Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (22 page)

Pierce had presided at enough crime scenes where rituals had gone wrong to know that there was no such thing as safe, only low risk vs. high risk. Unfortunately, most of the rituals that they cobbled together to suit the needs of police work were sufficiently experimental that there was no way to rank them on the risk scale without trying them to find out.

“So what are we doing here?” she asked as she stepped in, letting the door fall closed behind her with a heavy slam.

“Ah, Claire, good,” Cliff said with a smile, turning away from the table. “I was just about to come and find you—I thought you’d like to be on hand to witness this.”

“Depends if it’s going to explode in my face,” she said, edging around the etched circle to get a good look at the setup for the divination. The bat pendant now rested at one point of a large triangular design that had been chalked out on the desktop, surrounded by many scribbled runes. A weighty yellow-paged tome rested open on the corner of the table, and Pierce could see a diagram of a similar ritual arrangement annotated with angles and compass orientations.

“In theory, we should be all right with this one,” Jenny said, hauling a stack of bags and boxes from the metal cabinets at the rear. “It’s always a bit of a crapshoot trying to work a divination on anything that’s already enchanted, but since Cliff’s pretty confident that at least one of this thing’s functions is acting as a type of locator charm for our head vampire to find his cultists, there shouldn’t be any negative interaction between the spells—we’re basically magicking it to do something it’s already designed to do.”

“Famous last words,” Pierce said.

Jenny lifted her gaze from the book she was consulting to offer her a crooked grin. “If you want certainties, you’re in the wrong lab.”

“In the wrong bloody career,” she said.

“So, it
shouldn’t
go messily wrong,” Jenny repeated. “Enchantment-wise, we’re encouraging water to flow downhill, and unless there are booby-traps Cliff hasn’t managed to spot on it, the worst potential problems are either total failure, or succeeding too well. If we pick up all of the cultists and they’re widely separated, we’re going to have trouble pinning it down to a sensible map scale.”

“How are we pinning it down?” Pierce asked.

Jenny opened up one of the carrier bags she’d retrieved from the cabinets to unveil a stack of map books. “With a slightly more sophisticated twist on traditional bibliomancy.” She set out a road atlas and arranged a ring of eight incense burners shaped like open-mouthed dragons around it, checking their angles carefully with a compass. “The ritual will show us the right page, and then
this
will help us narrow it down further.” She held up a silver ritual knife in its padded box.

“Oh, good, the boss always likes it when you lot start playing with knives,” Pierce said.

“Rather a necessary component of the ritual, I’m afraid,” Cliff said. “Since we are, in effect, attempting to hack into an existing network of magical links, we maximise our chances of success by using harmonious materials in the ritual. The principles of sympathetic magic: a silver knife to represent silver necklaces, blood to activate the blood binding.”

“More pigs dying for our art?” Pierce presumed, but Cliff gave a rather apologetic headshake.

“Unfortunately, in matters such as these, exactitude can be very important,” he said. “I really must advise that human blood be used.”

Pierce sucked in a breath past her teeth. “Cliff, we’ve talked about performing human sacrifices in the research labs,” she said. But more seriously, there were still plenty of issues with using even a small quantity of donated blood. “I’m not sure we have time to jump through all the legal hoops required before they’ll let us do a blood ritual.” Even for a serial killer case it would be a hard sell: the only approval she’d heard of since the regs had been tightened up in the ’nineties had been a case down in London involving kidnapped children and a tight time limit.

“We don’t need any quantity,” Jenny said, raising a finger to correct her. “Just a single drop will do. There’s still an exemption for pinprick rituals provided authorisation is granted by a police officer of the rank of DCI or higher.”

“In that case, granted,” Pierce said. “And you’d probably better grab me a thing to sign before it all goes horribly wrong.” She didn’t think Superintendent Snow was the sort to be understanding about paperwork being completed after the fact. Especially since she was already being somewhat liberal about his instruction to keep him up-to-date on what they were doing in the Valentine Vampire case. Divination rituals, she was mostly sure,
probably
hadn’t been included in his instruction to seek authorisation before doing anything dangerous, if only because he didn’t know they ought to be.

She scribbled the appropriate arse-covering explanations on a form while Jenny made the last few tweaks and checks to her ritual arrangement. “Right,” Jenny said finally, dusting the chalk from her hands. “We’re about as well prepped as we can be—either it’s going to work or it isn’t.”

She lit the ring of incense burners one by one, all with the same match and moving clockwise from the northmost, murmuring soft words Pierce couldn’t quite make out. As the various perfumed scents mingled, threatening to make her cough, she felt a faint, impossible breeze stir through the air of the underground room. The match flame bent and flickered as Jenny moved around the circle, and Pierce half held her breath, fearing they’d have to stop and reset everything if the match went out before she’d completed the circuit.

But the flame held, and as she lit the last of the eight, the unnatural breeze stilled—at least, outside of the ring of incense burners. Inside it, Pierce saw the edges of the map book’s pages trembling, as if blown by balanced breezes from all sides, none quite strong enough to fully lift the pages and go rifling through the book. The soft susurration of moving air was almost like a song on the cusp of hearing, a distant choral dirge in a language she didn’t know.

She was so caught up on that, focused on the dragon burners, that she almost missed it as Jenny lifted the silver dagger from its case. It was overkill for drawing a single drop of blood, and Pierce winced, thinking of all too many ritual scenes gone wrong that she’d attended, but Jenny deftly touched the very point of the blade to the tip of her left ring finger, a tiny bead of red blood welling up.

Then she touched the point of the dagger against the silver bat pendant. The lines of the blood sigil appeared on the bat’s belly like a brand, and its eyes, pinprick holes pressed into the silver, glowed a dull red. Pierce instinctively stepped back, as if she might somehow be spotted through those lifeless metal eyes.

She wasn’t entirely certain that she couldn’t be.

Her gaze was pulled away as the dragon burners all began to hiss as one, a sound more like furious animals than simple steam. White smoke billowed from the gaping mouths of the brass holders, swirling about the circle as if caught in a clash between winds. The pages of the map book rustled, lifted... began to rapidly turn, as if flipped by an impatient hand.

She saw Jenny step forward, the dagger held in her left hand by the lightest of fingertip grips on the pommel. The clouds of smoke whipped around her as the storm inside the circle raged, growing ever faster as she shouted words in Latin above the burners’ hissing. As the recitation reached its climax, she raised the point of the dagger’s blade towards the ceiling—and without further warning, threw it upwards into the air. Pierce flinched back against the wall unconsciously.

The dagger whipped around in a fast arc in the air, slamming down to stick point-first in the map book. The hissing of the brass dragon burners cut out as abruptly, and everything went still.

The smoke slowly dissipated, and they moved forward to see that the map book had fallen open to a double page spread covering much of West Yorkshire. The blade of the dagger had pierced all the way through the pages and into the wooden desk below, slicing a neat horizontal line through the letters of the word
Leeds
.

“Looks like your killer didn’t skip town after last night’s murder,” Jenny said.

That was good news—but not quite good enough. “How much further can you narrow this down?” Pierce asked.

“Give me the chance for a few repeated iterations of the divination, and I should be able to pin it down to a street, if not house number,” Jenny said

Pierce rounded the table towards the door. “Right. You do that. I’m going to get his nibs on board and start things rolling with Leeds police. As soon as you’ve got us a full address I want to be ready to move in.”

After three decades chasing this cult, they finally had a chance to get ahead of the bastards.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

T
HE SUPERINTENDENT PROVED
to be easier to persuade than Pierce had feared: Snow might not have much tolerance for the fuzzy areas of magic-based policing, but he was extremely keen for them to start making some arrests in the Valentine Vampire case, especially after last night’s debacle. By the time Jenny had narrowed the location down to within a couple of streets, Leeds’ finest and the local Firearms team were already prepping for the raid; by the time she called them back with an exact address, Pierce was already in the car and on her way.

She relayed the information to the head of the Firearms Support team, a man called Jim Clarke that she’d met once or twice but didn’t know as well as she’d known Leo, and could only trust would follow her lead if magic became involved. “Get the street blocked off, but don’t move until Ritual are there to join you,” she directed. “The location could be booby-trapped, magically or otherwise.”

“
We’ll have bomb disposal standing by
,” he said, not making any direct acknowledgement of her mention of magic but at least not scoffing at it either. Too much scepticism could be as dangerous as panic.

Which was why Pierce had wanted to be on the scene to oversee the operation herself. Dawson had insisted on being there too, despite the fact he’d been on-shift since she’d called him out to the murder scene in the early hours; while she wasn’t always thrilled with his bull-headed brand of backup, she couldn’t deny that it would be useful to have someone else with the appropriate training along on the raid.

She just hoped it turned something up, because if it didn’t, the cult were due to take another victim in a matter of days, and her already limping credibility would go down in smoke.

They needed a win on this one.

The address Jenny’s ritual had zeroed in on was not dissimilar to the base back in York, another neglected red brick terrace where the houses were all so closely crammed together it was hard to believe that the neighbours wouldn’t know everything that went on. Of course, neighbours had an inconvenient habit of minding their own business just when the police least wanted them to do it.

And of sticking their noses in at times like this. When Pierce arrived to join the entry team in the back of their unmarked van, it was in that brief period of limbo between lunch and the school run where the streets were relatively quiet; even so, this was a broad daylight raid in the middle of a city, and they couldn’t afford to hang around.

But they couldn’t rush in unprepared, either. “We need to be right behind you when you go in,” she insisted to Clarke, a thin man with an equally thin moustache who was being difficult about her and Dawson entering the house before it was pronounced safely clear. “These people are smart, and they enjoy taunting the police. If they’ve laid traps, they’ll be specifically set up to catch our team as they go through the house. Your people don’t have the training to know what to look for.”

“One little mark painted on the floor, and your brains could be on the ceiling,” Dawson added.

“Fine,” Clarke conceded with an unhappy scowl. “But Firearms stay in the lead at all times.”

“Agreed.”

The van they were currently all huddled in was parked outside a small takeaway at the south end of the street. The road was narrow enough that a second van positioned at the other end could effectively block it, and the houses stood back to back with those of the street behind, no rear exits. In theory, if there was anyone inside the house, they were pinned down.

In theory. She exchanged a glance with Dawson, stuffed into protective gear of his own and at least looking like a pretty solid barrier to any suspect trying to get out past him. Pierce was physically the weak link on this operation—but she knew better than anyone what they might be facing inside.