Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2)

by E. E. Richardson

  Roots. The tendrils were roots, she realised, spreading across the metal walls like a scene watched in time-lapse photography; forcing their way in through the gaps around the doors like questing fingers probing for weaknesses.

  They found one in the join between the shipping unit’s doors, held together only by the padlock on the outside. The container creaked and strained as the ever-growing mass of roots began to force the doors outwards, warping and buckling the metal with a succession of sharp cracks.

  Pierce glanced back at the others, and saw Greywolf still sitting cross-legged at the centre of the ritual spiral, his face tense with concentration. Was this his doing?

  Even if it wasn’t, it was something that they might be able to take advantage of. Inching as close as she could to the doors without stepping on the web of roots, Pierce adjusted her grip on the set of keys in her hand, letting the penlight fall to dangle from the ring and instead threading a pair of keys between her fingers like spikes. A feeble weapon against Tasers—she’d been thinking as much earlier—but perhaps with the advantage of surprise...

  She turned to jerk her head at Freeman, gesturing for her to come up closer to the doors, and Freeman began to move along the length of the container to join her, careful to skirt around the edges of the chalked design on the floor.

  Pierce had only just turned her gaze back when the over-stressed padlock finally gave way with an audible snap. With a metallic screech like a car accident, the roots ripped the doors open, blinding light flooding into the container. She lunged forward, half blinded and almost tripping over the crawling carpet of roots.

  She was a sitting duck—but the guard outside the doors was gone. As Pierce blinked teary eyes, scanning the area, she saw that plants all over the field had exploded with the same wild growth. The tufts of springy grass around them had grown up to waist high, mounds of weeds erupting between them like Mesozoic megaflora. Roots snaked everywhere along the ground, a squirming, tangling mesh.

  The barriers around the sheep pen had been heaved up by the growth, setting the animals free to fight their way through the grass in bewildered bleating panic. The guard who should have been watching the prisoners had run down to close the field gate before they could escape into the lower field and trample over the ritual. He was struggling to move it, the gate already half buried by a thickening grass mound.

  The field below had been stripped down to bare earth for the ritual, but the burrowing roots were spreading down the hill. Pierce heard frantic shouts from the Red Key forces below as they scrambled to defend their preparations for the ritual. Just how far had the Archdruid’s enchantment spread?

  She turned back to see the shipping container behind her was now almost completely covered by layers of roots, the roof buckling ominously as they cinched in tighter. “Get out of there!” she barked. Freeman was already on her heels; Doctor Moss hurried to join them, offering a hand to the Archdruid. He snapped out of his trance and stood up just as the roof creaked and began to bow inwards with a groan of over-stressed metal.

  “Come on!” Pierce yelled. She stepped back in to grab Doctor Moss’s hand and haul her out past the mound of roots. The metal container was crumpling like cardboard, Greywolf forced to duck down as he scrambled out just before the whole roof caved.

  The sound of a vehicle’s engine coughed to life behind her, and Pierce whirled to see that the guard at the gate had abandoned his efforts and run to one of the parked JCBs, revving as if he hoped he could tear free from the high grass that held it mired. Maybe he still planned to try to block off the gate; maybe he was thinking of nothing but a chance to make his escape.

  Either way, his luck had just run out. The crawling roots burst through the windscreen like groping fingers, and he ducked beneath the dashboard with a yell. More roots were winding up the scoop at the back of the digger, gradually tilting it backwards despite the thick grass that mired the tyres.

  Deciding the guard had bigger problems than chasing them, Pierce turned back to Greywolf. “Is this your doing?” she demanded, forced to shout over the crunching, splintering, shattering din as the plants rapidly consumed the remaining vehicles, spreading up and under the high wooden hoardings around the site. Panicked sheep fought and bleated, tangled in plant snares that grew through their fleece before they could move. It was like some dark simulation of nature reclaiming the world after the end of civilisation, cranked up to high speed.

  “It’s my spell—but I’m not controlling this!” the Archdruid said. For the first time his mask of calm self-assurance had slipped to show a degree of alarm. “It should have stopped. There shouldn’t be this much power!”

  “The ritual,” Doctor Moss said, looking grim. “Our spell has interacted with the others... this may be very, very bad!” She started to force her way through the tall grass in the direction of the lower field.

  Pierce chased after her. “Watch out! There are still guards all over the place.”

  “My staff,” the Archdruid was saying behind her. “If I can get to my staff, I might be able to bring this back under control.”

  “No,” Doctor Moss said soberly, as she reached the line of fencing that separated the two fields, and hauled herself up on top of one of the posts to get a good view. “No, I don’t think you will.”

  Pierce joined her at the fence, setting a foot on the bars of the metal gate to raise herself up above the rising tide of grass and take a look.

  Down at the base of the hill everything was anarchy. A chain of wooden hoardings had fallen like dominos across the road, forced outwards by the thrashing, spreading plants. The group of druids had driven their VW bus over them to keep the breach open; they’d been joined by more of their people, and they were tussling with the guards. Pierce saw one of the girls whack a guard with her wooden placard, another one go down shuddering from the shock of a Taser...

  There was no way the druids could hope to win this fight; the shapeshifters would cut through them in seconds.

  Pierce looked around frantically for the two shifters they’d seen, but something else grabbed her attention first. The innermost ditch around the stone circle had been filled with water, like a moat: the first line of the magical defences. Except that as Pierce looked on now, she could see ribbons of pale steam rising up from the ditch.

  The water was boiling away.

  “Tell me this isn’t what I think it is,” she said hoarsely.

  “If it’s not what you’re thinking of, then I’m afraid it’s worse,” said Doctor Moss. “The ritual has, to quote my dear late husband, ‘gone to cock.’ We’re not waiting for the solstice now—and we’re not dealing with a controlled and contained summoning.” She drew a deep, shaky breath, staring up at the sky. “The demon’s coming through.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE WARLOCK ORCHESTRATING the ritual had risen to his feet, shouting words that Pierce couldn’t make out over the general din. From the rhythm of his voice it was a ritual chant, but whether he was trying to raise the demon or prevent its early emergence she couldn’t tell.

  If it was the latter, it wasn’t working. There was a rising tension building in the atmosphere: the air felt thick and difficult to inhale, and carried a metallic taste like blood. The world had dimmed as if a cloud had passed over the sun; looking up, Pierce saw that the sky had turned a bruised yellow. Clouds swirled outwards in a spiral from the spot above the stone circle, as if a hole had been punched in the sky and the poison atmosphere of some alien place was pouring through. She thought, as she stared up into the heart of that impossible vortex, that behind the clouds she could see the dim red glow of some celestial light, a foreign sun or moon, or something else they had no words for.

  It was mesmerising, difficult to tear her eyes away from.

  And it shouldn’t be happening.

  “Tonight! You said that it would be tonight!” she shouted at Doctor Moss.

  “The ritual was planned for tonight!” Moss said. “The demon isn’t p
laying by those rules. Our spell has intersected with the summoning, fed it too much energy too fast. It’s trying to claw its way through on its own!”

  “But what about the sacrifices?” The four of them had been intended to be fuel for the pyre, but the guards running about below were too busy trying to contain the druids or rescue their preparations to notice or care that they’d escaped their prison. The fire pit inside the ritual triangle had yet to even be lit, and the sheep destined for the flames had escaped their shattered pen and fled for the hills through the gaps in the fallen fencing. “How can it be coming through without the sacrifices?”

  Doctor Moss looked grim. “It’s going to get them,” she said. “They don’t need to be offered to the fire—any blood shed on this ground will feed the demon now. The circle is incomplete. It’s uncontained.”

  “Well, how the hell do we contain it?” Pierce demanded.

  But Moss only shook her head, looking overwhelmed; the muddy yellow light of the unnatural sky reflected in her glasses as she gazed up, awestruck. Pierce looked down on the druid protestors battling the guards; they were hopelessly outmatched, and she could already see white-clad bodies fallen and trampled in the fray. She looked back, and saw the shattered shell of the JCB their prison guard had tried to run for; no sign that he’d managed to crawl his way back out.

  Moss was right. The demon would receive its sacrifices.

  They could run, make sure the four of them weren’t among that group—but Pierce had the ugly feeling that if this wasn’t stopped, then nowhere they ran would be far enough.

  She turned back. “Freeman!” Where the hell was she? Pierce had lost her and the Archdruid in the seething mass of spreading foliage. Then she spotted the two climbing down from the cab of one of the shattered vehicles, already half devoured by the plants. The Archdruid had his staff now—had he risked their lives for that? But then she saw Freeman was also clutching some kind of bundle.

  “Is that my bag?” Doctor Moss turned back from the fence to take a step towards Freeman. She staggered and almost fell, and Pierce grabbed her to keep her from falling. She realised as she did that the ground was shaking faintly, a subtle tremor that almost passed for wobbly vision.

  “Guv! We got the stuff they confiscated—some of it,” Freeman called out as she stumbled closer. She shoved the bag into Doctor Moss’s extended arms. “I don’t know if it’s all there... I got my cuffs, and one of the phones.” She grabbed it from her pocket and shoved it towards Pierce.

  Pierce thumbed the power, but it didn’t just lack a signal—the screen was showing nothing but a flickering jumble of distorted colours. She looked up at the boiling clouds, a level of interference far beyond anything the natural world could produce.

  They were alone, cut off from any help.

  Greywolf staggered to join them, leaning heavily on his oak staff. He wasn’t any younger than she was, and he’d spent hours cooped up in a metal box, but there was no time to care about anyone’s frailties now. “Can you do anything with that staff?” Pierce demanded.

  “Against that?” He gazed up at the maelstrom over the circle. “No. But if I join up with my people I might be able to bring these plants under better control.”

  Pierce swung back towards Doctor Moss as she took inventory of her gear. “Do you have what you need to end the ritual there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Moss said helplessly, shaking her head.

  “Guv, what do we do?” Freeman asked her.

  “Buggered if I know,” Pierce said. “But we’re going to have do something. Come on!” She led the way over the fence at an ungainly scramble.

  The stones of the ancient circle shimmered like a heat haze. The wooden fence posts around it had become blackened, burning stumps, the copper wire flash-melted into a mist of droplets. Even as they ran, Pierce saw the sacrificial pyre down in the pit burst into flames—spontaneous combustion or some action of the warlock’s, she didn’t know. The flames burned yellow-green, leaping high over the boundary of the pit like a portal into hell.

  And in the third circle the warlock knelt, arms raised and hands contorted in clawed shapes as he seemed to almost grapple with invisible forces in the air. His hood had been thrown back, and she saw his face, scalp shaved bald and decorated by interlocking tattoos, the waxen skin stretched back against his skull as if under tremendous g-forces. He was still shouting words into the void, swallowed by a screaming rush of wind that Pierce could feel tugging at her clothes and hair as she ran, sucking everything towards the stones.

  The spreading plants they fought through had stopped dead at the line of ashes that marked out the ritual triangle, as cleanly as if sliced through with a blade. “What happens if we breach the triangle?” Freeman shouted.

  “I don’t know!” It was no protective barrier, she was sure: rather, the design was surely intended to feed energy between the three circles, warlock to pyre to demon to warlock. But as to what would happen if they crossed the line of ashes and snapped its power, like cutting a stretched elastic band....

  “It makes no difference,” Doctor Moss said from behind them. “It’s not the ritual here that’s keeping the demon contained—only the effort of crossing into our plane. Look at the clouds.”

  The alien sky had already spread far beyond the boundary of the ritual design, casting strange moving shadows over the fields below. The late afternoon light had taken on a shifting hue, painting all the colours wrong, blacks as blues and greens ruddy, giving everything a strange staccato quality like strobe lighting. Pierce knew the guards and druids running about the hillside below were really only a short distance away, but somehow it seemed as if the space around the circle had been compressed, more distance than ought to be possible folded up into the landscape. Sound was distorted, adding a nightmarish quality to the shouts and cries of pain and the distressed bleats of stampeding sheep.

  Like a black hole, she thought. Fucking with all the laws of time and space as they drew closer to the event horizon.

  “Come on!” she shouted, and it felt like her own words were stretched and torn, as if she was yelling them out of the window of a fast-moving car. She led the charge towards the triangle.

  A guard ran forwards to intercept them, half raising his Taser, but his eyes were drawn sideways by the spectacle of the flashing clouds above the circle, and the Archdruid whacked him aside with a blow of his staff. Pierce reached the boundary first, and forced her way through; it felt like shoving into a taut sheet of rubber that resisted her, stretching and stretching like a bungee cord...

  And then it snapped. A blast of heat rushed over her like a roaring furnace; rippling, crawling sensations squirmed over her skin like swarming insects. Her ears popped and filled with a feedback screech that sounded almost like distant voices, shrieking cries that scraped her nerves like nails on a blackboard.

  “What do we do, Guv?” Freeman shouted, scrambling after her.

  “Stop that warlock finishing his ritual!” One way or another.

  Younger and fitter, Freeman pulled ahead, sprinting past the flaming sacrifice pit to run on towards the warlock’s circle. As Pierce followed, she spotted trouble: the lioness, a rangy sandy-coloured shape, hunched amid the plants at the far side of the triangle.

  “Shifter!” she yelled hoarsely, the word eaten by the screaming of the wind. “Freeman! Watch your back!”

  The lioness burst forth from among the writhing plants as they too poured forward, no longer held back by the boundary line that Pierce had broken. The shifter bounded across the triangle towards Freeman, taking a direct line between the stone circle and the flaming pit.

  Pierce saw the way the big cat’s ears were flattened to its skull, the fur of the enchanted pelt bristling; there might be a human mind in there somewhere calling the shots, but it was at war with the animal’s instincts—and even human instinct had enough monkey nature left to be howling with panic about the proximity of something wrong in that circle.


  The shifter was distracted, and that might be the only chance they had.

  “Look out!” she yelled at Freeman as the big cat loped after her, looking almost slow in the distortion of the circle, yet covering the distance all too fast. Pierce grabbed for her cuffs, and let out a string of curses as she remembered she didn’t have them. All she had in her pockets was her bloody useless phone. She hurled it at the shifter before it could reach Freeman, missing and hitting the ground by its feet in a spray of dirt.

  It might have done more good than any ineffectual hit; in a panic, the animal reeled away from the dust of the impact, swinging back towards the stone circle before it caught itself and turned again, now heading towards the flaming pit. Freeman followed Pierce’s lead and hurled her silver cuffs after the thing: they struck the lioness’s flank, and it jumped at the sting of the silver. Half mad with animal fright, the shifter took a running leap at the fiery pit, trying to clear it to escape. Despite everything, Pierce held her breath, half willing the jump to succeed just out of the horror of the alternative.

  But it was an impossible leap. The great cat’s front paws scrabbled at the dirt at the far edge of the pit, but found no purchase, clawing soil loose. Pierce turned her head away with an involuntary hiss as the lioness fell amid the flames. The agonised yowl and sickening scent of burning fur and flesh brought stinging tears to her eyes as she gagged.

  Across from her, Freeman staggered to a halt, wide-eyed and horrified as she clapped a hand over her mouth. “Christ. That was a person,” she said.

  One who would have gladly condemned them to the same fate, but that was bitter consolation. If they were doing their job, nobody should die: not police officers, not innocents, not criminals.

  Today wasn’t going to be one of those blessed days. Pierce closed the shifter’s dying howls off behind the walls of her mind; there’d be time to face those nightmares tomorrow, if they survived.