Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (32 page)

Either way, Pierce had a duty. She was out here without backup, hadn’t even checked in with the local police since Tomb had been so purposefully vague about where they were going, but there could be a life in danger, and there was no time to wait for assistance to get here.

“I’m going in,” she told Deepan. “Figure out whose jurisdiction I’m in and get me some backup out here—and make sure you warn them what we could be dealing with.” RCU assistance would be better, but the rest of her team were a good ninety minutes’ drive away, and RCU Oxford weren’t much closer.

“On it, guv,” Deepan said, sparing her the arguments and questions. Good lad. Pierce ended the call and tucked the phone away so she’d have both her hands free to tackle the door.

However she was going to do that. No convenient windows to smash here: the only points of entry were the doors. The metal one round the front was an obvious no-go, but she was fairly sure she could shift this wooden one with a bit of applied force.

Unfortunately, she’d left the battering ram in her other coat, not to mention the sturdy young officer to do the swinging for her. She cast around for anything else she could use to break through. No conveniently dumped tools or bricks, no rocks any bigger than pebbles; the fenceposts that ran nearby were metal, and looked harder to break than the door. There were a few saplings behind the fence, but it didn’t look like their skinny branches would be up to damaging much.

On the other hand, a thin twig might actually be more useful. Grimacing, Pierce dug through the mulch of dead leaves at the foot of the trees until she came up with one that seemed suitable, thin but not too whippy.

There was no visible lock on the wooden door, so it must be secured from inside—hopefully with a simple bolt rather than a padlock. She tugged again on the iron ring, pulling the door outwards as far as the loose hinges would allow, and fed the twig into the narrow crack that she’d created in a bid to locate the bolt on the other side. When it seemed to get wedged halfway up she thought her luck might be out, but as she jiggled the twig back and forth a bit she realised the door was held shut not by a bolt, but by a simple hook latch.

The latch was stiff enough that it still took some effort to work it loose without snapping the twig, but at last she heard it scrape free from the catch and the door bounced forward a fraction. She tugged it further open, wincing at the screech of the rusty hinges. She’d just have to hope that neither Violet nor any surviving cultists were here right now, because she wasn’t convinced she could make an arrest with handcuffs and intimidation alone.

The inside of the barn was dark, lit only by the thin cracks of light that made it in around the ill-fitting roof. The high-ceilinged space was too big for her torch to highlight more than a small patch of it at once, and stacks of wooden crates and indistinct tarpaulin-covered shapes created a maze of threatening shadows around her. Off to her right was a rickety wooden ladder Pierce assumed led to a hayloft; below it ran a line of animal pens with rusty metal gates, like old barred cells.

She entered the barn at a wary pace, heart pounding as she flicked the torch about to peer into the shadows. The drumming of the rain and the rattle of the roof created a murmur of background noise that could have hidden any number of sounds all around her. More than once she jerked around to face a flicker of motion, breath catching, only to realise it was just the darting shadows cast by her own torch.

The dull knocking came again, somewhere over to the right, and Pierce swallowed, licking her lips nervously. There could be a victim in here, but she still hesitated to call out again.

She made her way in the direction of the sound at a nervous crouch, edging round each obstacle and checking every corner. Something soft gave under her foot, and she jumped away, her heart pounding, before she registered that it was just a fold of tarpaulin. She kicked it out of her way, and the tarp slithered down to reveal the low stone slab it had been draped over. The stone rose about six inches above the floor, etched with grooves that all funnelled down towards a wider channel at one end. There were heavy metal rings at the corners that looked like they were meant to anchor ropes.

Pierce had a bad feeling that it wasn’t intended for anything involving livestock.

The best thing she could do with the grisly discovery was keep well away from it until forensics arrived. Pierce skirted around the stone block. She could call Deepan to confirm that this was definitely the right place, but backup was already coming, and she didn’t want to risk the distraction.

That banging sound again. It was coming from one of the animal pens at the far side of the barn. She swallowed and crept closer. An irregular dull knocking—just something come loose, tapping against the brick wall in the wind, or was there somebody there?

“Hello?” Pierce said tentatively. Her own tremulous tone annoyed her, and she squared her shoulders to speak more firmly. “Is somebody there? Identify yourself. This is the police.”

She thought she might have heard a choked breath, almost like a sob—but if so, it wasn’t followed by any louder cry, only more of that soft tapping against the brickwork. She inched forward, cautiously shining her torch through the metal grill that closed off the pen. The inside was heaped haphazardly with straw, and at the back there was a hump of fabric that might or might not have been a human form under a blanket. “Hello?” she said again. The blanket didn’t stir.

The tapping had stopped.

Pierce opened the gate onto the pen—another simple latch, though the metal had stiffened enough to make it difficult—and tugged it open, flakes of rust cascading to the ground. She moved to stoop over the shape in the blanket, drawing her phone from her pocket to call for an ambulance if it was needed, and reached out to give the huddled lump a cautious shake.

The blanket collapsed under her touch, revealing only more heaped straw. There was a creak from the hayloft above, and she started to look up—

Not fast enough to avoid the shadowy form that leapt down to meet her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

P
IERCE HIT THE
hay-strewn floor of the barn with a startled
oof
, the breath smashed from her lungs by the body that slammed into her from above. The torch gave an ominous crunch in her hand, and the barn was plunged back into darkness. The phone was still cradled safely against her chest, but before she could think to dial, her arm was wrenched viciously back and clawing fingers ripped it from her grip. She heard the impact as it shattered against the barn’s rear wall.

Then the weight was gone from her back, and the pen door slammed shut with a rattling crash.

Like jail cells, she’d thought when she’d first seen the things. Oh, fuck. She’d been lured into a more literal trap this time—and the fact that she wasn’t dead yet was probably only a sign of nastier plans in store.

Pierce climbed heavily to her feet, repeatedly clicking the torch in her hand but getting nothing in response. Definitely broken. She shuffled forward through the straw, groping blindly ahead until she met the metal gate that now barred the exit from her cage. She shoved at it, but was grimly unsurprised to find no give; unlike the warped old barn door she’d broken in through, this one rested securely up against the edge of the frame, and the grill was too narrow to fit her hand through. She had to wonder now if these ‘animal pens’ had actually been original to the barn at all, or fitted by the cult with this exact purpose in mind.

She was in big trouble.

Still, admitting that wouldn’t get her anywhere. “Hey,” Pierce shouted, rattling the cage again, a demand for attention. “You think this is going to get you anywhere? In a couple of minutes this place is going to be flooded with police.” She wished. Deepan would do his best, but with only her report of suspicious noises to go on, she’d be lucky to have a pair of local bobbies show up when they’d dealt with their other business.

Not the sort of thoughts she wanted to be projecting right now. Act confident. “There’ll be Firearms Officers called in—you’re fast, but you’re not going to outrun a bullet,” she said. “It’s in your best interest to surrender peacefully to the police before they get here. Nobody wants this to end in bloodshed.”

Except of course, Violet probably did—and the prospect of peaceful surrender wasn’t much of a carrot to dangle for someone who was looking at life in a high-security facility, assuming she could even survive breaking off the cycle of killings that sustained her. All the reply that Pierce got was the scrape of the barn’s outer door, Violet’s outline briefly silhouetted in the doorway before she pulled it closed again behind her.

It would be nice to think that meant she’d decided to just leave Pierce here and run while there was time, but more than likely she knew the talk of backup was overinflated, and was just heading out to Pierce’s car to move it out of s—

Fuck! Tomb. She’d left him waiting for her in the car, and hadn’t even warned him of the cult leader’s true identity. What if she tricked him into getting out of the car? And even if he didn’t, locking the doors wasn’t much of a defence; Violet could smash her way in without raising a sweat. Would he have the time—and the presence of mind—to call 999 before she got to him?

She doubted it very much. He was going to end up dead... and there was nothing Pierce could do about it from in here.

She shoved at the metal gate again, more urgently now, but it wasn’t budging.
Think
. Her phone. Violet had thrown it, it had sounded like the screen had shattered, but maybe... She got down on the ground to scrabble through the straw, trying to guess where it had fallen from the sound. There was barely enough light to make out more than the vaguest outlines of the space. If only the bloody torch hadn’t broken too...

Wait. She still had her penlight. Cursing herself for an idiot, aware of the useless panic hammering away in her chest, Pierce scrabbled in her pockets for her keys. She was so frantic to activate the penlight that she flicked it on and off again before she got a steady light.

Its feeble beam could barely map the confines of her cage, but it showed enough for her to spot her phone down in the corner. As she lifted it she heard the disheartening rattle of something loose inside, but she tried to switch it on all the same, lifting it to her ear despite the blank, broken screen.

Dead. Goddammit.

Dropping the now-useless phone, she turned the penlight upwards, remembering how Violet had jumped down on her from above. There was a trapdoor up in the floor of the hayloft, presumably intended for dropping feed down to the animals below, but it would be well out of her reach even if she tried to climb up the inside of the cage door.

She was completely trapped.

In lieu of any smarter escape plan, Pierce went back to slamming her weight against the door of the makeshift cage, bracing herself against the wall and kicking out at it in an effort to jar the lock open. She suspected she was onto a losing game, up against a structure made to contain livestock that could kick a lot harder than her, but she had to try.

Amid the juddering rattles of the metal framework, she almost missed the sound of Violet’s return. The sudden influx of weak daylight drew her attention back to the barn’s outer door; she grabbed the bars of the door to still the reverberations and clicked off the penlight.

She could see that Violet had something slung over her shoulders, a bulky burden that she carried as if it weighed nothing; Pierce’s heart jolted as she recognised the unconscious form of Christopher Tomb hefted in a fireman’s carry. At least, she could only hope he was unconscious. There was no way to be sure of his condition in the dark, but he’d yet to make a sound, and though she strained her eyes, she couldn’t see any evidence of movement.

She thought that Violet would bring him over to another of the cells, but instead she unceremoniously dumped him on the floor a few steps in and went off to rummage for something in the shadows, obviously not worried he was going get up and run. When she returned to the light, Pierce saw that she was carrying a coil of rope. Her heart lurched. While rope at least implied a live prisoner, opting for it over the easier choice of the barred cells suggested she had specific plans for him.

Her mind flashed back to the stone slab with its metal rings, and she started to yell.

“Hey!” she shouted, slamming the cell door again, as Violet began to drag Tomb across the barn floor like a sack of potatoes. “Don’t make this worse for yourself. Let him go! The police are coming!”