Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (17 page)

“Coming to join you.”

As she descended the slope, she could hear the radio chatter of the other teams checking in, but she relegated it to the back of the line for her attention. They had to stay alert now; danger could come from any side.

“Spread out a bit, but don’t move out of line of sight,” she ordered Archer. “Check the ground for signs of digging, or any recent disturbance.” Or bodies, but she didn’t need to tell him that. “You check that side, I’ll check this side.”

They made their way downhill. The sparse trees provided little shelter from the rain, only channelled it to run off in larger quantities. Pierce envied Archer his uniform gear, better designed for the weather than the suit and shoes she’d picked out for a day that wasn’t supposed to involve hiking in the woods. The hood of her coat had become plastered to her head, just as miserably cold and damp as if she’d gone without it. Among the trees it felt closer to midnight than early evening.

She shone the torch over the uneven ground, strewn with rocks and fallen leaves and the odd scrap of litter. Impossible to pick out any clear signs of disturbance; there was no smooth dirt here to disturb. Impossible to listen out for creeping danger either, while the rain drummed down, the trees rustled, and Magnus the police dog kept barking—somewhere closer now, but still difficult to pin down.

“I see lights!” Archer blurted, and she turned to see the glimmer of a torch beam off through the trees to her left. She thumbed her radio.

“Romeo Charlie Three, is that your team that I’m seeing?”

The torch flashed briefly off and on again. “
It’s us, Guv
,” Freeman confirmed over the radio, and Pierce could faintly hear the duplication of her voice from further away.

They made their way towards each other, but Pierce didn’t see a second torch beam emerge from the trees. “Where’s PC Winters?” she asked, as her own torch picked out Freeman’s squinting face.

Freeman turned to gesture. “He’s just—” She faltered. “Fuck. He was with me a second ago.” She raised her voice to shout. “Winters?”

Pierce went for the more direct route of the radio. “Winters, check in,” she commanded. Silence.

“He was right
here!
” Freeman repeated with frantic dismay. She shone her torch round in an arc, illuminating nothing but the sparse winter trees.

“All right,
stay close,
” Pierce ordered her and Archer, keeping a tight rein on her own rising sense of things spinning out of control. “Back to where you saw him last. He can’t have gone far.”

Not physically, anyway—but it only took a moment to send a victim off to somewhere nobody could follow. Where the
hell
were her missing officers?

They started on down the slope in tense silence, broken by updates from the other teams over the radio. “
Romeo Charlie Two here at the edge of the woods now,
” Deepan reported. “
How do we proceed?
”

“Stay on the road,” Pierce decided. There weren’t enough of them here to effectively cover the whole of the wooded region in the dark, and sending the teams in two by two was just putting more of them in danger. “Keep watch for anyone trying to exit the woods and wait for the others to join you. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here, and we’re missing Winters as well as Collins and Davenport now.”

Call for further backup? But there might be little to be had, with the local force already depleted of as many officers as they could spare for the search, and outside assistance would take its time arriving. And besides, all the officers with relevant training were already here—the only other RCU member she had to call upon was Dawson, and he had less experience than either her or Deepan.

“Guv—dog!” Archer said abruptly. She followed the line of his torch with her own, and saw the German Shepard crouched in a gap between the trees, ears flattened back and hackles bristling even in the rain. He was emitting a low growl that became a flurry of frantic barks as the torches lit him up. Pierce held completely still; the quiet, placid police dog that had sat calmly by their feet earlier in the afternoon was now very visibly a threat.

“All right, easy,” Freeman said soothingly, raising a hand towards the dog from a safe distance. “Magnus?” The dog’s ears twitched a little at the sound of his name, but he remained warily crouched and growling. “Good boy, Magnus,” she persisted. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

“Careful,” Pierce said in a low voice, barely above a whisper. She’d seen a dog attack or two in her early years in uniform, and it hadn’t been pretty. Police dogs were trained to detain, not to savage, but in a charged situation like this all bets were off.

“I can see something on the ground,” Freeman murmured back, just as quiet. “Just behind that tree on the left side. Is that somebody...?” Pierce’s stomach jolted as a dark shadow in a hollow resolved itself into what might well be somebody’s leg. Archer shifted nervously beside her, and she wanted to snap at him to be still, but she was afraid that he’d jump at the sound and set the dog off.

Freeman kept inching closer to the gap in the trees that Magnus was guarding, murmuring a stream of placating words as she tried to slip past. “Yeah, you’re a good boy, aren’t you? Good boy. You remember us—you met us earlier. We’re doing our job, just like you’re doing yours, yeah?”

As she eased past the tree, keeping as far back as possible, a branch snagged on the back of her jacket and bent backwards before pulling free, shaking the tree and sending a cascade of water droplets pouring down. Magnus lunged towards her, barking furiously. Freeman flinched back against the tree, and the dog retreated, running further off into the trees and barking again.

“He’s pretty freaked out, Guv,” Freeman said, still pressed back against the tree as she looked their way.

“Him and me both,” said Archer, looking pale in the torchlight.

“All right, let’s check that body,” Pierce said—a pessimistic slip of the tongue, but correcting herself would only draw more attention to the fact. “And keep an eye on that dog!” She doubted any of them would be up to the task of corralling a petrified German Shepherd; she wasn’t sure even Collins would be able to calm Magnus right now.

Definitely not, in fact, because as Freeman moved forward to shine her torch into the hollow between the trees, Pierce saw that it was the dog handler who lay slumped on the muddy ground, face a mask of blood as it lay turned away from them.

She cursed and grabbed her radio. “This is Romeo Charlie One—we need medical support!” she said as Freeman knelt down to try for a pulse. “We have police casualties here.” Pierce expected to see a grim headshake, but instead Freeman’s eyes widened as she looked up.

“She’s still alive, Guv!”

Archer hurried forward to join her, prompting a flurry of new barking from Magnus, but the dog didn’t try to approach them, running in circles and whining. As Pierce relayed the information into the radio, she glimpsed a figure in a police uniform through the trees ahead of them. She stepped forward, squinting past the rain. “Winters, is that you?” she called. “Why didn’t you respond?”

He was just standing there under the trees, unmoving as the rain poured down on him. Shock? Injury? Pierce moved towards him. She shone her torch on his face, but the peak of his cap cast a shadow over his features.

Cap, not helmet. PC Winters had been wearing a police helmet—it was the community support officers who were in caps. Not Freeman’s missing partner, then, but Davenport, the PCSO who’d been on patrol with Collins. She took another step forward... and registered dark stains on the reflective surface of his hi-vis jacket that she didn’t think were rain.

And then he lunged out of the darkness towards her, swinging a tree branch as thick as his arm straight towards her head.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

P
IERCE YELPED AND
jumped back from the assault, taking the hit on her forearm with almost enough force to jar the torch out of her hand. Davenport swung at her again before she’d had the time to catch her breath, only the tangled branches above her robbing the blow of its force. She scrambled backwards up the slope, feet tripping and slipping on the sodden leaf-carpeted ground.

She shone the torch into Davenport’s face—and saw that the man she vaguely remembered from a few hours ago was gone. His face was a ruin, eyes rotted away in their sockets to ooze blood and decay down his cheeks, skin waxy pale and blistered as if by some dreadful disease. If he hadn’t been moving, it would have been quite clear that he was dead.

And she didn’t think that he was moving under his own power. Possessed, as Vyner had been—but while the necromancer had apparently been protected enough to escape the worst of the effect, here the parasitic spirit had full reign. Whatever was controlling Davenport’s moves now was nothing the human body had ever been designed to host, and his body and mind were rejecting the invasion like a failed transplant. Given time, the thing would be neutralised just by physically falling apart.

But they couldn’t afford to give it time.

Pierce cursed and leapt out of the way as the possessed Davenport lunged at her with his club, hitting the tree beside her hard enough to break branches. She fumbled for her radio, the buttons slick with rain. “PCSO Davenport is under magical influence!” she shouted, dodging away from him. “Detain with silver cuffs!”

Much easier said than bloody done, but that was all she had time for before he was coming at her again. She grabbed the end of his branch club, trying to wrestle it off of him before he could try for a second swing, but the strength that ripped it from her hands was more than human. She turned and sprinted away through the trees, heading downhill away from the others less by choice than because it was the path of least resistance.

The running that she’d done already was exacting its toll; she’d barely had the chance to catch her breath back, and it was burning in her chest as she scrambled between the trees. Bursts of chatter on the radio, but she couldn’t spare the attention to listen, dodging obstacles by the narrow beam of the torch in her jolting grip, trying to track Davenport’s pursuit by the sound of splintering trees.

The possession might be causing his body to degrade, but it didn’t slow him down. He had no bloody
eyes
left, yet he still kept after her, crashing heedlessly through obstacles in his path. There was no time for Pierce to look around and formulate a plan or pause to yank her silver cuffs out from under her coat.

Her foot hit something more solid than a loose branch and she tripped, sprawling across the warm bulk of a human body. She grabbed her radio. “I’ve got Winters—” she started to report, but Davenport was on her before she could say more. She threw herself to one side as he smashed out with the club, wincing when it cracked down on Winters’ chest instead, wincing more when it brought no reaction. Winters was dead, or at least in a bad way.

And Pierce was in danger of joining him. As Davenport lunged again, she kicked out at him and scrambled away, finally managing to yank her coat open and grab for the cuffs. Before she’d fumbled them out a sweep of Davenport’s club cracked the side of her knee, sending her staggering and cursing. She crashed into a tree and water poured down on her head, the torch knocked from her hand to bounce off down the hillside. “Fuck!” She could see it was still switched on, lighting up the rain, but before she could chase after it, Davenport was there.

The first blow of his club struck her in the stomach, knocking her breath away; she barely caught the second with her arm. As she jerked away from the third swipe, it crunched against the tree behind her, the branch breaking in two with a splintering crack. Davenport gave an indistinct roar and let the club fall, grabbing for her throat instead.

The strangling hands that closed around her windpipe were cold as the dead. As Pierce clawed at his hands to try to wrench them away, the wet skin under her nails slid and ripped, as if it was no more than loose wrapping around decaying flesh. She couldn’t even gag; the crushing fingers stayed remorselessly tight even as the skin encasing them sloughed away.

She yanked her silver cuffs the rest of the way from their pouch, hooking her fingers through one of the loops. No time to try to deploy the things properly; she used them like a set of knuckle dusters, punching Davenport in the jaw. He growled like he was gargling his own decomposing flesh, but the grip around her throat didn’t slacken.