They made their way downhill. The sparse trees provided little shelter from the rain, only channelled it to run off in larger quantities. Pierce envied Archer his uniform gear, better designed for the weather than the suit and shoes she’d picked out for a day that wasn’t supposed to involve hiking in the woods. The hood of her coat had become plastered to her head, just as miserably cold and damp as if she’d gone without it. Among the trees it felt closer to midnight than early evening.
She shone the torch over the uneven ground, strewn with rocks and fallen leaves and the odd scrap of litter. Impossible to pick out any clear signs of disturbance; there was no smooth dirt here to disturb. Impossible to listen out for creeping danger either, while the rain drummed down, the trees rustled, and Magnus the police dog kept barking—somewhere closer now, but still difficult to pin down.
“I see lights!” Archer blurted, and she turned to see the glimmer of a torch beam off through the trees to her left. She thumbed her radio.
“Romeo Charlie Three, is that your team that I’m seeing?”
The torch flashed briefly off and on again. “It’s us, Guv,” Freeman confirmed over the radio, and Pierce could faintly hear the duplication of her voice from further away.
They made their way towards each other, but Pierce didn’t see a second torch beam emerge from the trees. “Where’s PC Winters?” she asked, as her own torch picked out Freeman’s squinting face.
Freeman turned to gesture. “He’s just—” She faltered. “Fuck. He was with me a second ago.” She raised her voice to shout. “Winters?”
Pierce went for the more direct route of the radio. “Winters, check in,” she commanded. Silence.
“He was right here!” Freeman repeated with frantic dismay. She shone her torch round in an arc, illuminating nothing but the sparse winter trees.
“All right, stay close,” Pierce ordered her and Archer, keeping a tight rein on her own rising sense of things spinning out of control. “Back to where you saw him last. He can’t have gone far.”
Not physically, anyway—but it only took a moment to send a victim off to somewhere nobody could follow. Where the hell were her missing officers?
They started on down the slope in tense silence, broken by updates from the other teams over the radio. “Romeo Charlie Two here at the edge of the woods now,” Deepan reported. “How do we proceed?”
“Stay on the road,” Pierce decided. There weren’t enough of them here to effectively cover the whole of the wooded region in the dark, and sending the teams in two by two was just putting more of them in danger. “Keep watch for anyone trying to exit the woods and wait for the others to join you. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here, and we’re missing Winters as well as Collins and Davenport now.”
Call for further backup? But there might be little to be had, with the local force already depleted of as many officers as they could spare for the search, and outside assistance would take its time arriving. And besides, all the officers with relevant training were already here—the only other RCU member she had to call upon was Dawson, and he had less experience than either her or Deepan.
“Guv—dog!” Archer said abruptly. She followed the line of his torch with her own, and saw the German Shepard crouched in a gap between the trees, ears flattened back and hackles bristling even in the rain. He was emitting a low growl that became a flurry of frantic barks as the torches lit him up. Pierce held completely still; the quiet, placid police dog that had sat calmly by their feet earlier in the afternoon was now very visibly a threat.
“All right, easy,” Freeman said soothingly, raising a hand towards the dog from a safe distance. “Magnus?” The dog’s ears twitched a little at the sound of his name, but he remained warily crouched and growling. “Good boy, Magnus,” she persisted. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
“Careful,” Pierce said in a low voice, barely above a whisper. She’d seen a dog attack or two in her early years in uniform, and it hadn’t been pretty. Police dogs were trained to detain, not to savage, but in a charged situation like this all bets were off.
“I can see something on the ground,” Freeman murmured back, just as quiet. “Just behind that tree on the left side. Is that somebody...?” Pierce’s stomach jolted as a dark shadow in a hollow resolved itself into what might well be somebody’s leg. Archer shifted nervously beside her, and she wanted to snap at him to be still, but she was afraid that he’d jump at the sound and set the dog off.
Freeman kept inching closer to the gap in the trees that Magnus was guarding, murmuring a stream of placating words as she tried to slip past. “Yeah, you’re a good boy, aren’t you? Good boy. You remember us—you met us earlier. We’re doing our job, just like you’re doing yours, yeah?”
As she eased past the tree, keeping as far back as possible, a branch snagged on the back of her jacket and bent backwards before pulling free, shaking the tree and sending a cascade of water droplets pouring down. Magnus lunged towards her, barking furiously. Freeman flinched back against the tree, and the dog retreated, running further off into the trees and barking again.
“He’s pretty freaked out, Guv,” Freeman said, still pressed back against the tree as she looked their way.
“Him and me both,” said Archer, looking pale in the torchlight.
“All right, let’s check that body,” Pierce said—a pessimistic slip of the tongue, but correcting herself would only draw more attention to the fact. “And keep an eye on that dog!” She doubted any of them would be up to the task of corralling a petrified German Shepherd; she wasn’t sure even Collins would be able to calm Magnus right now.
Definitely not, in fact, because as Freeman moved forward to shine her torch into the hollow between the trees, Pierce saw that it was the dog handler who lay slumped on the muddy ground, face a mask of blood as it lay turned away from them.
She cursed and grabbed her radio. “This is Romeo Charlie One—we need medical support!” she said as Freeman knelt down to try for a pulse. “We have police casualties here.” Pierce expected to see a grim headshake, but instead Freeman’s eyes widened as she looked up.
“She’s still alive, Guv!”
Archer hurried forward to join her, prompting a flurry of new barking from Magnus, but the dog didn’t try to approach them, running in circles and whining. As Pierce relayed the information into the radio, she glimpsed a figure in a police uniform through the trees ahead of them. She stepped forward, squinting past the rain. “Winters, is that you?” she called. “Why didn’t you respond?”
He was just standing there under the trees, unmoving as the rain poured down on him. Shock? Injury? Pierce moved towards him. She shone her torch on his face, but the peak of his cap cast a shadow over his features.
Cap, not helmet. PC Winters had been wearing a police helmet—it was the community support officers who were in caps. Not Freeman’s missing partner, then, but Davenport, the PCSO who’d been on patrol with Collins. She took another step forward... and registered dark stains on the reflective surface of his hi-vis jacket that she didn’t think were rain.
And then he lunged out of the darkness towards her, swinging a tree branch as thick as his arm straight towards her head.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PIERCE YELPED AND jumped back from the assault, taking the hit on her forearm with almost enough force to jar the torch out of her hand. Davenport swung at her again before she’d had the time to catch her breath, only the tangled branches above her robbing the blow of its force. She scrambled backwards up the slope, feet tripping and slipping on the sodden leaf-carpeted ground.
She shone the torch into Davenport’s face—and saw that the man she vaguely remembered from a few hours ago was gone. His face was a ruin, eyes rotted away in their sockets to ooze blood and decay down his cheeks, skin waxy pale and blistered as if by some dreadful disease. If he hadn’t been moving, it would have been quite clear that he was dead.
And she didn’t think that he was mov
ing under his own power. Possessed, as Vyner had been—but while the necromancer had apparently been protected enough to escape the worst of the effect, here the parasitic spirit had full reign. Whatever was controlling Davenport’s moves now was nothing the human body had ever been designed to host, and his body and mind were rejecting the invasion like a failed transplant. Given time, the thing would be neutralised just by physically falling apart.
But they couldn’t afford to give it time.
Pierce cursed and leapt out of the way as the possessed Davenport lunged at her with his club, hitting the tree beside her hard enough to break branches. She fumbled for her radio, the buttons slick with rain. “PCSO Davenport is under magical influence!” she shouted, dodging away from him. “Detain with silver cuffs!”
Much easier said than bloody done, but that was all she had time for before he was coming at her again. She grabbed the end of his branch club, trying to wrestle it off of him before he could try for a second swing, but the strength that ripped it from her hands was more than human. She turned and sprinted away through the trees, heading downhill away from the others less by choice than because it was the path of least resistance.
The running that she’d done already was exacting its toll; she’d barely had the chance to catch her breath back, and it was burning in her chest as she scrambled between the trees. Bursts of chatter on the radio, but she couldn’t spare the attention to listen, dodging obstacles by the narrow beam of the torch in her jolting grip, trying to track Davenport’s pursuit by the sound of splintering trees.
The possession might be causing his body to degrade, but it didn’t slow him down. He had no bloody eyes left, yet he still kept after her, crashing heedlessly through obstacles in his path. There was no time for Pierce to look around and formulate a plan or pause to yank her silver cuffs out from under her coat.
Her foot hit something more solid than a loose branch and she tripped, sprawling across the warm bulk of a human body. She grabbed her radio. “I’ve got Winters—” she started to report, but Davenport was on her before she could say more. She threw herself to one side as he smashed out with the club, wincing when it cracked down on Winters’ chest instead, wincing more when it brought no reaction. Winters was dead, or at least in a bad way.
And Pierce was in danger of joining him. As Davenport lunged again, she kicked out at him and scrambled away, finally managing to yank her coat open and grab for the cuffs. Before she’d fumbled them out a sweep of Davenport’s club cracked the side of her knee, sending her staggering and cursing. She crashed into a tree and water poured down on her head, the torch knocked from her hand to bounce off down the hillside. “Fuck!” She could see it was still switched on, lighting up the rain, but before she could chase after it, Davenport was there.
The first blow of his club struck her in the stomach, knocking her breath away; she barely caught the second with her arm. As she jerked away from the third swipe, it crunched against the tree behind her, the branch breaking in two with a splintering crack. Davenport gave an indistinct roar and let the club fall, grabbing for her throat instead.
The strangling hands that closed around her windpipe were cold as the dead. As Pierce clawed at his hands to try to wrench them away, the wet skin under her nails slid and ripped, as if it was no more than loose wrapping around decaying flesh. She couldn’t even gag; the crushing fingers stayed remorselessly tight even as the skin encasing them sloughed away.
She yanked her silver cuffs the rest of the way from their pouch, hooking her fingers through one of the loops. No time to try to deploy the things properly; she used them like a set of knuckle dusters, punching Davenport in the jaw. He growled like he was gargling his own decomposing flesh, but the grip around her throat didn’t slacken.
Pierce was losing air, a deeper darkness than the night beginning to bloom around the edges of her vision. She pressed the edge of the cuffs against Davenport’s hand, and the skin sizzled like pork crackling at the touch of the silver.
But it wasn’t enough. Even as his body burned, he still kept up the pressure. Her rushing blood was pounding in her ears, and she could feel her struggles weakening, fading...
A furious explosion of barking, and Magnus burst out of the trees, the light from her dropped torch painting the dog in hellhound shadows. Davenport didn’t react, heedless of the sound or perhaps already deaf to it as his body decayed. Something about his scent was clearly driving the dog wild, and it growled and barked madly before rushing forward in a frantic lunge. Jaws closed on Davenport’s leg, but his dead face showed no sign of pain as he loosed his grip with one hand to backhand the dog away.
Pierce wrenched away from him the moment that he let her go, scraping her back on the tree behind her as she lurched sideways. She fell to her knees in the mud and wheezed, grabbing at a tree for balance as she tried to force enough breath back into her body to get moving again. Her vision was a chaos of light and shadow, torches through the trees and driving rain. Magnus was still barking, and she could hear people shouting somewhere nearby in the woods as well as over the radio.
Focus. Davenport. She staggered upright, trying to resolve the blur. He was still close, he had to be—shit! She stepped back from his swinging fist and grabbed at his arm, trying to force it away before he could go for the throat again. Even though she could feel his flesh slip like well-cooked meat off the bone, he was still impossibly strong, and she was using her weak arm because in the other hand she still had the—
—Fucking handcuffs, for fuck’s sake. She shook the cuffs open and snapped the first loop around the wrist in her grip, turning her head with a hiss as the rotting skin began to smoke. Still panting, breathless, she lunged around behind him, succeeding in wrenching his arm behind his back because he lacked either the wit or the pain centres to turn with her. Instead he twisted round the other way to meet her, snatching at her clumsily with his free hand, and she grabbed at it to close the second cuff.
Even with his arms pinned back Davenport was still too strong for her, throwing himself backwards to smash her aside with a blow of his shoulder. He tossed his head back, trying to headbutt, trying to bite, the movement carrying them both skidding and staggering down the slope. A police torch shone on the two of them in a blinding burst of light. Freeman, Archer, someone else? Couldn’t tell.
“Mirror, need a mirror!” she gasped, thinking of Vyner. His might have been enchanted, it might be useless, but still—“Try to reflect his eyes!” Of course he didn’t bloody have eyes left, not physically at least—but something was steering him, and symbol was as powerful as fact in ritual magic.
Her own compact mirror was still in her bag in the car, no bloody use to man or beast right now. Would Freeman have one? Probably not, for the same reason: you didn’t carry crap around while you were on the job.
As Davenport swung round again, Pierce darted back from him. He was clumsier now at least, both from the cuffs and his rapid decay, but no less determined to do violence to anyone who came near.
“We found Winters, Guv,” Freeman tried to report to her. “He’s—” She had to leap out of the way as Davenport charged at her full tilt. In the momentary flash of torchlight Pierce could see that his skin had turned an ugly greenish black, beginning to split. His body was decaying faster than a corpse in any natural conditions, but it wasn’t slowing him down nearly as much as it should.
She glimpsed a flash of hi-vis yellow at the corner of her eye. Archer. “Stay back!” she said. He wasn’t trained for this kind of confrontation—not that any of them bloody were, but he was just a PCSO.
But he dodged around the hand that she’d held up to warm him off. “No, I’ve got...” He fumbled something out of his pocket, running towards Davenport but jerking back as the butting head and gnashing teeth snapped his way.
As Davenport turned away from her, Freeman darted forward, grabbing hold of the silver cuffs that chained his hands. “I’ve got him!” she said—over-optimistically. He bucked and
fought in her grip, and she had to bend backwards to escape a crack to the chin.
“Watch it!” Pierce yelled, not sure who she was warning. Archer ran forward again and shoved whatever he held in Davenport’s face. For a moment the trio were a struggling tableau in the rain, and then Davenport went limp in Freeman’s arms.
Entirely, horribly limp, dissolving from an upright if decaying figure into a lifeless, putrefying heap of flesh. Freeman stepped back with a yelp as the corpse slithered out of her arms, pouring from the tattered uniform like so much slurry.
And it was now, unquestionably, a corpse. Pierce finally found some breath from somewhere and sagged against a tree. “Mirror?” she asked Archer.
Not exactly: he turned to show her the dark screen of his switched-off smartphone. “Guess it was reflective enough,” he said.
She nodded wearily. “Good thinking, that man.”
He grinned briefly in triumph, but the expression slipped from his face as he looked down at the half-liquefied corpse and seemed to register for the first time that it had been not just a person but one wearing a uniform that matched his.
“Oh, God, is that Terry?” he moaned, and twisted away, managing to stagger only a few steps before he was noisily sick in the undergrowth.
Pierce looked away, her own stomach lurching in sympathetic nausea. No point chiding him for fucking up her crime scene; he wasn’t trained for anything like this, and her crime scene was already pretty fucked. She could hear the dog still barking somewhere further off in the woods, and in the distance sirens spoke of backup arriving.
Too late for Davenport for sure, and probably for Winters too. Collins hadn’t exactly been in promising shape either. It was raining, the crime scene had been trampled, and she still wasn’t even certain where Davenport and Collins had found the three skulls. Or where she was, for that matter; she’d lost all sense of orientation with respect to the road. She reached for her radio.
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