Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (26 page)

“Well, generally we prefer good citizens to stay back out of harm’s way. Which is why, I’m afraid, I really do have to ask you if you can move your people away from the station building. As today’s incident has demonstrated, we do regrettably deal with some dangerous people from time to time, and having crowds around the station is only risking the safety of my people and yours.” She didn’t overtly state that the crowd had allowed her attacker to get close, but he was a bright boy, he must have realised it. Maybe his sense of good citizenship would extend to getting the hell out of their car park.

“Then I in turn must make my apologies,” Greywolf said solemnly. “These are not my preferred methods, I assure you, Chief Inspector—but my people’s concerns really must be heard.”

“And they will be,” she said, refusing to concede control of the situation. “However, you have to appreciate that the RCU deals with many dozens if not hundreds of cases across the whole of the north, and we have to prioritise those incidents that pose the most urgent danger to people’s lives and welfare.” She would have been delighted to
have
enough officers to let one of them waste time chasing up trivial land use disputes with no proof of a crime, but this was the real world.

“This
is
urgent,” the Archdruid said forcefully, locking eyes with her. His were a rare shade of brilliant blue that were difficult to meet directly, and Pierce didn’t doubt that he was used to getting his way by sheer weight of personality. “The stone circle my people venerate is a site of great ritual potential. I believe that the farmer who used to grant us access was pressured into selling against his will, and now he fails to answer any of our communications. The site has been completely sealed off, and we believe the new owners are making preparations for a ritual.”

Pierce resisted the urge to sigh and rub her temples. All right. He
sounded
relatively sane, and while she doubted there was much substance to the allegations, perhaps some evidence that they were taking steps to investigate would be enough to get him and his druids off their backs.

“All right,” she said. “If you really can show visible indications that there may be illegal magic going on at the stone circle, I will try to detail an officer to go and check that out just as soon as we have somebody available. Now, in return, can I please ask that you be willing to move your encampment away from the police station to avoid any further incidents like today’s?”

“Of course,” he said, inclining his head with an affable smile.

She just wished she was optimistic enough to believe it would be that easy.

A
GREEMENT OR NOT,
there was no way the druids’ issue was going to make its way onto her priority list any time soon. They might have all but resolved the artefact thefts, but right now they still needed all hands on deck to deal with the matter of the skulls. As soon as Deepan and Freeman returned to the station she gathered her team together for a briefing.

“All right,” she said, surveying her forces, limited though they were. “From this point on, the skull case is officially the RCU’s top priority. Here’s what we know so far.” She indicated the photos from the ritual scenes in Bingley and Silsden, pinned to a board behind her; high-tech was all very well, but in her experience you usually spent more time trying to get the computer and projector to agree to talk to each other than you actually saved by using the fancy equipment.

“These two sites are apparently spirit traps or cages,” she continued. “They were keeping disembodied spirits—or minor demons, possibly, it’s a matter of terminology—of some form penned up inside.” She swept her gaze across the team. “Now, as we’ve learned, those things are bloody dangerous in themselves. It could be that this is intentional, and the traps are primed to unleash the things on anyone who interferes. Or it could just be an ugly side effect. That doesn’t really matter for our purposes.” It might when it came to figuring out the appropriate criminal charges, but Pierce would worry about that when they had some suspects in hand.

She pointed at their map of the region, made up of several sheets of printed A4 pinned together. The Bingley and Silsden sites were marked, with intersecting circles drawn around them so that the whole thing looked like a lopsided Venn diagram.

“Now, we’ve consulted with an expert in ritual demonology, and she believes that there will be a third site, echoing the triangular arrangement of the skulls at the two we’ve already discovered. That gives us two potential locations for the third.” She squinted at the map. “Somewhere around... Oakworth? And somewhere just south of Ilkley, on the moor.” At this scale, any triangle they marked out was going to be inexact.

“That’s not very much to go on, Guv,” Taylor said dubiously. They all remembered just how well a vague, directionless search had gone in Silsden, and now they had two sites to cover simultaneously.

“No, it’s not,” Pierce said. “And there’s worse. Our intelligence suggests that whatever this ritual is supposed to accomplish is due to go down on the twenty-second of December—that is, for those of us who haven’t spent enough time looking at the calendar lately, the day after tomorrow. That means we only have a very limited time to act on this information and locate the site before it all goes pear-shaped.”

Freeman looked like she was on the verge of raising a hand to be called on with her question before she remembered that she wasn’t in school any more. “Do we know what the ritual is intended to accomplish, Guv?” she asked.

“According to DI Dawson’s informant”—still an unidentified corpse, poor bugger, despite their best efforts with prints and dental records—“the spirits imprisoned by the skull traps are effectively bait for something even bigger and nastier,” she said. “We believe that the group behind this ritual are trying to summon a far more dangerous entity—what’s generally referred to in the literature as a major demon. The lesser spirits in the traps are to draw its attention, luring it closer to the barrier between this world and the Other Side—whichever theory you subscribe to about what kind of ‘other side’ we’re dealing with.”

Pierce wasn’t sure if that one was a question for the ritual theorists or the philosophers. Certainly, none of the sources that claimed to have had a glimpse of said beyond sounded remotely convincing, and if the ones who’d died horribly trying had actually managed, nobody would ever know.

As far as she was concerned, it didn’t really matter
what
demons were or where they came from; it wasn’t her job to make sense of it all, just to police those bits of it that caused trouble in her territory.

“Have we spoiled their plans by destroying two of the skull traps?” Freeman asked, sitting forward.

“It would be nice to think so.” Which was why Pierce didn’t trust that thought. “But we have to proceed from the assumption that whatever they’re trying to lure is already close enough for them to perform the final summoning—whatever form that takes. Our expert’s going to come back to us with more research on that, but it’s safe to assume it will involve large scale sacrifice. And probably large scale slaughter if it succeeds.”

She had a bad feeling she might be underselling it even with that. Major demons in the literature were the kind of thing that wiped whole towns off the map, if not entire countries.

“Do we have any clue who might be behind the rituals?” Deepan asked, face uncommonly sombre. Pierce hesitated, thinking of the shapeshifter and her suspicions. But then her gaze slid past him to DI Dawson where he stood in the doorway, one hand rubbing the bridge of his bruised nose. He might have come through for her earlier, but she still wasn’t entirely certain how far they could trust him.

“Not at present,” she said crisply. It was true enough. “Our informant claimed that they’re calling themselves Red Key, but I doubt that pursuing that will get us any paper trail. What we
do
know is that they’re highly organised, and they must have a fair number of people in their employ. The skulls were set in place with great precision and presumably some degree of ritual, without drawing the attention of the public. That suggests a group of people working together with a high degree of professionalism. They’ve sent killers after two of our consulting specialists, and they have at least one shapeshifter on their team, panther form.”

She saw Deepan press his lips together. He hadn’t been with her in the barn when Sally had got her throat slashed by the last panther shifter they’d tangled with, but he’d seen the aftermath.

“These people are dangerous,” Pierce said, meeting the eyes of her two newest young rookies in particular. “Extremely so. We have to assume that they
can
accomplish what they’ve set out to do. We have to be aware of the possibility they may be keeping tabs on our investigation.” She drew in a deep breath. “And, somehow, we have to get ahead of them.”

She turned back to gesture at the map behind her. “We can’t afford to gamble on picking the right site and risk wasting our time,” she said. “It’ll stretch us thinner, but we have to try to tackle both at once.” She indicated the northernmost of the two sites, near Ilkley. “Dawson, you’re in charge of the search on the moor. See if you can borrow additional warm bodies from across the county line in North Yorkshire.”

After Silsden, the regular police should at least be taking the situation seriously, even if they were less than happy about cooperating. She just had to hope that Dawson could keep enough of a lid on his obnoxiousness to avoid riling them any further, because she really couldn’t spare the resources to keep an eye on him.

She turned back to face the others. “Sergeant Mistry and Constable Taylor will be handling the second search in the Oakworth region.” With his lesser rank, Deepan might face more obstruction from the locals, but hopefully a greater degree of RCU presence would balance that out; Pierce didn’t want to commit herself to either location before they knew which was the real one. “Freeman and I will be following up other leads from here.” Assuming they could find any.

She surveyed her team, locking eyes with each of them in turn. “From now until D-Day,” she said, “consider this case the only one that matters.”

The clock was ticking.

CHAPTER TWENTY

A
FTER DEALING WITH
their two new prisoners and reporting in to Snow, there were only so many hours of afternoon left to get anything done. They were coming up for the shortest day of the year, and the two area searches barely had a chance to get started before the winter dark dropped like a blackout curtain. After what had happened in Silsden, Pierce reluctantly vetoed any idea of continuing into the night, and ordered the two groups to resume at dawn. She could only pray that the lost hours wouldn’t come back to bite them.

She wasn’t certain that finding the third skull site would get them any closer to dealing with the main demon-summoning in any case. What they really needed was more information back from Doctor Moss—but that was a process she had no power to accelerate. Pierce had the itchy feeling of sitting at a traffic light when she was in a hurry, knowing that things needed to be done but unable to take any action until things outside her control had lined up. She spent far too long pacing the office when there was no reason for her to still be there, too restless to settle to the actual work that
was
available for her to do.

When she finally left, the druids’ vans and tents were still set up in the car park, but the druids themselves and their placards and banners were nowhere in sight. Pierce pressed her lips together. The Archdruid had appeared to accept her request for them to clear off, but he hadn’t given any promise of how soon they would do it. She’d already struggled to get Snow off her back after the incident with John Brown in the car park.

Apparently a glutton for castigation, she kept flicking the news on all night, looking for fresh evidence that details were leaking, even hoping that somehow the media had learned something she didn’t know yet. But right now the vultures were still picking the corpse of their juicy story from Silsden. Police officers dead, the potential for an inquiry... this was all going to crash down on Pierce’s head eventually, but if some kind of major demon ate Yorkshire next week, they’d all have bigger problems.

She was too wired to sleep easily—taking the job home with her in her head, the big thing they warned you against, though when the job involved a looming threat to who knew how many lives, it was advice that was impossible to heed. She couldn’t risk taking any pills that might leave her groggy and hungover in the morning, so she only dropped off in the early hours, spending her dreams running through endless corridors in search of a vital meeting she was supposed to be leading.