Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2)

by E. E. Richardson

  She had no more bloody clue than they did, but she had enough of one to realise there was more at work than an aggressive nutter.

  “Taylor, get that knife off of him!” she barked, lunging for Vyner’s kit. Think, think—if he’d raised something he hadn’t meant to, how did she put it down? She scrabbled through the contents of the duffle bag, upending it: books, books, jars, candles, nothing fucking labelled, fucking idiot—

  A yell of pain split the air, and she looked up to see Bowers clutching at his ragged suit sleeve, gushing blood welling beneath his hand. Dawson’s attempt to tear Vyner away from him sent all three men staggering through the tangle of pegged strings and down into the excavation pit, scattering the salt and powder lines and kicking candles everywhere.

  Taylor scrambled after them, lunging for Vyner’s waving knife hand but jerking back as the blade swung towards his face. As Dawson grabbed to try and restrain Vyner’s snapping teeth, his hand knocked the necromancer’s glasses away. Pierce glimpsed the eyes behind, narrowed with rage, and red as clotted blood from edge to edge.

  She doubted they were coloured contact lenses.

  “Shit!” Scrabbling more frantically through the detritus of the dumped out duffle bag, Pierce tried to find anything that might help reverse a possession. Why hadn’t Vyner taken some kind of—

  Or maybe he had taken precautions. Cursing herself for an idiot, she abandoned the duffle and ran back to the remnants of the ritual. If he’d had anything on him to deal with things going bad, he would have kept it close to hand, not shoved at the bottom of a bag.

  As she reached the crumbling edge of the excavated hole, Vyner tore free from the three men trying to hold him. He sighted her, and snarled like a beast catching a new scent, blood red eyes glaring over the yellow lenses of his lopsided glasses.

  Tinted glasses. Who wore bloody tinted shades on grey days in December?

  Someone who was trying to avoid meeting people’s eyes. Snippets of questionable magical trivia she’d picked up over the years flashed through Pierce’s mind: mesmerising gazes that had to be avoided, turning power back with a reflection. And one of the things that Vyner had laid out for the ritual had been a silver folding mirror...

  As he came lunging at her, Pierce cast around for the case on the ground. A glint of silver there on the grass—Fuck! She jerked back as Vyner’s clawing fingers raked at her face. Almost too bloody fast to evade—his moves were simian, fluid and flexible beyond the limits of a body that looked like it spent most of its time shut indoors in dark rooms.

  Pierce was no spring chicken herself, and weeks of medical leave with the use of only one arm hadn’t lent itself to building up her fitness. She tried to duck away, but Vyner’s next swinging blow still clipped the side of her head, sending her reeling. As she staggered, dizzied, across the uneven ground, her foot came down on a candle. It rolled under her shoe, and she lost her balance and put her hand out to stop herself from falling, pain jarring through her still-healing shoulder.

  Mostly desk work, she’d told the doctor who’d approved her return to work. A little bit of walking around. Not the DCI’s job to grapple with suspects.

  She’d barely straightened up before Vyner slammed into her, gnashing teeth just missing her ear. She shoved him back with her good arm and ducked under the next swipe, scrambling past him at a crouching run. As she reached out to snatch the mirror case up from the grass, a brutal kick to her back sent her sprawling to the ground. She rolled over to see Vyner looming over her, red eyes wild and teeth bared, the knife in his hand.

  As he lunged at her with the blade, Pierce opened up the two halves of the mirror and shoved it into his face.

  Vyner froze, the knife dropping from suddenly loose fingers. Neutralised, or only temporarily distracted? There was no way to be sure.

  “Cuff him!” she bellowed from her position on the ground. “Silver cuffs!” And prayed that Dawson or Taylor had their RCU-issue cuffs with them, because, fuckety fuck, she hadn’t yet picked up replacements for the pair she’d lost on the shapeshifter case.

  Above her Vyner quivered, and she wondered, tension tightening her chest, if there was any hope she could kick him away before he fell on her...

  And then Dawson and Taylor were there, wrestling his hands behind his back and hauling him away. As Taylor closed the first silver cuff around his wrist, Vyner let out a howl—not a human sound of rage or pain, but an ululating shriek that clawed along her nerves like fingernails. His head snapped back, and Pierce could see blood pouring from his nose and weeping from the corners of his eyes.

  “Get that salt container over there,” she ordered Taylor as she struggled up. “Make a circle round him.” It might not do a damn thing, but when it came to magical threats, you threw everything but the kitchen sink and hoped you weren’t making things worse.

  Dawson hauled Vyner over to a patch of open grass and shoved him down to the ground; he went with no resistance, knees folding under him as he sat down in a dazed stupor. Taylor had the sense to keep a safe distance away as he poured out a ring of salt around him on the grass. As the circle closed, Vyner’s head and shoulders slumped, all the breath and the resistance going out of him.

  “Could be a ruse,” Dawson warned sharply. “Keep an eye on him.”

  Deciding things were as much under control as they were likely to get, Pierce took a moment to look around and assess the rest of the scene. Bowers was being attended by a uniformed PC; didn’t look like his knife wound was too serious, or at least he was still upright and keeping pressure on it. The handful of others who’d reached them—the whole thing had happened in moments—had faltered, obviously uncertain of what to do next.

  She raised her voice to address them. “Get the paramedics down here.” Bowers should get that wound checked out, and Vyner might well need attention of some sort, though she doubted the NHS would have much clue what to do with him.

  She wasn’t sure the RCU were any wiser on that front. How could they know if Vyner was back to himself? He sat huddled in the salt circle for several long minutes, making no effort to escape, and then at last he took a shuddering breath and straightened up. His face was wan, cheeks hollow, and the corners of his eyes and nose were smeared with drying blood—but his eyes were no longer deep red, just bloodshot human brown. He stared forward blankly and incuriously, either unseeing or just not taking anything in.

  Dawson folded his arms. “Can you tell us your name?” he asked brusquely.

  Vyner took another deep breath and lifted his head towards the voice, though his gaze still seemed unfocused. It took him a moment to dredge up the answer. “Martin Vyner.”

  “Today’s date?”

  That took him a bit longer. “The... sixteenth of December? Still?” Pierce surreptitiously checked her own watch to make sure he was correct. Two months off with no daily duties bar the odd hospital check-up had played havoc with her sense of time.

  Dawson didn’t give him any confirmation of the answer, still watching intently. “You know who I am?” he asked.

  Vyner squinted blearily at Dawson. “You’re... Inspector Dawson?” He was beginning to sound and look a little more alert. “You called me in to raise a spirit for the Ritual Crime Unit. But something wasn’t right, I felt—I should have...” He shook his head, squinting as if pained, and then looked around, for the first time seeming to register his circumstances and surroundings. “Did I hurt anyone? I don’t really remember what happened...”

  To Pierce’s eyes he still seemed to be in a state of half-numbed shock, but Dawson pressed on regardless, barking questions in quick succession like a hail of conversational bullets. “How did the spirit you raised get out of the circle? Was it too strong; what? How did it take you over?”

  Pierce hesitated on the verge of calling a halt to the questioning, but Vyner shook his head and spoke up fairly quickly. “Didn’t raise a spirit,” he said, squinting. “Not from the skull. This was...” Another headshake, but this one seemed
more like a frustrated attempt to clear his thoughts. “Outside,” he said.

  “Explain,” Dawson demanded, and she gritted her teeth. Words needed to be had about using this kind of aggressive interrogation style on a vulnerable witness, but she was loath to interrupt things just when it seemed he might be getting at something significant.

  “There was no spirit in the skull to raise,” Vyner said. “Felt like I wasn’t getting anything, but then I got something, but it wasn’t...” He squeezed his eyes shut, seemingly trying to brute force himself into a more articulate state. “The skull was contained by the circle,” he managed, laying each word down with careful emphasis. “This spirit wasn’t in the skull, it was... across the whole site. Distributed. Circle wasn’t big enough.”

  “What does that mean?” Dawson asked.

  Vyner shook his head again, biting his lip, and made a fraction of a shrug before he remembered or was halted by his handcuffs. “Don’t know. Just... no lingering spirit in the bones. Not killed recently. The bones aren’t victims, they’re... material. Part of the ritual to do something else. Whatever I raised was separate from the skull. From outside it. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  He was starting to sound frantic even through his tired tone, and Pierce stepped in before Dawson could press him any further. “All right, let the man rest,” she said. “Doesn’t look like we’re going to get any more excitement here. Break the circle—carefully,” she instructed Taylor. “If nothing happens, take him out of the handcuffs. Whatever that thing was, we’re just going to have to hope it’s gone.” Because if it turned out their makeshift measures hadn’t managed to remove it from Vyner permanently, she was buggered if she knew what to try next.

  They uncuffed the shaken necromancer without further incident, and the paramedics arrived to take care of him and Bowers. When everything seemed to be under relative control, Pierce took her chance to pull Dawson aside.

  “This was an unnecessary risk,” she said. “You heard Vyner—those skulls weren’t recent murder victims. There was no time urgency. We could have investigated the site more slowly and safely before leaping straight to performing new rituals without knowing what we were dealing with.”

  “Would we know as much about what we’re dealing with if we hadn’t?” he countered. “I did hear Vyner, and I saw him too. Whatever took him over didn’t do it by chance. Someone left it here to attack anyone who interfered with the site. I’d say that’s even more reason for urgency than plain old murder.”

  He turned to move away, apparently considering the matter closed; she couldn’t chase after him without drawing their infighting to the attention of the local police. Who had more than enough reason to badmouth them already. Pierce gritted her teeth, feeling a headache coming on. Dawson was going to be trouble, all right.

  She grimaced around at the debris of Vyner’s ritual, now a second crime scene to be documented. She had a feeling this case wasn’t going to be plain sailing, either.

  THE REST OF Pierce’s first day back was swallowed up by paperwork and catching up on details of the cases that she’d missed. At least her subordinates had been around to curate the contents of her paper in-tray; one look at the number of emails waiting for her, and she was tempted to just do a mass delete and wait for anyone whose message mattered to resend.

  Which of course was not an acceptable tactic when it came to police business, so she spent most of the afternoon sorting emails into folders according to how urgently they needed to be dealt with, rather than actually dealing with any of them.

  On the other hand, the inbox archaeology did unearth a half forgotten contact from an old case, a university lecturer in occult studies who’d written a book on demonology. Pierce managed to catch her on the phone and arranged to drop by to ask her opinion on the Bingley skulls first thing tomorrow. No guarantee it would turn up anything, but at least it would get her out of this chair for a while.

  Even with half the day spent doing paperwork, she was knackered by the time she made it home. The rest of her good intentions for a fresh new start on her return to work went up in a blaze of takeaway pizza, toffee ice-cream, and two glasses of wine she probably shouldn’t have had after the painkillers for her shoulder. She could start being healthy and virtuous tomorrow.

  She’d survived her first day back. That was something, she supposed.

  She just wished she could believe it would be plain sailing from here.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PIERCE LEFT THE house in good time for her meeting at the university, but the rigmarole involved in sorting out a visitor’s parking permit forced her to jog across the campus to the School of Occult Studies to make it in time. It was a grubby yellow brick building tucked away around the back of the site behind some trees. There was a card lock on the main door, but a young lad with a scruffy beard held it open to let her in.

  Human nature: there was no plan so flawless that someone wouldn’t take a shortcut somewhere for convenience. While it might seem at first glance that whoever had planted the skulls in that field hadn’t left a single clue, there was almost certainly something they’d felt safe to cut a corner on. The trick was to keep tugging at every thread in the hope one would unravel.

  Maybe this Doctor Moss could help with that.

  Deciding the building’s creaky old lift wasn’t likely to be any faster than her creaky old joints, Pierce took the stairs up to the upper level. The first closed office door she came to bore the name plate DOCTOR A.C. MOSS, OCCULT STUDIES, and she rapped with her fist, hoping her adventures in car parking hadn’t cut things too late. She couldn’t just leave confidential crime scene photos on the woman’s desk with a Post-it.

  “Come in!” called a deep, resonant female voice, the kind that would sound at home ordering teenagers around a netball pitch or shepherding a group of recalcitrant Brownies.

  It belonged, Pierce discovered as she let herself in, to a tiny woman not far south of seventy, with a head of grey-white curls and round glasses on a neon green neck strap. Her impeccably tailored navy suit jacket and skirt made Pierce feel like even more of a scruffy bugger than usual. Police work didn’t lend itself well to being overly precious about clothes, and neither did one-armed ironing.

  “Doctor Moss?” she said. “Claire Pierce. We spoke on the phone yesterday.”

  The woman waved the formality away with a veiny hand. “Annie, please. Can’t stand ceremony. Which is why I work for a university, obviously,” she added, with a dry lift of her eyebrows. She cocked her head. “You said there was something I might be able to help your department with...?”

  “Well, it’s a long shot,” Pierce said, “but given your field of expertise, we were wondering if you might be able to make anything of this.” She brought out the folder she’d put together with a few photos of one of the skulls and Constable Taylor’s meticulously measured crime scene sketch—the first one, drawn before Vyner’s attempt at necromancy had complicated things. “We have reason to believe that it may be some sort of attempted summoning.” Maybe not just attempted, if Vyner’s possession hadn’t been a self-induced cock-up.

  Moss readjusted her glasses and studied the pictures intently, long enough for Pierce to start to get twitchy in the silence. She jumped when it was broken by a loud chime from a phone on the desktop. Doctor Moss set the folder down.

  “My apologies, Chief Inspector, but I’m supposed to be meeting one of my PhD students for coffee,” she said. Nonetheless, she spared another moment to peer at the site diagram as she stood. “This arrangement.” She tapped the drawing with the base of her phone. “I’m not sure, but it does ring a bell. I’ll have to check my books... Would it be all right if I consult with a few colleagues?”

  It was always a risk involving outside academics, but the esoteric subjects RCU work encountered rarely left them with much choice. This could be their only chance of getting any information.

  “Yes, but please could I ask you not to share the photographs or the fact tha
t this concerns an active police investigation?” she said. The last thing they needed was for details to get out—not just because of the risk of compromising the investigation, but the chance of idiot copycats buggering about with rituals that they didn’t understand. There was always someone out there with just enough knowledge to be dangerous and not enough sense to know they were out of their depth.

  Pierce didn’t think this case was one of those, though. No, this one had the scent of somebody who understood exactly what they were doing.

  That might be even worse news.

  Her phone rang as she was on the way back to her car, and she hurried away from the drifting students to take the call in relative privacy among the trees. An unfamiliar mobile number. “DCI Pierce.”

  “Er, Guv, it’s Constable Taylor.” The accent would have identified him even without the introduction. “We just received a call about the necromancer who helped us yesterday.”

  About, not from. “Has he relapsed?”

  “Er, not exactly, Guv,” he said, awkwardly. “Local police found him dead. Looks like a suicide.”

  PIERCE GROUND HER teeth as she drove to the scene of the death, going back over all the decisions it was too bloody late to change now. Should’ve gone with her instincts and countermanded Dawson’s bad idea of trying necromancy, instead of worrying about departmental politics. Should’ve called a halt to the interrogation of Vyner earlier. Should’ve done more to see he was looked after in his vulnerable state of mind post-possession.

  It was always easy to pick the best option in hindsight. But all the same, one ugly truth remained: they’d called him in to consult on a case, and now he was dead. This was the RCU’s fuck up.

  It was tempting to lay it all on Dawson’s head, but the fact was the buck still stopped with her. She was the one in charge, and she could have overruled him. Should have overruled him. Probably would have, if she hadn’t been hesitant to rock the boat on her first day back on the job.