Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (22 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

P
IERCE GOT ONE
of the nearby businesses to provide them with bolt cutters so they could break the padlock onto the factory grounds. They found the informant’s body dumped a short distance away, on a patch of brick-strewn waste ground between the trees. His chest had been ripped open: a faster death than waiting to bleed out from the leg wound, but not a kind one.

When Firearms Support arrived they searched the region thoroughly, but to no one’s great surprise the shapeshifter was long gone by then. More than likely he’d stripped out of the pelt, stashed it in a car, and driven off with nobody the wiser.

Another operation gone completely to shit. This morning’s minor victory in retrieving the artefacts already seemed both small and far away.

“You should have taken backup to the meet,” she told Dawson. “If we’d had more people on scene from the start, we could have watched for attempts on his life.”

“Would we have been prepared for shapeshifters?” he countered. “The RCU shouldn’t be reliant on outside Firearms units. We need to have our own silver bullets.”

“Take it up with the government.” Personally, she’d rather not have to deal with the responsibility of carrying a gun; she’d had to briefly handle one in the clusterfuck of their last shapeshifter case, and she’d been at least as worried about hurting somebody as she had the shapeshifters trying to kill her. She certainly didn’t want an impulsive maverick like Dawson in a position to literally call the shots.

A dedicated Firearms Officer of the RCU’s own, though... But that was a pipe dream, and way down a wishlist that started with a desperate need for more manpower of any variety. She could have had her whole team on safeguarding the informant, and it still wouldn’t have given them a hope of watching every angle well enough to stop the shapeshifter’s attack.

Which didn’t excuse Dawson’s idiocy. “Shapeshifter or not, you shouldn’t have been out here alone without even a radio check-in,” she said. “If we hadn’t come out here after you, that could be your guts decorating the woods alongside our informant. The shifter would have had all the time in the world to conceal the crime, and we wouldn’t have even been sure till tomorrow that you were missing.” She should not have to be talking to a forty-something DI like the parent of a recalcitrant teenager.

“If you’d been here when I arrived, the bloke would have done a runner, and we wouldn’t have got anything out of him at all,” he said.

“It didn’t sound like you were getting very much,” she said.

“Got enough to prove he was involved,” Dawson said, with a dispassionate glance down at the corpse. “He told me he was working for a group called Red Key. He confirmed he helped them plant the skulls—and he said that was only the start.”

“The start of what?” she asked.

“A much bigger ritual. They’re trying to summon some kind of major demon. The skull sites are like bait—little spirits trapped in cages, drawing the big one closer. Those things that attacked our people are just worms on hooks, there to lure the big fish to the surface.”

If those were the worms... “How big a fish are we talking, exactly?” she said, feeling the hairs rising on the back of her neck. Read a dozen texts on demonology and you could find an equal number of quibbling definitions of demons versus spirits versus djinn and ghosts and fuck-knew-what-else, but if there was one thing they agreed on, it was that anything grouped under the banner of ‘major demon’ was apocalyptic levels of bad news.

Maybe literally.

“Our man didn’t know the details, or he didn’t want to risk his neck by sharing them,” Dawson said. “But it was bad enough to make him risk coming to us even though he thought they’d kill him for it.”

Pierce grimaced as she looked down at the savaged body between them. “Wasn’t wrong, was he? Poor bastard.”

They didn’t even have a name to put to the dead face: the man had no ID on him, and while they could take prints and dental X-rays, she already had a hunch it wouldn’t get them far. An outfit this professional, using shapeshifters to silence awkward witnesses? She had a bad feeling she’d tangled with these people before, and they didn’t leave any loose ends behind. She stretched her injured shoulder out, feeling the ache.

Last time, she’d won a minor victory but lost the war: only the skinbinder Sebastian taken into custody, and by Deepan’s account, he hadn’t stayed there long. This time, with the prospect of a demon summoning, they might be playing for even higher stakes.

And if Cliff was right about Monday being the deadline, they only had three days to stop it happening.

M
OST OF THE
rest of the day was spent on the futile hunt for the shapeshifter and dealing with the fallout from the incident. Pierce received
another
bollocking from Snow over the shambolic proceedings, which made it impossible to discuss any concerns about Dawson’s reckless behaviour without seeming as if she was shifting the blame.

At least she had their partial success in the artefact thefts to pull out of her hat, but as predicted, it didn’t do much to sway him with the perpetrators still on the loose. They needed an arrest, something concrete he could put down on his crime statistics, and then maybe he’d finally back off.

Or maybe he wouldn’t. The involvement of the panther shapeshifter had only brought her paranoia back. If the group she’d tangled with were still operating in the area, then maybe it wasn’t so crazy to think that they hadn’t just packed up and left the RCU after their operative took Palmer’s place. Snow
might
just be the innocent successor filling dead man’s shoes, but he could also be their inside man. And what about DI Dawson? Just a bull-headed cowboy operator who was used to getting his way, or was he actively working against her?

There were no answers, only the headache of continued uncertainty. It went nicely with the matching headaches of her unsolved cases and the bloody druids still hanging around. She treated herself to red wine and ice-cream that night, and studiously ignored the footage running on the news of herself evading questions and the anchors quoting Dawson’s false assurances over haunting photos of Terry Davenport and Alan Winters looking all of bloody twelve years old.

Even with the wine, she didn’t sleep too well.

Pierce returned to work the next day to more media presence, ongoing druid occupation, and, more promisingly, a message from Doctor Moss to say she was out of the hospital. Pierce arranged to meet the lecturer at her house, and snagged Dawson to take with her, both to keep him out of trouble and because he was the only one who’d actually heard what their informant had said about the ritual.

Moss was the same woman that she’d met with just days ago, but now somehow she looked her age. Even in home surroundings she was just as well turned out, blouse and skirt and suit jacket and hosiery
et al
, but in place of her previous energetic presence she seemed almost dwarfed by the armchair that she sat in. She looked pale, blue veins visible through the skin, and she still had a wound dressing taped to her forehead.

But though her movements seemed faintly shaky as she stirred sugar into her tea—served from a dedicated sugar bowl, into delicate china cups with matching saucers—the lecturer’s voice was as strong as ever.

“First I should thank you, Chief Inspector, for your help the other night,” she said. “I’m told that thanks to your actions the fire damage was minor, and mostly confined to the—frankly, dreadful—carpet. I shudder to think what would have been lost if the books in there had been allowed to burn.”

Her own life, for a start, which would have weighed on Pierce more than academic knowledge, no matter how irreplaceable. “I can only apologise for having put your life in danger in the first place,” she said. “If we’d had any idea that there would be an element of risk involved, we would never have brought you in on the case.”

“Nonsense,” Moss said briskly, breaking a wafer biscuit in half to consume it in delicate bites. “People don’t try to murder you over things that aren’t important.” Pierce’s police experience argued it was often otherwise, but she let the overall point stand. “If it matters that much, you need an expert, and I flatter myself enough to be fairly assured I’m as much of one as you can hope to find.”

“So can you tell us what the ritual’s all about?” Dawson said, sitting forward. He looked distinctly out of place perched on one of Moss’s Queen Anne chairs, like a bulldog pressed into taking part in a child’s tea party.

Moss smiled smoothly, unfazed by the bluntness. “I can’t give you particulars,” she said. “I
can
tell you that the site you documented will be the first of three.”

“Definitely three?” Pierce exchanged a glance with Dawson. They’d found two, and suffered for it both times. The idea that there was a third out there, as yet undiscovered...

Moss nodded over her cup. “Potentially nine, but yes, given the scale of the operations involved, I think most likely three. Magical patterns create amplification. ‘As I was going to Saint Ives, I met a man with seven wives, and every wife had seven sacks...’ There will be three sets of three skulls, and you can expect the arrangement to mimic the placement of the skulls.”

“So we’re looking at an equilateral triangle,” Pierce said. That should narrow their search down at least, to two locations either side of the line formed by the first two. But given that they’d been lethally overstretched covering only one, the prospect of that search was far from simple.

“Yes, almost certainly,” Moss said.

“We spoke to someone involved in setting up the sites,” Dawson said. Leaving out the fact said informant had died a gory death moments later, but Pierce couldn’t really blame him for that omission. “He said that the skulls were a lure. Holding low level spirits as bait.”

“Oh.” Moss’s eyes widened behind her glasses. “Ohhh... Yes, that would make a lot of sense. Demonic chum. Oh, that’s
clever
,” she said, almost admiringly. “The big demons are... deep, you see? Very far from this world, on whatever plane you postulate they actually exist. The ocean analogy works well enough: the really big beasties, the leviathans, you don’t find them hanging around a few inches under the surface. It takes a
massive
amount of power to raise a major demon, but if you can lure it close to the barrier between worlds of its own accord...”

“Less massive?” Dawson guessed.

Her gaze snapped back to sharpness from the reverie she’d drifted into. “Less, in the sense that it’s easier to pick up a bus than an aircraft carrier,” she said. “It’s still going to take an awful lot of work.”

“Sacrifices?” Pierce presumed. Beyond a certain level of trivial enchantments, there wasn’t much that could power magic besides pain and death.

“Human, fresh, and many,” Moss told her in clipped tones. She set her cup and saucer down and stood up from her chair. “Let me consult my books for a while and get back to you,” she said. “I might be able to tell you more about what kind of summoning we’re dealing with. But I’m warning you now—whatever this is, it’s vital that it’s stopped before it happens. This
won’t
be the kind of genie you can put back in the bottle.”

“L
OOK, WE NEED
to work together on this one,” Pierce said, as she and Dawson drove back to the station. “I can’t have you running off half-cocked and doing your own thing on a case as big as this.” Preferably not on any case, but time to pick her battles. “We have to coordinate. I know you’ve been used to running the department on your own for the last couple of months, but now that I’m back, you need to clear what you’re doing with me.”

“Red tape’s going to get people killed,” Dawson said. “This thing is big and it’s dangerous, and we don’t have time to fart around crossing every ‘t’ on the paperwork.”

“What we
don’t
have time to do is bugger about, acting at cross purposes,” Pierce said sharply. “From now on, everything related to this case, you clear with me. And at the very least, take backup, even if you have to borrow some uniforms to do it. These Red Key people have proved that they’re not hesitant to kill.”

“And they have at least one shapeshifter on their team,” Dawson said, sliding the subject away from his own behaviour. He took his gaze off the road momentarily to glance sideways at her. “Any relation to your last case?”