Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (21 page)

Cliff shrugged his shoulders. “
That
I’m not too sure about,” he admitted. “The source text just said we’ll see ‘the true sign stand clear of the false.’”

“Helpful,” Pierce said with a sigh. Even when they were legitimate, occult texts were all too often a cryptic mishmash of second and third-hand accounts from people too deeply immersed in the subject to recognise what ought to be spelled out. “How much of a faff is the ritual?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s relatively straightforward, as these things go. In fact, if Nancy’s happy there...”—busy taking notes at the lab table, his assistant gave them an absent thumbs-up—“I was just about to take a stab at it now. You’re welcome to watch.”

Pierce hung back out of his way as he fished a many-times folded piece of paper from his trouser pocket, flattening it out to reveal cramped pencilled notes. Squinting frequently to consult it, he gathered a miscellany of items from the equipment trolley and the cupboards at the side and began to set things up. It took long enough that Pierce was on the verge of discreetly slipping back out when it seemed he was finally happy with the arrangement.

The equipment he’d gathered together was a mix of the arcane and the pragmatically everyday. A small bronze cauldron with a band of runes around the rim sat atop a foil tray covered by a grille, rather like a disposable barbecue. Instead of charcoal, however, it was filled with a careful arrangement of twigs and leaves taken from bags that were labelled with the types of trees. He’d doused the wood in some kind of oil, with a cloying, vaguely perfumed smell.

The cauldron itself he filled with a measure of blood poured out from a bottle he retrieved from the fridge at the back of the lab. “Pig’s blood,” he explained, with a sidelong look.

Pierce raised her hands innocently. “Didn’t ask.”

To that, after another period of squinting intently at his notes, he added pinches of herbs and powders from various canisters, and then another kind of incense oil. Even cold, the mix of scents was nauseating, making the air in the room taste somehow greasy.

Finally Cliff hung the medallion from a clamp stand above the cauldron, and poured a careful ring of salt around the whole arrangement. He stood back, checked his scribbled notes one last time, then dusted his hands and beamed at her expectantly. “Right. Shall we see what we can see?”

Nancy turned round from her worktable and tucked her hands in the pockets of her lab coat to watch the show, either eager to learn or readying herself to duck. Pierce, who’d also had some experience of supposedly harmless divination rituals—especially those involving flames—stood well back, with one hand on the door handle.

Cliff lit a wooden taper with a cigarette lighter, and carefully poked it through the barbecue grill to touch the twigs laid out beneath. It didn’t catch immediately, giving him the chance to pull his arm back out of the salt circle and step away to a safe distance before things began.

For several moments nothing seemed to happen. Nancy coughed, and Cliff adjusted his lab goggles. Pierce was about to ask for some hint of what exactly she was waiting for when she realised the herbal smell was growing stronger, and she could hear the faint burble of the cauldron’s contents beginning to boil. Fine wisps of pinkish steam the colour of rare steak began to rise from the cauldron’s mouth.

The steam thickened and spread, the tendrils coiling back on themselves as they reached the boundary of the salt circle, as if trapped by an invisible glass tube. Droplets of red-tinted condensation began to collect on the metal clamp stand and the medallion suspended from its arm.

Not condensation. At first Pierce thought the gathered droplets were just running down like raindrops on a car window—but then she realising that some of them were flowing
up
, pouring in towards the central carving of the sprinting hare like water swirling into a plughole. The lines of the design were rapidly staining a vivid, bloody red until they looked like wounds cut into flesh—and yet the containment circle of runes that ran round the outside showed no such sign of the phenomenon.

Proof, she guessed, that the enchantment had been made with a blood binding.

Pierce was so intently focused on the medallion that she jumped when Cliff’s voice spoke above the sizzling of the cauldron. “Well, that certainly seems to be a positive result.” He retrieved a film camera from a cupboard to take shots of the medallion from both sides. “Now, I’m not sure how well these will come out with the steam,” he cautioned. “The ritual specifies that the effect fades, but not how quickly, so hopefully it will linger long enough to properly record.”

He reached for the handles of the boiling cauldron to lift it away from the fire. As soon as his arm passed over the boundary of the salt circle, the steam flooded outwards in every direction, as if released from a popped bubble. Pierce covered her face with her sleeve, but the steam thinned out as Cliff carried the cauldron away to place on a mat by the lab sink, and she decided she probably didn’t need to open the door to vent the room. Just as well—the superintendent wouldn’t be pleased if another of Cliff’s tests set off the fire alarm.

At least the steam didn’t seem to have harmful effects—or so she thought, until Nancy gave a startled squawk from across the room. “Uh, Doctor Healey?” she said urgently. “I think you should look at this.”

Pierce turned to look too, and saw that Nancy was standing well back from her own lab bench, where she’d been documenting the items taken from the dead cultist. Apparently the cooling steam from the cauldron had reached far enough to affect them, because droplets were already collecting on the bat necklace, forming faint shapes that Pierce was quite sure hadn’t been there before.

Cliff polished his slightly steamed goggles with the sleeve of his lab coat. “Hmm,” he said peering closer. “Well, that’s interesting. Could you bring that over here, my dear?”

He stepped back over to the lab table and replaced the cauldron on the fire. Nancy followed with the chain of the bat necklace held rather gingerly in her gloved hand, and Cliff hung it from the clamp stand.

In the thick of the full cloud of steam, it took only moments for the lines of a sigil to show up on the belly of the silver bat, vivid slashes across the surface like freshly made cuts. Where the lines of blood had merely soaked into the existing carving on the spirit charm, here they subtly shifted and squirmed on the surface of the silver bat, as if they were watching the same symbol being repeatedly redrawn.

It was a mark Pierce didn’t know, made up of two triangles descending from either end of a line—a symbolic set of vampire fangs, no doubt—with the linking line bisected by two curves like a pair of brackets facing away from each other. A simple enough sigil, but then, she doubted it was one that would be found in any existing library of magical runes. No, this was an individual’s magical mark, a symbol of power and ownership like the rune Sebastian had worked into his shapeshifting pelts.

It was the mark of the Valentine Vampire—and its presence on the pendant meant that those who wore the sign of his cult shared some kind of magical connection to their leader. That was probably how he’d tracked Jonathan down to their late-night meeting—perhaps even how he’d known he was betrayed. It gave Pierce a slightly queasy feeling to realise that Jonathan might have worn the pendant just so he could prove his bona fides, and in doing so sealed his own doom.

But that wasn’t the only implication of this little revelation. A magical connection was always a two-way link. If the cult leader could track his followers through their pendants, then the police could do the same thing.

They had a magical trail that would lead them to the vampire cult. Now all they had to do was figure out how to follow it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
T WAS AN
impatient wait for Cliff to declare the bat pendant clear of known curses before they could risk handing it over to Jenny for a tracking ritual. Pierce grabbed a hasty lunch in the canteen and put a call in to Gemma to see how things were going back at the warehouse.

“They’ve let forensics inside now, but we’re taking it slow,” Gemma told her. “I want to check for more trigger runes before we move anything.”

“Probably sensible.” The locals might whine about their forensics people being tied up, but she couldn’t spare any more RCU personnel to speed the checks right now.

“They were definitely keeping live animals here, too, guv—there were still a few left inside when they torched the place.” Pierce could hear the note of dismay in her voice, and hoped it wasn’t going to be too much of an issue; animal cruelty could hit some people harder than good old human-on-human violence, and with the number of rituals that required animal blood or body parts the RCU could be a rough ride for anyone who got too hung up on it. “Most of them probably suffocated from the smoke, poor little guys—at least it looks like they were already sedated.”

But Gemma managed to keep any overt distress under wraps as she continued with her briefing. “Erm... it doesn’t look like there was much else left for the fire to destroy,” she said. “We’ve did find some woodworking tools that suggest they were manufacturing the charms here, and there’s another altar setup like the one back at the barn, except this one’s still mostly intact.”

“Good. Make sure they get plenty of photographs and test it for blood before anything’s disturbed, just in case there’s another trigger rune somewhere.” Proof of blood rituals would aid their case, but a good lawyer could still argue it was legally obtained animal blood, and with the altar from the barn heavily damaged they might struggle to prove beyond doubt that there was a link between the two scenes.

“Don’t let forensics open or unwrap anything, even if it looks like it’s free of runes,” she added. “Have everything transported to Cliff sealed so he can give it all a proper going over.” Gemma was competent and observant, but she was still new in the job, and Cliff knew more than even Pierce did about the many and varied ways objects could be magically booby-trapped. “Let’s not lose any more evidence—or lives.”

“Right, guv,” Gemma said.

“Any word on the lorry?” Pierce asked.

“Found abandoned and torched down a back road about twenty miles away,” she said. “No cameras. Uniform are searching the surrounding area, but they can’t have got far with the cages, so odds are they switched vehicles.”

“Meaning there’s at least one more gang member involved,” Pierce surmised. Maybe more. She sighed. “All right. Keep me posted.”

She hung up and went to poke her head into the Artefacts lab. Only Nancy was still there, tapping away at a laptop. “Are we good to go on the bat hunt?” Pierce asked her.

Nancy blinked at her for a few moments’ confusion. “Oh, er... we think so. They went down to the basement lab.”

“Right.” Pierce let the door fall closed and headed back down the stairs.

Enchanted Artefacts was the only analysis department big enough to have its own lab area for performing magical tests—and as this morning’s thankfully happy accident had proved, conducting rituals in close proximity to racks of semi-identified artefacts from other ongoing cases could have some unpredictable results. Rituals other than Cliff’s theoretically routine tests took place in the dedicated lab space down in the basement.

In truth, though it might be reserved for ritual use only, the small basement room resembled nothing quite so much as a repurposed holding cell, complete with a sliding observation hatch in the heavy-duty security door. Pierce checked through it to make sure she wasn’t about to walk in on anything explosive, then let herself in to join Cliff and Jenny at the lab table.

Unlike Cliff’s lab area, which resembled a cross between a school science classroom, an evidence lockup and an eccentric backstreet magic shop, the basement lab was more starkly appointed. A single square table was bolted to the middle of the concrete floor; there were no chairs or lab stools around it that could have been left where they might break the lines of the protective circle etched into the floor. A matching design was painted on the room’s ceiling, ensuring any ritual conducted between them stayed totally contained.

In theory. A sufficiently well-designed pattern of concentric circles and protective runes would trap all but the most powerful of summoned spirits and magical effects, but it did nothing to block your common or garden explosions, fires, and projectiles. If a ritual generated enough energy to cause a blast or a small quake, it could potentially damage the containing circle from inside and allow the magic to escape too.