“It’s a complex question,” Cliff mused, rubbing his chin as he gazed off into the distance. “A well-made shape-shifting skin should last almost indefinitely—there are museum examples that have survived for centuries, though of course no one’s actually worn them to see if they work. But there’s been a lot of debate in the literature about the difficulty of producing working ape skins—it’s possible the source animal’s intelligence may be a factor in the success of the initial skinbinding ritual, or that perhaps there’s a form of rejection at work, where the more similar the transformation is to the wearer’s natural form, the more likely the body will revert of its own accord.”
Jenny was leaning forward, and Pierce could see they were in danger of slipping into an academic debate. She cleared her throat. “Regardless of how they did it, these people clearly have the capability to walk into police-controlled facilities and seize any evidence that would incriminate them.”
“And you want me to find out where it wandered off to?” Jenny surmised.
“The test results are almost certainly gone,” Pierce said. “But a panther pelt’s a difficult thing to sneak out of the storage facility without a trace—and a valuable artefact to destroy without good reason.” Skinbinders who could make truly high-quality pelts were rare, and for that matter, panthers weren’t exactly crawling out of the woodwork either. “It’s possible it’s still in there somewhere while they wait for an opportunity to move it out. With the amount of crap that’s stored in there, we’d have to strip the place bare to find it... unless you know a quicker way.”
Jenny took her glasses off to clean them as she thought. “Well... I did do some research into the enchantments on shapeshifting pelts after you brought me that case in October,” she said. “I might be able to whip up a divination that’ll show you if the pelt’s somewhere nearby. If they’ve already moved it halfway across the country, though...” She shrugged apologetically.
“Well, let’s see what we can see,” Pierce said.
T
HERE WAS A
different security guard on duty this time, but this one also knew Cliff by name and waved them in without quibble. The lack of curiosity was convenient for their purposes, but also made Pierce suspect that any impostor with a decent fake ID would have faced little challenge from the guards.
They followed Cliff through the echoing aisles to the rack of shapeshifting pelts they’d gone through the night before. Pierce checked them all again, nonetheless, since if there was one thing decades of police work had taught her, it was that mind-boggling stupidity was always a depressing possibility. But no, the pelt still wasn’t here. She turned to Jenny. “All right, then. Your show.”
Hers and Cliff’s, though Jenny was directing; Pierce could only restlessly pace the aisles, useless in the painstakingly slow business of ritual setup. She made a full circuit of the warehouse, scanning the rows as if she might spot the pelt draped across a shelf somewhere, and then returned to where the others were working. Cliff had produced a roll of white cloth from his satchel to lay out on the floor, and by now it was covered with charcoal lines and curves, complex sigils set within the loops of a curling pattern that formed a kind of pointer arrow aiming away from the rack of pelts and out into the warehouse
Within the loop at the tip of the arrow was set a simple glass dish piled with silver powder. Jenny was just tapping the last of it loose from the canister with a frown of concentration, Cliff shielding the edges of the dish with his latex-gloved hands; both of them holding their breath to avoid scattering the powder. Even the smallest smudge across the design could break a line or alter the shape of a sigil, with potentially disastrous effects.
At last Jenny seemed to decide she had as much powder poured out as she was likely to get, and sat back, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her arm. Cliff stood up and stepped away with an audible click of his knees.
Pierce decided it was safe to speak without making them jump. “How are we doing?”
Jenny rose and stood back to survey their handiwork. “I think we’re about good to go,” she said. “There are a few more runes that I could add for extra reassurance, but at this stage, the more complex we make it, the more chance there is that we’ll fudge it. As it is, I’m bodging about three different things, so there’s every chance that it won’t work as intended.”
“What’s the intention?” Pierce asked, moving closer to study the setup.
Jenny swiped at her forehead again and then gestured vaguely towards the rack of shapeshifting pelts with the same arm. “We’re going to use the whole set of pelts as a focus for the tracking spell,” she said. “Christ knows what effect that’s going to have on the strength of the spell—in theory it should boost it, but the trouble with massive power boosts is that sometimes they become massive overloads and everything goes haywire.”
Pierce nodded, having seen a number of attempted rituals go that way in the supposedly safe environs of the police station. Working spells on or around artefacts that were in themselves inherently magical could have all kinds of unpredictable effects, often destructive. And this place was packed to the rafters with them—secured to the best of their abilities, but often they just didn’t know enough to be sure how.
“Still, it’s probably our best chance of success,” Jenny said. “If we just used an individual pelt, or hair samples taken from the pelts, we run the risk of narrowing the focus to the point where it won’t find anything since it’ll be seeking an exact match rather than shapeshifting pelts in general. And we may
need
the power, considering the amount of magical background noise there’ll be in here.”
She looked around at the site of their ritual. “Unfortunately, since we haven’t got the floor space or the tools to build a circle that will enclose all of this, I’ve had to adapt the ritual geometry from a nice, safe, well-contained circle to a pointery-thing without any outer boundaries. So not only is it possible that I’ve screwed up translating the ritual design and it just won’t work, but if it
does
go boom, it will go boom pretty messily, right in our faces.”
“This is boding well,” Pierce said.
Jenny snorted. “Oh, I haven’t finished yet,” she said. “The
other
thing I’m bodging is that this is traditionally done with a candle flame. Unfortunately”—she pointed up at the ceiling—“sprinklers.”
“Not a good idea,” Pierce agreed, while Cliff looked faintly ill at the very thought. Odds were such a tiny flame wouldn’t be enough to agitate the smoke detectors high above their heads, but a warehouse full of vital evidence, in the form of thousands of irreplaceable, priceless magic artefacts, was not the place to go taking a chance.
“Not a good idea,” Jenny echoed. “So, we’re improvising again.” She gestured to the dish of piled silver powder, and reached under her collar to tug off the necklace she was wearing. It was a divination pendulum that Pierce had seen her use in a couple of rituals before, a faceted amethyst crystal that came to a point. Pierce had a pretty low opinion of pendulum-based divination—subject to human arm wobbles and confirmation bias, they were distinctly suspect, magic-wise, in her view—but at least she knew Jenny had the training to know what she was doing.
“Pendulum and powder,” Jenny explained. “It should, in theory, produce a similar effect to using actual smoke, but it’s not going to last anywhere near as long.” She nodded her head at the heap of silver powder in the dish. “If all goes well, we’ll see some signal leading us to the nearest shapeshifting pelt, but once all the powder’s used up, it will disappear.”
“So how long before it’s used up?” Pierce asked.
Jenny shrugged.
“How long is a piece of string?” Cliff said with a wry smile.
“Long enough to be useful for something, hopefully,” Pierce said. She took a deep breath. “All right. Let’s get this show on the road, then.” Even a brief indication of a direction would help to narrow the search—or, more likely, the lack of any indicated direction would prove the pelt was long gone and not worth searching for.
Or simply be a sign the ritual hadn’t bloody worked. Always a frustrating lack of certainties with magic—and this improvised ritual was a longer shot than most.
But it was the best shot they had.
Jenny sat cross-legged on the floor, closing her eyes and breathing evenly as she let the pendulum dangle from her fist above the dish of silver powder. When its subtle swings had gentled to near imperceptible, she opened her eyes.
“Like calls to like,” she said out loud, her voice echoing in the empty warehouse, and followed it up with a phrase in some Germanic language, the sounds just familiar enough for Pierce’s brain to briefly tangle over trying to make sense of them before she understood it wasn’t English. “Essence to essence.” Then the other language again; Pierce couldn’t tell if she was just translating or the words in the two languages were different. “Heart to heart.”
And so it went, switching back and forth through the lines of the recitation in a rhythmic chant. The air inside the warehouse seemed to thicken, the shadows around them growing deeper. Pierce had been cold before, but now the space seemed oppressively warm, as if the ritual was generating heat like a campfire.
Jenny’s hand on the pendulum still appeared rock steady, and yet the weighted stone slowly began to swing, circling back and forth in ever-widening loops that reversed direction with each switch in languages. Pierce could feel a pressure in her ears and static crawling on her skin as grains of glittering silver began to rise up from the dish, spinning about the circle like leaves caught in a tornado.
The effect was hypnotic, and Pierce’s attention blurred, only hooked back in as the rhythm of Jenny’s words changed. “Let that which is lost now be found,” she said. “Let that which is broken be whole. Let that which is unknown be known. Seek the heart, seek the essence, seek! Seek!” One more guttural phrase in that unknown language, and the pendulum lashed like a whip, snapping loose from its chain to fly across the room as Jenny cried out and clutched at her hand.
Pierce rose to her feet to run to her, but that was when Cliff called out, “Claire!” She looked down; the cloud of swirling silver had contracted into a ball of bright light and was even now streaking away towards the front of the warehouse. “Don’t lose track of it!”
Leaving him to take care of whatever injury Jenny might have sustained, Pierce turned to chase after the light. She had to sprint to have a hope of keeping up, the darting light zipping away through the shelves almost too fast to follow. It was shedding material as it went, a wispy trail of silver that strung out behind it like a contrail.
The glow disappeared at the end of an aisle and Pierce cursed, putting on a burst of speed though her lungs were already starting to burn in stressed protest. She clipped her elbow on the metal shelf support at the corner, the kind of numb jolt that would blossom to agony as soon as her brain caught up with it, but there was no time to do more than grunt with pain as she spotted the ball of light heading for the main doors. The spell had picked up something, but not within the warehouse—somewhere close? If it wasn’t, they were going to lose the trail fast, because the light was already looking dimmer.
The glowing orb passed right through the warehouse doors without pause, leaving Pierce behind to face the constraints of physics as she stumbled after it and slapped the door release, glad she didn’t need a card key and a code from the inside. The security guard turned her wide eyes from the streaking light to look at Pierce as she burst through. “Hey! What—?”
“Emergency police business!” Pierce panted out without a pause. “Stay where you are!” As the glow passed through the outer doors it was already little more than a silvery glimmer to the air; if Pierce fell behind, the last trace of the spell would be gone before she could see the direction of its target.
“You have to sign out!” the guard shouted after her as Pierce yanked the door open to follow. Pierce ignored her, charging out onto the road outside to look around. The evidence facility was surrounded by a chain link fence; the glow had already crossed the car park to pass through it, darting out across the dual carriageway and disappearing amid the glare of the headlights. Pierce raised her gaze up and beyond them before she could be blinded, fixing on the common ground beyond the road. Nothing out there, just a patch of scrappy grass with a few people walking dogs—
Dogs. Pierce raked her gaze over the group of dog-walkers, looking for what she was suddenly certain would be there. A dog as big as a man—big enough to
be
a man. Her eye fell on a Range Rover parked up on the edge of the grass, the hindquarters of a big black dog just scrambling up over the tailgate. There was no one there to guide the dog inside, just a reflection-blurred figure in the driver’s seat, but on the second blink, it was a human hand that she saw reaching back to pull the hatch down from inside.
She grabbed her phone for a photo, but the Range Rover was already bumping down from the kerb, and all she caught was a blurry snap of the back wheels, no sign of a licence plate on the vehicle. The silver glow of the spell had faded beyond her ability to pick it out in the dark, but she was sure this was where it had been leading her. Not to the missing panther pelt—but to another, closer shapeshifting skin: a shifter keeping them under surveillance.
And she was pretty sure she knew who was behind it. The criminal operations that she’d busted liked their flashy deadly predators as shapeshifting forms: big cats, wolves and bears, exotic skins that evoked fear. But
government
people, people in the business of making threats to national security discreetly disappear,
Maitland’s
people... they used dogs.