Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2)

by E. E. Richardson

  “Come on! Warlock!” she barked at Freeman. Their target was still working his spell in the other circle, gestures growing steadily more frantic as the fires of the sacrifice pit flared up beside him. The earth tremors were growing stronger, visibly shaking the ground, and the atmosphere had taken on that staticky feeling of the moment just before a lightning strike. The shifter’s death had fed the ritual more power, and now the warlock was building towards a crescendo—or losing control.

  Either way, the spell had to be stopped.

  As they ran towards the warlock’s circle, he began to stand—not facing them, but raising his hands towards the stone circle. It looked almost like the funnel of a tornado now, swirling shadows in the centre of the circle that stretched up to meet the clouds above. Staring into the vortex, Pierce saw flickers of alien shapes and impossible colours, glimpsed and gone too fast to leave any clear impression, only unsettling impressions.

  “Stop!” she yelled at the warlock. “This is a prohibited ritual! Cease all magical activity and leave the circle!”

  From the expression on his face, a rictus that looked like half rapture, half terror, the warlock was far beyond listening. He might not even have heard; the screaming, screeching, howling wind from inside the circle was like a roaring jet engine in her ears. The warlock made a sweeping gesture, spreading his hands as if preparing for some final grand motion.

  “I’ve got him, Guv!” Freeman shouted, reaching the edge of the circle. As he began to howl the final syllables of his spell, she dived forward in a rugby tackle that knocked him staggering backwards outside the bounds of the ring.

  There was a mighty flash, and the world tore inside out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  PIERCE FELT LIKE all her senses had been wrenched away and then handed back in the wrong order. She couldn’t even tell if her eyes were open or closed: migraine patterns of light and darkness flashed in iridescent colours like a petrol spill. The earth shuddered beneath her feet, and she felt like she was falling in every direction at once. Was the rushing in her ears somebody screaming nearby, or the sound of the blood pounding in her head?

  At last her vision halfway cleared, her surroundings reappearing from the smear of blurry light. The ground was still shaking, and between that and the wind that seemed to drag instead of pushing, she stumbled a few involuntary steps forward. Her foot crossed the line of the warlock’s circle, and she flinched, half expecting a shock, but there was nothing. The power of the circle was broken. Freeman lay slumped across the outer edge of it, the warlock equally unmoving a few feet away. They were both on their backs, as if they’d been blasted apart by an explosion when they made contact.

  Pierce scrambled towards Freeman, cursing, and bent to take her pulse. The quaking of the ground made it almost impossible, but the young DC stirred weakly at the brush of her fingers, though her eyes looked dazed when she blinked them open.

  “Freeman. You all right?” Pierce helped her to sit up.

  Freeman touched the back of her head and squinted at her fingers. No sign of any blood, but she seemed pretty out of it. “Where are we?” she asked blankly, and Pierce wasn’t sure she recognised who she was talking to.

  Concussion, more than likely, but there was nothing she could do right now—and little chance of diagnosing a head injury when the world was so askew that Pierce’s senses weren’t reporting anything reasonable.

  “We’re on a case. You hit your head. Just stay there,” Pierce said, and hoped that being inside the warlock’s circle would afford her some modicum of protection.

  If not, well, it wasn’t as if anywhere else would be much safer.

  The warlock’s efforts had stopped when he fell unconscious, but it hadn’t brought the summoning to an end. Instead, it seemed to be burgeoning still further out of control: staring into the stone circle was like looking at the halo around an eclipse, painful to look at and leaving her eyes burnt with coloured afterimages that she feared might end up permanent.

  She looked back behind her, and saw Doctor Moss struggling across the shaking ground towards her. The plants were pouring over the ritual ground in a wave, the barriers that had kept them out now shaken to pieces. Greywolf had disappeared: Pierce didn’t have the time to care where to.

  “Can you end this?” she bellowed at Moss. As she looked up at the clouds, they no longer seemed to be clouds at all, but something like a nebula, a hole torn in the sky to reveal ghostly constellations. Night had fallen over the site, naturally or otherwise, but everything was still lit up in shifting hues from the fire pit and that alien sky.

  “Perhaps!” Moss said, but she looked doubtful, almost going to one knee as she stumbled away from the spreading roots. “I need to be inside the warlock’s circle—and I need it kept clear of these plants!”

  That was a tall order. Pierce looked around, and saw the fallen warlock slumped across the ditch that marked the boundary of his circle; she ran forward to grab him by his robes and drag him back in. The ditch, filled with rock salt and who knew what else, might be enough to keep the enchanted plants from encroaching for a while, but the constant quaking of the earth was already causing the loose soil to shift and crumble. It wouldn’t take much to compromise the magic barrier.

  As Moss staggered over to join them in the circle, Pierce tried to check the pulse of the warlock. She thought she felt a thready beat, but it was hard to tell.

  Best to get him restrained in any case: one tiny move from him could ruin everything. She had no cuffs, and didn’t have the time to hunt for Freeman’s; instead, she yanked out the braided cord that belted the warlock’s robes and loosely bound his wrists together with it. There’d be words about non-standard ways of restraining suspects if they got out of this, but right now that was the least of her troubles.

  As Pierce rose back to her feet, she saw the crawling roots had already reached the edge of the circle, probing at the crumbling soil around the outer ditch as if searching for any weaknesses. Every magical protection here was now eroding. There was a stench in the air like sulphur, like decomposing corpses, like the metallic taste of blood bringing bile up in her throat.

  Every instinct that she had was screaming at her to run, run, get away from the hole in the world. She defied them all and turned her back on the great sucking void, reaching out a hand to help Doctor Moss climb across the ditch around the circle.

  “Can you work here?” she said, forced to raise her voice over the unearthly screeching even when they were just feet apart.

  “I’ll try!” Moss staggered forward, and Pierce did what she could to shelter the other woman in the lee of her body as she dropped her bag on the ground and knelt to dig through it. “I can’t promise this will work—but if it doesn’t, there’s no point in running.”

  With an unconscious prisoner and Freeman hurt, there was little chance they’d make it past the guards in any case. They had no choice but to make their stand here.

  As Moss hastily drew a knife from her bag and began to cut symbols in the dirt, Pierce saw figures approaching the ritual ground out of the dark. She opened her dry mouth to give another shout of warning, but then she recognised the staff in the lead figure’s hands: Archdruid Greywolf, and a handful of white-clad followers. They all stared, mesmerised, at the maelstrom in the circle.

  From somewhere, Pierce found enough breath in her tight lungs to shout. “Greywolf! Stop the plants!” she bellowed over the shriek of the wind-voices. If he and his druids could keep the encroaching roots back, then Moss might have a chance to stop the ritual.

  She thought she saw him nod, but then another tremor shook the soil beneath her feet, and she had no time to focus on anything but staying upright. Moss cursed, raising her hands, afraid to risk touching the ritual designs she was crafting until it stopped.

  This was the equivalent of magical bomb disposal. One wrong move could blow everything, and failure now would be catastrophic.

  “All right there, Freeman?” Pierce called ou
t as the earth stabilised. The constable was hunched forward, clutching her head in her hands.

  “I—” She started to lift her head and open her eyes, but recoiled with a cry of pain. “Too bright... What’s happening?” Pierce wasn’t sure if it was concussed confusion talking, or just general bewilderment.

  Either way, the answer was the same. “Fucked if I know! Just don’t look between the stones.” Pierce immediately ignored her own good advice, taking a glance over her shoulder into something that her senses couldn’t even fully process. In the instant before she squeezed her eyes shut and twisted away, an afterimage like a jagged red crack in the world burned through her eyelids.

  She was no expert on barriers between realities, but that sure as fuck looked like a hole being torn in one to her. “I don’t think we’ve got long!” she shouted. And there was nothing at all she could do in the time left: it was all in Doctor Moss’s hands from here.

  Her and the druids. Greywolf planted the end of his staff in the earth, shouting orders to his followers. Less than half a dozen of them with him—where were the rest? Fled, still scuffling with the guards, injured... dead? Her stomach twinged, knowing that she couldn’t run to help them; couldn’t leave the circle now the counter-ritual had begun.

  Moss was making gestures of her own now, muttering, sweeping her hands back and forth over the ground. Pierce had the growing sense of tension gathering, as if every sweep was collecting thicker air around her hands.

  The small band of druids had formed a loose ring around the outside of the circle. Five of them, far too few to link hands around it, but they stretched their open palms towards each other with bowed heads, echoing the Archdruid’s low chant. Their voices blended into Moss’s, into the storm of noise; no distinguishable words, just the rising, falling cadence of magic being worked.

  Pierce saw the squirming roots around them gradually fall still, an effect that flowed outward like concentric ripples in a pond. Then the plants began to shrink back, retreating and shrivelling. They cleared from the edge of the circle, leaving the ring of salt around it chewed but still intact. The trembling of the earth eased amid the spreading wave of stillness.

  At the heart of the circle Doctor Moss rose to her feet, presence powerful despite her slight, frail form. She raised her hands and bellowed to the sky, rich lecturer’s voice booming out above even the screaming wind. Words in languages Pierce didn’t know, in languages that perhaps no one knew, but she could hear the power in them, feel every syllable ring through the heavy air like a struck gong.

  Every word was like a nail being hammered into the thick, breathless atmosphere. Her hair rose. Her skin rippled. It felt as if the blood was fizzing in her veins, and she burned to scratch all over, rip the unbearable itch out with her fingernails. Pressure was squeezing her head like a vice, and beside her she heard Freeman sob with pain.

  Doctor Moss’s face was drawn taut with the tension, almost cadaverous in the shifting light of the circle. Pierce couldn’t see her eyes behind the reflections that danced in her glasses, but she still kept her head up, shouting to the sky. Pierce could feel the rhythm of the ritual reaching a crescendo, the pressure growing, growing, until she felt like something in her head would surely burst, that any moment now her eyes and ears would start to bleed.

  “Begone!” Moss shouted in English, as her words reached their climax. “I banish thee! I banish thee! I banish thee! Begone!” Her voice cracked into hoarseness on the final repetition, and she threw her arms up crossed to shield her face as there was a great rushing in the air, as if someone had punctured the Earth’s atmosphere.

  Pierce was almost thrown off of her feet, and she dropped to the ground, sinking her fingers into the soil as if that would somehow help her to cling on to the earth. The ground was quaking even more violently than before, and she was sure that something had gone wrong. There was a rolling, drawn-out thunderclap...

  And then nothing. Darkness and silence.

  Pierce took a moment to wonder if she was dead before she became aware of the sensation of soil between her fingers. She realised that her eyes had fallen closed, and cautiously opened them, one at a time. It was still dark, but she could see a little, by the light of the fire burning in the pit to her left. It had died down to the level of a standard bonfire now, and the blaze burned with a normal orange hue.

  She cautiously stood up; the ground had stilled, but she felt the way that she did disembarking from a boat, the world still weaving even after the motion had halted. Moving on stiff, uncooperative limbs, she turned around to face the stone circle.

  All she could see now was the ring of ancient stones, dull, inconspicuous lumps in the dim firelight. The great crack in the substance of the world had sealed itself.

  Looking up at the sky, she saw that the swirl of alien clouds had also vanished, and now there was just the overcast night sky, occasional stars peeking through the grey clouds. She looked down for her watch, but her wrist was bare. Confiscated. Right. She doubted it would have retained the right time in any case. She wasn’t sure the world had kept the right time. That rip in the air had chewed time and space up into something out of step with their traditional measures, and it was anybody’s guess how much they might have lost.

  But it was gone. Pierce drew in a deep breath, brushing the clinging dirt off of her hands. “Everybody all right?” she asked. “Freeman, you okay?”

  The pained groan that she got in response concerned her a little, but at least the young DC didn’t seem to be much worse off than before, sitting rocking forward slightly as she clutched her head. The light show and rapid shifts in atmospheric pressure would be enough to give anyone a headache, let alone somebody who was already concussed.

  “We’ll get you medical attention as soon as we can,” she promised. God knew when that would be. She wondered if the cars parked outside the site had escaped unscathed, if anyone had phones that might work now. She turned to check on the others. “Doctor Moss? Are you injured?” she asked.

  “I seem to be in one piece,” Moss said, standing cautiously. “Though I think this outfit has seen better days.” She squinted at the site of the failed summoning. “It seems my hunch was right. The partially opened portal was unstable from the start—I only had to snip the ritual threads feeding it power, and it collapsed in on itself.”

  “Good to hear.” Pierce twisted round to look at the small knot of druids. “Mr Greywolf? Are your people all right?”

  “Those of us that are here are fine,” he said, though he was leaning heavily on his staff for support. “But others have been hurt. We need to see what’s become of them all.”

  “Right,” she said, turning about to face what she thought was the direction of the road. The great mass of plants surrounding the ritual triangle had withered and died away, but with only the limited light of the dying fire down in the pit she couldn’t see much in the darkness. “Let’s see what we can do—”

  She was cut off as the bright beam of a torch shone in her eyes, quickly joined by half a dozen others.

  “Stay where you are, please, Chief Inspector. All of you,” said a calm voice from outside the circle. She squinted past the light to try and make the speaker out, and glimpsed the dark army surplus outfits of the Red Key guards. Beside them slunk the hulking shape of the bear-form shapeshifter that she’d lost track of in the general chaos.

  This wasn’t over yet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  PIERCE WASN’T SURE if she and her fellows in the circle were outnumbered, but they were definitely in no condition to fight. Freeman was probably concussed, Doctor Moss had been through far too much already for an aging academic who’d been in hospital just days ago, and the druids seemed shaken and drained after their ritual. Pierce herself might have just about enough energy left to throw a punch or two, but it would be a wholly futile gesture.

  She substituted bravado instead. “Cut your losses, folks,” she advised. “Your ritual’s a bust, and you’ve alr
eady committed enough crimes tonight. Let’s not add anything else to the tally.”

  The spokesman of the Red Key forces didn’t bother trading taunts. “Everyone stand up,” he said. “Leave all your ritual equipment on the ground and move away from it. We’re going to have to ask you to come with us, please.”

  Pierce held her ground. “I don’t think we’re going to be doing that, son,” she said, staring past the glare of the torches in an effort to meet the man’s gaze. Refusing to go along might just get them all killed, but accompanying the Red Key forces anywhere would more than likely end in the same fate, with less chance of their bodies being found.

  “I appreciate your reluctance, but I’m afraid you don’t have a choice.” The lead guard nodded his head towards the bear-form shapeshifter. “Move, or we’ll encourage you to do so.”

  Pierce tensed. Getting hit with a Taser would be one thing—and not one she looked forward to—but the shapeshifter’s crushing jaws and vicious claws were another level of lethal. The bear’s ears were back as it swung its lowered head from side to side, snarling, animal instincts probably still twitchy from the magical events in the circle. It wouldn’t take much to trigger it to attack.

  It might not need any real trigger at all.

  “All right,” Pierce said, breathing out as she raised her hands. “All right.” Playing for time. Bear or no bear, she knew they couldn’t afford to just meekly go along with the Red Key team. As soon as they let these people take them away from this site, they were done for. “But we have injured here. You’re going to have to give us a chance to help them.” She moved towards Freeman, but a jerk of the man’s Taser made her freeze.

  “Not you,” he said, and nodded his head at Doctor Moss instead. “You help her up.”

  After that ritual, Pierce wasn’t sure Doctor Moss even had the strength to support herself, but that was probably the point of the selection. The guards weren’t taking any chances. “All right,” she said, making a point of stepping away to exchange places with Moss.