Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) Read online

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2015 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Commissioning Editor: David Moore

  Cover & Design: Sam Gretton

  Marketing and PR: Lydia Gittins

  Publishing Manager: Ben Smith

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Copyright © 2015 Rebellion Publishing Ltd.

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-900-9

  Ritual Crime Unit, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE NEXT TIME Pierce got stabbed in the shoulder by a suspect, the bastard had better have the decency to do it in the summer. Bad enough to have spent weeks in a sling and more doing rehab without the shitty weather and joint aches to contend with. She was cleared to drive by now, but still wary of her shoulder; the December roads were icy after last night’s rain, and the last thing she needed was to crash the car on the way to her first day back at work.

  The station hadn’t got any prettier in her absence. A squat, shabby red brick building, it hosted the local police team first, the Ritual Crime Unit crammed in as a vague afterthought. Promises of new facilities had never come to anything; the budget always went on Oxford branch or RCU London. Here up north, they made do.

  Pierce parked outside and walked in. On duty at the front desk, Jill Lyons gave her a nod. “Dragged you back already, have they?” she asked. “So much for the season of goodwill.”

  “Needs must when the budget drives,” Pierce said. In truth, she could probably have swung the extra leave to stay off till after Christmas, but one more week at home and she’d go spare. After years of vaguely dreaming of having more time off, it turned out she had bugger all to do with it. Her duff shoulder had put the kibosh on fixing up the house or garden, and most of her social connections had withered on the vine after years of the job getting in the way.

  The problem with being married to your work was that eventually there came a point when you had to get a messy divorce. Pierce grimaced as she climbed the stairs up to the RCU. She might be out of shape from her time off, but at almost fifty-five, there was a limit to the shape she could get back into.

  Not that she had any business feeling sorry for herself. She’d been lucky to come out of her last clusterfuck of a case with no worse than a stab wound: shutting down a ring of illegal shapeshifters and the skinbinder supplying their pelts had left one of her officers critically injured and another dead.

  Pierce hesitated in front of the double doors onto the office, steeling herself against the inevitable ache of the missing faces. The RCU’s work was always high risk, but there had been something rotten in the state of Denmark this time round: too much information held back from her team when they needed it, too many special interests playing politics with people’s lives. There was no way she was shuffling quietly off to retirement when there were forces above her head in the police and government who thought they could manipulate the RCU and the law.

  At least there was still one familiar face left to greet her. As she pushed through into the RCU’s open-plan office, Sergeant Deepan Mistry jumped up from his computer with a smile. “Guv! Come back to take the reins at last?” he said.

  Despite the boyish grin, the detective sergeant looked older than when she’d seen him last. Even now he’d hit thirty, Deepan had a chubby-cheeked baby face and a penchant for hair gel that had always made him seem barely out of his teens to her; right now, though, the clear signs of tiredness were etching more years on his face. October’s bloodbath had left him in the lurch, the only RCU member still standing after the carnage cleared.

  But Pierce was back now, and hopefully able to lift some of the weight of shepherding the rookies off his shoulders. “Looks like my reign’s not over yet,” she said, glancing around the office to see what was new. Not much, except her Team Leader: DCI Claire Pierce sign had been supplanted by a sheet of printer paper that read Acting Team Leader: DI Graham Dawson. She supposed it would be petty to walk right over and tear it down, though it didn’t seem that the man himself was around to see it.

  The room’s only other occupant was a smartly dressed young black woman with her hair pulled back into a bun, fresh-faced and eager and not looking a day over twenty-five, if that. Pierce felt a twinge as she remembered the last equally youthful soul to occupy that chair, and why he wouldn’t be there anymore.

  She kept that thought off her face, and gave their new recruit a nod and smile. “You’re one of us now, I take it?” she said.

  “That’s right, Guv.” The woman nodded crisply. “Constable Gemma Freeman—I took the PRMC certificate with Greater Manchester Police.”

  The PRMC exam was required to work in Ritual these days, though Pierce wasn’t convinced it was much more use than her own on-the-job orientation, which had largely been on a theme of, “Assume nobody has a clue what they’re doing and everything can kill you.” Even in these twenty-first-century days of global information networks, magic was still too difficult to reproduce and too deeply surrounded by fakery and bullshit to have more than a trial-and-error approach to understanding what it could do. The only training they could give their people was to toss them in at the deep end and hope they either swam or clawed their way out without drowning.

  Probably not an effective pep speech, that.

  “Well, welcome to the team,” she said, instead. “I don’t doubt Deepan’s done a good job showing you the ropes while I was off.” She turned back to him. “Where’s DI Dawson?”

  “Out at a scene, Guv, with our other new DC.”

  “Two new constables and a DI?” Pierce raised her eyebrows. “Good Lord. Rock star treatment.” Maybe having three out of four of the team dead or injured in a span of days had finally woken somebody up to the fact that they really did need the extra personnel they’d been requesting for years.

  Or, more likely, her superiors had expected her to conveniently retire after the disaster of the shapeshifter case. Well, they were out of luck: Pierce had never been one to take subtle hints, and there were too many unanswered questions for her to step down now. She might have arrested the skinbinder, but they still only knew him by the possibly false name of ‘Sebastian,’ and the group who’d funded him remained a mystery. With the Counter Terror Action Team muscling in on her case, all the evidence had been seized before she’d had the chance to follow up.

  That didn’t mean she was prepared to let things go without a fight—so if Dawson was planning to ascend the ranks and take her place, he was going to have to be a patient man. Pierce had hoped to have the chance to meet with him and make their positions clear right from the start, but she supposed it had been too much to ask that the RCU’s never-ending caseload would give everyone the day off to throw a welcome-back party.

  “All right. If Daws
on comes in, tell him to come and see me,” she said to Deepan. “Figure out which cases I need to know about, and get me copies of the files.” The RCU was always snowed under with reports on every squiggle of suspicious graffiti, self-described magician and fancy dress party north of the Watford Gap; if she tried to read up on everything that had come in while she was away, she’d be here till Easter. “I’ll be next door.”

  That loose term covered the assorted offices of the Magical Analysis department: what passed for forensics when it came to the occult, though anybody who worked in true forensics would hate the comparison. Even after decades of development, police magical research was still largely at the level of ‘poke it and see what happens.’ They could get results, sometimes even repeat them, but finding something that could be relied upon in court was like winning the lottery.

  Hence the fact that the RCU’s research department was made up of a hodgepodge of eccentric specialists, crammed into tiny offices and working on a hundred things at once. Pierce poked her head into one particularly small room, so close to literally overflowing that there were books and files stacked on the floor outside the door. She waved at the woman just about visible behind the wall of file folders.

  “Jen! How’s Sympathetic Magic treating you?”

  “Claire! You’re back! Not very sympathetically.” Jenny Hayes rolled her chair round the end of the desk, or as far as it would go before the wheels struck yet more boxes, and leaned out to wave back. “Your new constables are wee sweet little lost lambs, but somebody really needs to teach them that they don’t need to send me every hair and fibre from within fifteen miles of the crime scene.”

  “I approve of thorough,” said Pierce. Always better than slapdash.

  “Yes, I know you do, since you’re not the one who has to process it.” But Jenny grinned. “Good to have you back—place hasn’t been the same without you.”

  “Is that in a good or a bad way?” she asked dryly.

  “It’s been awful,” Jenny said, composing a piously straight face. “I hope you realise I’ve had to pretend to be a proper grown-up professional every time your new DI drops by. Had to put my shoes on and take my feet off the desk and everything.”

  “Terrible,” Pierce agreed. “Dashing, is he?”

  “Only in the sense of moving places fast.” She arched her eyebrows over her glasses. “Bit of a bulldozer, that one. Wants things done his way and fast, doesn’t want to hear about the details.”

  “I know the type.” And it didn’t bode well for harmonious cooperation; still, plenty of those who pushed the support staff around weren’t quite so eager to bark at the boss. She’d see. “Right, better push on and act like I’m doing something useful around here... I’ll see you later, Jenny.”

  “We should go down the pub sometime, celebrate you coming back to work,” Jenny called after her as she left.

  “We should.” A nice plan that was never going to happen, given how much Pierce had to catch up on. All the same, it was good to be reminded that even with half the detective branch gone, there were still people here that she knew and trusted. She’d felt isolated and ineffectual, stuck at home recovering, but now she was back on her own turf.

  She dropped in on each member of the research team to let them know that she was back and see what kind of workload they were up against. Without exception heavy, but that was nothing new: they’d always had a backlog on their backlog. Pierce was fairly sure there were some evidence lots still waiting to be processed that had been around since she was a DS.

  The Enchanted Artefacts department had the biggest backlog of all. The literature on magic was still such a patchwork of guesstimates and myth that it was tough to certify anything as definitively free from enchantments: all they could do with mystery items seized from ritual scenes was keep prodding to see if they went boom.

  As Pierce approached the lab at the end of the corridor, she became aware of a faint but insistent hum on the cusp of hearing, like a machine running somewhere in the distance. As she pushed the door open to step into the Artefacts lab, the hum grew louder, but no more distinct.

  Clifford Healey popped up from behind a lab bench to greet her, wearing a pair of clear plastic goggles and a set of headphones. He was a big man with a broad face like an affable potato, and hair that had migrated into two greying clumps on either side of his head. He raised a finger to beg for a moment’s pause as he struggled to retrieve his mp3 player from a pocket under his V-neck and disentangle himself from the headphones.

  He beamed at her. “Claire!” he said heartily. “Back in our neck of the woods? I was beginning to fear we might have seen the last of you.”

  “You should be so lucky,” Pierce said. The humming hadn’t stopped with the cessation of whatever music he was listening to, and she found she was talking too loudly to compensate. “What’s that noise?” she asked with a wince. It was hitting the perfect frequency to drill right through her head.

  “Ah!” Cliff said, holding up his hand. “Turns out today is quite the day for blasts from the past.” He bounded across the lab to the racks of metal shelving on the far side and began to peer at the labels on various storage boxes.

  “You calling me an old fart, Cliff?” she said, leaning against the doorway.

  “We can both be farts together, my dear,” he said, smiling at her through the shelves as his box-shuffling created a gap.

  Pierce couldn’t help but snort. “You really know how to charm the ladies, you do.”

  “And now here I come bearing gifts.” He moved back to the table with a large plastic storage box, removing the lid with a flourish. “Recognise this handsome fellow?” he asked.

  She leaned in to get a look at what seemed to be an intricately made, if hideous, cast iron lantern. The eight sides were fashioned into faces, devilish masks with wide gaping mouths, each sharing one eye with each neighbouring face so they blended into one unbroken chain. It had an iron ring on top to hang it up, supported by metal bands that gave the faces the impression of horns.

  “Looks like a bloke I went out with in the ’nineties, only he had a bigger mouth,” she said. She was aware of a change in the quality of the hum as Cliff lifted the thing out of the box. “Although it does seem to be blowing a lot of hot air. So where did we get this thing, and should we be worried that it’s humming?”

  “We’ve had it for years, and... who knows?” he said, with the airy shrug of one who spent his days playing with volatile enchanted objects to see what he could make them do. Sometimes Pierce suspected their research department had even less sense of self-preservation than the detective branch.

  He moved the box onto the floor and stood the iron lantern on the lab bench. “This was seized evidence from the Collingate murders,” he said. “I don’t know if you remember?”

  It rang a vague bell, though she thought it had been somebody else’s case back in the day. “Big posh house, son tried to summon something nasty to murder the father, ended up getting more nasty for his money than he was expecting?” she said.

  “Something along those lines,” Cliff said with a nod. “The father was a collector—had a lot of unclassified artefacts that weren’t directly involved in the murder itself, but were judged potential class three and four violations. We seized the lot, and haven’t done much with them since. However, Nancy was down at the long-term storage facility the other day and noticed that our devilish friend here had started making a noise—gave her quite a start, I should imagine. And so... here we are.” He spread his hands.

  Pierce bent down to peer closer at the lantern, holding her palm in front of each of the mouths to see if she could feel any motion of air. Nothing obvious. “And do we know why it’s making a noise?” she asked, looking up at Cliff.

  “Well, we have theories,” he said. “I’ve been doing some research, and I believe our friend here is probably a watch lantern. It’s his job to let his owner know when something nasty approaches—nasty, in this case, most likely me
aning some form of supernatural beastie with ill-intent. Quite the thing among feuding spirit-raisers a few centuries back.”

  Pierce stepped back, reflexively looking around even though she didn’t know what she expected to see coming at them in the middle of a police station. “So what is it warning us about?” she asked.

  Cliff pursed his lips, as close as he ever seemed to get to an actual frown. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” he said. “Now, it may be something as simple as proximity to another artefact that’s set it off, or it may be something in the greater area. In theory, if his light was lit, he might be able to give us more of an indication of where it was coming from. Here’s where the science gets a bit fuzzy, though, I’m afraid: the signals were not really standardised, and I haven’t been able to dig up any specific information on the provenance of this particular model.”

  “Any risk to lighting it up?” she asked.

  “Well, there shouldn’t be. I was planning to get around to trying it sometime later today, but there’s no reason we can’t do it now, if you’d like to watch. It never hurts to have a second set of eyes to check my observations.”

  Pierce stood back. “Go on, then. Dazzle me.”

  Cliff smiled, and patted several pockets before coming up with a cigarette lighter.

  “Thought you quit,” she said, as he bent with a slight groan to pick up a big box of candles from the floor.

  “Well, I did,” he confessed, “but it’s so convenient to have the lighter for work, and when you’ve got it right there with you in your pocket...”

  “You should get a job that doesn’t require setting things on fire,” she said.

  He grinned as he opened up one latched side of the lantern to place a candle inside, causing a shift in the atonal hum. “Now, where’s the fun in that?” he said. He closed the lantern hatch again and retrieved a pack of wooden tapers, shaking one out and setting the end of it ablaze with his lighter. “All right,” he said. “Best not to get too close, but do watch carefully. Any subtle action of the flame could well have some meaning.”