Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (28 page)

Doctor Moss paused. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear. I think there may have been a bit of a misunderstanding. You see, the date of the twenty-second of December is not meaningful in itself—it’s simply the fact that the winter solstice often fell that day in past years. This year, however, I’m afraid the moment of solstice occurs on the twenty-
first
—the ritual will be at eleven o’clock tonight.”

Pierce closed her eyes. “Wonderful,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

P
IERCE CHECKED IN
with the two searches again. Still no results. She studied the map of the region pinned up in the office, looking for inspiration. Too many potential sites, too much ground to cover... She could tell the local forces to keep an eye out, but she had no concrete information to give them, and as many officers as could be spared were already committed to helping her teams around Oakworth and Ilkley.

With Freeman out of the office on useless busy-work, the RCU couldn’t respond to any other cases. Pierce was pointlessly cooling her heels, currently stymied on the demon summoning but unable to commit to anything else while she was waiting for news to come in. She paced, checked her messages, ate an early lunch that sat uncomfortably in her stomach; time was ticking away both too quickly and too slowly. Knowing it was futile pushing but unable to prevent it, she phoned Doctor Moss to see if she’d made any progress yet.

“I’m just about to head back to my office at the university,” Doctor Moss told her. “I’m told I should be able to get back in there now, and there are materials there that might be of some use, if they’ve survived.”

“I’ll join you there,” Pierce said. Probably nothing more useful she could do at the university than here, but at least keeping moving gave her the illusion of accomplishing something. And while she didn’t have a background in demonology, she’d picked up enough snippets over the years that she might be of some limited help in flicking through the books to narrow down what they were looking for. Time was of the essence.

She resisted the urge to annoy her team by checking in on their progress again, and headed out to the car park. The druid vans were still there. She went and rapped on the window of the VW bus again. “Thought we gave you lot instructions to clear out? Your chief said you’d be gone.”

She wasn’t sure if the tousled head that popped up was the same druid that she’d spoken to before or a different one. They were all much of a muchness: young, drippy student types interspersed with aging ones with too much hair who could have been rock band roadies.

“We’re leaving, but there are important rituals of consecration we need to perform first,” the woman told her. “And Damon and Kelly have gone to buy us lunch.”

“Fine,” she said. “But get a move on. The superintendent’s not going to be happy if you’re still here by the afternoon.” He probably wasn’t happy that they were still here now, but that didn’t have to be her problem for a while.

Pierce drove back to the university. The place was relatively quiet on a Sunday morning this close to Christmas, most of the students presumably gone home for the holidays by now. The Occult Studies building showed little sign of the events of earlier in the week, aside from the churned up tracks left in the mud outside by the emergency vehicles. Doctor Moss’s office still stunk of burned carpet, but the fire damage didn’t seem to be too extensive.

“Anything lost?” Pierce asked, standing in the doorway to watch as Moss flicked through a stack of books on the back shelf. The lecturer had exchanged her smart clothes of earlier for sensible boots and trousers and a sleeveless khaki jacket with many pockets, the sort of thing somebody might wear on a fishing trip.

“Nothing irreplaceable,” she said. “Though the exposure to the smoke won’t have done the books in here much good.” She nodded at the closed cabinet at the rear of the room. “Fortunately, we keep most of the truly nasty grimoires locked away from curious students as a matter of course, so they should have escaped the worst of the harm.” She let the cover of the book she was perusing fall closed, and laid her hand on top of the stack. “I think I have everything I need here,” she said. “Let me just get a few things from down in the labs.”

“You perform rituals here?” Pierce said, raising her eyebrows as they left the room. That sounded like a recipe for disaster if ever she’d heard one.

Moss gave her a wry smile. “Not summonings, no. Nor do we teach the students the specifics of how to perform them, even theoretically. But we do teach the basic principles of ritual geometry, so that when they’re inevitably foolish enough to try it anyway, there’s at least a better chance they’ll have made a good protective seal around the area.”

She led the way through to a lift, pressing the button for the basement level. “Now, most of what we keep down here is for undergraduate students to practise with,” she said, “so obviously it’s of limited usefulness against this magnitude of threat. However, we do keep a few other supplies on hand in case of greater magical disaster.”

“That happen often?” Pierce asked her.

“Well, we did have one young idiot almost burn his face off trying to raise some kind of fire spirit,” Doctor Moss said. “We were just lucky he did it down here in the lab where there are protections worked into the floor, or he could have set the whole campus ablaze. That was back in the ’eighties, though,” she added. “Can’t say our newer batches of students are any wiser, but the safety rules are certainly stricter.”

“None of your former students spring to mind as a possible candidate for this demon-raising, then?” Pierce asked her.

“Few of my former students spring to mind as great candidates for anything that required that much effort, frankly,” she said. “And the ones that
were
hardworking were also correspondingly sensible.” She shook her head. “I find it hard to believe that any of them could be involved in something as malevolent as this... but then again, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would be, isn’t it?”

Pierce could think of any number of possible reasons, with simple callous self-interest right up there at the top of the list. It came to something, she supposed, when your job gave you a darker outlook on humanity than a lecturer in demonology.

The lift reached the bottom level, opening onto a dim basement corridor with several adjoining doors. As the lift closed behind them and it began to rattle its way back up, Pierce thought she heard a thump somewhere above them, like one of the building’s heavy fire doors falling closed.

“Anyone else in the building today?” she asked, instincts going on the alert.

“One of my PhD students, possibly?” Doctor Moss said, raising her voice before Pierce could caution her not to. “Yasmin, is that you?”

No response. Just silence, and then another not-quite sound: maybe the soft click of heels on tiles or coins in someone’s pocket, maybe just pipes down here in the basement making noises. Pierce drew a breath around the solid weight of tension in her chest and turned back towards Doctor Moss. “Right,” she said.

And then the lights went out.

“Shit!” She spun back, grabbing for the police torch that she wasn’t carrying. Double shit. Penlight—she fumbled for her keys and the feeble little keyfob torch that still beat groping in the dark. Even as she yanked them out, cursing the betraying jingle, there was the small flare of a cigarette lighter in the dark beside her.

“Is that the fuse?” Moss said, looking up at the ceiling.

“If it was, it didn’t blow by chance.” Pierce moved in front of her, protective in the face of a threat that could be coming from any direction. She glanced towards the lift: a risky choice of an escape route—and a useless one. The dull glow of the floor indicator had gone out. Fuck. “Where are the stairs?” she asked urgently.

“This way.” Moss waved vaguely off to their left, taking a step in that direction.

Pierce grabbed her wrist to halt her. “Stay by me.” She flicked the narrow beam of the penlight around the walls. Closed lift doors. Closed and card-locked lab room on the opposite side. No one along the corridor behind or ahead.

She still didn’t relax.

“All right,” she said slowly, taking a few steps ahead of Moss towards the stairs. “Let’s just get out of this basement and check the building’s clear.” She fumbled her phone out of her pocket. The bright glow of the screen was a relief, the lack of reception far less so. Police radio likely wouldn’t be much better down here in the concrete basement even if she hadn’t left it in the car. The same protections needed to keep rituals contained left the two of them cut off from any kind of help.

Pierce paced along the corridor, Doctor Moss close behind; both of them had fallen silent, but she could hear the older woman’s breathing in the hush. Not too panicked yet, Pierce didn’t think, but if they had to run, could she do it?

And down here, where the hell would they run
to
?

She took another few steps, passing the door to the lab on the corner. The tiny red light on the card lock was still on, at least—maybe it was just the overhead lights and the lift that were out.

That didn’t exactly make her feel much better. A targeted power outage boded even less well than a total blackout. Pierce flicked the tiny torch at the window in the lab door. Couldn’t see much beyond the reflected light, but it looked shadowy and empty.

“This is where the ritual supplies are kept,” Doctor Moss said. “Should we—?”

It wasn’t a sound so much as a moving shadow that made Pierce whirl about, throwing an arm in front of Moss’s chest to shove her back. A dark shape, bursting forward from the shadows on the corner; she hardly had the time to register it at all before the bulk of it slammed into her, animal-smelling and coarse-furred.

“Shapeshifter!” Her attempted shout came out as a pained groan, still loud in the near silence of the basement. The shifter moved with barely a whisper of sound: was it the panther that had killed their informant? She couldn’t see, the faint beam of the penlight lost in the thing’s rough fur as she tried to shove it off of her.

She might as well have been trying to shove a sofa full of people, for all her strength could move it; the thing was solid muscle, and her only saving grace was that it couldn’t snap or slash at her while it held her crushed to the wall. As it twisted around to rectify that, Pierce squirmed away, scrabbling to pull her silver cuffs out; she’d never get them on the thing, but the touch of the metal would hurt it and hopefully drive it back.

“Run!” she yelled to Doctor Moss. She had to be the shifter’s main target. But instead, the lecturer let out a cry and thrust her cigarette lighter into the creature’s face. Transformed human or not, it couldn’t fight animal instinct to flinch away from flame. Pierce glimpsed snarling teeth and golden feline eyes in a dark face.

“Run!” she shouted again as she scrambled towards Moss.

But the lecturer was fumbling with the door behind her; Pierce heard the clunk as the card lock popped open. “In here!” Moss said.

Her sense of tactics rebelled. “We’ll be trapped!” They might be able to barricade the thing out, but for how long? And without any prospect of help on the way...

Moss ignored her, darting inside and holding the door open. The panther was regrouping, muscles bunching up to spring... “Shit!” Pierce dived for the doorway. She barely squeezed through the gap, half crushed by the door’s weight before it sealed with a click after she’d gone through.

Sudden stillness. With the panther momentarily shut out, Pierce sagged and gasped for breath. Her heart was pounding. She turned the penlight on the window in the door, but it was set at human height, too high to show the beast prowling outside.

She turned to Moss. “Is there another way out of the room?”

The lecturer shook her head, looking pale but composed. “We should get the supplies while we’re shut in here,” she said, moving towards the store cupboard at the side.

Pierce could applaud her aplomb, but it wasn’t going to help them much if the shifter broke through the door—or just plain opened it. The previous would-be assassin had managed to hack the locks, and this one had to have got into the building somehow. Their best chance of survival was if the shifter had to revert to human in order to operate the door. One brief window of vulnerability... She shone the torch around the lab, searching for a weapon.