Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3)

by E. E. Richardson

  “Leave it!” she barked at him, stepping on one of the charms to cover it. “You’ve got nowhere to go, so—”

  Miller surged up out of his crouch into a rugby tackle, knocking her backwards into the car park sign at the edge of the kerb. The impact clacked her teeth together, and she couldn’t tell if the taste of blood in her mouth was just from her nose or she’d bitten her tongue. She didn’t have a hand free to check it as she had to bring them both up to defend herself from Miller’s efforts to crack her head against the sign, no chance to get the cuffs on him.

  He still had one of the charms in his hand, and Pierce snatched for it, prying the wooden disc loose from his grip but unable to yank it away from him with the cord wrapped round his fingers. He shoved at her again, and as she tried to angle her head away from the metal pole behind her she staggered out into the road. She turned her ankle coming down from the kerb, her grip on the medallion slowing her fall until her weight wrenched the cord out of Miller’s hand. As she hit the tarmac, her cuffs clattered away from her.

  Miller came after her, reaching inside his jacket for one of the charms—or who knew what else. Pierce was still on the ground, nothing to defend herself with except the wooden disc in her hand, too lightweight to use as a weapon.

  At least, not any conventional weapon. Pierce hadn’t had a chance to get a good look at the charm, but she’d seen them in action, she knew how they worked... and most importantly, she knew the activation phrase. She clutched it tighter in her palm, covering the trigger rune that Cliff had shown her on the back.

  “Anima!” she gasped.

  All at once the wooden disc flashed hot in her hands, crumbling away between her fingers like ashes. Before there was even time for the heat to scorch her skin it was no more than dust pouring from her palm.

  In its place she held a spreading ball of cool silver light that raised pins and needles as it brushed over her skin. She glimpsed a sinuous feline shape twisting amid the smoke...

  And then the effect hit her nervous system with a jolt like biting down on a metal fork. Pain like an ice-cream headache stabbed right through her brain as all her senses screamed protests at once, as if somebody had found a bank of mental volume switches and flipped them all up to the maximum.

  Traffic noises, roaring so loud in her ears she looked around for the car that must be about to run her down. Her vision felt like it had been stretched into widescreen, details at the corners of her eyes as sharp as right in front of her face. The brightness seemed to have been turned up until the colours bleached out, the No Entry signs and green wheelie bins of the alley across the road blending into the same murky yellow as if she’d suddenly been struck colourblind. She could smell the stink of the bins as if she’d shoved her head right in them, mingling with the pungent scent of dog or fox urine and choking traffic fumes.

  It was a disorienting blare of excess information that hit her like a mix of migraine aura and nauseating motion sickness. She’d almost forgotten Miller completely until movement at the corner of her vision grabbed for her attention like a flare.

  As he kicked out at her again Pierce rolled away, muscles responding before her brain had the chance to remind her that she couldn’t move that fast. She could; her limbs felt fluid and loose, as if someone had oiled all her joints with WD-40. She was back on her feet and twisting around to meet him before he’d even caught his balance from the kick.

  She felt feverish, buzzing as if she’d overdone the caffeine, everything coming at her amped up and intense, yet oddly dreamlike. She could smell Miller’s deodorant and the faint scent of his cooked breakfast clinging to him; see his every move telegraphed in the subtle shifts of his gaze and posture. She could hear the crashes and shouts coming from back inside the shop as if the fight was happening inches from her ear.

  Miller took a wild swing at her, but she leapt back before it even came close. Instead of following up, he darted back towards the pavement and the spirit charms scattered across the ground. Pierce lunged and grabbed his wrist just before he seized one; in the corner of her eye she saw her handcuffs glinting where they’d fallen halfway under a parked car. She was stretching to reach them before she realised her deceptive new sight made them seem a whole lot closer than they were.

  But she was also stronger and faster than she expected to be, hauling Miller off his feet as if he was a toddler. She snatched the cuffs up and twisted to snap one round his wrist before he’d even straightened up. He cursed and lashed out at her with his free hand, but she barely felt the blow, effortlessly capturing that arm too and locking it into the cuffs. She pinned him to the pavement, wincing slightly as he hit the ground with a much harder thump than she’d intended; the strength and speed the charm had given her was all out of whack with the force her brain said she should need against a man of his size.

  A figure ran into her expanded peripheral vision, and she was spinning, adrenaline burst ready for the fight, before she could make enough sense of the distorted colours to recognise a police uniform.

  “All yours, constable,” she said, not sure if she was speaking at the correct volume as she let him step in to take charge of Miller. She was glad to hand him off, not sure he should be in her custody when she was this out of it from the charm. She hoped she hadn’t done him any actual injury; the circumstances would make it hard to claim excessive force, but she didn’t like the thought she wasn’t fully in control—and even in an emergency, unauthorised use of an enchanted artefact wouldn’t look too good on a report.

  It didn’t feel that brilliant, either. Pierce pressed the heel of her palm to her splitting head and squeezed her eyes shut to block out the distortion. The sounds of the rest of the team dealing with the other two prisoners still echoed in her head, though it seemed to her that the urgency of the scuffle had calmed. Everything under control, she hoped.

  Aside from her burgeoning headache. How long did the effect of these bloody charms last, anyway? It couldn’t be that long—there was only so much magical juice you could wring out of even a blood sacrifice—but the effects were definitely distracting.

  “Guv?”

  The soft voice calling for her attention sounded like the bark of a drill instructor. Pierce pinched the bridge of her nose as she turned to see Gemma Freeman coming towards her, the enchanted sight leaching her face of natural flesh tones to make a kind of jaundiced, bruised yellow. It gave Pierce the unsteady feeling of being on the edge of a faint, where her vision went wobbly just before it turned to black.

  “We’ve got all three of them, including Miller,” Gemma reported. “No major injuries, and we didn’t have to use the Tasers.” It was good news, but Pierce couldn’t concentrate when it felt like the volume on the world was up too high. “You all right, guv?” Gemma asked.

  “Set off one of the charms,” she said, by way of curt explanation. “I’m fine, just the migraine from hell. You can handle the aftermath here.”

  She was going to have to, because right now Pierce needed to find somewhere dark and quiet to curl up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  AFTER A BRIEF once-over by a first-aider who was in no position to do more than monitor the basics and affirm that she didn’t seem to be dying, Pierce endured a miserable car journey back to the station—the only available compromise between heading home alone with nobody to monitor her, or to a hospital where they’d surely have no more clue what to do with magical side effects than the first-aider had.

  Home alone would have been her preferred choice if they’d let her, and if there hadn’t been too much work to take the day off; within moments of arriving back at the busy police station, she was wondering if she shouldn’t have insisted anyway. Having no private office of her own, she holed up in the Ritual Materials lab; empty, with Simon on one of his many days off. It had the advantage of being relatively quiet and devoid of distractions, but the disadvantage of a number of chemical smells and uncomfortable chairs.

  Though Pierce suspected anything
would be uncomfortable right now. Everything smelled funny, felt funny; every tiny movement snatched at her attention. Even sitting in Simon’s lab with the door closed, she could hear the sounds of typing and shuffling of papers in the adjacent offices, as if everybody had switched to clackety old typewriters and started throwing heavy books around. She could hear Eddie speaking on the phone in the RCU office down the hall, on that maddening cusp of hearing where she couldn’t ignore the susurrus of his voice but couldn’t quite make out the actual words.

  After the first half hour of trying to tough it out, she took some painkillers, but they were no obvious help: it wasn’t a headache making her oversensitized, but the other way around. She should probably just give the day up as a loss and head home after all, but the idea of a second car journey didn’t appeal much more than staying here, and besides, an inconvenient headache didn’t change the fact that they were running out of time on the Valentine Vampire case; she ought to be on hand in case anything new came up requiring her attention.

  Which didn’t mean she was precisely happy when something did come up.

  The footsteps in the carpeted corridor outside all sounded so close that it took her a moment to realise that this set were actually coming her way. The click of the door was like a gunshot, and she squinted in the bright blaze of the corridor lights. It took her a moment to even recognise Eddie, ginger hair rendered a dull straw colour to her modified sight.

  “Guv, we’ve had a call on the Valentine Vampire tip line,” he said. “Woman who says you spoke to her by the railroad tracks in York.”

  It took a moment for her to switch her beleaguered brain into the right gear. “Leo’s witness from the last raid. The woman with the silver bat necklace.” She’d come forward after all.

  Eddie nodded solemnly. “I remembered you asking me about that, so I thought she might be the real thing. She claims she used to be a member of the vampire cult and she might be able to help you find them now.”

  “What’s her information?” Pierce asked, frowning in an effort to focus through the lingering daze.

  His mouth twisted apologetically and he tugged nervously at his shirt. “She won’t say over the phone, guv,” he said. “Says she wants your personal guarantee of protection as the officer in charge—she won’t speak to anyone else.”

  “God, everybody thinks they’re a negotiator these days.” Pierce huffed unhappily. The charm’s effects had yet to show signs of wearing off, but this was too urgent to risk any delay—or chase off a potential informant. “All right, set something up, ASAP,” she said. “Better bring Dawson in as well—he’s the one been keeping up with the case.”

  And she might need him for backup if her brain wasn’t back to normal by the time of the meeting.

  She grimaced as a further wrinkle occurred to her. “I’d better go and clear all this with the big cheese. He’s not going to be thrilled to have a cultist dictating terms after what happened with the last one.”

  Fortunately, it seemed that either their recent successes or the fact she was actually asking permission instead of forgiveness for once put Snow in a more cooperative mood.

  “Very well,” he said, folding his hands and giving her a stern look over his glasses. “Agree to this woman’s terms—but this time there’ll be no Lone Ranger antics. There will be at least one other officer with you at the meeting, and you will keep a backup car standing by ready to move in, just in case this vampire cult goes after your witness again.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, happy to let him believe he’d won a concession.

  The woman, who’d identified herself as Violet—a name Pierce didn’t suppose was much more authentic than ‘Jonathan’—had agreed to meet them in a little café not far from the boarded-up house in York. To Pierce’s relief, the headache was abating as they headed out—either she was adjusting, or the effects of the charm were slowly wearing off—but all the same, she opted to let Dawson do the driving.

  “I can take this,” Dawson said, glancing across at her as he drove. Pierce suspected she looked either stoned or pained as they zipped down the dual carriageway with her vision still set to widescreen. She thought her colour vision was starting to come back, but it was subtle, like trying to make out hues through tinted sunglasses. She couldn’t tell if her other senses were going back to normal, since all she’d been able to smell since she’d got in the car was Dawson’s cigarettes, and the engine noise was a roar in her ears.

  She realised she was drifting again, which couldn’t be doing much to convince Dawson that she was with it. “I’m fine,” she said, belatedly. “And our source has said she’ll only talk to me.”

  “I’ll wear a wig,” Dawson said. He shrugged. “It’s a power play. Wants some attention from somebody with a bit of rank. Doubt it’s going to matter to her who.”

  “That’s flattering,” she said dryly. “And no, I’m fine. It’s wearing off.” She was more or less certain that was true, and besides, she wasn’t about to sit this one out. She didn’t trust Dawson to ask the right questions of an informant who’d already proved she was cagey about talking to them at all.

  They left their uniform backup parked discreetly down a side street a short way away from the café: out of sight, but within radio hailing distance if things got nasty. Pierce hoped. She couldn’t help but remember just how fast their attacker at the park had moved.

  And no amount of haste was going to do them any good if Violet was dead before they got there.

  She pushed the what-ifs aside, and instead tried to put her expanded senses to good use as they drove towards the café. Nothing obviously suspicious that she could see—the streets were quiet apart from a pensioner walking a slow-moving Scottie dog and some workmen half-heartedly building a brick wall. But then, it was broad daylight this time: maybe that would be enough of a deterrent to keep the killer away.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t, if he was keeping close enough tabs on his disciples’ movements to recognise something amiss. Shit, she should have had Eddie tell the woman not to wear her bat necklace to the meet. But it was too late now—and at least if the cult leader did make a move, it would be their chance to nab him.

  Maybe they should have brought more backup after all...

  Dawson pulled up outside the café, a small corner building on the end of a row of terraced houses. A sign proclaimed it Melanie’s Café & Sandwich Shop; it looked like the sort of shabby little place that guaranteed either the best cooking in town or food poisoning. The blinds were angled half-closed, and Pierce would have been dubious that it was even open, if not for the sign on a string hanging inside the door. Maybe Violet had picked this place for the privacy.

  She let Dawson take the lead, still scanning the streets for threats. The woman with the Scottie dog was watching them from across the road, but only with the kind of bland indifference that suggested they were marginally more interesting than watching the dog pee up a wall. The workmen were now out of view, but Pierce could still hear the faint clinks and thuds of bricks being shifted. All apparently quiet. She followed Dawson through into the shop.

  The dimly lit interior was as cramped as the outside had led her to expect, with just about room for three tiny, two-person tables lined up opposite the sandwich counter. The middle-aged woman indifferently wiping it down with a cloth glanced up at them briefly, but offered no greeting before getting back to her task; there was a half-closed door behind her that was marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, though Pierce was dubious about the need for the plural. They seemed to have the place to themselves.

  Until the door fell closed behind her, and a whisper of movement from the corner made her spin. She saw that there was a fourth table in there after all, tucked in behind the door and next to the bin. Sitting in the corner seat with her back to the wall was a dark-haired woman Pierce recognised well.

  “Violet, I presume?” she said, pulling out the chair opposite her, and trying not to wince too obviously as the metal legs scraped on the floor. She was g
rateful the blinds in here were down, blocking out the worst of the sunshine, but the food smells were overpowering, and not in a good way. The cuts of meat on the sandwich counter stank like a slaughterhouse, the bin smelled rancid, and the vinegar bottle on the table stung her eyes and nose like chemical fumes.

  “DCI Pierce,” the woman said with a small nod. She had a low, soft voice that Pierce suspected she’d have had to strain to hear if it wasn’t for the silence of the café and her boosted senses. Her previous impression held: Violet didn’t seem old enough to have been the woman Leo claimed to have seen outside the booby-trapped base. Maybe she was a relative of that woman: a sister, even a daughter. Cults did encourage recruitment, after all.

  Or maybe she was very well-preserved. How much of the effects of the blood ritual did their vampire killer share with his followers?

  Pierce’s gaze dropped to the silver bat necklace around her neck; as if in nervous response, Violet lifted the pendant from her chest to fiddle with it, winding the chain around her hands. She seemed calm on the surface, but her face was very pale, and Pierce couldn’t help but suspect that her choice of seat hadn’t been random chance, tucked away in the corner here with her back to the wall and the exit close by. Her eyes kept flickering between it and the employee door that must lead to the kitchen and the flat upstairs.

  “Got another name to go with that?” Dawson asked, dragging a chair over from one of the other tables to join them. Pierce was uncomfortably aware of the woman behind the counter listening in.

  “Yes,” Violet said tartly, and didn’t offer it. “Do you have one?”

  “This is Detective Inspector Dawson,” Pierce said, before he could steamroll ahead with his questioning. She was already beginning to regret bringing him along; his brand of forceful interrogation was hardly likely to be a help.

  Or maybe it would. She was having trouble getting a proper read on Violet: nervous gestures, but a calm expression. Maybe magical youthfulness robbed you of expression much as surgery did.