Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3)

by E. E. Richardson

  Snow could go on about prioritisation all he liked, but if there was one thing she couldn’t stand it was sitting idle, rereading the same files over and over and waiting for new information to come in. Forensics might come back with something useful from the murder scene, but until then, they might as well get on with some actual police work.

  MILLER’S WAREHOUSE WAS tucked away in an unoccupied corner of a shabby industrial estate. On this grey February morning the whole site was quiet, only a handful of the units in use and the few parked vehicles standing amid seas of empty spaces. They left their own car in front of a carpet shop and approached on foot; sometimes it was useful that two women in business suits didn’t register with most people as being police.

  And as she and Gemma rounded the corner, Pierce could see their luck was in: whatever Wilkes had told her suppliers last night had clearly convinced them that a hasty clearout of the premises was required. The shutter was up, and a trio of men were loading boxes and equipment into a lorry labelled Miller Supplies—and the white van they were looking for was parked right beside it.

  A casual passer-by probably wouldn’t have spared much curiosity for the tarp-covered crates, but to Pierce’s eyes they looked an awful lot like they could have been cages. She heard no obvious sounds of animal distress as the trolley wheels rattled over the rough tarmac, but she doubted the men who’d mass-euthanised the animals back at the barn would fret too much about the health risks of keeping them sedated for transport.

  Pierce snapped a few surreptitious shots of the men and vehicles, hoping it would pass for checking something on her phone. That was the van, all right—but they didn’t have it directly linked to a crime, only to a rather suspicious late-night visit to Helen Wilkes. Hopefully she could get her suspects to incriminate themselves with a little luck and bluster.

  So she put on a smile and the apologetic air of a woman who’d just stopped to ask directions as she approached the lorry, hoping to get a glimpse inside before they cottoned on.

  “Hi, excuse me,” she said to the heavy-set man who was just jumping down from the rear of the lorry. “Do you work here? I was wondering if you might be able to help me.” She tried to steal a glimpse into the back of the lorry, but to her frustration the cages were still covered. “I just had a few questions.”

  “Can’t, sorry, on the clock,” he grunted, stepping around her as she blocked his path. “You’ll have to speak to someone else.”

  “All right, no problem.” She wheeled about and strode towards the open shutter, prepared to see how far she could get on sheer chutzpah.

  Not far, as it turned out; the man grabbed her arm to stop her with unnecessary force, and she winced as his fingers crushed the bruise from last night’s bite. “Oi! Private property,” he said as he hauled her back.

  The gig was up, but Pierce could see that Gemma was busy trying to get a look into the van, so she did her best to distract his attention with her warrant card. “DCI Pierce, Ritual Crime Unit. Is this your warehouse, sir, or are you—?”

  That was when one of the other men stepped out from under the shutter with a startled shout: “Oi! Get away from there!” Pierce recognised Michael Miller’s shaggy blond hair from the web page Eddie had shown her earlier.

  The man who’d grabbed her swung around to follow the cry, and spotted Gemma peering into the windows of the white van. “These bitches are with the police!” he shouted to his friends.

  “Charming,” Pierce said, but she wasn’t going to complain if he wanted to incriminate himself by shouting warnings. “Now, if you don’t mind, how about all of you come over here so we can have a nice, civilised chat about the animal sacrifice laws and how they pertain to ritual artefact licensing?”

  But it looked like even an uncivilised chat was off the table as Miller clutched at something underneath his shirt, shouting “Anima!” A cloud of silver smoke poured out from between his fingers, billowing out to form the ghostly outline of a rearing bull with fiery eyes; the shape lingered in the air for a heartbeat before collapsing in on itself in a cloud of fluttering ashes.

  For a moment, she could swear that Miller’s eyes glowed fiery red.

  And then he charged after Gemma with a new, startling strength, slapping her away from the van with a casual backhand that was almost enough to lift her off her feet. She staggered backwards into the wall of the unit behind her. “Hey!” Pierce barked, yanking her radio out, but the first man grabbed her arm and twisted sharply, wrenching her bad shoulder as he tore it from her hand. “Fuck!” She clutched her shoulder, ducking away from him as he hurled the radio away across the car park.

  She darted a glance towards Gemma, cornered by Michael Miller against the wall. She seemed to be just about fast enough to keep dodging his magic-enhanced blows, but one lucky hit would end the whole thing fast. There was no way she’d be able to call for backup herself. Pierce scrambled onto the road after her radio.

  As she did, she saw her own attacker yank another of the charms out from under his T-shirt. “Anima!” The wooden disc crumbled away to ashes in his hands, the smoky shape of the spirit form pouring out like gas released from a smashed bottle. Despite herself, she was distracted from her goal for a beat to watch it form. Not a bull this time, but something smaller, sleeker, canine. A wolf? A fox?

  A greyhound.

  She barely had time to take in the implications before the man’s eyes flared red. “Shit!” Pierce turned and lunged for the radio, just a few feet away, but the man surged past her, shoving her away. As she reeled backwards, staggering to keep her balance, she heard the lorry engine rumble to life. Miller had made it into the cab, starting the engine without bothering to try to close up the back.

  Pierce looked around for Gemma, felt the kick of fear as she saw her down on the ground—but she was already climbing back to her feet, hopefully no more than bruised. As her gaze slipped past Pierce to the warehouse shutter she gasped out urgently, “Guv!”

  Pierce followed her gaze to see the third man making a break for it—and cursed as she realised she could smell something burning, the first coils of a less supernatural kind of smoke drifting out from inside. Destroying the evidence just like at the barn. She moved to intercept the runner, but the man with the greyhound charm charged at her from behind, knocking her sprawling with a glancing elbow strike.

  She couldn’t match his speed or strength, but he had no apparent plans to fight her, leaping past to chase after the departing lorry. It was only just pulling away, big tyres bumping carelessly over the kerb, but it still should have been a struggle for a man on foot to catch up. He made it in two long strides and a leap, landing well inside the back with a metallic clang and turning to yank the doors shut behind him. Gemma scrambled out of the way of the lorry as it swung through a wild turn to escape the cul-de-sac.

  The third man, left behind by his escaping colleagues, was now making for the van. Pierce forced herself up from the ground, every muscle protesting the move, and staggered forward at a stumbling wheeze, yanking her silver cuffs out from their pouch.

  The man reached the van ahead of her, but he had to slow to tug the door open, and his panicked fumbles gave her the chance to catch up. She slapped one cuff around his wrist, but he wrenched free from her grip and whipped her in the face with her own cuffs. She reeled back with a shout, momentarily blinded by the eye-watering crack across her cheekbone. As the man turned to kick her away, Gemma came rushing up, shoving the van door halfway shut on him before he could get in. Cursing, he scrabbled under his shirt with his free hand for one of the charms.

  Before he could activate it, Gemma seized him by the wrist, and between them they turned him around and got the handcuffs on him. “This is police brutality,” he said, his face pressed against the side of the van.

  “Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the bruises on my bruises,” Pierce said, rubbing her cheek. She looked round for the lorry, but it was well away—they’d have to call it in and hope there was someone close enough t
o catch up before Miller and friend ditched it. The smoke pouring out of the warehouse was already thickening alarmingly, and Pierce had a bad feeling they weren’t going to retrieve much more evidence in there than they had from the barn.

  But at least they’d made one arrest and confirmed Miller’s involvement, so this hadn’t been a complete disaster.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE MAN THAT they’d arrested was younger than the two who’d escaped, and probably fairly low down the totem pole, judging by the ease with which his colleagues had abandoned him. On the plus side, that meant he’d probably have less to lose by spilling his guts to the police.

  Unfortunately, he had yet to be persuaded of that, so Pierce had opted to let him sweat for a bit while they did their best to reel the others in without his help. One thing he had given them, albeit unwillingly, was the charm pendant that had been taken from him on his arrival at the cells. She’d had it sent up to Cliff in Magical Analysis before going in to attempt to question the prisoner, so she headed up there now to see what he’d made of it.

  For once, Cliff had some company in the Artefacts lab, in the form of his young lab assistant Nancy. She usually did the admin work and ran the more routine tests on days when Cliff was out of the office—either it was all hands on deck today, or Cliff was nervous about the prospect of more evidence going walkabout if he left the lab unattended.

  The thought was a sobering reminder of Maitland’s invasion of her home last night, and Pierce patted her pocket, making sure she still had the envelope with the evidence he’d left. She was going to have to find some way to process that without going through the police labs—or involving Cliff and Jenny. She didn’t want to bring any more trouble to their doors than she had already.

  As it was, Cliff was already more twitchy than she was used to from him, jumping at the sound of the door and breaking off his conversation with Nancy. She looked up as well, and gave Pierce a bright smile. “Hiya, boss,” she said. “Heard you had a busy night and morning.”

  “I have a busy everything,” Pierce said. The week had long since blurred into one vague, headachy morass that didn’t feel like it had included much sleep. “Any excitement here?”

  “Ah, well, it’s a bit early to say,” Cliff said. “Standard forensics have just released some of the effects from our vampire cultist, but we’ve yet to do much in the way of tests.” He gestured to the lab table where he and Nancy were standing, scattered with a small assortment of items: an expensive-looking watch with a leather band, a silver ring with a square amethyst stone, and the silver bat necklace, now carefully cleansed of the blood that had been spilled on it last night—human blood was never a wise thing to leave coated on potentially magical jewellery.

  “The watch looks pretty ordinary,” Nancy volunteered. “It’s a nice one, but it’s not engraved or anything, and there’s no stitching on the band or whatever. It’s probably clean.”

  Cliff nodded along with her assessment. “It’s unlikely to have had any sort of enchantment placed on it, though of course we’ll test it nonetheless,” he said. “The jewellery is a more likely suspect, but I’m afraid it will take a bit of time to process, since we don’t know what, if anything, we’re looking for.”

  “Pretty sure the necklace has some kind of significance,” Pierce told him. “Not sure if there’s any magic to it, though.” It could just be a simple badge of membership, given out to the chosen few in the cult. “What about the charm seized from our arrestee this morning?” she asked, changing tracks.

  “Ah, yes, the animal spirit charm.” Cliff brightened. Leaving Nancy with the cultist’s effects, he moved over to another bench, retrieving the wooden medallion from inside an evidence bag. He held it up in one gloved hand to display the carved design. “I don’t know if you had the chance to take a good look at this earlier, but anyway, this rather nice little pictogram of a rabbit—or possibly it’s a hare, I must admit my knowledge of zoology is lacking—”

  “So there are limits to your talents,” Pierce said. Nancy grinned in the background.

  “Oh, many, sad to say,” Cliff said, shaking his head. “But anyway, regardless of whether this is a hare or a rabbit, I believe the actual design of the carving is unimportant: purely aesthetic, or perhaps an aide-mémoire. What’s important is the enchantment bound into it—perhaps, as Jennifer suggested, with the animal’s blood as part of the sacrificial ritual. This ring of runes is, if you will, the magical equivalent of a rope tying back a tree branch: as soon as the ring is broken, the enchantment is loosed.”

  He turned the medallion over. “Now, this is the part we couldn’t see in your earlier photograph, and it’s really rather clever.” In the centre was another carved sigil, surrounded by wavy lines that radiated out towards the rim. “This here is a perfectly simple little trigger rune, a less destructive baby brother to the one that you set off at the barn. It causes the wood to smoulder away, beginning at the outer edges, and thus destroying the ring of runes that holds the enchantment in check. Hence, you can unleash a powerful pierce of magic that should take hours to perform with just a touch of this rune and a single word.”

  He smiled, and closed his hand around the disc. “But obviously, we don’t want to do that. Since I know how you frown on having evidence go up in smoke.”

  “We’ve had enough of that in this case already,” Pierce said.

  “As you say. So, I propose a slightly less destructive test,” he said. “I did some research last night into sacrificial bindings, and I’ve found a ritual that was used in blood oaths for secret societies. Members would carry the society’s sigil, but to prevent falsification, the mark was ritually infused with the bearer’s blood. The ceremony itself has, sadly, been lost to the mists of time, but we do have the instructions for the verification ritual to confirm the mark’s legitimacy. It should show us whether a blood ritual was used in the crafting of this charm.”

  “That would be a start,” Pierce said. It wouldn’t outright prove the blood came from an illegal ritual, but it would certainly support their case, and ‘magical analysis confirmed the presence of blood’ was the kind of nice, straightforward explanation that you liked to be able to present in a courtroom. “Will it give a clearly visible result?” A colour change that showed up in photographs would go down much better than nebulous waffle about signs they couldn’t reproduce.

  Cliff shrugged his shoulders. “That I’m not too sure about,” he admitted. “The source text just said we’ll see ‘the true sign stand clear of the false.’”

  “Helpful,” Pierce said with a sigh. Even when they were legitimate, occult texts were all too often a cryptic mishmash of second and third-hand accounts from people too deeply immersed in the subject to recognise what ought to be spelled out. “How much of a faff is the ritual?” she asked.

  “Oh, it’s relatively straightforward, as these things go. In fact, if Nancy’s happy there...”—busy taking notes at the lab table, his assistant gave them an absent thumbs-up—“I was just about to take a stab at it now. You’re welcome to watch.”

  Pierce hung back out of his way as he fished a many-times folded piece of paper from his trouser pocket, flattening it out to reveal cramped pencilled notes. Squinting frequently to consult it, he gathered a miscellany of items from the equipment trolley and the cupboards at the side and began to set things up. It took long enough that Pierce was on the verge of discreetly slipping back out when it seemed he was finally happy with the arrangement.

  The equipment he’d gathered together was a mix of the arcane and the pragmatically everyday. A small bronze cauldron with a band of runes around the rim sat atop a foil tray covered by a grille, rather like a disposable barbecue. Instead of charcoal, however, it was filled with a careful arrangement of twigs and leaves taken from bags that were labelled with the types of trees. He’d doused the wood in some kind of oil, with a cloying, vaguely perfumed smell.

  The cauldron itself he filled with a measure of blood poured
out from a bottle he retrieved from the fridge at the back of the lab. “Pig’s blood,” he explained, with a sidelong look.

  Pierce raised her hands innocently. “Didn’t ask.”

  To that, after another period of squinting intently at his notes, he added pinches of herbs and powders from various canisters, and then another kind of incense oil. Even cold, the mix of scents was nauseating, making the air in the room taste somehow greasy.

  Finally Cliff hung the medallion from a clamp stand above the cauldron, and poured a careful ring of salt around the whole arrangement. He stood back, checked his scribbled notes one last time, then dusted his hands and beamed at her expectantly. “Right. Shall we see what we can see?”

  Nancy turned round from her worktable and tucked her hands in the pockets of her lab coat to watch the show, either eager to learn or readying herself to duck. Pierce, who’d also had some experience of supposedly harmless divination rituals—especially those involving flames—stood well back, with one hand on the door handle.

  Cliff lit a wooden taper with a cigarette lighter, and carefully poked it through the barbecue grill to touch the twigs laid out beneath. It didn’t catch immediately, giving him the chance to pull his arm back out of the salt circle and step away to a safe distance before things began.

  For several moments nothing seemed to happen. Nancy coughed, and Cliff adjusted his lab goggles. Pierce was about to ask for some hint of what exactly she was waiting for when she realised the herbal smell was growing stronger, and she could hear the faint burble of the cauldron’s contents beginning to boil. Fine wisps of pinkish steam the colour of rare steak began to rise from the cauldron’s mouth.

  The steam thickened and spread, the tendrils coiling back on themselves as they reached the boundary of the salt circle, as if trapped by an invisible glass tube. Droplets of red-tinted condensation began to collect on the metal clamp stand and the medallion suspended from its arm.