Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (13 page)

“That would be good,” Pierce noted.

“
Or
it might go back even further than that, and point at the site of this individual’s death.” She waved a hand at the skull.

“Which would also be good.” It might not lead them directly to the criminals, but with the bones still unidentified, any little snippet of information would be useful.

“Or it might point at our evidence room at the station,” she added. “Or it might—and this is the most likely outcome—do absolutely nothing.”

“You’re always such a ray of sunshine,” Pierce said.

“We aim to please,” Jenny said. She drew a compass from her pocket and made steadily more minute adjustments to the position of the boards until she was satisfied, then took the skull from its plastic wrapping and placed it on the central rotating plate.

“So how does this divination work?” Pierce asked her, standing back to watch the preparations.

“Poorly,” Jenny said, and grinned at her own bad joke before reaching out to tap the wooden board that held the skull. “This gadget here is a specialised form of dial planchette, a bit of a variation on the theme of a Ouija board—it can be used for contacting spirits, but we’re going to use this one for divination. You can buy little ones in the shops, which the instructions generally tell you to start spinning by hand, because, surprise, they don’t actually work. In theory, this one will move under its own power.”

“In theory,” Pierce echoed.

“
If
all goes well.” Jenny moved back to the cupboards to root through more of the storage boxes. “Now, we haven’t had a
great
deal of success with it,” she cautioned over her shoulder. “Pet theory is that, because this is quite a weighty thing, it probably takes a fair bit of magical juice to get any form of movement out of it. Now, since we’re generally discouraged from performing human sacrifices ourselves—”

“We get snitty memos about it from Human Resources,” said Pierce.

“It’s health and safety gone mad,” Jenny said, shaking her head. “Anyway, the point being that since there’s a limit to how much we’re actually empowered to do ritual-wise, it’s hard to test whether it’s just generally useless, or it requires a bit of the old blood and bone to get it going.” She gestured to the skull. “However, since this thing is obviously a powerful ritual artefact in itself...”

“It should be enough to power the ritual on its own,” Pierce assumed.

“That’s the hope,” Jenny said. “If there’s a powerful enough magical pull on the thing, then it’s like rolling down a hill: it already
wants
to move, just needs a little bit of a nudge to get it going.” She gave a shrug. “But as I say, this may do nothing at all.”

“Well, let’s see.” Pierce stood back and watched as Jenny completed the rest of the preparations. Various small items were placed at points upon the painted baseboard: what looked like iron filings, a crystal, a small brass incense burner, a sprig of some kind of herb Pierce lacked the knowledge to identify. Finally, Jenny tore a strip of paper off the edge of a notebook page and wrote what looked like a few words in Latin on it with a cartridge pen, before tearing it into tiny pieces and dropping them into the oil atop the burner.

“All right,” she said, looking back at Pierce. “Here goes nothing.” She struck a match and lit the candle under the incense burner. Once the flame had caught she danced back out of the way, and they both watched intently as the cloying scent of the incense spread through the small room.

After choking on smoke two days in a row, Pierce’s throat tickled warningly at the first hint of it on the air, but this time it was a false alarm, no sign of any greater blaze about to erupt. The tiny flame was a bright spot in the dimness of the room, drawing her gaze and blinding it to the sight of anything else. It took a moment to register the slight twitch of the rotating platform, longer to be sure that it was more than just a trick of her tired eyes.

“Is that movement?” she asked in a low voice, the thickening atmosphere somehow demanding a funeral hush. There was a thunderstorm tension in the air that made her spine tingle and sweat pool on her back despite the coolness of the concrete room.

“Maybe,” Jenny murmured back, just as quietly. Pierce barely blinked as she watched the swing of the arrow, slow and subtle enough that it was easy to believe it was no more than an optical illusion. A tiny fraction to the right, a tiny fraction more... had it stopped? No, it was swinging back the other way, at first equally slow but then gaining in speed. The incense smell in the room was growing stronger, or else her senses had become so acutely focused that it seemed more overpowering.

The spin of the pointer was definitely speeding up now, the skull on its turntable visibly beginning to turn away from them—but then it reversed direction again, still increasing in speed. It was spinning like a record player, getting faster, turning further... another sharp reverse, and she heard the wood creak with the strain. The iron filings on the board fluttered in the wind of the increasing rotation.

The thing was going round almost once a second now; surely the divination ritual didn’t call for this kind of pace? She shifted closer to Jenny. “Is this supposed to happen?”

“I don’t know...” she said, biting her lip. “It could be—” The rotating board made another sharp reverse, and Pierce could swear she saw a wisp of woodsmoke rising from the friction. “Shit. No!”

The skull was rattling in position, beginning to shift around the turntable. If it was an electrical device Pierce would have yanked the plug by now, but interrupting a ritual wasn’t quite so straightforward. “How do we stop this thing?” She had to raise her voice over the increasing noise of the thing going round.

“We don’t, it’s self-perpetuating!” Jenny said. “Maybe I can—” She darted forward to snuff the candle out with her fingers.

The second she made contact, there was an explosive crack, and the overhead lights went out. Pierce cursed as a flying fragment of who-knew-what stung her cheek, dozens more pinging off the walls and clattering to the floor.

Then there was silence and total darkness.

“Fuck,” said Jenny dazedly, from somewhere down on the floor.

“Are you hurt?” Pierce said, groping for the heavy door and throwing it open. Light flooded into the room from the corridor outside; at least they hadn’t blown the power for the entire station.

“Apart from the bruise on my bum? No, I don’t think so.” All the same, Jenny gave a pained groan as she hauled herself back to her feet with the aid of the table. Taking in the state of the room, Pierce saw that it was littered with fragments of splintered wood—and bone shards.

“Did our evidence just explode?” she said, nudging one of the larger pieces of bone she could see with her shoe to move it closer to the light. She’d seen a few dismembered skeletons in her time, but what was left of the skull now looked like it had been blasted apart from the inside.

Jenny flattened her wavy hair back into place with a sheepish grin. “Erm. Well, we appear to have had what is known in technical circles as a Goldilocks incident. Our earlier attempts with the divination board didn’t have enough power to work. This one...”

“A little bit too much?” Pierce said.

“Just a tad.” She smiled wryly. “Still, on the bright side, I can definitely confirm that there is magic in those skulls. Quite a high potential for it.”

“Mm.” Pierce surveyed the remains of this one, scattered all over the concrete floor. The magic circle hadn’t been a whole lot of use in keeping
that
in; it might have spared her from being struck by the raw force of any magical blast, but when it came to flying projectiles, it was just as much use as any other line drawn on the floor. There were bits of skull and splinters just about everywhere, including, more than likely, in her clothes and hair.

Not quite the result they’d been hoping for—and not exactly respectful and dignified treatment of human remains in their care, either. She sighed. “So, what does your divination expertise allow you to read from
this
arrangement?” she said.

Jenny pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose as she studied the debris that littered the room for a moment. “I predict a very high chance of us getting another snitty health and safety memo,” she said.

“Marvellous,” said Pierce.

So much for that idea.

CHAPTER TEN

W
ITH DIVINATION APPARENTLY
a no-go, they were stuck with more conventional methods of identifying the skulls. Pierce popped her head into the RCU office. “Freeman. Any more progress on the history of those stolen artefacts?”

“Looks like that’s a dead end, Guv,” she said, shaking her head. “But Sergeant Mistry says there might be something in the CCTV footage,” she added. “He’s just gone next door to speak to somebody from Arcane Documents.”

“Excellent.” Something resembling progress at last. “In the meantime, I want you to try and find some kind of a source for these skulls we pulled out of the field on Tuesday,” she said. “Check into deaths—not necessarily recent—and grave robberies in the general Bingley area. I’ll give you my case notes.”

She flipped through her notebook until she found the right page, puzzling briefly over the date that she’d scrawled in the corner until she remembered her earlier meeting with Cliff. Something wicked this way coming on the twenty-second of December. Another bloody thing that they had no clue where to start with. Oh, well. For now, as the superintendent had said, best to focus on the cases that were actually cases.

She handed the notebook over. “All right, that’s what we’ve got so far, assuming you can read my handwriting. Ask Dawson if you need more to go on. Wherever he’s got off to.” Had he even showed up to work yet?

“He’s taken Eddie out to a call—suspected illegal artefacts,” Freeman told her helpfully.

It took a moment for Pierce to link ‘Eddie’ with Constable Taylor in her mind. She really needed to get to know her new people better.

Case in point: Dawson had taken Taylor with him to the Bingley crime scene, too—just the luck of the draw when it came to who was closest at the time, or was he favouring one of their new constables over the other? She should probably run the question by Deepan, see if he’d noticed a pattern.

Christ, taking time off work was a pain in the arse. Any health benefits from the rest were more than outweighed by the amount of stress and extra work it took to get back up to speed on her return.

“All right,” she said to Freeman. “Get on with that research, and I’ll see what Deepan’s got for us on those thefts.”

“Will do, Guv.” Freeman scrutinised the notepaper with what was either commendable attention to duty or an indictment of Pierce’s terrible handwriting. Pierce left her to it and headed down the hall back to Analysis.

The Documents room was a large space made smaller by the many rows of shelves, an incongruous mix of forensic lab with the impression of one of those second-hand bookshops that had given up on finding room and just started piling books willy-nilly. Well-thumbed modern mass market reference books rubbed shoulders with battered hardbacks from past decades and old leather-bound tomes. More carefully stored in the room at the rear were those even older, rarer texts that required careful handling.

It was a collection to rival most specialised libraries of the occult. Unfortunately, they only had two busy document techs to curate it, so they were reliant on memory, luck, and an ancient card index that had yet to be more than partly digitised to find anything useful.

Deepan was leaning against one of the lab tables studying a computer print-out as she entered, while the sound of papery rummaging drifted from the shelves at the rear.

“Morning, Guv,” he said, straightening up as she entered. “Anything new on the skull case?”

“All the wrong kind of bombshells,” Pierce said. “Have I mentioned that self-destructing evidence is my least favourite kind?” She rubbed her cheek where the flying shard of bone had struck her face.

“A few times, yeah,” he said. He waved the print-out at her. “Well, the good news is I might have found something on the Hemsfield Gallery theft.”

She took the paper from him and saw that it was a screenshot cropped from grainy grey CCTV footage, showing the passenger side of a grubby white Transit van at an angle to the camera.