Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3)

by E. E. Richardson

  Not condensation. At first Pierce thought the gathered droplets were just running down like raindrops on a car window—but then she realising that some of them were flowing up, pouring in towards the central carving of the sprinting hare like water swirling into a plughole. The lines of the design were rapidly staining a vivid, bloody red until they looked like wounds cut into flesh—and yet the containment circle of runes that ran round the outside showed no such sign of the phenomenon.

  Proof, she guessed, that the enchantment had been made with a blood binding.

  Pierce was so intently focused on the medallion that she jumped when Cliff’s voice spoke above the sizzling of the cauldron. “Well, that certainly seems to be a positive result.” He retrieved a film camera from a cupboard to take shots of the medallion from both sides. “Now, I’m not sure how well these will come out with the steam,” he cautioned. “The ritual specifies that the effect fades, but not how quickly, so hopefully it will linger long enough to properly record.”

  He reached for the handles of the boiling cauldron to lift it away from the fire. As soon as his arm passed over the boundary of the salt circle, the steam flooded outwards in every direction, as if released from a popped bubble. Pierce covered her face with her sleeve, but the steam thinned out as Cliff carried the cauldron away to place on a mat by the lab sink, and she decided she probably didn’t need to open the door to vent the room. Just as well—the superintendent wouldn’t be pleased if another of Cliff’s tests set off the fire alarm.

  At least the steam didn’t seem to have harmful effects—or so she thought, until Nancy gave a startled squawk from across the room. “Uh, Doctor Healey?” she said urgently. “I think you should look at this.”

  Pierce turned to look too, and saw that Nancy was standing well back from her own lab bench, where she’d been documenting the items taken from the dead cultist. Apparently the cooling steam from the cauldron had reached far enough to affect them, because droplets were already collecting on the bat necklace, forming faint shapes that Pierce was quite sure hadn’t been there before.

  Cliff polished his slightly steamed goggles with the sleeve of his lab coat. “Hmm,” he said peering closer. “Well, that’s interesting. Could you bring that over here, my dear?”

  He stepped back over to the lab table and replaced the cauldron on the fire. Nancy followed with the chain of the bat necklace held rather gingerly in her gloved hand, and Cliff hung it from the clamp stand.

  In the thick of the full cloud of steam, it took only moments for the lines of a sigil to show up on the belly of the silver bat, vivid slashes across the surface like freshly made cuts. Where the lines of blood had merely soaked into the existing carving on the spirit charm, here they subtly shifted and squirmed on the surface of the silver bat, as if they were watching the same symbol being repeatedly redrawn.

  It was a mark Pierce didn’t know, made up of two triangles descending from either end of a line—a symbolic set of vampire fangs, no doubt—with the linking line bisected by two curves like a pair of brackets facing away from each other. A simple enough sigil, but then, she doubted it was one that would be found in any existing library of magical runes. No, this was an individual’s magical mark, a symbol of power and ownership like the rune Sebastian had worked into his shapeshifting pelts.

  It was the mark of the Valentine Vampire—and its presence on the pendant meant that those who wore the sign of his cult shared some kind of magical connection to their leader. That was probably how he’d tracked Jonathan down to their late-night meeting—perhaps even how he’d known he was betrayed. It gave Pierce a slightly queasy feeling to realise that Jonathan might have worn the pendant just so he could prove his bona fides, and in doing so sealed his own doom.

  But that wasn’t the only implication of this little revelation. A magical connection was always a two-way link. If the cult leader could track his followers through their pendants, then the police could do the same thing.

  They had a magical trail that would lead them to the vampire cult. Now all they had to do was figure out how to follow it.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  IT WAS AN impatient wait for Cliff to declare the bat pendant clear of known curses before they could risk handing it over to Jenny for a tracking ritual. Pierce grabbed a hasty lunch in the canteen and put a call in to Gemma to see how things were going back at the warehouse.

  “They’ve let forensics inside now, but we’re taking it slow,” Gemma told her. “I want to check for more trigger runes before we move anything.”

  “Probably sensible.” The locals might whine about their forensics people being tied up, but she couldn’t spare any more RCU personnel to speed the checks right now.

  “They were definitely keeping live animals here, too, guv—there were still a few left inside when they torched the place.” Pierce could hear the note of dismay in her voice, and hoped it wasn’t going to be too much of an issue; animal cruelty could hit some people harder than good old human-on-human violence, and with the number of rituals that required animal blood or body parts the RCU could be a rough ride for anyone who got too hung up on it. “Most of them probably suffocated from the smoke, poor little guys—at least it looks like they were already sedated.”

  But Gemma managed to keep any overt distress under wraps as she continued with her briefing. “Erm... it doesn’t look like there was much else left for the fire to destroy,” she said. “We’ve did find some woodworking tools that suggest they were manufacturing the charms here, and there’s another altar setup like the one back at the barn, except this one’s still mostly intact.”

  “Good. Make sure they get plenty of photographs and test it for blood before anything’s disturbed, just in case there’s another trigger rune somewhere.” Proof of blood rituals would aid their case, but a good lawyer could still argue it was legally obtained animal blood, and with the altar from the barn heavily damaged they might struggle to prove beyond doubt that there was a link between the two scenes.

  “Don’t let forensics open or unwrap anything, even if it looks like it’s free of runes,” she added. “Have everything transported to Cliff sealed so he can give it all a proper going over.” Gemma was competent and observant, but she was still new in the job, and Cliff knew more than even Pierce did about the many and varied ways objects could be magically booby-trapped. “Let’s not lose any more evidence—or lives.”

  “Right, guv,” Gemma said.

  “Any word on the lorry?” Pierce asked.

  “Found abandoned and torched down a back road about twenty miles away,” she said. “No cameras. Uniform are searching the surrounding area, but they can’t have got far with the cages, so odds are they switched vehicles.”

  “Meaning there’s at least one more gang member involved,” Pierce surmised. Maybe more. She sighed. “All right. Keep me posted.”

  She hung up and went to poke her head into the Artefacts lab. Only Nancy was still there, tapping away at a laptop. “Are we good to go on the bat hunt?” Pierce asked her.

  Nancy blinked at her for a few moments’ confusion. “Oh, er... we think so. They went down to the basement lab.”

  “Right.” Pierce let the door fall closed and headed back down the stairs.

  Enchanted Artefacts was the only analysis department big enough to have its own lab area for performing magical tests—and as this morning’s thankfully happy accident had proved, conducting rituals in close proximity to racks of semi-identified artefacts from other ongoing cases could have some unpredictable results. Rituals other than Cliff’s theoretically routine tests took place in the dedicated lab space down in the basement.

  In truth, though it might be reserved for ritual use only, the small basement room resembled nothing quite so much as a repurposed holding cell, complete with a sliding observation hatch in the heavy-duty security door. Pierce checked through it to make sure she wasn’t about to walk in on anything explosive, then let herself in to join Cliff and Jenny at the l
ab table.

  Unlike Cliff’s lab area, which resembled a cross between a school science classroom, an evidence lockup and an eccentric backstreet magic shop, the basement lab was more starkly appointed. A single square table was bolted to the middle of the concrete floor; there were no chairs or lab stools around it that could have been left where they might break the lines of the protective circle etched into the floor. A matching design was painted on the room’s ceiling, ensuring any ritual conducted between them stayed totally contained.

  In theory. A sufficiently well-designed pattern of concentric circles and protective runes would trap all but the most powerful of summoned spirits and magical effects, but it did nothing to block your common or garden explosions, fires, and projectiles. If a ritual generated enough energy to cause a blast or a small quake, it could potentially damage the containing circle from inside and allow the magic to escape too.

  Pierce had presided at enough crime scenes where rituals had gone wrong to know that there was no such thing as safe, only low risk vs. high risk. Unfortunately, most of the rituals that they cobbled together to suit the needs of police work were sufficiently experimental that there was no way to rank them on the risk scale without trying them to find out.

  “So what are we doing here?” she asked as she stepped in, letting the door fall closed behind her with a heavy slam.

  “Ah, Claire, good,” Cliff said with a smile, turning away from the table. “I was just about to come and find you—I thought you’d like to be on hand to witness this.”

  “Depends if it’s going to explode in my face,” she said, edging around the etched circle to get a good look at the setup for the divination. The bat pendant now rested at one point of a large triangular design that had been chalked out on the desktop, surrounded by many scribbled runes. A weighty yellow-paged tome rested open on the corner of the table, and Pierce could see a diagram of a similar ritual arrangement annotated with angles and compass orientations.

  “In theory, we should be all right with this one,” Jenny said, hauling a stack of bags and boxes from the metal cabinets at the rear. “It’s always a bit of a crapshoot trying to work a divination on anything that’s already enchanted, but since Cliff’s pretty confident that at least one of this thing’s functions is acting as a type of locator charm for our head vampire to find his cultists, there shouldn’t be any negative interaction between the spells—we’re basically magicking it to do something it’s already designed to do.”

  “Famous last words,” Pierce said.

  Jenny lifted her gaze from the book she was consulting to offer her a crooked grin. “If you want certainties, you’re in the wrong lab.”

  “In the wrong bloody career,” she said.

  “So, it shouldn’t go messily wrong,” Jenny repeated. “Enchantment-wise, we’re encouraging water to flow downhill, and unless there are booby-traps Cliff hasn’t managed to spot on it, the worst potential problems are either total failure, or succeeding too well. If we pick up all of the cultists and they’re widely separated, we’re going to have trouble pinning it down to a sensible map scale.”

  “How are we pinning it down?” Pierce asked.

  Jenny opened up one of the carrier bags she’d retrieved from the cabinets to unveil a stack of map books. “With a slightly more sophisticated twist on traditional bibliomancy.” She set out a road atlas and arranged a ring of eight incense burners shaped like open-mouthed dragons around it, checking their angles carefully with a compass. “The ritual will show us the right page, and then this will help us narrow it down further.” She held up a silver ritual knife in its padded box.

  “Oh, good, the boss always likes it when you lot start playing with knives,” Pierce said.

  “Rather a necessary component of the ritual, I’m afraid,” Cliff said. “Since we are, in effect, attempting to hack into an existing network of magical links, we maximise our chances of success by using harmonious materials in the ritual. The principles of sympathetic magic: a silver knife to represent silver necklaces, blood to activate the blood binding.”

  “More pigs dying for our art?” Pierce presumed, but Cliff gave a rather apologetic headshake.

  “Unfortunately, in matters such as these, exactitude can be very important,” he said. “I really must advise that human blood be used.”

  Pierce sucked in a breath past her teeth. “Cliff, we’ve talked about performing human sacrifices in the research labs,” she said. But more seriously, there were still plenty of issues with using even a small quantity of donated blood. “I’m not sure we have time to jump through all the legal hoops required before they’ll let us do a blood ritual.” Even for a serial killer case it would be a hard sell: the only approval she’d heard of since the regs had been tightened up in the ’nineties had been a case down in London involving kidnapped children and a tight time limit.

  “We don’t need any quantity,” Jenny said, raising a finger to correct her. “Just a single drop will do. There’s still an exemption for pinprick rituals provided authorisation is granted by a police officer of the rank of DCI or higher.”

  “In that case, granted,” Pierce said. “And you’d probably better grab me a thing to sign before it all goes horribly wrong.” She didn’t think Superintendent Snow was the sort to be understanding about paperwork being completed after the fact. Especially since she was already being somewhat liberal about his instruction to keep him up-to-date on what they were doing in the Valentine Vampire case. Divination rituals, she was mostly sure, probably hadn’t been included in his instruction to seek authorisation before doing anything dangerous, if only because he didn’t know they ought to be.

  She scribbled the appropriate arse-covering explanations on a form while Jenny made the last few tweaks and checks to her ritual arrangement. “Right,” Jenny said finally, dusting the chalk from her hands. “We’re about as well prepped as we can be—either it’s going to work or it isn’t.”

  She lit the ring of incense burners one by one, all with the same match and moving clockwise from the northmost, murmuring soft words Pierce couldn’t quite make out. As the various perfumed scents mingled, threatening to make her cough, she felt a faint, impossible breeze stir through the air of the underground room. The match flame bent and flickered as Jenny moved around the circle, and Pierce half held her breath, fearing they’d have to stop and reset everything if the match went out before she’d completed the circuit.

  But the flame held, and as she lit the last of the eight, the unnatural breeze stilled—at least, outside of the ring of incense burners. Inside it, Pierce saw the edges of the map book’s pages trembling, as if blown by balanced breezes from all sides, none quite strong enough to fully lift the pages and go rifling through the book. The soft susurration of moving air was almost like a song on the cusp of hearing, a distant choral dirge in a language she didn’t know.

  She was so caught up on that, focused on the dragon burners, that she almost missed it as Jenny lifted the silver dagger from its case. It was overkill for drawing a single drop of blood, and Pierce winced, thinking of all too many ritual scenes gone wrong that she’d attended, but Jenny deftly touched the very point of the blade to the tip of her left ring finger, a tiny bead of red blood welling up.

  Then she touched the point of the dagger against the silver bat pendant. The lines of the blood sigil appeared on the bat’s belly like a brand, and its eyes, pinprick holes pressed into the silver, glowed a dull red. Pierce instinctively stepped back, as if she might somehow be spotted through those lifeless metal eyes.

  She wasn’t entirely certain that she couldn’t be.

  Her gaze was pulled away as the dragon burners all began to hiss as one, a sound more like furious animals than simple steam. White smoke billowed from the gaping mouths of the brass holders, swirling about the circle as if caught in a clash between winds. The pages of the map book rustled, lifted... began to rapidly turn, as if flipped by an impatient hand.

  She saw Jenny step
forward, the dagger held in her left hand by the lightest of fingertip grips on the pommel. The clouds of smoke whipped around her as the storm inside the circle raged, growing ever faster as she shouted words in Latin above the burners’ hissing. As the recitation reached its climax, she raised the point of the dagger’s blade towards the ceiling—and without further warning, threw it upwards into the air. Pierce flinched back against the wall unconsciously.

  The dagger whipped around in a fast arc in the air, slamming down to stick point-first in the map book. The hissing of the brass dragon burners cut out as abruptly, and everything went still.

  The smoke slowly dissipated, and they moved forward to see that the map book had fallen open to a double page spread covering much of West Yorkshire. The blade of the dagger had pierced all the way through the pages and into the wooden desk below, slicing a neat horizontal line through the letters of the word Leeds.

  “Looks like your killer didn’t skip town after last night’s murder,” Jenny said.

  That was good news—but not quite good enough. “How much further can you narrow this down?” Pierce asked.

  “Give me the chance for a few repeated iterations of the divination, and I should be able to pin it down to a street, if not house number,” Jenny said

  Pierce rounded the table towards the door. “Right. You do that. I’m going to get his nibs on board and start things rolling with Leeds police. As soon as you’ve got us a full address I want to be ready to move in.”

  After three decades chasing this cult, they finally had a chance to get ahead of the bastards.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE SUPERINTENDENT PROVED to be easier to persuade than Pierce had feared: Snow might not have much tolerance for the fuzzy areas of magic-based policing, but he was extremely keen for them to start making some arrests in the Valentine Vampire case, especially after last night’s debacle. By the time Jenny had narrowed the location down to within a couple of streets, Leeds’ finest and the local Firearms team were already prepping for the raid; by the time she called them back with an exact address, Pierce was already in the car and on her way.