Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3)

by E. E. Richardson

  “Well, let’s see what we can see,” Pierce said.

  THERE WAS A different security guard on duty this time, but this one also knew Cliff by name and waved them in without quibble. The lack of curiosity was convenient for their purposes, but also made Pierce suspect that any impostor with a decent fake ID would have faced little challenge from the guards.

  They followed Cliff through the echoing aisles to the rack of shapeshifting pelts they’d gone through the night before. Pierce checked them all again, nonetheless, since if there was one thing decades of police work had taught her, it was that mind-boggling stupidity was always a depressing possibility. But no, the pelt still wasn’t here. She turned to Jenny. “All right, then. Your show.”

  Hers and Cliff’s, though Jenny was directing; Pierce could only restlessly pace the aisles, useless in the painstakingly slow business of ritual setup. She made a full circuit of the warehouse, scanning the rows as if she might spot the pelt draped across a shelf somewhere, and then returned to where the others were working. Cliff had produced a roll of white cloth from his satchel to lay out on the floor, and by now it was covered with charcoal lines and curves, complex sigils set within the loops of a curling pattern that formed a kind of pointer arrow aiming away from the rack of pelts and out into the warehouse

  Within the loop at the tip of the arrow was set a simple glass dish piled with silver powder. Jenny was just tapping the last of it loose from the canister with a frown of concentration, Cliff shielding the edges of the dish with his latex-gloved hands; both of them holding their breath to avoid scattering the powder. Even the smallest smudge across the design could break a line or alter the shape of a sigil, with potentially disastrous effects.

  At last Jenny seemed to decide she had as much powder poured out as she was likely to get, and sat back, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her arm. Cliff stood up and stepped away with an audible click of his knees.

  Pierce decided it was safe to speak without making them jump. “How are we doing?”

  Jenny rose and stood back to survey their handiwork. “I think we’re about good to go,” she said. “There are a few more runes that I could add for extra reassurance, but at this stage, the more complex we make it, the more chance there is that we’ll fudge it. As it is, I’m bodging about three different things, so there’s every chance that it won’t work as intended.”

  “What’s the intention?” Pierce asked, moving closer to study the setup.

  Jenny swiped at her forehead again and then gestured vaguely towards the rack of shapeshifting pelts with the same arm. “We’re going to use the whole set of pelts as a focus for the tracking spell,” she said. “Christ knows what effect that’s going to have on the strength of the spell—in theory it should boost it, but the trouble with massive power boosts is that sometimes they become massive overloads and everything goes haywire.”

  Pierce nodded, having seen a number of attempted rituals go that way in the supposedly safe environs of the police station. Working spells on or around artefacts that were in themselves inherently magical could have all kinds of unpredictable effects, often destructive. And this place was packed to the rafters with them—secured to the best of their abilities, but often they just didn’t know enough to be sure how.

  “Still, it’s probably our best chance of success,” Jenny said. “If we just used an individual pelt, or hair samples taken from the pelts, we run the risk of narrowing the focus to the point where it won’t find anything since it’ll be seeking an exact match rather than shapeshifting pelts in general. And we may need the power, considering the amount of magical background noise there’ll be in here.”

  She looked around at the site of their ritual. “Unfortunately, since we haven’t got the floor space or the tools to build a circle that will enclose all of this, I’ve had to adapt the ritual geometry from a nice, safe, well-contained circle to a pointery-thing without any outer boundaries. So not only is it possible that I’ve screwed up translating the ritual design and it just won’t work, but if it does go boom, it will go boom pretty messily, right in our faces.”

  “This is boding well,” Pierce said.

  Jenny snorted. “Oh, I haven’t finished yet,” she said. “The other thing I’m bodging is that this is traditionally done with a candle flame. Unfortunately”—she pointed up at the ceiling—“sprinklers.”

  “Not a good idea,” Pierce agreed, while Cliff looked faintly ill at the very thought. Odds were such a tiny flame wouldn’t be enough to agitate the smoke detectors high above their heads, but a warehouse full of vital evidence, in the form of thousands of irreplaceable, priceless magic artefacts, was not the place to go taking a chance.

  “Not a good idea,” Jenny echoed. “So, we’re improvising again.” She gestured to the dish of piled silver powder, and reached under her collar to tug off the necklace she was wearing. It was a divination pendulum that Pierce had seen her use in a couple of rituals before, a faceted amethyst crystal that came to a point. Pierce had a pretty low opinion of pendulum-based divination—subject to human arm wobbles and confirmation bias, they were distinctly suspect, magic-wise, in her view—but at least she knew Jenny had the training to know what she was doing.

  “Pendulum and powder,” Jenny explained. “It should, in theory, produce a similar effect to using actual smoke, but it’s not going to last anywhere near as long.” She nodded her head at the heap of silver powder in the dish. “If all goes well, we’ll see some signal leading us to the nearest shapeshifting pelt, but once all the powder’s used up, it will disappear.”

  “So how long before it’s used up?” Pierce asked.

  Jenny shrugged.

  “How long is a piece of string?” Cliff said with a wry smile.

  “Long enough to be useful for something, hopefully,” Pierce said. She took a deep breath. “All right. Let’s get this show on the road, then.” Even a brief indication of a direction would help to narrow the search—or, more likely, the lack of any indicated direction would prove the pelt was long gone and not worth searching for.

  Or simply be a sign the ritual hadn’t bloody worked. Always a frustrating lack of certainties with magic—and this improvised ritual was a longer shot than most.

  But it was the best shot they had.

  Jenny sat cross-legged on the floor, closing her eyes and breathing evenly as she let the pendulum dangle from her fist above the dish of silver powder. When its subtle swings had gentled to near imperceptible, she opened her eyes.

  “Like calls to like,” she said out loud, her voice echoing in the empty warehouse, and followed it up with a phrase in some Germanic language, the sounds just familiar enough for Pierce’s brain to briefly tangle over trying to make sense of them before she understood it wasn’t English. “Essence to essence.” Then the other language again; Pierce couldn’t tell if she was just translating or the words in the two languages were different. “Heart to heart.”

  And so it went, switching back and forth through the lines of the recitation in a rhythmic chant. The air inside the warehouse seemed to thicken, the shadows around them growing deeper. Pierce had been cold before, but now the space seemed oppressively warm, as if the ritual was generating heat like a campfire.

  Jenny’s hand on the pendulum still appeared rock steady, and yet the weighted stone slowly began to swing, circling back and forth in ever-widening loops that reversed direction with each switch in languages. Pierce could feel a pressure in her ears and static crawling on her skin as grains of glittering silver began to rise up from the dish, spinning about the circle like leaves caught in a tornado.

  The effect was hypnotic, and Pierce’s attention blurred, only hooked back in as the rhythm of Jenny’s words changed. “Let that which is lost now be found,” she said. “Let that which is broken be whole. Let that which is unknown be known. Seek the heart, seek the essence, seek! Seek!” One more guttural phrase in that unknown language, and the pendulum lashed like a whip, snapping loo
se from its chain to fly across the room as Jenny cried out and clutched at her hand.

  Pierce rose to her feet to run to her, but that was when Cliff called out, “Claire!” She looked down; the cloud of swirling silver had contracted into a ball of bright light and was even now streaking away towards the front of the warehouse. “Don’t lose track of it!”

  Leaving him to take care of whatever injury Jenny might have sustained, Pierce turned to chase after the light. She had to sprint to have a hope of keeping up, the darting light zipping away through the shelves almost too fast to follow. It was shedding material as it went, a wispy trail of silver that strung out behind it like a contrail.

  The glow disappeared at the end of an aisle and Pierce cursed, putting on a burst of speed though her lungs were already starting to burn in stressed protest. She clipped her elbow on the metal shelf support at the corner, the kind of numb jolt that would blossom to agony as soon as her brain caught up with it, but there was no time to do more than grunt with pain as she spotted the ball of light heading for the main doors. The spell had picked up something, but not within the warehouse—somewhere close? If it wasn’t, they were going to lose the trail fast, because the light was already looking dimmer.

  The glowing orb passed right through the warehouse doors without pause, leaving Pierce behind to face the constraints of physics as she stumbled after it and slapped the door release, glad she didn’t need a card key and a code from the inside. The security guard turned her wide eyes from the streaking light to look at Pierce as she burst through. “Hey! What—?”

  “Emergency police business!” Pierce panted out without a pause. “Stay where you are!” As the glow passed through the outer doors it was already little more than a silvery glimmer to the air; if Pierce fell behind, the last trace of the spell would be gone before she could see the direction of its target.

  “You have to sign out!” the guard shouted after her as Pierce yanked the door open to follow. Pierce ignored her, charging out onto the road outside to look around. The evidence facility was surrounded by a chain link fence; the glow had already crossed the car park to pass through it, darting out across the dual carriageway and disappearing amid the glare of the headlights. Pierce raised her gaze up and beyond them before she could be blinded, fixing on the common ground beyond the road. Nothing out there, just a patch of scrappy grass with a few people walking dogs—

  Dogs. Pierce raked her gaze over the group of dog-walkers, looking for what she was suddenly certain would be there. A dog as big as a man—big enough to be a man. Her eye fell on a Range Rover parked up on the edge of the grass, the hindquarters of a big black dog just scrambling up over the tailgate. There was no one there to guide the dog inside, just a reflection-blurred figure in the driver’s seat, but on the second blink, it was a human hand that she saw reaching back to pull the hatch down from inside.

  She grabbed her phone for a photo, but the Range Rover was already bumping down from the kerb, and all she caught was a blurry snap of the back wheels, no sign of a licence plate on the vehicle. The silver glow of the spell had faded beyond her ability to pick it out in the dark, but she was sure this was where it had been leading her. Not to the missing panther pelt—but to another, closer shapeshifting skin: a shifter keeping them under surveillance.

  And she was pretty sure she knew who was behind it. The criminal operations that she’d busted liked their flashy deadly predators as shapeshifting forms: big cats, wolves and bears, exotic skins that evoked fear. But government people, people in the business of making threats to national security discreetly disappear, Maitland’s people... they used dogs.

  Maybe they were the ones who’d faked Sebastian’s death. Maybe they just didn’t want her to be able to prove that someone else had.

  Either way, the fact that they were on her back meant trouble.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  PIERCE WENT BACK in and smoothed things over with the security guard, implying without outright lying that the glow she’d seen race out through the reception area was down to the accidental activation of one of the stored artefacts.

  “Oh, we’re used to it here,” the woman said, unfazed. “You get all sorts—boxes that talk to themselves, ghosts in the aisles, ice on the shelves in the middle of summer... We just call Doctor Healey down to look at things when the artefacts start misbehaving.”

  “I’ve said many times we need a more specialised storage facility than this,” Cliff said apologetically.

  Pierce sighed. “Yep, and after that we just need the staff and the training and the equipment...” It was a pipedream—and there was no guarantee it would have kept Maitland’s people out anyway. “The panther pelt’s gone,” she told the others when they were beyond the reach of the guard’s prying ears. “And we’re being watched. Keep an eye out for big dogs and don’t talk about any of this to anyone.” She was beginning to regret having brought them into this at all; she needed help if she was going to sort this mess out, but it was starting to feel like her efforts were doing nothing but painting targets on more people’s backs.

  Still, the more of them that there were in the know, the harder it was going to be for any of them to be conveniently disappeared.

  She hoped.

  All the same, spotting their observers had left her decidedly on edge. She found herself watching every pair of headlights in the rearview mirror as she drove back home, looking for that Range Rover, or other signs of pursuit. Her phone rang just as she was starting up the garden path, and she eyed the unknown number warily. “DCI Pierce, Ritual Crime,” she said brusquely, lifting it to her ear.

  “Ah, Claire! I was hoping to be able to catch you. Not interrupting your plans for the evening, I hope.” After a moment’s blankness Pierce placed the voice on the other end as Christopher Tomb. “Good news—I’ve spoken to my contact who gave me the information on the vampire cult, and he’s agreed to share his knowledge with the police.”

  “Great. Give me his contact details, and I hope you impressed on him that time is of the essence.” Pierce fumbled through the awkward choreography of trying to unlock the door, switch on the light and retrieve her notebook without losing the phone.

  “Unfortunately, I’m afraid he does have some conditions,” Tomb said.

  Pierce rolled her eyes to the heavens, trying but not really succeeding to keep the frustration out of her voice. “Mr Tomb, it’s late, and this is a major murder enquiry,” she said. “This cult has killed, and we have every reason to believe they’ll kill again if they aren’t stopped. We don’t have time to play games—if your contact has information that could save lives, he needs to share it.”

  Tomb had an almost impressive way of blithely continuing the conversation, ignoring her words entirely. “He’s willing to meet with you personally, but only face to face, and with me there to act as a guarantee of your good intentions.” Pierce wondered rather cynically if that had really been the alleged cultist’s condition, or Tomb’s own effort to elbow his way into proceedings. “He’s requested we meet under cover of darkness, at midnight tonight.”

  Well, that was a load of melodramatic bollocks. Pierce huffed irritably. To her mind this seemed more like a publicity stunt than a legitimate lead, and she was buggered if she felt like traipsing around in the middle of the night to meet some supposed informant who might not know anything useful, but professionalism reluctantly won out. There might be something to it, however unlikely it seemed, and Lord knew they didn’t have such an abundance of promising leads that they could afford to reject anything out of hand.

  “Fine,” she said tightly, massaging the bridge of her nose. “Tell me where he wants to meet.” No sleep for her tonight, it seemed.

  THE MEETING POINT that Tomb relayed to her was the relatively unglamorous location of a pub car park on the outskirts of Leeds. Her instincts were pinging for a waste of time a lot harder than they were for an actual threat, but nonetheless she shot off a quick email to Dawson down in Nottinghamshire t
o keep him apprised of her movements; she couldn’t have arranged more backup even if she’d wanted to, with two of her team on a stakeout at Trick Box and Deepan in no state to join her.

  The pub itself was closed by the time Pierce arrived there, but there were a few cars still outside, maybe belonging to the owners, or customers who’d had the sense not to try to drive home. Pierce parked up next to a boxy old Mercedes on the end that she pegged as most likely to be Tomb’s. The slam of her car door echoed loudly in the silence as she got out to look around.

  Pierce was no stranger to arriving at crime scenes after dark, but usually she’d be pulling up alongside a row of emergency vehicles with their lights still flashing, the scene crawling with uniforms or people in forensics coveralls. Here, the frigid February chill had chased everyone inside, and everything seemed almost unnaturally still and silent. Even the windows of the houses across the street were largely dark, aside from the odd stray upstairs light behind the curtains.

  She could see her own breath in the glow of the pub’s security light as she rounded the Mercedes to peer in through the driver’s door window. No one inside.

  “Claire?” The voice came from the shadows of the building beside her, and she jumped before she could stop herself. She breathed out slowly before she turned on her heel, refusing to let him see how much he’d startled her.

  “Mr Tomb,” she said, crisply professional, though she suspected a spark of her irritation came through. She was cold and tired and extremely short on patience for whatever amateur dramatics he had planned. At least, she saw as he stepped out of the shadows, he’d forgone his ridiculous daytime getup. He wore a bulky purple all-weather jacket that didn’t much suit his image but did look enviably warm.

  It also made Pierce think of the Valentine Vampire’s victims and the incongruously sporty clothes that they’d been laid out in, and she held back a shiver. Tomb had been eliminated from their enquiries years ago: he had alibis, and he was too young to have been the original killer—but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be involved somehow. She closed her fist around the comforting bulk of the radio in her coat pocket. Her team were all occupied or off-duty, but police backup was still only a shout away.