Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (36 page)

Yet even as she thought it, the dog’s outline was folding and shifting, like some grotesque contortionist act with bones that bent in the wrong places. The canine body rapidly melted into the form of a slim-built man weighed down by the bulky pelt strapped to his back.

A man who staggered and grunted, clutching his left thigh as he tried to climb back to his feet.

“
Leo?
” Pierce blurted in disbelief.

She caught the faint flash of his grin as he reached up to touch the heavy head of the dog pelt on his back. “Found a way I can infiltrate the patrols,” he said.

“A shapeshifting pelt? Leo, are you
nuts?
” she said. Leaving aside the obscene amount of money he must have sunk into commissioning the thing—if Firearms paid that well, she’d clearly picked the wrong specialisation—shapeshifting pelts were highly regulated... and dangerous. A pelt wasn’t something you threw on like a coat: he must have had the activation rune tattooed on his skin, inextricably linking himself to the pelt’s enchantments. Every time he used it, he’d become a little more animal and less human.

Leo didn’t seem too bothered by any of those concerns, almost high with uncharacteristic excitement. “It’s a legal pelt,” he hurried to assure her. “Got it made at the Darville skin shop—guy who works there owes me a favour. All the paperwork’s in order, he’s just... going to delay registering it a little while.”

Pierce sighed, vainly massaging at her headache. “Leo...” she said, and then didn’t know where to go from there. The awkward position he was putting her in, given her job enforcing pelt regulations, barely even registered on the scale of problems with this idea. Except it wasn’t just an idea, it was already a fait accompli.

“Leo, what the hell were you thinking?” she demanded. “You went out and got yourself a permanent magical binding, based on some half-baked plan to—what—sneak in the gate with a pack of their dogs and hope they don’t notice an extra? You’ve seen what shapeshifting does to people—you’re the one out there with the silver bullets bringing them down when they lose too much of their humanity to keep control.”

“Not anymore,” he said forcefully, with a sting of bitterness that silenced her briefly. He met her eyes, serious now, though she could see the jittery restlessness bubbling beneath. “Claire. You know what we’re up against. Police tactics aren’t going to cut it; they
control
the police. We’re going to have to get creative, and we’re going to have to get dangerous. We’re not going to beat them without playing their game.”

“Yeah,” she said with a weary sigh, although she only felt bruised and defeated. He might be right that there was no way to win against these people within the law, but that didn’t make her any happier at the prospect of stepping outside it. “The thing is, if we start playing their game, then we’ve already pretty much given up on winning.”

Leo gave a thin smile in response, but she could tell he didn’t really agree. Would
he
have, before he’d lost his career to the injuries she’d caused by dragging him into this fight? He’d always been calm and dependable, not someone she’d ever believe would be advocating vigilante justice... but how much could you ever know somebody, really?

Pierce might have an ally in her fight against this conspiracy now—but she couldn’t help but feel like she was as alone as ever.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E.E. Richardson has been writing books since she was eleven years old, and had her first novel
The Devil’s Footsteps
picked up for publication at the age of twenty. Since then she’s had seven more young adult horror novels published by Random House and Barrington Stoke.
Spirit Animals
is her third novel for Abaddon Books.

She also has a BSc. in Cybernetics and Virtual Worlds, which hasn’t been useful for much but does sound impressive.

A tough, hard-nosed career officer in the male-dominated world of British policing, DCI Claire Pierce of North Yorkshire Police heads Northern England’s underfunded and understaffed Ritual Crime Unit. Unregarded by the traditional police, struggling with an out-sized caseload, Pierce is about to tackle her most shocking case so far.

Following reports of unlicensed shapeshifters running wild in the Dales, DCI Pierce leads a failed raid to capture the skinbinder responsible. While the dust is still settling, a team from Counter Terrorism turns up and takes the case off her.

Pursuing the case off the record, she uncovers something murkier and more terrible than she suspected. Has her quarry achieved the impossible and learned to bind human skin?

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A hard-nosed career officer in the male-dominated world of British policing, DCI Claire Pierce of North Yorkshire Police heads Northern England’s underfunded and understaffed Ritual Crime Unit. Injured in the line of duty, Pierce returns to work to find her new Detective Inspector has brought in a self-proclaimed necromancer to question the victim of a murder, there’s a coven of druids outside protesting the sale of their sacred site, and an old iron lantern in the evidence room has just sent out a signal.

Pierce is going to have to hit the ground running. A suspected ritual murder and a string of puzzling artefact thefts initially seem unconnected, but signs point to something bigger: buried skulls possessed by evil spirits start turning up, and they may only be the beginning. Someone is planning something big, and the consequences if they succeed could be catastrophic. With a rebellious second-in-command, an inexperienced team, and a boss who only cares about potential bad publicity, Pierce has to make the connections and stop the ritual before it’s too late...