The fire was already spreading at an alarming rate, spilling across the half-drawn lines of the fake ritual circle. Through the smoke of stinking carpet fumes, she could see Doctor Moss weakly stirring in her chair, obviously dazed even without the choking smoke.
Pierce tore the plastic tag from the extinguisher and aimed the hose, wincing as the shift to supporting the thing by its handles put all the weight on her bad arm. She struggled to hold it steady as it spewed foam over the twisted mess of half-melted candles and burning carpet.
“Can you move?” she shouted to Doctor Moss. There might have been some coughed words in response, but the fact she couldn’t make them out didn’t bode well for the answer.
The fire was shrinking, but Pierce wasn’t sure there was enough foam in the extinguisher’s tank to fully smother it. Regulation said at this point it was the fire brigade’s job, and not to put herself in danger trying to assist.
Maybe so, but regulation expected fire and police to be responding to the same 999 call, not her on-scene with them minutes away. Making split second decisions in the field wasn’t always about what was smartest or safest—it was about the choice you knew you’d have to live with.
Still spraying the hose back and forth over the fire, Pierce skirted closer than she should around the edge of it, feeling the heat bake her skin and coughing in the smoke. She tried to call out to Doctor Moss again, but the words became a wheeze.
Moss was struggling to get up, but she needed help, and Pierce couldn’t assist her and keep aiming the hose. The extinguisher felt like it must be near empty, so she let the hose drop and hauled the lecturer from her chair, unable to take the time to be gentle. The older woman seemed dazed, but she was still awake, and managed to grab hold of Pierce in turn.
Pierce swung back to face the remains of the smothered fire, and saw that it wasn’t out yet. “Shit!” She raised the extinguisher for one last burst of foam, blasting the flames back towards the desk side of the room as best she could. Then she let it fall to the floor and charged across the office, pulling Moss with her. Her feet almost skidded on the foam-slick carpet, but she made it across and shoved Moss out into the corridor.
“We need to get to the stairs!” she barked, turning to slam the office door behind them. Maybe that last blast of foam had killed the fire, maybe it hadn’t; either way they’d be fools to stick around here and find out. Doctor Moss needed medical attention, and Pierce was feeling faintly light-headed herself as she led the lecturer at a staggering dash towards the stairway. Fumes or just the adrenaline rush?
“My books...” Doctor Moss said feebly, turning partway back towards the office. Not just lack of priorities, Pierce knew—some of those occult works were doubtless irreplaceable.
Still less valuable than human lives.
“The fire brigade’s coming,” she offered as a sop. Prophetic: as they pushed through the door into the stairway, she heard the sound of sirens in the distance. They descended the staircase, Doctor Moss leaning on her with a dizzy groan. She looked pale, the wound on her forehead starkly drawn.
As they pushed out through the fire exit, fresh alarms joining the cacophony, Pierce drew in a great gulping breath of air. The cold evening hit like a slap, ice water thrown on skin that still felt scorched. It took a moment to adjust her eyes to the darkness dotted with artificial lights.
A small crowd of students had gathered to gawk at the smoking window, teenage appetite for spectacle overriding common sense. “Police! Back up, back up,” she yelled at them. “Get away from the burning building!” She didn’t think it would go up, hoped that she’d smothered the blaze well enough that it wouldn’t even burn out the office, but only idiots would take that sort of thing for granted.
She helped Doctor Moss to sit down on the grass and looked around for anyone who looked like campus security or a paramedic. As she started to straighten up, Moss tugged on her trouser leg—not in immediate medical distress, she realised after a heart-dropping moment, but trying to communicate something. Pierce crouched down to speak to her. “Don’t try to talk,” she said.
But Moss sucked in a gasping breath, persisting stubbornly though her voice was a croak. “The ritual. I was researching...”
“I know.” Doubtless the photos and any notes Moss had made had been the first things to be disposed of, but that wasn’t a major concern right now.
Moss shook her head, insistent. “The ritual,” she repeated. “More skulls. More sites. Part of a greater d-design...” She broke down coughing, and Pierce patted her back uncertainly, not confident that thumping would help rather than harm.
“Okay,” she said. “All right. Don’t try to talk now.” The details could wait until a time when Moss didn’t look like she was on the verge of keeling over. As Pierce straightened up, she could see blue flashing lights. “All right. Help’s coming.”
The immediate crisis seemed to be over, but a grim feeling still gripped her stomach like a clenching fist. First Vyner killed, now this. Whatever they’d stumbled over in that field, it was big. Big enough for whoever was behind it to keep tabs on the police investigation, and deal professionally with anyone who knew too much.
And if Moss was right that the site that they’d found was only one part of a greater ritual at work, then this could well be something far nastier than they’d guessed.
AFTER A QUICK check-over by the paramedics, Doctor Moss was taken to the nearest hospital, while Pierce stayed behind at the site to coordinate with the local emergency services. The fire brigade went up, and came back down, rather anticlimactically: it seemed she’d more or less done the job of containing the fire, and hopefully at least some of the rare texts in Doctor Moss’s office would be recoverable.
If Pierce hadn’t decided to drop by with the photos from Vyner’s house this evening, they wouldn’t have been so lucky. It seemed that Doctor Moss had been the only one still working after hours, and she doubted very much that anyone would have noticed anything amiss until the building was ablaze.
The device that had been used to override the lock had vanished with the man who’d used it; she should have thought to take it as evidence before she’d entered the building. The local police would dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s when it came to processing the office for trace evidence and checking campus CCTV, but she already suspected they’d find nothing. The hooded assassin had been too professional to leave any obvious trail.
Once she’d given her statement of events to anyone who needed to know, there was little else useful that Pierce could do here. Exhausted, aching and chilled, she trudged back to her car and called in to the RCU to report the incident.
The northern RCU team was too small to be worth further subdividing with round-the-clock shifts; in the absence of urgent time-sensitive cases, they worked a theoretical—if often extended—eight hours and then left it to dispatch to determine whether anything was urgent enough to recall them to duty. Aside from the semi-regular bollockings about the amount of overtime her officers inevitably drew, it worked about as well as any other system for covering half the country’s ritual crime cases with only a handful of staff.
So with Deepan unlikely to have stayed more than an hour or so, she was expecting the office to be empty when she called in, and it threw her off-balance to be put through to Dawson. “What are you doing working this late?” She didn’t recall authorising anything that should have taken him this long.
“Just dropped back in to write up a report,” he said. “Got word back from the Vyner post-mortem. Definitely murder dressed up as a suicide.”
As a confirmation of earlier assumptions, it didn’t really need him to rush back into work to deal with, but she could charitably assume that despite the continued brusque tone, Vyner’s death was eating away at Dawson more than he cared to show.
Or he could be making another attempt to do an end run around her authority and pursue the case however he pleased.
Or he could be flat out lying to her, to
cover some less legitimate reason to be at the office on his own. Suspicions prickled, but she was too damn tired to sort conspiracy theories from reasonable doubt. She let it pass.
“I’ve got an attempted homicide here that may be the same attacker,” she said instead. “Doctor Anne C. Moss, lecturer in occult studies—I gave her some photos of the ritual skull arrangement to research. Came back this evening, and caught the perpetrator in the act of setting the scene to have her killed in a seemingly accidental fire. White male, brown hair, average height, probably under forty...” She shook her head, aware it was so generic it could hardly be termed a description. “Had his face covered by a hood and scarf, so I didn’t see much of him. I doubt the CCTV got a good picture, either.”
“Get a witness statement from Moss?” he asked.
“No opportunity,” she said. “She was taken to the hospital—smoke inhalation and a blow to the head; hopefully nothing worse.” Doctor Moss wasn’t a young woman, but hell, neither was Pierce, and she’d bounced back from a battering or two. Even if her current bounce felt more like a feeble totter right now. “I’ve asked the local uniforms to keep an eye on her,” she said. “I doubt the killer will make another attempt in the glare of the spotlight, but if he does, then hopefully we’ll nab him.”
From Dawson’s noncommittal grunt, he didn’t believe that outcome was any more likely than she did.
“So it’s the same thing,” he said. “We bring in an expert, they send someone after them.”
Pierce gritted her teeth, biting down on an unwise urge to snap at him. Asking an outside academic to take a look at some pictures was hardly the same as recklessly ordering an attempt at necromancy on top of an unidentified ritual, and he had to know it. She could deal with officers who made mistakes—Lord knew Ritual Crime ran on a haphazard process of trial and error even at the best of times—but ones who were too bloody stubborn to admit when they’d done something wrong were a much bigger problem.
“It’s not the same,” she said. “Vyner was much more directly involved—more so than he should have been. He should never have been allowed to attempt necromancy before we had any background on the intended purpose of the ritual.” She sighed. “But yes, it’s looking like these people are willing to go after anyone even peripherally involved in the investigation.” Had they simply followed Pierce to the university office—worrying enough—or had something Moss’s research dug up got them spooked?
She grimaced, aware she was going to have to concede further ground to Dawson’s conviction his bull-headed way was the right way. “And yes, it does look like this case is more urgent than it first seemed,” she admitted. “Moss managed to tell me that she thinks there are more sites like this out there. What we’ve found so far may be only the tip of the iceberg.”
As she hung up the phone and sagged for a moment, mustering the energy to drive herself home, she couldn’t help but grimly contemplate just how slim their chances were of finding the rest before things went to hell.
CHAPTER NINE
PIERCE ARRIVED BACK at work the next day with a gritty-eyed feeling of too little rest that even coffee wouldn’t shift. At least she’d beaten Dawson into work today, however; the only one in the office when she arrived was Constable Freeman.
“Morning, Guv!” she called out from behind her computer, bright eyed and enthusiastic enough to make Pierce feel even more ancient. She hoped the greeting she managed past her sip of coffee didn’t come out too much of a grumble.
“I’ll be over in Magical Analysis,” she said. “Let me know if anything important comes in.” Preferably before Dawson had any chance to get his sweaty mitts on it, but she probably shouldn’t say that sort of thing in front of impressionable young constables.
“Will do, Guv,” Freeman chirped, then bowed her head again to her computer. Pierce wondered if she was actually as absorbed as she looked, or just out to impress the new boss. With their overstretched resources, much of the RCU’s work came down to remote consultation, advising police departments around the country whether X bit of random graffiti looked like a legitimate occult ritual and how to handle artefacts seized at the scene of a crime. Pierce supposed even that might be fascinating to an RCU rookie used to far more mundane police matters, but after decades on the job, the shine of advising officers who didn’t know their ritual arse from their occult elbow had well and truly worn off.
Of course, that was why the good Lord had made constables, that DCIs might be free to get on with more interesting cases, at least when not buried under mountains of paperwork. Pierce had more than enough of that to be going on with, but hopefully Magical Analysis would have something on the skulls by now to spare her.
She popped her head into Cliff’s lab, still faintly whiffy after her first smoke-related incident this week. “Cliff! Got my skulls?” she asked him, once he’d untangled his headphones and pulled them from his ears.
“These fine fellows?” He indicated a table across the lab, where one of the skulls had been set up with ribbon-wrapped scroll and surrounding ring of stones in careful reproduction of the crime scene. On the next bench sat a second, but this one disassembled into parts, the stones lined up and the scroll untied and unfurled.
She couldn’t spot the third skull anywhere. “One of them gone walkabouts?” she asked.
“Jenny has the third one,” he said. “I do believe she was planning on attempting some divination with it first thing this morning, actually. She’s probably down in the ritual lab if you want to see what she’s made of it—I’m afraid we haven’t had much luck up here.”
“No?” Pierce wandered over to look at the unfurled parchment scroll. As she’d suspected, inked on it in careful brushstrokes was what looked like a spell, a nine-layer pyramid of runes surrounded by an intricate design. The unfamiliar alphabet made its purpose impenetrable.
Cliff moved over to join her, running a latex-gloved finger along the line of rune stones. “You’ll note that there are no common characters between this rune set and the set on the scroll,” he said. “Documents believe that this”—he indicated the scroll—“is some form of phonetic alphabet—see, you have several repeating characters, here, here, here, nineteen separate unique symbols in total—whereas these are most likely ideograms. Alchemical symbols, spirit names—planets, if they haven’t got the message about Pluto yet...” He spread his hands with an apologetic grimace of a smile. “Without the necessary text to decode them, we are, alas, completely in the dark.”
“And the runic alphabet?” she asked, without much hope.
“Also unfamiliar. Possibly a cypher of some sort, but with no knowledge of the underlying language...” He shrugged.
“Bit harder than doing the daily Codeword puzzle.” With a message in a language where they knew the rules of grammar and patterns of letters, they might get somewhere decoding it; with an unknown spell, the words could be literally anything. They didn’t even know how to read the pyramid—left to right, right to left, upwards, outwards from the middle? Unless they could match it to a source text, the spell was a dead end.
“What about the rest of it?” she said, gesturing towards the skull set up to match the original burial. “What does this arrangement say to you?”
Cliff pulled an awkward smile. “Mostly, I’m afraid, it says that more context is needed. Skulls, blood... they’re used for any number of ritual purposes. Something powerful, certainly. My instinct says a summoning, breaching the barrier with the spirit world. But I can’t give you any more than that without more details to go on.”
“Mm.” She nodded grimly, aware that she probably couldn’t have asked for much more, but still frustrated by the lack of information.
“Oh!” Cliff brightened beside her. “But I have managed to do some more tests with our friend the singing watch lantern from Tuesday.”
“Contained experiments, I hope,” Pierce said with a wince, remembering the smoke.
“Nothing so extreme as our first adventure, w
orry ye not,” he said. “Now that I have some idea of the strength of the reaction, I can calibrate my tests accordingly. I’ve been measuring the increase in the warning signal since yesterday morning.”
She turned to look at him. “It’s increasing?” That was never a good sign.
“Yes, and rapidly,” Cliff said. “Now, based on my measurements, and what I’ve been able to research in the literature about watch lanterns—and do please bear in mind that this is not an exact science—I believe that the warning signal indicates the approach of an event in roughly four days’ time. Probably some point on the twenty-second of December, though potentially it could fall as much as a day to either side.”
“An event,” she echoed.
“‘Something wicked this way comes,’” he said. “As to what, I’m afraid our metal friend is ill-equipped to tell us.”
“The twenty-second of December,” Pierce repeated. She pulled her notebook and pencil stub from her pocket to scribble that date down. “So, we can expect something unspecified, but probably bad, to happen on... this coming Monday?”
“That’s about the size of it, yes,” he said.
“Marvellous.” Typical—the one time they actually had advance warning of something going down, and they didn’t even know what they had advance warning of. “And do we know which direction to start looking in?” she asked. “You said watch lanterns could indicate that.”
“Ah.” His cheeks dimpled in a wry smile. “That would be the wrinkle that we fell afoul of on yesterday’s test. The smoke should, in theory, have issued forth from one of the lantern’s mouths to indicate the direction of the threat.”
“It didn’t do that,” she noted.
“No,” he said. “Because, you see, the danger is coming from all sides.”
ON THAT CHEERFUL note, Pierce left him to it, taking the stairs down to the station’s basement.
While the Enchanted Artefacts department merited their own lab space upstairs—though recent events might see that reconsidered—the rest of the RCU’s researchers had to make do with shared use of the ritual lab down in the basement. A small concrete box of a room not much different from the station’s holding cells, it had protective circles permanently marked out on the floor and ceiling to contain any magic worked down there. In theory.
Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) Page 8