Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2)

by E. E. Richardson

  As Pierce crossed in front of her, the lecturer twisted slightly to reveal something in her hand—the ritual knife that she’d been using to mark symbols in the dirt. She stumbled as she took a step, and in grabbing Pierce for support, managed to shove the knife into her coat pocket. It was an unexpectedly smooth move, Moss already moving away again as the lead guard barked a warning. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, still tottering. “Not very steady on my pins right now, I’m afraid.”

  Pierce kept her back to the guards, subtly lowering her hands as she stepped away from the rest of the group. Was the knife Moss had given her made of solid silver? She hadn’t been able to get a good look in the limited light, and she certainly couldn’t pull it out to inspect it now.

  If it was, then she might have a paper thin chance of damaging the shifter’s pelt before it ripped her head off. If it wasn’t, they were fairly fucked... but that was hardly a downgrade on their current situation. She kept shuffling backwards, hoping the guards’—and the bear shifter’s—attention was more on Moss as she helped Freeman up.

  In her peripheral vision Pierce spotted the sprawled form of the warlock, apparently still unconscious on the ground. There was her chance. As she took another step backwards she deliberately let her foot catch the man’s limp, outflung arm, and staggered, her hands flailing for balance.

  She dipped into her pocket and drew the knife out as she twisted, looking down at her feet. She half raised her hands in a gesture of apology, hoping no one would see the glint of metal tucked behind one of them.

  One last chance. Just one card left to play.

  “Move away from the rest of the group, Chief Inspector,” the head guard ordered.

  “I’m moving. I’m moving.” Pierce half turned towards the group of guards. Where was the bear? Not within her line of sight, so it must be creeping closer in the blind spot on her other side.

  Behind her was the dull thump of something hitting the dirt—the Archdruid’s staff, maybe, or some other distraction, intentional or otherwise. Pierce turned towards the noise—and just kept turning, spinning round to lunge at the bear with the knife in her hand, slashing at the creature’s thick brown pelt.

  But not fast enough. Even as she struck out, the shifter reared away, slapping out at her with one great heavy paw. She jerked backward by reflex before it could make contact, but the rapid movement caused the knife to fly from her fingers. Before she could scramble to recover it, the head guard moved to stamp his foot down on the blade.

  One last gamble—and she’d lost.

  “Move away from the knife, Chief Inspector,” the head guard said, his tone more steely than before. Pierce took a few slow paces down the hill towards the road. Ahead of her she could see more of the guards moving around, torches flashing as they packed away equipment and herded the surviving druids onto a lorry. She tried to eyeball the distance past all of them and down to the road where they’d left the cars behind; cars that might or might not start, that she wasn’t sure she’d kept hold of the keys for.

  Too far. Too many obstacles. No way she could realistically hope to escape.

  But as she heard the metallic click of a weapon behind her that she knew wasn’t just a Taser, Pierce tensed to run anyway. If she couldn’t get away, at least she could leave behind a crime scene too messy to clean up.

  “That’s far enough,” the chief guard said. She paused. Drew a slow breath. Could she stall them any longer, or just start moving n—?

  An incandescent glare filled the world, and Pierce reflexively cried out, throwing her hands up to shield her face even though she was sure the light was the blaze of a fatal shot as it blew through her brain. They said you never got the chance to hear the one that killed you...

  Then sound filtered back in past the first burst of alarm: vehicle engines, a hum that built into the rotor noise of an approaching helicopter, and the distortion of an amplified voice over a loudhailer. “This is the police! You’re surrounded! Drop all your weapons and get down on the ground!”

  Firearms officers swarmed the site, followed by a wave of uniforms. Pierce saw the dark shape of the bear go hurtling past her, charging over the fallen wreckage of the hoardings to flee for the hills. “Shapeshifter’s on the move!” she shouted urgently, but she wasn’t sure if anybody heard or paid attention.

  A bright light was shone in her face, and she reeled backwards, squinting. “DCI Pierce, RCU!” she said, yanking out her warrant card. “You’ve got a shapeshifter in bear form, making a break for it across the fields—where’s your officer with silver bullets?” Anti-shapeshifter rounds were rare and expensive; she’d be lucky if the local Firearms Support Unit had even one officer with training and ammo to stop the bear.

  “Do you need medical attention?” the young officer asked her.

  She waved him away. “I’m fine.” Starving, busting for a pee, and her bad shoulder was aching, but otherwise still in remarkably close to one piece. She thumbed over her shoulder at the circles. “But DC Freeman took the backlash from interrupting the ritual. Make sure she goes to hospital and gets thoroughly checked.”

  There was little way of guessing what damage the magical blast might have done, nor of predicting whether anyone who’d been here at ground zero would face after-effects. Ritual Crime was a crapshoot of unanticipated consequences, and the scale of tonight’s ritual was a first even for Pierce.

  She looked around. To her relief, the Red Key guards weren’t fighting to the death; some had followed the shapeshifter’s lead and tried to flee, but others had surrendered, allowing themselves to be disarmed and cuffed and led away. Maybe they thought their bosses would get them out of trouble. Considering the level of resources that had gone into this setup, they might even be right.

  Or else they were just planning to do their time and keep their mouths shut until they got out. Pierce was painfully aware that there was little adequate that they could be charged with. Possession of the Tasers, unlawful detainment of their prisoners; might be possible to single a few individuals out for assault on the druids. But the summoning itself was too big, too complicated, to fall under the limited ritual laws. If they could prove the intent to sacrifice human lives, that made it a prohibited ritual, but the only one they could actually nail for that was the warlock himself.

  Wherever he was now. Pierce turned her gaze towards the remnants of the ritual triangle, lit by the fading glow of the nearly exhausted fire pit. Police were everywhere, cuffing the guards, escorting Greywolf and his druids away. She couldn’t see the warlock among the arrested; had the Red Key forces freed him from his ropes, or was he still lying trussed up on the ground, forgotten and unnoticed?

  For all she knew, he could have been dead before she’d bound him with the ropes. She hadn’t had the time to stop and check.

  She just hoped like hell he hadn’t died while he was lying there, injured and improperly restrained. It had been the best she could do under the circumstances, but that wouldn’t make her feel any better if it turned out they’d lost a prisoner while he was in police custody.

  Especially one of such importance to a major case. The guards, even the shifters, could all be hired guns, but the warlock had to know more about this. You couldn’t find somebody to perform a ritual like this just by advertising in internet chatrooms. He must have been training for this for years.

  Even he might not be able to tell her much about his employers—but he sure as hell had to know what the goal of tonight’s summoning had been.

  And Pierce meant to know too. She jogged towards the knot of uniforms dealing with the handcuffed guards. “Where’s the warlock?” she barked at them.

  Bewildered faces all round. God, they were all almost offensively bloody young, police and prisoners alike. Up past their bedtimes, the lot of them.

  “Red robes, tied up on the ground—have you found him?” she demanded. “He was here, in the circle, possibly unconscious.”

  The uniform sergeant she’d collared continued t
o look blank, and now faintly worried as well. “Er, not sure, ma’am. DI Dawson’s coordinating,” he said, passing the buck further up the stream. He pointed towards the upper field where the sacrifices had been held, and she saw Dawson’s bulky figure picking his way through the wreckage of broken fencing and vehicles in the dark.

  Pierce hurried up the slope to join him. As she drew closer, she could see from the angle of his head and emphatic hand gestures that he was talking to someone further uphill. She was too far back to hear what he was saying, but as the police helicopter made another sweep over the scene, the searchlight briefly lit up the arguing figures. She caught a glimpse of billowing robes: not druid white, but darker.

  The warlock.

  Cursing, Pierce broke into a faster run, looking around for someone to call out to for backup. But she’d left them all behind down by the ritual triangle, and there was no one up here within earshot. Without a radio, her only options were to go alone, or run back and hope that nothing happened while her back was turned.

  Bloody Dawson, charging in like a bull in a china shop again—he’d probably spotted the warlock outside the police perimeter and just gone after him without a thought for procedure. In the brief glimpse she’d had in the light she’d seen he had a stab vest, but that wouldn’t help him much if the warlock had some kind of prepared magic in reserve.

  As she drew closer, heart pounding, she saw the warlock throw his hands out in an angry gesture, Dawson raising his own arms as if to grab or shove him—

  And then the night exploded with bright flames. Pierce cursed and shielded her eyes, still staggering forward at a half-blinded run though she was certain she’d just seen her DI immolated. “Dawson!” she yelled. As she ran towards the conflagration, she collided with a solid body, and she fought before she registered the fabric of the stab vest. Dawson’s body wasn’t ablaze; the warlock’s was.

  “What the hell happened?” she demanded. The fire was already burning itself out, faster than any natural flame could have consumed a human being. The warlock’s body had barely had enough time to start collapsing to the ground before it was fully incinerated, crematorium ashes fluttering away from the glowing hot bones before they too crumbled down to nothing.

  “I was trying to talk him down,” Dawson said, still gripping her arms, though there was nothing left for her to run forward and try to save. The flames had ignited and burned out so fast the fire hadn’t even had the time to spread over the grass. “He knew he was caught. Guess he didn’t want to be taken in alive.”

  “Hell of a suicide method,” Pierce said, as she stepped away from him. Quick, but it couldn’t have been painless.

  “Fanatics, these bastards,” Dawson said.

  Possibly—but as he turned and strode away to summon some uniforms to join them, Pierce couldn’t help but wish that she’d been close enough to overhear their conversation. Maybe it had gone down exactly as Dawson said... and maybe it hadn’t. How did she know that the warlock had been threatening suicide, and not the one under threat? From the little she’d glimpsed in the dark, there was no way to be certain that it was the warlock and not Dawson who’d sparked the magical blaze.

  She watched him barking orders to the uniforms down in the lower field. They’d given him control of her department, but she still didn’t really know a thing about the man. Who was Graham Dawson? Was he just an honest cop with a bad attitude... or was he playing his own game?

  Pierce turned to survey the site of the aborted ritual, drinking in all the details just in case they went up in smoke like the evidence from the skinbinder bust in October. She didn’t know who was behind this group calling themselves Red Key, or if it was a part of the same setup. But one thing was for sure.

  It wasn’t safe to trust anyone right now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  VISITING HER OFFICERS in hospital was never a happy task, even when the prognosis was good. As Pierce walked the stark, antiseptic corridors, she couldn’t help but recall all the time she’d spent there in the last few months. Visiting Sally after the panther shifter had damn near slashed her throat; her own shoulder surgery and long recovery... most vividly, the visit she’d received from Superintendent Palmer—or rather, someone she was all but certain had been a shapeshifter wearing his skin.

  The RCU was nasty, dangerous work, and Freeman had just had a demonstration. If even a long-serving officer like Sally could be shaken into leaving, what were the odds that a new young recruit with plenty of time to switch specialisms would want to stick around? The RCU had always been a revolving door, few choosing to stay long with the harsh risks and poor rewards.

  But as Pierce poked her head into the ward, Freeman smiled at her brightly from where she was sitting up in the chair next to her hospital bed. With her hair loose around her head rather than pulled back into its customary bun, she looked even younger. A lanky lad of maybe eighteen with his hair in cornrows was casually slouched in the next seat, sitting up straighter as Pierce walked in.

  “Morning, Guv,” Freeman said cheerfully. She pointed a thumb at the boy beside her. “This is my brother Joey. Joe, this is my boss, DCI Pierce.”

  Pierce briefly shook hands with him, and he got up and stretched. “All right. I’m going to go and see if they have food in this place,” he told his sister.

  “Smuggle me back a doughnut,” she said. “And call Mum, tell her my head’s not going to fall off and she really doesn’t need to drive all the way up to see me.”

  “They give you a scan?” Pierce asked her, once Joey had gone.

  “Yeah.” She smoothed her hair back, wincing slightly as she touched her head. “Apparently my brains are still intact. I feel fine, Guv,” she insisted. “Just a bit dizzy. I should be good to get back to work in a day or two.”

  “Don’t strain yourself,” Pierce cautioned. “Might as well leave it till after Christmas at this stage.” She’d be working over the holiday herself; too much to do, too much time off already, and frankly she’d already spent enough of her medical leave with her mother and sister to last her all the way to next December.

  Freeman shook her head determinedly, despite the fact it clearly hurt to do so. “I want to be involved in this one, Guv,” she said. “This is my first big case for the RCU—I want to make sure these Red Key people don’t slip through our fingers.”

  “Well, the case’ll be waiting for you when you get back,” Pierce said. Somehow she suspected they weren’t going to resolve this one quickly and easily—and this time, she wasn’t conveniently out on medical leave so that others could shuffle it all under the rug. “Look after yourself. We need you back, but we need you on top of your game, not dragging yourself back to work before you’re ready.”

  “You can count on me, Guv,” Freeman said.

  Pierce left the hospital in a slightly better mood. Perhaps this new RCU team could hold together long enough for her to get to know them after all.

  She drove back to the station, at last mercifully cleared of picketing druids. She wasn’t sure that would be quite enough of a feather in her cap, though, as she went through to see the superintendent. They’d prevailed yesterday, but it had been a bloody close-run thing.

  “DCI Pierce,” he said, shuffling papers and looking up at her over his glasses. “How are things going at the ritual site?”

  “They’re still bagging and tagging and taking photographs,” she said. “Doctor Moss helped our folks from Magical Analysis to confirm there’s no live magic at the site. Right now it’s just a big field full of evidence.”

  Confused, trampled, and half deconstructed evidence, but at least it hadn’t all gone walkabouts in the middle of the night. After the deaths of PCSO Davenport and PC Winters at the Silsden scene, Dawson’s demands for backup had been taken seriously, and the place was crawling with enough uniforms and forensics people to give even the most connected conspiracy pause for thought. Their evidence might yet conveniently vanish down the cracks between storage units later,
but at least they’d get their chance to examine it first.

  “The third set of buried skulls has been found and removed safely as well,” she said. “Whatever lesser spirit was originally caged there was apparently cannibalised by the big one before the ritual last night. Or at least, it didn’t pop up to rip anyone’s face off.” That was about as much as they could ask.

  “Yes.” Superintendent Snow pressed his lips together in a frown. She got the impression he wasn’t much of a fan of the ephemeral, hard-to-classify nature of most of the threats they dealt with in the RCU. Unfortunate for him. “And Constable, er... Freeman?” he asked.

  “She’s doing well. Eager to be back at work,” Pierce said.

  “Good, good.” He clasped his hand together and sat forward. “Frankly, Pierce, you’ve come out of this operation better than you deserved to,” he said bluntly. “The whole thing has been a shambles of poor organisation from start to finish. Seconded officers killed, consultants and informants murdered, loose ends at every turn—if it wasn’t for the sheer scale of the criminal enterprise you brought down last night, there would certainly be questions raised about your suitability to continue in this role.”

  Pierce held his gaze, refusing to back down. They’d cocked up along the way, fair enough, but he needed to appreciate what he was dealing with. “Sir, this is Ritual Crime,” she said. “We’re never going to have an opportunity to do things by the book with minimised risks. The book hasn’t been written, we don’t know what the risks are, and people can’t be trained in the best way to handle things that no one in the police has seen before. We do the best we can with what we have.”

  “If the book doesn’t exist, then I suggest you write it,” Snow said crisply. “You may be dealing with the unknown, but I still expect you to communicate, coordinate, and document your work. I’ve allowed a little leeway given your time off on leave and the fact that the majority of your unit is new, but there will be no cowboy operations under my watch. Is that understood?”