Pierce let out a slow sigh at the thought. She hadn’t worked with either of them long, but they both seemed like good kids. She didn’t want to believe that one of them might be a spy in her department, but she knew she had to stay wary of the possibility. The only people she could trust now were those outside of the police completely.
Even if that was more by misfortune than by choice. She paused as she came to the Gs in her address book. Leo Grey. Should she update him on the latest wrinkle in their investigation? It wasn’t as if there was anything he could do... and, yet somehow she thought it might make her feel better to have a conversation with someone where she could put all her cards on the table.
She picked up the landline and dialled Leo’s number.
“Hello?” His wife answered the phone on the second ring, catching Pierce slightly unprepared.
“Er, hi, this is Claire Pierce from the RCU. Is Leo there?”
“No, he’s not,” she said. She sounded faintly worried, which put Pierce on alert. “Is he working on something for you? I’ve been trying to get hold of him all day, but his phone’s switched off.” She tutted a little at her own concern. “Oh, I know I shouldn’t fuss, and I’m sure it’s important... It’s just that he was out half the night last night as well, and I don’t want him to push himself too hard doing ten times the work you even asked him for, you know? He’s really not recovered enough to drive himself like this.”
It was probably more a general outpouring of worries to a sympathetic ear than anything aimed at Pierce specifically, but it still hit her like an accusation. “I did ask him to look into a few things for me,” she admitted, “but there’s no reason for him to be burning the midnight oil over it.” Especially when their investigation seemed to have hit a dead end with the Hardison Group site—a site that she was prepared to bet Leo was sitting outside right now, keeping up a lonely, dangerous surveillance.
“Look, I might have an idea where he’s taken himself off to,” she said. “I need to speak to him anyway, so I’ll have a word, tell him to take a break. It’s really not that urgent.” Not when there was no obvious way to proceed from here.
“Could you?” The gratitude in his wife’s voice only made her feel worse. “It’s just that it’s difficult coming from me, you know? I don’t want to feel like I’m nagging, but you know how stubborn he is.”
“I do,” she said.
What his wife didn’t know was that it could already have got him into much bigger trouble than just setting back his recovery from his injuries.
IT TOOK PIERCE several wrong turns to find her way back to the Hardison site; she was grateful her own car was still being examined for evidence back at the barn so she was driving one no one would find familiar. It still felt reckless to be returning this soon, and she drove past several more turns before parking to return on foot. She saw no other cars along the way; if Leo was here, he’d either brought in a third party to drop him off or hiked further than he probably should with his injured leg. Both options struck her as unnecessarily reckless.
Of course, maybe she was wrong, and he hadn’t come here at all.
Or maybe he’d already been caught. Pierce cursed to herself. She’d brought him in on this mess so that she wouldn’t have to keep going out on a limb all by herself, with no one knowing where she’d gone or why. It hadn’t been part of the plan for Leo to start doing the same thing.
She picked her way cautiously across the fields towards the Hardison building. In the dimming light, she could just about make out the glint of the high metal fence. There was no way Leo would have been able to get past that level of security. But if he’d set up surveillance on the place, then where would he be? She headed towards a small copse of trees beside the access road to the site, the only obvious source of cover around.
Too obvious? As she approached, she thought she saw a moving shadow shift beneath trees, and she hesitated. If it wasn’t Leo, but one of Maitland’s people...
Then she was already caught. She stepped backwards, reaching for her warrant card, as a dark shape emerged from under the trees.
On four legs rather than two. Shit, shit, shit. Pierce turned to run, but the big dog leapt after her, eerily silent as it bounded past her and herded her back towards the trees. In the face of gaping mastiff jaws that could crush her bones, she raised her hands and backed down, mind ticking away furiously. Malodorant spray—had she grabbed another canister after discharging hers in the scuffle at the park? Shit, she didn’t think she had. She had the silver cuffs, which would neutralise the pelt, but she’d never get them on the shifter while it was in dog form.
Yet even as she thought it, the dog’s outline was folding and shifting, like some grotesque contortionist act with bones that bent in the wrong places. The canine body rapidly melted into the form of a slim-built man weighed down by the bulky pelt strapped to his back.
A man who staggered and grunted, clutching his left thigh as he tried to climb back to his feet.
“Leo?” Pierce blurted in disbelief.
She caught the faint flash of his grin as he reached up to touch the heavy head of the dog pelt on his back. “Found a way I can infiltrate the patrols,” he said.
“A shapeshifting pelt? Leo, are you nuts?” she said. Leaving aside the obscene amount of money he must have sunk into commissioning the thing—if Firearms paid that well, she’d clearly picked the wrong specialisation—shapeshifting pelts were highly regulated... and dangerous. A pelt wasn’t something you threw on like a coat: he must have had the activation rune tattooed on his skin, inextricably linking himself to the pelt’s enchantments. Every time he used it, he’d become a little more animal and less human.
Leo didn’t seem too bothered by any of those concerns, almost high with uncharacteristic excitement. “It’s a legal pelt,” he hurried to assure her. “Got it made at the Darville skin shop—guy who works there owes me a favour. All the paperwork’s in order, he’s just... going to delay registering it a little while.”
Pierce sighed, vainly massaging at her headache. “Leo...” she said, and then didn’t know where to go from there. The awkward position he was putting her in, given her job enforcing pelt regulations, barely even registered on the scale of problems with this idea. Except it wasn’t just an idea, it was already a fait accompli.
“Leo, what the hell were you thinking?” she demanded. “You went out and got yourself a permanent magical binding, based on some half-baked plan to—what—sneak in the gate with a pack of their dogs and hope they don’t notice an extra? You’ve seen what shapeshifting does to people—you’re the one out there with the silver bullets bringing them down when they lose too much of their humanity to keep control.”
“Not anymore,” he said forcefully, with a sting of bitterness that silenced her briefly. He met her eyes, serious now, though she could see the jittery restlessness bubbling beneath. “Claire. You know what we’re up against. Police tactics aren’t going to cut it; they control the police. We’re going to have to get creative, and we’re going to have to get dangerous. We’re not going to beat them without playing their game.”
“Yeah,” she said with a weary sigh, although she only felt bruised and defeated. He might be right that there was no way to win against these people within the law, but that didn’t make her any happier at the prospect of stepping outside it. “The thing is, if we start playing their game, then we’ve already pretty much given up on winning.”
Leo gave a thin smile in response, but she could tell he didn’t really agree. Would he have, before he’d lost his career to the injuries she’d caused by dragging him into this fight? He’d always been calm and dependable, not someone she’d ever believe would be advocating vigilante justice... but how much could you ever know somebody, really?
Pierce might have an ally in her fight against this conspiracy now—but she couldn’t help but feel like she was as alone as ever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E.E. Richardson has been wr
iting books since she was eleven years old, and had her first novel The Devil’s Footsteps picked up for publication at the age of twenty. Since then she’s had seven more young adult horror novels published by Random House and Barrington Stoke. Spirit Animals is her third novel for Abaddon Books.
She also has a BSc. in Cybernetics and Virtual Worlds, which hasn’t been useful for much but does sound impressive.
A tough, hard-nosed career officer in the male-dominated world of British policing, DCI Claire Pierce of North Yorkshire Police heads Northern England’s underfunded and understaffed Ritual Crime Unit. Unregarded by the traditional police, struggling with an out-sized caseload, Pierce is about to tackle her most shocking case so far.
Following reports of unlicensed shapeshifters running wild in the Dales, DCI Pierce leads a failed raid to capture the skinbinder responsible. While the dust is still settling, a team from Counter Terrorism turns up and takes the case off her.
Pursuing the case off the record, she uncovers something murkier and more terrible than she suspected. Has her quarry achieved the impossible and learned to bind human skin?
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A hard-nosed career officer in the male-dominated world of British policing, DCI Claire Pierce of North Yorkshire Police heads Northern England’s underfunded and understaffed Ritual Crime Unit. Injured in the line of duty, Pierce returns to work to find her new Detective Inspector has brought in a self-proclaimed necromancer to question the victim of a murder, there’s a coven of druids outside protesting the sale of their sacred site, and an old iron lantern in the evidence room has just sent out a signal.
Pierce is going to have to hit the ground running. A suspected ritual murder and a string of puzzling artefact thefts initially seem unconnected, but signs point to something bigger: buried skulls possessed by evil spirits start turning up, and they may only be the beginning. Someone is planning something big, and the consequences if they succeed could be catastrophic. With a rebellious second-in-command, an inexperienced team, and a boss who only cares about potential bad publicity, Pierce has to make the connections and stop the ritual before it’s too late...
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It’s not unusual to work two jobs in this day and age, but sorcerer and former triad soldier Rupert Wong’s life is more complicated than most. By day, he makes human hors d’oeuvres for a dynasty of ghouls; by night, he pushes pencils for the Ten Chinese Hells. Of course, it never seems to be enough to buy him a new car—or his restless, flesh-eating-ghost girlfriend passage from the reincarnation cycle—until opportunity comes smashing through his window.
In Kuala Lumpur, where deities from a handful of major faiths tip-toe around each other and damned souls number in the millions, it’s important to tread carefully. Now the Dragon King of the South wants to throw Rupert right in it. The ocean god’s daughter and her once-mortal husband have been murdered, leaving a single clue: bloodied feathers from the Greek furies. It’s a clue that could start a war between pantheons, and Rupert’s stuck in the middle. Success promises wealth, power and freedom, and failure... doesn’t.
“There’s a lot of laughs and imagery that lives and breathes and sells the monsters, the ghosts and gods and demigods, the violence and the shit and the absolute craziness that Rupert meets with an even gaze and a nervous chuckle. A compelling world, a rich cast of characters, and a complex plot; I can only hope there is much more to come.”
Quick Sip Reviews
“If the novella were only about Rupert flailing against the momentum of war, trying to save what he can – which mostly means his own skin – it would be an entertaining tale worth checking out. But this story does something a bit more than that, something subversive and subtle... In accepting the belief that Rupert is doing the only thing he can, the reader becomes a part of the corruption that makes victims of everyone. Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef is fun and funny and charming, but it is also subversive as hell and exquisitely pointed.”
Nerds of a Feather
“Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef is one of those books that you have to pick up when you find it, if only just to see whether or not the title is screwing with you. Bottom line: if you can handle the profanity and grotesque content, you just may find this one to your liking...”
Manhattan Book Review
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Louie “Fitz” Fitzsimmons is getting out of the drugs business. It was never what you might call a career, anyway; he’s got problems – strange, violent, vivid hallucinations that have plagued him since he was a kid – and what with one thing and another, this is where he’s ended up. So he’s been cooking Hollywood gangster Blake Kaplan’s books, and putting a little aside for a rainy day – fifteen million, give or take – and he figures it’s time to cut and run. Until a vision hits at the worst possible moment, and now he’s in hospital and looking at a stretch in County on a possession charge.
Then a Lithuanian goddess of the hunt murders her way into the hospital, and Fitz ends up on the run from a pissed-off angel, and there’s new gods – gods of business and the internet – hunting him down, and what started as a bad day gets a whole lot worse. Because Fitz is a Chronicler, a prophet – a modern Moses or Hesiod – with the power to make, or break, the gods themselves...
‘A head-shakingly perfect blend of deadpan wit, startling profanity, desperate improvisation and inventive brilliance’
Kirkus Reviews on City of the Lost
‘Blackmoore is taking urban fantasy in all new directions and setting fire to its cherished tropes’
SF Revu
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Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) Page 25
