Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (5 page)

As it was, Bowers seemed to have built up a head of steam of his own. “Some bloke with no police credentials just showed up at the gate saying that you called him in,” he said with a glower. “Who is he? Is he one of your lot? If you want us playing rent-a-guard while your people ponce about, the least you could do is keep us bloody informed.”

“Outside consultant,” Dawson said. “I called him in to perform a ritual for us.”

“He’s cleared for RCU work,” Pierce put in, and hoped Dawson wasn’t making her a liar. He must have had this bloke vetted before using him at scenes, surely.

“Oh, is he, now?” Bowers was not appeased. “Well, maybe your work involves farting about doing rituals, but we have actual police work to get done. Forensics have done their job, or as much of it as you’ll actually let them do, so how long before we can remove the skulls? We can’t keep this place cordoned off for you all day.”

“That depends on the outcome,” Dawson said, looking past Bowers to where DC Taylor was approaching, accompanied by a tall, cadaverously thin gent with a dark Van Dyke who was carrying a duffle bag. He wore a suit jacket over a black T-shirt with a pentagram design, and small round glasses with yellow lenses.

Pierce could have picked him out as the necromancer in a crowd without even being told she was looking for one. She doubted he could do anything except make matters worse, but she couldn’t send him away now without making the RCU look like they didn’t know their arses from their elbows.

Not that they had much credit to lose with Bowers on that front. He looked as if he was about to burst a blood vessel as Dawson strode off without a backwards glance to hail the new arrival.

“Mr Vyner! Thanks for getting here so quickly.” So her DI
did
have manners, he just didn’t think the local police they had to work with day-in, day-out merited them. Bloody wonderful.

She could sympathise with Bowers’ visible headache, but she doubted he’d appreciate the commiseration. “’Scuse me,” she said politely, more to stick it to Dawson than out of any hope of papering over the damage he’d already done, and went to join her subordinates with Vyner. She just hoped that this alleged necromancer could manage some sort of performance that wouldn’t leave all them looking like idiots.

The necromancer had a soft, dry voice that was made for snooker commentary, and a penchant for stroking his beard as he listened. “Hmm, yes, I see, I see,” he was saying as Dawson outlined the situation. “And these skulls haven’t been moved from their resting place?”

“Excavated by police forensic specialists,” Dawson assured him. “They’re very careful not to disturb anything from its original position.”

“Excellent, excellent.” Vyner nodded. “An unquiet spirit builds a connection to the soil in which it’s interred; the raising will be easier if the bones are still in place.”

Constable Taylor looked like he was drinking this all in, but Pierce preferred to talk practicalities. “So what’s the plan?” she asked bluntly. “What can you do, and what do you need to do it?”

Vyner turned to face her, eyes rendered uncomfortably unreadable behind the tinted lenses of his glasses. He had the kind of calm composure that
could
indicate confidence—or just a plain old con.

“If the soul died in pain or spiritual distress, then I should be able to call it forth and command it to speak,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee it will have any story to tell. Spirits are no more than lingering impressions, the psychic stain left behind by the victim’s final memories. They fixate, and rarely retain enough self to offer more than one or two repetitive thoughts.”

Genuine and smart enough not to promise too much, or covering for the fact his so-called ritual wouldn’t do a damn thing?

“We’ll start with this one,” Dawson said, leading the way to the first skull they’d uncovered, out in the open.

They stood and watched with varying degrees of scepticism as Vyner made his preparations. He laid out a carefully measured ritual circle around the excavation using poured salt and powders, then drove metal stakes into the ground at points around the circle, joining them together with taut strings. He set out various items on a cloth beside him—a knife, a set of brass scales, a mirror—and planted seven blood red candles around the circle. All the way through, he kept up a low chanting under his breath, the rhythmic words indistinguishable.

At last, when he was satisfied, he sat back on his heels. “If I could have silence, please?” he said. “Everyone, be careful not to come too close to the circle—it’s vital that the line remain unbroken.”

Vyner struck a match and raised it to light the first of the candles. “Spirit, I call to thee,” he said, the low words loud in the thick silence. The flame leapt high, burning a deep indigo blue, and the stench of sulphur filled the air. “Spirit, I call.” He lit the second candle, bathing his face in blue light. The atmosphere seemed to chill and the field become darker; Pierce looked up at the sky, but the sun still squinted out between the hazy clouds just as brightly as before. Somehow it seemed to be further away.

“I call to thee,” Vyner repeated as he lit the third candle. The dark smoke rising from the candles filled the air above the excavation with a haze, and his voice now sounded hoarse. “I call to thee.” The fourth candle. The world beyond their little knot of observers around the circle had receded, sounds hushed, the wind calming into stillness, though she could see tree branches moving on the other side of the field.

He lit the fifth candle. “I call to thee.” The sixth. “I call.” At the lighting of the seventh, his voice rose abruptly into a booming roar. “Answer the call!”

The atmosphere sizzled and cracked, like a lightning strike without the flash and bang. Pierce felt her ears pop, and the short hairs at the back of her neck rose, as much from static as the rippling chill. They all held their breath as the candle flames died back down, and the smoke over the excavation slowly drifted away to reveal...

Nothing.

The long moment of waiting began to tip over from tense into awkward.

Bowers was the first to break the silence. “That it, then?” he said, folding his arms. “Well, if you’ve quite finished arsing about, I’m going to—”

Vyner snatched up a bone-handled knife from his kit and threw himself forward, face contorted in an animal snarl as he lunged towards Bowers.

CHAPTER FOUR

T
HE NECROMANCER MOVED
too fast for anybody to react, slamming into Bowers and sending the DI staggering backwards. Vyner’s spindly limbs were flailing in a frenzy, the knife he clutched in one hand already half forgotten as he tried to attack with his whole body at once. He was snapping his teeth, kicking, clawing, trying to headbutt... It was as if he was too crazed to try to think.

As if he wasn’t the one doing the thinking.

“He’s a fucking psycho!” Bowers choked out, trying to ward off the flurry of attacks. He didn’t have a stab vest; he was a detective visiting a potential body dump, not a uniformed officer expecting trouble on the beat.

Dawson was equally defenceless as he grabbed at Vyner around the middle, trying to haul him off the other man and getting the back of Vyner’s head to his jaw for his trouble. One lucky swipe of that wildly swinging blade, and there’d be arterial blood flying. Pierce could see uniform officers running to join them, but they were too far off, and they didn’t know what they were dealing with.

She had no more bloody clue than they did, but she had enough of one to realise there was more at work than an aggressive nutter.

“Taylor, get that knife off of him!” she barked, lunging for Vyner’s kit. Think, think—if he’d raised something he hadn’t meant to, how did she put it down? She scrabbled through the contents of the duffle bag, upending it: books, books, jars, candles, nothing fucking labelled, fucking
idiot
—

A yell of pain split the air, and she looked up to see Bowers clutching at his ragged suit sleeve, gushing blood welling beneath his hand. Dawson’s attempt to tear Vyner away from him sent all three men staggering through the tangle of pegged strings and down into the excavation pit, scattering the salt and powder lines and kicking candles everywhere.

Taylor scrambled after them, lunging for Vyner’s waving knife hand but jerking back as the blade swung towards his face. As Dawson grabbed to try and restrain Vyner’s snapping teeth, his hand knocked the necromancer’s glasses away. Pierce glimpsed the eyes behind, narrowed with rage, and red as clotted blood from edge to edge.

She doubted they were coloured contact lenses.

“Shit!” Scrabbling more frantically through the detritus of the dumped out duffle bag, Pierce tried to find anything that might help reverse a possession. Why hadn’t Vyner taken some kind of—

Or maybe he
had
taken precautions. Cursing herself for an idiot, she abandoned the duffle and ran back to the remnants of the ritual. If he’d had anything on him to deal with things going bad, he would have kept it close to hand, not shoved at the bottom of a bag.

As she reached the crumbling edge of the excavated hole, Vyner tore free from the three men trying to hold him. He sighted her, and snarled like a beast catching a new scent, blood red eyes glaring over the yellow lenses of his lopsided glasses.

Tinted
glasses. Who wore bloody tinted shades on grey days in December?

Someone who was trying to avoid meeting people’s eyes. Snippets of questionable magical trivia she’d picked up over the years flashed through Pierce’s mind: mesmerising gazes that had to be avoided, turning power back with a reflection. And one of the things that Vyner had laid out for the ritual had been a silver folding mirror...

As he came lunging at her, Pierce cast around for the case on the ground. A glint of silver there on the grass—Fuck! She jerked back as Vyner’s clawing fingers raked at her face. Almost too bloody fast to evade—his moves were simian, fluid and flexible beyond the limits of a body that looked like it spent most of its time shut indoors in dark rooms.

Pierce was no spring chicken herself, and weeks of medical leave with the use of only one arm hadn’t lent itself to building up her fitness. She tried to duck away, but Vyner’s next swinging blow still clipped the side of her head, sending her reeling. As she staggered, dizzied, across the uneven ground, her foot came down on a candle. It rolled under her shoe, and she lost her balance and put her hand out to stop herself from falling, pain jarring through her still-healing shoulder.

Mostly desk work, she’d told the doctor who’d approved her return to work. A little bit of walking around. Not the DCI’s job to grapple with suspects.

She’d barely straightened up before Vyner slammed into her, gnashing teeth just missing her ear. She shoved him back with her good arm and ducked under the next swipe, scrambling past him at a crouching run. As she reached out to snatch the mirror case up from the grass, a brutal kick to her back sent her sprawling to the ground. She rolled over to see Vyner looming over her, red eyes wild and teeth bared, the knife in his hand.

As he lunged at her with the blade, Pierce opened up the two halves of the mirror and shoved it into his face.

Vyner froze, the knife dropping from suddenly loose fingers. Neutralised, or only temporarily distracted? There was no way to be sure.

“Cuff him!” she bellowed from her position on the ground. “Silver cuffs!” And prayed that Dawson or Taylor had their RCU-issue cuffs with them, because, fuckety fuck, she hadn’t yet picked up replacements for the pair she’d lost on the shapeshifter case.

Above her Vyner quivered, and she wondered, tension tightening her chest, if there was any hope she could kick him away before he fell on her...

And then Dawson and Taylor were there, wrestling his hands behind his back and hauling him away. As Taylor closed the first silver cuff around his wrist, Vyner let out a howl—not a human sound of rage or pain, but an ululating shriek that clawed along her nerves like fingernails. His head snapped back, and Pierce could see blood pouring from his nose and weeping from the corners of his eyes.

“Get that salt container over there,” she ordered Taylor as she struggled up. “Make a circle round him.” It might not do a damn thing, but when it came to magical threats, you threw everything but the kitchen sink and hoped you weren’t making things worse.