Under the Skin

by E. E. Richardson

  There was always a certain sense of stepping back in time on passing through the stalls to the occult section; leaving behind familiar brands and garish modern logos for strange little stands selling handmade things covered with obscure symbols. A heady mix of scents filled the air: acrid herbs, sweet incense, perfumed oils. She passed stalls stacked with thick leather-bound books, and others loaded with trinkets that claimed to be magic charms.

  Most of the goods were cheap knock-offs and silly New Age nonsense: at best just pointless quackery, at worst actively dangerous to use in a real ritual. None of that was the RCU’s problem. They had their hands full just dealing with genuine artefacts; Trading Standards could handle the rest.

  Occult markets were a con-artist’s paradise, but an experienced eye could pick out the real thing from all the junk. Pierce cast a glance over each seller’s wares as she passed by, alert for anything illegal even if she was formally off-duty.

  A few of the regular stallholders here knew her by name, or at least well enough to share a nod in passing. It was the first place the RCU looked for illegal sales; there weren’t many places outside Leeds and London where the occult markets were big enough for criminals to lose themselves in the crowds.

  The knife stall was a frequent port of call, for all that its sales were above board. Anyone over eighteen could buy a ritual knife; they were rarely used as weapons outside of your average domestic, since those with premeditated murder on their minds had plenty of cheaper stabbing tools to choose from.

  But for ritual preparations, you couldn’t use just any old blade. The materials, the shape, the conditions under which it was made, the symbols worked into the blade and handle... all of them made a difference to the kind of enchantments it could be used for. Anyone with half an inkling of what they were doing would have a very specific set of requirements.

  And that made knives a very fruitful avenue of enquiry. If the seller was willing to cooperate.

  “Our Lady Pierce,” Harry Draper said wryly as she approached his stall. “Come to harass an innocent businessman again?” He was a big burly bear of a man, the kind that even the most opportunistic thief would think twice about trying to wrestle a knife away from. Six foot and change—lots of change—with a beard you could lose a small pet in, he was close to being literally twice her size.

  Pierce wasn’t intimidated. In her experience, it was the scrappy little guys with lots of practice taking punches that were the ones you had to watch for in a fight. “It’s your guilty customers I’m more concerned about,” she said. “I need you to consult your records for me.”

  He cocked his head, unimpressed. “Got a warrant?”

  “Have a heart, Harry,” she said, stepping closer as she saw a girl in a green hoodie pause to give them a curious stare. “I’ve got one officer dead and another badly injured. There was a skinbinder involved, and he left his knife on the scene. Anyone come in today to buy a silver skinning knife?”

  “Not that I recall,” he said, stonewalling maybe just as a matter of principle. She’d heard that Harry had been in trouble with the police back in his youth, a hazard of being the biggest man still conscious at the scene of a few bar fights. Hard to say if he was covering for a customer right now, or yanking her chain purely for the hell of it.

  She pressed on anyway. “Or what about the original knife, do you remember that? A silver skinning knife with a curved blade; would have been sold maybe six months ago to a young man, twenty, twenty-five, with dark hair and rune tattoos on his arms.”

  “I wouldn’t remember that far back,” he said. “Old man like me? The memory goes.”

  He was ten years younger than her if he was a day—but it wasn’t Harry’s reaction that grabbed her attention. The girl in the green hoodie had jerked at the description, more response than she’d given to the talk of crimes and dead police officers. Pierce swung towards her, scenting a possible lead. “You know someone who looks like that?” she asked.

  The girl turned and ran.

  CHAPTER SIX

  FIRST RULE OF police work: when someone runs away from you, run after them. Second rule: don’t be an idiot about it.

  The first part was always easier to manage than the second.

  Pierce was reaching for her radio to call in for backup when she remembered that she was alone and technically off-duty. Balls. She’d better keep up with her suspect.

  The crowds that thronged the market worked against her on that front, shoppers still aimlessly drifting or looking around for the source of the commotion. “Police! Stop!” she yelled, which achieved nothing except wasted breath.

  If the girl had slowed to a walk and shrugged off the green hoodie, she could have disappeared into the crowd without a trace. Luckily she didn’t stop to think but just took off, the clatter of her feet and startled squawks of bystanders betraying her direction. Pierce elbowed her way past gawkers in time to see the girl run through the automatic doors and out onto the street.

  She gave chase, though her chest was starting to burn from the effort. Should have had a healthy lunch instead of the most greasy option—and not just today, either. The girl was pulling ahead, youth and fitness on her side, but her boots weren’t made for running and the awkward bulk of her shoulder bag was slowing her down.

  “Police! Stop!” Pierce yelled again. A lot of bloody good it did. The girl dodged around the bollards at the end of the pedestrian strip and ran out across the road without stopping to look. Pierce winced, anticipating squealing brakes or even worse, but luck carried the girl across the street without disaster.

  A big lorry arrived just as she reached the kerb, but she saw the girl veering right, and kept pace with her on her own side of the road. The line of shoppers at the nearby bus stop gawked at them both; Pierce cut across the road in front of their bus as it pulled up.

  The pavement on the other side curved round a sharp corner where the road merged into another. The girl ran straight across this road as well, this time earning a blare of horns from a swerving driver and the tail of traffic slamming on their brakes behind him.

  On the far side, hoardings closed off a partly demolished building. The girl slung her bag over the top, jammed a foot between the crumbling bricks of the adjacent shop front, and hauled herself up after it. As she stretched up, the sleeve of her baggy hoodie fell back, revealing a ring of runes tattooed around her wrist. Another skinbinder, or at least a wannabe.

  “Shit,” Pierce said with feeling. Now she had even more reason to copy the gymnastics.

  It wasn’t pretty. The last time she’d scrambled over a fence had been back in her uniform days, and she’d put on a lot of years and weight around the middle since then. As she dragged herself clumsily over the top, after several false starts, she hoped no one was videoing this from an angle that would show her face.

  On the other side of the fence was a patch of rubble-filled waste ground, overlooked by the boarded shell of the abandoned building. The girl hadn’t run any further, but stood waiting warily a little further up the slope. Behind her lay a collection of piled wooden boards with symbols chalked and spray-painted all over them. This was clearly a hangout for those who practised the less legal kind of ritual, without the money and resources to keep it behind closed doors.

  There was only one thing more dangerous than stupid kids playing with rituals they didn’t understand—smart kids playing with rituals they almost understood. Pierce eyed the girl, wondering which category she fell under.

  She was a scrawny kid, somewhere between her upper teens and middle twenties. All sharp angles, not enough meat on her bones for proper curves, with sunken cheeks and hair the grubby blonde of a cheap dye job.

  “Who are you?” she asked, watching Pierce with fierce suspicion. “You really police?”

  She reached for her badge. “DCI Pierce, Ritual Crime Unit. How about you? You got a name of your own?”

  She glanced around the site, wary of having been lured into an ambush, but there weren
’t many places to hide. Most of the entrances to the derelict building were boarded up, and on the right-hand side a maze of scaffolding would prevent all but the most determined of efforts to squirm through.

  “Julie,” the girl said tersely, after a lengthy pause spent playing with the drawstrings of her hoodie. Not likely to be her real name, but Pierce had bigger fish to fry than a young would-be skinbinder who might never have done more than talk the talk.

  “You recognised that description that I gave to Harry Draper,” she said, holding the girl’s gaze. “And it meant something, or you wouldn’t have tried to run. Who is he?”

  It was a worthless description really, nothing more distinctive than the mention of tattoos that almost any skinbinder would have. The fact that Julie had run meant she already had someone in mind, someone who she’d found suspicious even before she’d heard a description matching him.

  She gave a defensive shrug. “Look, I don’t even know him. He’s just some bloke who used to hang around here sometimes. I haven’t seen him for months!”

  “You know his name?” she pressed.

  Another sullen shrug. “Sebastian. That’s what he said, anyway. Like I say, I don’t know him. Somebody invited him because he had all these books about skinning and stuff, but nobody really liked him. He was a creep.”

  “He have other friends?” Pierce asked. She tapped her foot when Julie hesitated. “Look, this guy’s not your friend, so what do you care? Just tell me what you know, and I’ll get out of your hair. I’m not interested in what you and your mates get up to.” Not right now, anyway.

  “He didn’t have friends,” Julie said, wrinkling her nose. “But there was this bunch of blokes who turned up at our meetings—dunno who they were, none of us invited them. Craig reckoned they were government and they’d hacked our phones or something, but it was probably just some twat put the meeting up on Facebook.” She snorted and shook her head. “Anyway, they showed up, and they were asking all these questions about human transformation—had we tried it, did we know anyone who’d done it and all that shit. They had this book that was supposed to be the ritual for it.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “We told them to piss off!” Julie said in a sudden burst of animation. “Human skins? That’s psycho stuff. It’s all a load of bullshit, anyway. Doesn’t work. We figured it was the police trying to fit us up for something dodgy.” She glared at Pierce with fresh suspicion.

  “But Sebastian was interested in what they were saying?”

  And now they were back to the noncommittal shrugs. “I dunno—like I said, he was a creepy bastard. And after those blokes came round, he stopped showing up, so we all reckoned he must have gone off with them. That was about Easter. Haven’t seen him since then, so I can’t help you, all right?”

  Easter: six or seven months ago, roughly the same timeframe in which their skinbinder had become super-active, churning out pelts as if he had a whole menagerie at his disposal. Their efforts to track the source of the animals had got them nowhere; no zoos or wildlife sanctuaries missing anything major, no evidence of an increase in smuggling. Backers with money and connections explained a lot.

  That might be why Maitland’s team had been holding off before they brought in the skinbinder... but if so, why not keep her department informed and have them call off the raid? It was hard to escape the suspicion there was something shady going on.

  Behind them the scaffolding creaked, and Julie whirled to look at it, jittery as a cat. “Look, that’s all I know, all right?” she said, tucking her hands up inside the long sleeves of her hoodie. “I don’t know who those blokes were, I don’t know where they went, and I definitely don’t know anything about dead coppers. Can I go now, please?” She tensed, clearly ready to bolt regardless of the answer.

  “Who else might know something about Sebastian?” Pierce asked. “You mentioned a Craig...?”

  Julie stepped back, shaking her head. “I—”

  Another groaning creak sounded from the building behind them. The scaffolding gave an ominous rattle, and Pierce looked up in time to see a dark shadow detach from the edge of the roof. For a moment she thought a chunk of masonry had torn loose—and then her eyes made sense of the falling shape.

  Not falling—leaping. “Shit!” She scrambled back towards the fence.

  Julie barely had the time to look bewildered before the shapeshifter crashed down beside her in a cloud of brick dust. It was a huge black dog, a mastiff—but no normal dog would have made such a suicidal jump, or bounced up from it unharmed.

  It lunged for Julie, and she shrieked, smashing at it with her bag. The dog tore it out of her hands with a toss of its blunt head, scattering the contents across the ground. “Get back, get back!” Pierce yelled at her, but instead she snatched a chunk of broken brick up from the ground to hurl at the shifter. It bounced off like a pebble.

  Pierce grabbed for her malodorant spray, but before she could get close, the dog shifter gave an echoing bark and snapped its teeth at Julie. Her shrieks of fear became a howl of agony as the massive jaws clamped down around her arm.

  “Christ!” Pierce fired off the spray, a sulphuric stench that made her gag and her eyes start to stream.

  The big dog reeled back, swinging Julie with it, like a toy held in its mouth. She hit the scaffolding with such force that the metal bars jarred loose, and the framework collapsed in on itself in a jangling cascade. The creature dropped Julie’s limp body and bounded away, snarling and shaking its head as if to try to dislodge the smell. Chunks of brick and slate roof tiles rained down from the building behind.

  Pierce’s nausea rose higher as her ears rang from the avalanche, but she swallowed it and ran forward to grab Julie’s dropped bag. If she was a skinbinder, she should have the tools of her trade in there.

  She cursed as she dug through it, finding only make-up, books and junk. A glance up showed the big dog was turning around to come back, its human mind wresting control back from animal instincts. More discipline than most humans would have shown in a fight—but then, these shifters weren’t the usual bored thrill-seekers. She was dealing with people who had killed, and would do it again.

  Inside the satchel, her hand closed around a sheathed knife.

  The ritual blade that she pulled out was smaller than Sebastian’s, lacking the wicked curve and not half as ornately made. But in one important aspect, the two skinning blades were twins—both made of solid silver.

  Pierce fumbled to unfasten the leather sheath and release it as the big dog came thundering back towards her. She hadn’t trained to fight with knives, only against those wielding them, but all she needed was to do some damage to the pelt.

  And not get killed. That would be the real trick.

  As the shifter lunged towards her, she kicked the bag its way, but it just flopped over, the undone flap flying up in the dog’s face. The moment of obscured vision gave her time to dive away, escaping the snap of its slobbering jaws as she stumbled on a loose brick. Rubble shifted under her feet and she skidded down the slope, swinging the knife in a wide arc as she turned back.

  The dog leapt at her, its true size apparent for the first time; the huge frame stretched out longer than she was tall. Pierce lunged forward to meet it, stabbing upward with the blade.

  The shifter’s own momentum drove it onto the knife, and she felt the shift in pressure as her thrust into solid flesh became a slice through layers of fur and cloth. The body that slammed into hers was a man’s wrapped in fur, still heavy enough to knock her off her feet, but with teeth that clicked together harmlessly beside her ear, no longer the dog’s mighty crushing jaws. Before he could recover from the jarring shock, Pierce clouted him across the head and shoved him off of her, snatching for the handcuffs from her belt.

  “Police!” she shouted. “You’re under arrest! Stay down on the ground!”

  He ignored her words, or didn’t understand them, mind still not caught up to the shift in shape. Instea
d he staggered backwards, unbalanced on two legs, and tried to bark at her with vocal cords that wouldn’t make the sound. The face beneath the mastiff pelt was at odds with the snarl, clean shaven and well groomed like any bland young office worker.

  “Stay where you are!” she said again, but it only seemed to snap him out of the haze, his eyes growing more focused as the situation sank in. He turned and ran towards the fence.

  “Shit!” Pierce chased after him, but she was too winded to catch up, and he leapt to grab the top of the hoardings and haul himself up. As he swung over, the mastiff pelt flapped away from his back, and she glimpsed the maker’s rune tattooed beneath. Just a glimpse—but enough for her to see that it wasn’t Sebastian’s mark. The pelt had been made by another skinbinder.

  What the hell?

  For a brief instant she almost contemplated climbing after, but she knew she was too worn out from the previous chase—and that reminded her to think of Julie. She turned to look around for the young skinbinder, and saw her still lying slumped underneath the fallen scaffold.

  “Shit,” she said again, more heavily, and hurried over. She brushed brick dust off unmoving flesh, and felt for a pulse.

  No miracles today. The girl was dead.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PIERCE LEFT THE waste ground over the back fence, with a last apologetic look at Julie where she lay beneath her scaffolding cairn. It stung to flee the crime scene without waiting for the police, but she couldn’t afford to get bogged down in the red tape right now—or worse, let Maitland find out she was still on the case. She’d stumbled on something bigger here than one rogue murderous skinbinder, and she wasn’t about to let the trail go cold over a jurisdictional pissing contest.

  If that was all this was. Counter Terrorism had their own motives for seeking Sebastian, and she couldn’t trust their interests were in line with hers. Sebastian clearly had powerful backers, and it was all too easy to believe Maitland would be willing to cut them a deal.