Under the Skin

by E. E. Richardson

  Hence, the station’s Sympathetic Magic department was pretty small. About five foot one, in fact, and commonly known by the name of Jenny.

  “Jen!” Pierce leaned in through the door of the small office, made still more cramped by stacks of books and file folders. “Got an analysis job for you.” She held up the evidence bag.

  “Fantastic.” Jennifer Hayes peered out at her through a gap between cardboard boxes, a view that showed little more than a glimpse of her silver-framed glasses and wavy black hair. She gestured vaguely towards the left side of the room. “Put it with the other fifty-seven. I’m sure that I’ll get caught up sometime in the next few decades.”

  “This one’s a priority,” Pierce said, stepping into the room and closing the door behind her. She squeezed her way past a box of ring binders to reach the desk.

  “Aren’t they all?” she said with a wry purse of her lips, but she shoved a stack of books aside to free up some desk space. “All right. What miracles are you expecting me to work for you this time?”

  Pierce set the evidence bag down in front of her. “I need everything you can tell me about this.”

  She peered at the bag, for a moment more intrigued by the lack of labelling than the dark hair within. “Ooh, unmarked evidence.” She looked up with a slight smirk. “What am I doing, hunting down your ex?”

  “I don’t know when you think I had the time for one of those,” she said. If police work ate into your private life, then working for the RCU swallowed it whole and crunched up the bones. They were writing the book as they went along; so much about magic was still undocumented and poorly understood.

  “You’re telling me field investigation isn’t the glamorous rock star lifestyle that I’ve been dreaming of so long?” Jenny grinned, then bit her lip. “Sorry, I suppose that was poor taste,” she said, clearly thinking of the events of the night before. “Any word on how Sally’s doing?”

  “She’s stable.” A term that ought to be reassuring, but only served as a dark reminder of how close it had come. “Still waiting to hear from Leo Grey about the Firearms Officer who was hurt.”

  “Nasty business all round,” she said soberly. She studied the hair in its evidence packet. “This is from that?”

  “Hair from the shapeshifter’s pelt,” Pierce told her. “All that we’ve got left. Some goons claiming to be the ‘Counter Terror Action Team’ took over our case, seized all the evidence, and managed to give the suspect that we had in custody a chance to off himself while they were at it. Officially, it’s no longer our business.”

  “Officially,” Jenny echoed, and gave her a knowing look. She took a deep breath and pushed her chair back to stand. “Well,” she said, regarding the unmarked bag. “Obviously, the chain of evidence has been compromised here, so there’s no point passing this on to the officers handling the case.”

  “None at all,” she agreed.

  “So, since it doesn’t need to be retained, I could always use it to test a new divination process I’ve been trying to refine.” She slid a sidelong look towards Pierce. “Of course, I’d need somebody from the department to follow up on the results and verify the findings are correct...”

  “Well, if it’s for the cause of advancing our knowledge of magical forensics...” She spread her hands.

  “Absolutely.” Jenny led the way down to the ritual lab in the basement.

  Unlike the cluttered workstations filling most of the offices, the small square table in the centre of this room stood bare. Etched into the concrete floor around it was a ritual circle, bounded by concentric rings of symbols. On the ceiling above was painted an exact duplicate. Containment circles, there to trap anything that might be raised here; Pierce was careful to stay well outside the bounds.

  An industrial refrigerator hummed away to itself in the furthest corner of the room. Beside it stood a row of fireproof cabinets. Jenny fished a key out of her pocket to unlock the leftmost, rooting briefly through shelves of labelled boxes and plastic bags. “Ah, here we go,” she said as she retrieved a cloth-wrapped bundle.

  She tugged the cloth aside to reveal a crudely made bowl on a metal stand. Oval-shaped and fitted with a metal rim, the polished but uneven surface was the colour of ivory... or bone.

  “Is that a skull?” Pierce said, raising her eyebrows.

  “Yep.” Jenny gave an impish grin as she held it up beside her own head to illustrate the angle at which the skull had been sliced. “Brains not included, I’m afraid, but he does have mystical powers of divination to make up for it. And don’t worry—whoever he was, he’s a couple of hundred years outside your jurisdiction.” She turned the bowl over so Pierce could see the symbols painted inside. “This is a Magnus bowl.”

  “How does it work?”

  Jenny grinned wider as she set the bowl down on the table. “Ah,” she said, raising a finger as she moved to the refrigerator. “That’s where the goat blood comes in.”

  “Always reassuring words,” Pierce noted as Jenny came back to the table with a beaker of thick red fluid. She set it down next to the bowl, then retrieved a wax candle and a ritual knife from a drawer.

  “Right, now, I wasn’t kidding about this being an experiment,” she said. “We’ve tried this with hairs from live humans, but where fur from an enchanted shapeshifting pelt fits in, God only knows. Assuming that it’s viable at all, our best bet is probably divining something that’s a common truth for both panther and man. Location of their home, for instance.”

  “That’d do me.”

  “Okay. So, I’m going to carve what is hopefully the right symbol for home into this candle...”—she made a few precise incisions with the knife—“and then add the magic focus...” She made a deeper slit in the base of the candle and carefully inserted the hair. Then she stood it up in the middle of the skull bowl, and poured blood in around it. “All right,” she said, and took a slow, deep breath. “The next step is to light the candle.” Her eyes flicked to Pierce. “This might be a good time to mention that if this spell interacts badly with the one on the pelt, it could well blow our heads off.”

  “Good to know,” she said wryly, but made no move to leave.

  Jenny fetched a box of matches from the drawer, then shuffled back to arm’s-length distance from the table. “Well, here goes.” She lit a match and stretched forward to touch it to the candle.

  The wick went up as if it had been soaked in lighter fuel. Jenny yelped and scrambled backwards as the candle flame leapt high, burning a dark, vivid red that filled the space with shadows. The wax melted like butter, shrinking rapidly, while the atmosphere inside the closed room grew heavy and greasy. As the sinking flame drew level with the blood filling the bowl, it flashed into a hissing cloud of steam. Pierce flinched back, shielding her eyes from the scalding red mist that boiled outwards.

  When she lowered her arm a fraction later, the steam had faded and the candle burned out, leaving behind a nauseating smell like burning flesh. The thick tension that filled the air gradually leaked away.

  Beside the table, Jenny rose from her defensive crouch, and let her breath out in a sheepish huff. “Well,” she said, half to herself, “let’s see what that did.”

  Moving closer, Pierce saw that the inside of the skull bowl was caked with sticky black clots of dried blood. Random splashes, to her eyes, but Jenny seemed quite satisfied as she hauled over a big book from on top of a cabinet. She paged through the long lists of symbols inside, occasionally pausing to jot one on a notepad.

  “Right,” she said, after a good deal of rifling back and forth. “Amazingly, I might actually have something for you.” She indicated a blood splatter at the centre of the bowl, a crescent moon shape with a cluster of dots. “That’s definitely a number—twenty-two, I think. It could be thirty-two.” She moved her pen to point at to another misshapen blotch. “And this one I know for sure: that’s the symbol for ‘path’ or ‘way.’”

  “So it’s Twenty-Two Something Way?” That sounded promising. />
  Jenny raised a hand in a half shrug. “Could be ‘Way.’ Could be ‘Road,’ could be ‘Street.’ It’s not an exact translation.” She tapped two other clusters of blood spots with her pen. “Which is what makes this part tricky to decipher. So far as I can tell, these are the symbols for ‘antlers’ and ‘wood.’ Wood as in planks of, not a forest.”

  Pierce mulled that over. “Antler-timber.” Not the most common street name, she had to admit. What else could antlers stand for? Deer. Stags. Reindeer. Horns. Hornwood? Horntree? She had it. “Hornbeam!” she said aloud. “Twenty-Two Hornbeam Way?”

  “You should do cryptic crosswords,” Jenny said.

  “Ha. I prefer my clues to end with arrests and convictions.” She was already heading for the door. “Thanks, Jen,” she said.

  “I did nothing, I saw nothing, I was never here,” Jenny called after her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A LITTLE SLEUTHING turned up the most likely match to the partial address, and Pierce left Deepan in charge of the rest of their caseload while she drove over to check it out.

  It proved to be an ordinary residential street, narrow semi-detached houses with small gardens out front. Number Twenty-Two was no different to any of its neighbours, no obvious signs of neglect or suspicious activity to draw attention. There was a car on the drive in front of the garage; bog standard silver Ford, neither new enough nor old enough to be distinctive.

  The curtains were closed. Either someone inside didn’t want to be seen, or nobody had been home since they’d arrested the shifter.

  It was a big house for a single man living alone. Maybe there was an ex? She’d have to ask the neighbours. Considering she was no longer officially on the case, it could be tricky to find an excuse to get inside the house. But there might be someone on the street who’d seen something of use. If the shifter’s car was still here, then he must have got a lift, or else he owned a second vehicle. The white van at the barn? Maybe she could get a registration.

  Pierce drove on past the house and parked further up the street. No need to betray her interest in the house too soon. One advantage of coming alone was that no one suspected a middle-aged woman in a suit of being police.

  It could quickly turn into a disadvantage if someone was lurking behind those curtains. It was a chill October day during normal working hours, and the street appeared entirely deserted. The odds of someone coming to her aid if she called for help were on the anorexic side of slim.

  Best not to get in any trouble, then.

  She strolled past the front hedge, taking a casual glance up at the windows. Not enough gap round the edges of the curtains to be able to steal a peek. The narrow windows in the door were smoked glass, revealing no more than a useless blur. Pierce pressed the bell, and listened to it buzz faintly inside. No sign of movement.

  A second attempt proved just as fruitless. She peered in through the letterbox. There was nothing to see except the foot of the stairs.

  Balls. Time to try the neighbours, then.

  No one answered the door at the houses to either side, but the old lady opposite proved to be a goldmine—and not just because she offered tea and biscuits.

  “Oh, yes, that’s Joe and Lisa’s house,” she said, as she settled down in her armchair with a creak of bones that made Pierce wince in sympathy. “Well, I say Joe and Lisa’s. I think Lisa might have moved out, but I could be wrong.”

  “Oh?” Pierce cocked her head in encouragement as she eyed up a custard cream. There wasn’t much need to employ interrogation skills; the woman was clearly delighted to have a chance to chat.

  “That’s her car, you see, out there on the driveway,” she said. “Joe has his own—well, it’s more of a van, really, I suppose.”

  “Do you know the make and registration?” She reached for her notebook, not all that hopeful.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, love.” The old woman shook her head. “I’ve never been much of a car person. It’s a white van, but that’s all that I can tell you.” The teaspoon clinked in her cup as she stirred it reflectively. “I think he’s a builder or a plumber, something like that—Lisa was always a bit vague. She was the one that I usually spoke to; Joe always kept himself to himself, you know the type.”

  “But it’s been a while since you last saw Lisa?” Pierce pressed her.

  “Well, now I come to think of it, it must be a couple of months.” The old woman frowned over her cup and saucer. “I asked Joe—I thought she might be ill, you see, or maybe her car was broken down, with it just sitting on the driveway all the time. He told me she’d moved out, but, well, she’s done that before, you know.” She arched her eyebrows meaningfully. “They were always fighting—not that it’s any of my business, of course. I thought she’d be back within the week, but perhaps this time she’s thrown him over for good.” She took a thoughtful sip of tea and frowned again. “Funny that she wouldn’t take her car, though.”

  “Funny,” Pierce agreed with a tight smile.

  IT WOULD BE pushing it to claim she believed that lives were in imminent danger, but Pierce thought she’d learned enough to justify poking about. It wasn’t impossible to think Lisa could be a prisoner, and if so her captor wouldn’t be coming back. She’d be neglecting her duty if she didn’t at least take a closer look.

  A little investigating proved that the gate at the side of the house was only held closed by a bolt, easily jiggled loose. Pierce rounded the building, warily alert. It felt like an empty house, but even in more mundane police work it was a bad idea to trust appearances. Jumping at shadows was a small price to pay to avoid shadows jumping at you.

  The house’s small back garden was more overgrown than the front, but offered nowhere for a criminal to hide. A magpie watched her passing with a suspicious eye, but she was pretty sure shapeshifters couldn’t shrink that small. The skinbinder’s eagle wings made him a man-sized bird: not exactly inconspicuous in daylight. He’d need somewhere to hole up for the day in human form.

  Was this the place?

  The house had patio doors, unsurprisingly locked. Pierce looked in on the empty living room. Nothing of note to be seen, except for the fact that the three piece suite had been pushed to the wall as if to clear more floor space. The carpet looked rucked up, and she itched to be inside where she could lift it up to check for evidence, whether criminal or ritual.

  No warrant: no such luck. She moved on towards the rear of the attached garage instead. There was a back door, and she halted as she saw that it wasn’t completely shut; it had been pushed to, but wasn’t quite flush with the edge of the frame.

  Just a door swollen by damp that wouldn’t close—or was someone still inside?

  Her hand went to the malodorant spray fixed to her belt. Wouldn’t work so well on humans as on more sensitive noses, but it was still a vile stink that ought to shock anybody enough to give her time to run and call for backup.

  She should call for it right now, but she was hesitant to do it, unwilling to blow her cover before she knew that somebody was there.

  Exactly the kind of reasoning that got officers killed. Pierce guessed it was good she was old and wise enough to recognise the stupidity of the move—right before she went ahead and did it anyway. She unclipped the spray from her belt, holding it in her pocket ready to whip out. Then she took hold of the doorknob. The door was stiff in the frame, scraping along the ground with a rasp that ruined her efforts at stealth.

  Inside, the garage was musty, and dark aside from the light that followed her in through the door. She fished for the penlight that she had attached to her keys, wishing she’d stopped to grab her full-sized police torch from the car. If she hadn’t been kicked off the case, she wouldn’t need to be sneaking around without proper backup or equipment.

  The penlight’s narrow beam did little to illuminate the space, only highlighting isolated spots as she flicked it around. Workbenches, tools hanging up on the walls; this garage was clearly never used to store a car. It was crammed with old pi
eces of furniture and garden tools that filled the space with odd-shaped shadows.

  Pierce edged her way in past a rusty, grass-stained lawnmower, moving a folding chair out of her way. The garage smelled faintly of petrol, and under that another, subtler scent that raised her hackles. A rolled tarpaulin lay to one side, and she unfurled the plastic sheet as well as she could in the tight space. Dark streaks and drip stains marred the wrinkled fabric. Oil? She knelt down on the concrete to shine the torch beam closer.

  Not oil. Even by the penlight’s feeble glow she could see the faint reddish tint to the stains. Blood—but was it human or animal?

  A clunk and creak from the front of the garage made her whirl, and she saw the door starting to rise. The sunlight that poured in beneath was blinding, and she squinted to make out the figure silhouetted outside as she fumbled to pull the spray out from her pocket.

  Before she could bark out a warning, the man in the doorway spoke. “DCI Pierce.” She recognised the cool, calm voice at once. “Perhaps you didn’t fully understand my meaning when I told you that your team was off the case.”

  MAITLAND MIGHT HAVE caught her red-handed, but Pierce was pretty sure he was in no hurry to start disciplinary proceedings. Whatever his mysterious little group were up to, she doubted they could spare the time or stand the added scrutiny.

  So she stonewalled to the best of her ability. “I received a tip linking a shapeshifter to this address,” she said. Perfectly true, as was the fact she’d promised to protect her source; no need to delve into the details further. “Unauthorised shapeshifting falls under our jurisdiction.”

  Maitland gave a pleasant smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Of course. Nonetheless, given that you knew my team was working on a similar case in the local area, it might have been wiser to keep us informed.”

  “It was an unreliable tip,” she said. “Might easily have been nothing.” She hadn’t risen through the ranks to DCI without mastering the art of obfuscating without lies.