Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (25 page)

Pierce reached the top of the stairs and kept on going up the next flight, onto the first floor that was the RCU’s home territory. Past the main office, still empty—Deepan and Freeman not yet back from their case. Past the first few offices in Magical Analysis, where the researchers had their heads down, oblivious to much that went on outside of their doors. On towards the end lab: Enchanted Artefacts.

She pushed the door open, and it bumped something on the floor. Some
one
. Shit. The unconscious—she hoped just unconscious—form of Nancy Willis, one of Cliff’s lab assistants. Pierce half bent down to check her pulse before her instincts yelped at her to check the room for danger
first
.

Not fast enough. As she started to look up, she caught a blur of movement surging through the lab towards her, and barely had the chance to duck away. An elbow, maybe a fist, collided with her arm as she threw it up to shield herself. She couldn’t see the attack coming at her: there was only a vaguely human-sized distortion in the air, like a shadow glimpsed through murky, rippling water.

“Hey!” she shouted, lunging at the moving blur. Her hand closed on something like a fistful of slippery silk, and beneath that the solid warmth of human flesh. A person, dressed in some kind of a magical stealth suit—not quite invisible, but close to it. Even as Pierce grabbed for a better grip the thief twisted away, the material slipping through her fingers.

She saw the blur dart for the door, and threw herself in front of it. The intruder might be near-invisible, but this was no ghost: there was a solid human body underneath the suit, and if they wanted out, they’d have to go through her.

“This is a restricted area!” she barked. “Remove your concealment and come quietly.” Words for the sake of getting them down on the record; no surprise when in place of a response the rippling blur dashed off towards the shelves at the far side of the room. Pierce didn’t let herself be lured into chasing: there was only one way out of the lab, and she was blocking it right now.

It only took one blink for her to lose all certainty: had the intruder moved behind the row of shelves, or just disappeared by going still? Was that patch of darkness a distortion in the air, or just the odd-shaped shadows cast by objects on the shelves?

Wary eyes still on the rows of shelving, Pierce crouched down to take the fallen Nancy’s pulse. A strong beat beneath her fingers; her heart unclenched a fraction. Unconsciousness was bad news regardless of the cause, but it still beat the hell out of a corpse.

Straightening up again, Pierce reached for her phone, wishing she’d brought her radio in with her from the car. She couldn’t risk waiting around for someone to pick up; instead, eyes flicking between the screen and the shelves, she found Dawson’s number and sent him a terse text. I
NTRUDER IN
RCU.

She just hoped he bloody checked it—and still in interview, he might well not. Shit. Who else could she try? She wasn’t sure if Jenny had been in her office; Pierce hadn’t paid attention, hadn’t checked who else was on the floor. Had anybody out there heard her shout?

A sound in the far corner, something clanging off the metal supports of the shelf units. Pierce whipped towards it. Was that a shadow behind the shelves? Or—She turned back at a flash of movement at the corner of her eye, but by the time she focused there was nothing there. She blinked her eyes, feeling them start to blur and water from staring too intently at what might be empty air.

A door slammed somewhere else inside the building. Nerves on edge, she instinctively turned to look out through the pane of glass in the lab door. As she did, she caught the reflection of a blurry shape behind her that hadn’t been there the last time she looked.

Pierce whirled back round, and couldn’t see a thing. She held her breath for long moments. No sound. No movement. She turned her head in tiny fractions, until she could see into the small window pane again.

And saw the reflected shape that was looming right behind her. She swung around and struck out blindly, feeling like a child practising made-up karate—until her hand clipped someone’s shoulder in what looked like open space.

The empty air before her exploded with ripples, the intruder’s shape revealed by distortion where the enchanted silk was too slow to restore the camouflage after its wearer moved. Pierce grabbed for where the head should be, trying to unmask the thief, but she missed her aim and the silk cloth poured away through her fingers.

“Give it up!” she shouted, intimidation tactic more than any sense of having the advantage. She might be blocking the door, but if the thief had some drug or magic that could drop her like Nancy, she could be downed without seeing it coming.

Then she heard moving feet and voices out in the hallway. “In here!” she shouted. “We’ve got an intruder!” Her attacker danced away, running back towards the shelves.

Pierce heard the door open behind her, barely sparing the time to register whoever came through as more than a black and white blur. “Help her, but stay by the door,” she snapped. “There’s someone in here using magic to stay concealed.” Where were infrared sights when you needed them?

She’d lost the intruder already, in the brief moment that she’d looked away. Drawing the handcuffs from her belt, Pierce moved warily into the room, scanning the corners of the lab for any sign of ripples. All too aware the first warning she got might be the blow that took her down.

Her eyes fell on a wheeled trolley at the side, loaded with Cliff’s ritual kit. Odds and sods of candles, chalk, mirrors, markers, string... and a big canister of sea salt. She ran forward around the lab tables to grab for it—

And smashed into an invisible body in her path.

The thief squirmed away from her as she fought to get a better grip. She struck out blindly and missed, cracking her hand against the trolley. A shove sent her stumbling into it, jarring her hip in a rattle of wheels and falling objects.

She moved to snatch the canister of salt from the debris, the attacker’s next strike just clipping her chin as she turned away. She grabbed the cloaked arm while she still knew where it was and yanked the lid off of the salt, tossing the contents over the cloaked figure.

Flour might have clung better—but salt had its own power. Where the salt flakes struck the silk cloth of the thief’s disguise, some small number clung, but most immediately poured away towards the ground. As they tumbled down the slick cloth they left bleached streaks behind, revealing the thief’s shape like a transparent sculpture that had been splashed with white paint.

A much easier target. As the intruder turned to run towards the door, Pierce pulled the trolley out from the wall and shoved it at the running figure, prompting a very human
oof
of pain as the thief collided with it and tripped, sprawling across the tiled floor. Pierce lunged after the fallen form and this time got a solid enough grip to grab the hood of the costume and yank it back. The very pissed off face of a bearded man in his early thirties was revealed.

“Nice try, son,” she said, holding him down with a knee and reaching for his arm to snap her cuffs around his wrist. “But you’re not going anywhere.”

She recited the words of the caution on automatic, and then looked up, out of breath, to see a group of uniformed officers had crowded through the door. A pair of them were tending to the fallen Nancy, while the others looked a bit lost.

“We need this guy searched and stripped out of the magical camouflage gear,” she said. “It’s possible he’s got some of our artefacts on him, and he might have a few more of his own as well.” Pierce stood up, keeping a hold on the silver cuffs to encourage her prisoner to stand with her, and gave him a tight smile that he returned as a scowl. “Then stick him down in the cells with his mate from out the front,” she said. “Station invasion’s over.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

T
HEIR NEW PRISONER
seemed fairly disinclined to talk, switching between sullen silence and explosions of cursing as the uniforms took him downstairs to be processed. But once she returned to his partner in the interview room with news that he’d been apprehended, ‘John Brown’ folded like a paper swan. Yes, they’d stolen the artefacts, yes, he could give them names and details on his unfortunate partner, yes, he’d confess just about anything if it got him off the charge of attempting to murder a police officer. Pierce left the interview with the feeling of a job well done. At bloody last.

She checked in on young Nancy, and was relieved to find she’d already regained consciousness, responding well to the first-aider’s tests.

“I didn’t really see what happened,” she told Pierce. “The door opened and there was no one there, and there was just this
smell
—like, you know when somebody’s been smoking some kind of weird funky herbal cigarettes, and then they breathe it out right in your face? Like that. And then just: zonk.” She mimed falling over with a sweep of her forearm. “I really do feel fine, by the way,” she insisted to the bulky officer still hovering nearby with the first aid kit.

“Yeah, well, see a proper doctor anyway,” Pierce told her. “No offence, Baz,” she added to the first-aider.

“None taken. They didn’t train me for all this mystic shit,” he said.

“Me neither, but somehow I get paid to deal with it anyway.” She nodded at them both and headed out the door. Plenty more work still to do before the artefact theft case could be laid to bed, but the hard part was over, and now they were just left to clear up the details.

Like the gaggle of druids she’d had herded in for questioning, who it seemed were probably innocent of any wrongdoing after all. Pierce grimaced. She had a feeling the superintendent wouldn’t be too happy to hear that they’d hauled a whole group of protestors in off the street to help them with their inquiries. She just hoped the uniforms she’d had to delegate that task to had kept a light, polite touch and treated them as witnesses rather than suspects.

Pierce collared the uniform sergeant in charge of the questioning, Higson. “Our knifeman’s confessed,” she said. “Looks like this lot are all in the clear, so we just need witness statements from them. Where’s their boss?”

“Beardy fella with the big stick?” Higson nodded his head towards the door on the corner. “In there, having a chat and a cup of tea with Constables Lewis and Markham, all very civilised, like. Didn’t think the man in the fancy office would be too happy with us if we ruffled too many feathers dealing with this lot.”

A shrewd assessment. “You’ll go far, mate,” Pierce told him.

“Rather not, if it’s all the same to you, Guv,” he said with a smile. “Seems like the higher you go up the ladder the more paperwork falls on your head. I get enough of that where I am as it is.”

“If only we all had your sense.” She girded herself to go and make nice to the Archdruid, hoping he didn’t decide to kick up a fuss about his people’s treatment; it would be all too easy to spin that kind of story to a media already thirsty for blood.

“DCI Pierce.” He greeted her with a pleasant smile as she entered. The outfit somehow looked even more incongruous seated in one of their cheap plastic chairs, but the voice still gave him a presence that stopped him from seeming completely ridiculous.

“All done here?” Pierce asked the two PCs, who seemed only too happy to get up and scuttle out to leave her to it. She took over one of the vacated chairs and drew it closer to the table. “Firstly, I’d like to apologise for keeping you and your people here so long,” she said. “We appreciate your cooperation, Mr—” Mr what? The PCs hadn’t left her any convenient notes to skim from. “I’m sorry, sir, I never did catch your name,” she was forced to admit.

“Archdruid Alastair Greywolf,” he said, in measured tones.

Pierce very respectfully didn’t snigger, but she couldn’t help but raise a sceptical eyebrow nonetheless. “Is that what it says on your driving licence?” she had to ask.

“It does,” he said, but then smiled. “Not my birth certificate,” he conceded.

Praise the Lord, a glimpse of a sense of humour. Maybe there was a chance he could be reasoned with yet. “Well, thank you for your assistance earlier, Mr Greywolf,” she said, letting the matter of names go. “That could have been a very nasty incident, and we appreciate your help in containing the attacker.”

He inclined his head regally. “Surely what any good citizen would try to do,” he said.