Not out that bloody window, I’m not,” Pierce said, crouching over him. Even if she didn’t wedge herself in the gap, Winnie-the-Pooh-style, she doubted she could trust the plastic guttering and old, ill-anchored tiles to hold her weight for long enough to scramble up on top. She could run back down the stairs to try to give chase at street level, but there was no way she’d keep up.

  And she had a higher priority right now. An alarming amount of blood was already seeping through Dawson’s thin shirt, and there was a wheeze she didn’t like to his breathing. Christ, why hadn’t she insisted they wear stab vests?

  She grabbed her radio. “We need an ambulance to the scene at Melanie’s!” she shouted into it. “Officer injured!”

  Violet had escaped them yet again—Pierce was damned if she was going to let her add another murder to her tally.

  But that might well be out of her hands.

  IT WAS SOME hours later when a considerably grimmer and wearier Pierce made her way back to the office. No news yet on Dawson’s condition: the ambulance had arrived promptly and he’d still been conscious when they loaded him in, but stab wounds to the abdomen were nothing to mess with.

  Violet, as she’d suspected, had already vanished into thin air by the time a proper search got underway; at least now they had a description to circulate, and hopefully some useable prints from the café that would link her to both Jonathan’s murder and the house in Leeds.

  And they’d arrested two of her cultists. Pierce doubted that they’d get any cooperation there, but just getting them off the streets was still a win: they were accessories to murder at the very least, even if Violet performed all the ritual kills herself. Pierce hoped that these two were the only disciples she had—she might kill just as readily without them, but she’d have a much harder job doing it without leaving a trace.

  All the same, Pierce was in no mood to look on the bright side, and neither was the superintendent.

  “Your department limps from one disaster to another!” Snow snapped in disgust, his n
ostrils flaring. He was agitated enough to be on his feet today, towering over her. “Your pursuit of this case has been a shambles from beginning to end: murdered informants, leaks to the media, members of the public endangered, procedures disregarded... and now it emerges that the serial killer outright invited you to a meeting, and yet not only did she slip through your fingers once again, she put one of our best men in hospital doing it!”

  Pierce forbore from pointing out that he’d signed off on their plans himself. Much as she’d like to snarl at him, sitting here in his nice clean office measuring gut feelings against textbook guidelines, it wasn’t as if he was even wrong: she’d been the one on the front-line of the case, and he’d relied on her for a read of the situation. She couldn’t help but feel that somehow, some way, she should have smelled a rat much earlier.

  She let out a slow breath, trying to keep her temper at bay. “This was clearly a deliberate ambush aimed at hampering the police investigation,” she said. “We’ve come too close to catching her on multiple occasions this time round—this was a panic move.”

  Snow didn’t look impressed. “Close, Chief Inspector, may count for something when it comes to my daughter’s maths homework, but we don’t give points for effort in police work. The fact is that this woman remains on the loose, and is extremely likely to kill again soon—assuming she hasn’t done so already.”

  Pierce wasn’t sure if that was actually a jab at Dawson’s uncertain condition, but that was where her mind went anyway. She might not be fond of the man, but that wouldn’t make it fester any less to have another member of the RCU die on her watch—in fact, it only made the self-reproach weigh heavier. She was all too aware that she hadn’t made even the cursory attempts at getting to know the man that she had with her two new constables; she knew his first name was Graham, not that his dismissive demeanour particularly invited using it, but she wasn’t even sure if he was married, if he had kids, or what interests he might have beyond smoking like a chimney and gunning for her job. It wouldn’t make much of a eulogy.