Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (27 page)

She snapped awake to the sound of the alarm after what felt like no time, and spent several minutes contemplating the possibility of just staying in bed before she remembered why she couldn’t. Right. Back to the grindstone.

To her displeasure, the camper vans had
still
yet to disappear from their car park when she arrived back at work. She went over and knocked on the window of one until a ruffled head in a druid’s hooded robe poked out.

“Where’s your leader?” Pierce said. “I thought we’d agreed that you lot would be leaving our car park.”

“The Archdruid says we stay until you come through on your promise to investigate,” the young woman told her, jaw set stubbornly.

Bloody marvellous. “Well, at least stay in your vans and don’t interrupt police business, please,” she said. “We could have had a nasty incident yesterday.”

She headed back into the office. Most of her team were already out, gone off to direct search efforts beginning at first light, but Freeman was there and waiting for her despite the early start. Almost too efficient, that girl; hopefully she’d ease off a little when she wasn’t trying to make a good impression on the new boss, or else she’d burn out. There might be an urgent case underway, but when it was done the next one in line would probably be just as urgent.

“Any word from Deepan or... DI Dawson?” she asked. Bugger, it was awkward being on first name terms with one of her team and none of the others. Usually it was the other way around, one unfamiliar officer easing in to the team rather than having all but one replaced at a stroke. She’d have to get used to calling the newbies by their first names. Well, the constables at least. Dawson didn’t really strike her as a ‘Graham.’

“No, Guv, but, er, Superintendent Snow wanted to see you. He said it was about the druids?”

“Fabulous.” Pierce drained the rest of her coffee too fast and set the mug down with a wince. “Right. Off to face the lion in his den. Thank you...”—for a moment that she hoped didn’t stretch too long, she fished for the name—“Gemma.” From the bright smile, she’d either remembered it right, or she had a very polite one here.

Small victories, she sensed, would have to be the theme of the day. She’d be pretty bloody lucky to get any big ones.

For a start, Snow was predictably unhappy about just about everything.

“You assured me yesterday, Chief Inspector,” he said, glaring over his spectacles, “that the protestors occupying the car park of our station would be
gone
.”

“As their leader assured me.” Buck-passing; probably not a good tack. Pierce hurried on. “I’ve given him our word that his allegations
will
be investigated, and he’s promised that his people will be moving out of the car park accordingly.”

The superintendent pressed his lips together. “
Accordingly
is not good enough—I want them gone today, this morning. Send someone with them to address their concerns, and get them
out
.”

They really didn’t have the time or resources to spend on that, but she sensed that the superintendent wasn’t listening to her protests. Was he actively working to sabotage her efforts, or was he just a PR-focused pain in the arse stuffed shirt? It was well-nigh impossible to tell the difference.

Either way, unfortunately, she still had to obey his commands.

“Right, Freeman,” she said as she returned to the RCU office. “His nibs is insisting we have to get the protestors out of here today. I want you to go with them to this sacred site of theirs—take a look around, listen to them, take some notes... but then get back here as soon as you can. Tell them we’re investigating, assuming that there’s anything to investigate—in fact, tell them that even if there isn’t, or we’ll have them up our arses all bloody week—and we’ll follow up as soon as we can. Which will be, if they insist on being told, sometime next week.”

After Monday, either the worst crisis would be over, it would have proved less urgent after all, or both she and the superintendent and possibly the druids as well would all have bigger problems on their minds.

“On it, Guv.” Freeman jumped up from her seat.

“And keep your radio on you, and your phone,” Pierce advised. “We might need to call you in if anything comes up at either of the sites.”

No messages had come in to that effect, but she checked in with both searches all the same. “It’s a pretty vaguely defined search area,” Deepan warned. “We’ve got a fair bit of help from uniform branch, but it’s still a lot of ground for our team to cover. Inspector Wade wanted to draft some of the locals in to help with the search, but I said no.”

“Too dangerous,” she agreed. “They listening to you out there?” Getting the RCU’s authority recognised was always a challenge, and despite being one of its most experienced officers, Deepan didn’t have the rank to throw around with local forces.

“So far. Everybody’s heard about Silsden: they’re paying attention, but they’re all on edge.”

And a twitchy copper could be as dangerous as a careless one. “All right, keep them in line. If anybody finds anything, tell them to just stay the hell away from it. Right now, it’s less important to deal with the skulls than it is to find the damn things.” If they could pin down the third corner of their ritual triangle, it might help them locate the site of the main summoning. “Let me know the moment there’s any chance your team have found something.”

“Will do, Guv.”

He hung up, and Pierce had a similar if more brusque conversation with Dawson. She was already regretting not heading one of the two searches; all very well to say she’d coordinate from their home base, but she needed something to bloody coordinate first.

The clock had now ticked over into what most of the rest of the country called business hours, so she phoned Doctor Moss. “Have you managed to find any new details on the ritual?” she asked.

“I might be able to narrow it down for you, but I need more information—is it possible I can see the skulls that you have in your possession?”

“We’ve got them here at the station,” Pierce told her. “Take a taxi if you need to—we can reimburse you.” Out of her own pocket, if it was necessary, since there might be whines about expensing that. But the agitation in her gut outweighed the pragmatic concerns; they only had one day to go, and her instincts were buzzing at her to take action.

If only she had something to actually
do.
She strode down to the Enchanted Artefacts office, as much for the walk as anything else. Cliff was back on duty today. “How’s Nancy?” she asked him.

“She seems well.” He pressed his lips together, shaking his head. “Nasty business. That’s the first time we’ve had a break-in at the actual station, and I wasn’t here,” he said. “Obviously, I should just never take days off.”

“That’s my strategy,” Pierce said wryly. She’d planned to take this weekend off, easing back into her return to work, but the approaching deadline had put paid to that. “Listen, we’ve got a demonology expert coming in to take a look at the ritual paraphernalia from the first two skull sites. Can you line up what we’ve got?”

“Oh, that should be fascinating,” he said, brightening as he moved to sort through his shelved boxes. “I did want to consult with somebody better informed about the spell runes on the scrolls.”

“Documents have had no luck with identifying the language?” she asked.

“Alas not. But it seems that despite being identical in all other aspects, each skull has its own unique set of symbols.”

“Parts of a greater whole?”

“Indeed,” he said.

It seemed to take forever for Doctor Moss to arrive at the station to join them. Pierce had to resist the urge to physically hustle the woman through the building to get to the Artefacts office faster. Cliff had obligingly laid out each of the six skulls and their accoutrements, including the broken fragments of the one that Jenny had accidentally exploded with her attempt at divination.

Once furnished with her own set of evidence gloves, Doctor Moss started picking them up and turning them over, examining the markings on the underside and in the cavities that she couldn’t have seen on a photograph. Her mouth was flattened into a thin, troubled line.

“Yes, that’s consistent... see here, the radial lines around the neck?” She showed Pierce the underside of one of the skulls. “They’re like... magical circuitry, if you will. Probably long vanished into the soil by the time that you got there, but there would have been connecting lines of blood poured when the ritual was first laid out, linking the skull to the rune stones. Plugging it in to the larger ritual circuit. Powerful stuff.”

She moved on to peer at the set of six scrolls retrieved from the mouths of the skulls, now all opened out with their ribbons laid beside them. “Do you know the positions in which these were all found?” she asked.

Cliff pointed to them each in turn. “Bingley one, two, three, Silsden one, two, three... I have the site maps over here.” He waved at the diagrams. Doctor Moss rearranged the scrolls into two triangles to match their original layout, and stood over them for a moment, mouthing to herself as she sounded out the runes.

“Well, the incantation is definitely incomplete,” she said, “but based on this I believe it’s intended to summon a major demon for the purposes of striking some form of bargain—sacrifices in exchange for mystical knowledge is the usual formula, though the summoners could be seeking some other form of exchange.” She pulled her lips back in a grimace and shook her head. “However, it’s hard to say from this whether they’ll be able to keep it safely contained and return it to the plane from which it came. They do seem to have a relatively good grasp of the principles—but of course, the history of the art is littered with people who seemed to know what they were doing right up till the moment it went wrong.”

“The question is, do
we
know what they’re doing?” Pierce asked. “Based on this, are you able to tell us what we can do to stop the ritual from taking place?”

“You can’t,” Doctor Moss said flatly, holding her gaze. “You simply don’t have the required knowledge.” She inclined her head. “However, I imagine
I
probably could, if I was able to visit the site of the final summoning ritual.”

Pierce’s police instincts rebelled at the idea of bringing an untrained member of the public deeper into this murderous mess, but the fact was that they didn’t have much choice. “Can you pinpoint that final location for me?” she asked.

Moss glanced back at Cliff’s marked-out map of the sites. “Not unless you can bring me the scrolls from the third set of skulls,” she said, shaking her head. “It may be at the centre of the triangle defined by the three skull sites, or it may be projected outwards in a line from one of them, or from that centre point... I can consult my books with the information we have now and possibly give you an educated guess, but if I had the complete inscription, I could be more sure.”

“An educated guess is better than what we’ve got right now,” Pierce said. They barely even had the information to make an ill-educated one. She drew in a deep breath and straightened up. “All right, realistically, what are our likely outcomes here?” she asked.

Doctor Moss met her eyes with a composed frown. “Well, the best case scenario would naturally be to avert the summoning entirely, or for the summoners to fail so completely that nothing happens at all.”

“I don’t think we can safely count on that.” These people definitely had a good idea what they were doing. They might or might not achieve exactly what they’d aimed for, but Pierce was willing to bet it would end with more than a sad puff of smoke and a bad smell.

“Mm.” Doctor Moss nodded in agreement. “The second best scenario, then, is that we fail to prevent the ritual, and it goes exactly as the summoners planned. Whoever and whatever they planned to sacrifice—and it will be a large-scale sacrifice, believe me—will suffer and die... but the major demon will remain contained, and be dispatched back to the plane that it was drawn from without wreaking any further havoc.”

Cliff looked up from his work station beside them. “‘Large-scale sacrifice’ is a term you rarely want to hear in your best case scenarios,” he noted.

Pierce smiled tightly, without humour. “I’m guessing the worst case scenario involves further havoc.”

“Yes.” Doctor Moss peered at her seriously, eyes pale behind her glasses. “If the summoned demon does break loose from its containment... well, all we can realistically hope is that it will burn itself out like a wildfire, eventually running short of the tremendous reserves of energy required to stay manifest in this world.”

“How eventual is eventually?” Pierce asked.

“The simple, most accurate answer would be, ‘not soon enough.’”

Pierce didn’t know what kind of damage a major demon could do in burning itself out. She had a strong feeling she didn’t want to know. Nothing like understanding the full pressure on you to increase the chance you’d choke.

As always, the only approach was one step at a time. Locate the ritual. Stop the ritual. Worry about the might-have-beens when it was too late to lock up over the fear of making a mistake. “All right,” she said. “Thank you, Doctor. If I can ask you to get back to your books and gather together whatever you may need to stop this ritual? Our information says that this is going to happen tomorrow, so we may well have less than a day to act.”