Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (32 page)

Assuming that they were able to hit the site with enough force to overcome its defenders. After seeing the setup outside, Pierce had to admit she had her doubts. There must have been at least two dozen guards, most of them armed with Tasers, and at least two shapeshifters—the bear she’d spotted and the lioness that Freeman had seen. Plus if she was right that this Red Key crew were connected to the group who had funded the skinbinder, they might have even greater resources still to call on. She could only hope that Dawson would pull out all the stops, and not charge in with limited backup and cause a bloodbath.

“Our people will handle this,” she insisted. They would. They had to. It was their job.

“I hope they do,” the Archdruid said. “But, forgive me for this, Chief Inspector—right now you don’t seem to be any more in control of the situation than we are.”

She didn’t like the fact that he was right.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

P
IERCE PACED THE
full length of the shipping container, confirming without much surprise that it had no weak points they’d be able to exploit without tools that they didn’t have. With a sigh, she returned to the others and sat back against the metal wall.

“Well, there’s not a lot that any of us can do from in here, so we might as well conserve our energy,” she said. “Freeman. They leave you anything of use, or did they confiscate everything you had with you?”

“Er... still got a biro, Guv,” Freeman said after a moment; if she was leading with that, Pierce didn’t hold out much hope for the rest of the list. “They took my silver cuffs and incapacitant spray—not surprising, with the shapeshifters—and the phone and radio. Still got my belt and shoelaces, hair-tie and so on—and my keys. I had them in my pocket.”

Keys were a potential weapon in a self-defence situation, but Pierce wouldn’t want to bring them to a fight where the opponents had Tasers. Let alone where they had teeth and claws. “What about you, Mr Greywolf?” she asked.

“They took my staff, but they did leave me my amulet of office,” he said. “Both were carved from fallen wood from the same oak, and my followers all carry acorn charms from that same tree. If it’s true they’re still close by, I should be able to draw on their support to work some form of magic, but I fear these metal walls are blocking my energies. I tried to call on my staff earlier and couldn’t raise its power.”

That sounded like a suspiciously convenient excuse to Pierce, but she heard a rustle beside her as Doctor Moss searched for something in her pockets. “I might be able to provide you with the elements of a basic circle to amplify your power,” she said. “I have a few things here that those idiots didn’t bother confiscating... Chief Inspector, do you still have that penlight you had earlier?”

“I do.” She’d been planning to conserve its power unless it became essential, but she drew the set of keys from her pocket now and clicked the keyfob torch on. “What do you need?”

“Just a little light ought to do for now.” Moss pulled various items out from the many pockets of her sleeveless jacket and squinted at them, putting some back, keeping a few others. “I have chalk... no candles, alas, and no flame—probably not wise to light one in this enclosed space in any case... Ah, birch twigs, they may be of some use, and I have a few powders; it’ll be a bit of a bodge, but since we’re not trying to contain anything, only boost existing magics, it’s probably worth a punt.”

That wasn’t the sort of terminology Pierce was hugely comfortable hearing bandied about when it came to magical rituals—she was usually the one in charge of clearing up after such famous last words—but right now, they didn’t have much choice. Between the options of sitting and waiting for uncertain rescue or trying a long shot, she’d take the shot.

“All right,” she said. “See what you can do.”

I
T MIGHT BE
Pierce’s job to deal with the aftermath of ritual magic, but aside from looking over the shoulders of the team from Magical Analysis as they performed basic divinations, she was rarely there for the preparations beforehand. Generally by choice.

The truth was, contrary to the general public’s and certainly the media’s impressions of magic, ninety-nine percent of it was really bloody boring. Half the reason that it was still an obscure and poorly understood art even in the internet age was that achieving any measurable result took a huge amount of setup and finicky preparation. Everybody wanted to do magic; few people wanted it enough to spend six months practising drawing the basic circles before they got started on the simplest of rituals.

One break or wobble in a ritual circle, one shoddy stroke drawing a rune, one candle flame that flickered out at the just the wrong moment, and everything would fail. Usually, that just meant nothing would happen at all. Sometimes, it meant just enough would happen to go spectacularly wrong.

Pierce’s job probably gave her an overinflated sense of just how often things ended with the messy disaster option, but all the same, watching Moss and Greywolf set up their ritual was both incredibly dull and painfully tense. The darkness and the still air inside the shipping container made it all the more oppressive as she stood by to hold the torch on them while they worked.

Greywolf had taken up a cross-legged sitting position on the floor, his druidic robes hiked up rather inelegantly to reveal an ordinary pair of faded jeans and brown leather walking boots. Rather than adopt some meditative pose he simply watched and waited patiently as Doctor Moss drew her chalk design on the floor around him.

The pattern was an unusual one to Pierce’s eyes. Ritual geometry had a million and one possible variations, but the basic intent was usually the same: keep what was outside out and what was inside in. The most basic kind of protective design was a simple circle, convenient for defence because there were no corners or sides of different lengths to provide an obvious angle of attack. Magic circles could be jazzed up in any number of ways, but generally they were built out of layers of concentric rings, the more the better.

This design was different, the intent not to contain, but to amplify. Not a solid closed shape, then, but looping lines that spiralled outwards, crossing over each other and fragmenting the design into chambers that steadily increased in size towards the outer edge. It built up into something like an intricate spiderweb, with runes chalked or assembled from carefully placed birch twigs at the points where segments intersected.

Pierce could see Freeman was watching avidly, clearly itching to ask questions, but she had the sense not to interrupt and ruin Moss’s concentration. Pierce herself was far less curious; Freeman would learn with time that the details of specific rituals were rarely all that useful to know. You couldn’t learn them all, so it was better to ignore the specifics and look for the wider patterns. Outward spirals and expanding shapes for amplification; that was enough information to be going on with.

Assuming, of course, that this makeshift ritual even worked.

At last, Moss set her chalk down and walked around the design several times, studying it intently before she straightened up and rubbed her neck. “All right,” she said. “If this is going to achieve anything, this is as close as I can get to achieving it. Archdruid, if you would?”

Greywolf nodded solemnly and sat up straighter in the centre, heavy eyebrows descending in concentration as he clasped the wooden medallion between his hands. He closed his eyes, murmuring low words into his beard, and Pierce fought the urge to cough and shuffle in the thick silence. She couldn’t tell if what felt like a building pressure in the atmosphere was just her own growing tension or some form of magic gathering.

Just as she was considering whether to switch the penlight off to conserve its batteries, she heard a subtle cracking noise behind her. She spun about to shine the penlight in the direction of the doors, alert for any sign that their guards were about to enter—or worse, pump some kind of gas in through the cracks to knock them out before they had a chance.

Instead, she saw that the line of light under the doors was gradually disappearing, as if something was encroaching along the ground, covering the gap. The shadow of something large approaching the doors?

No—she realised that she could hear a continued crackling, a stressed metal groaning, as if someone was trying to prise the container’s doors open. Pierce stepped forward to shine the penlight’s weak beam more closely into the shadowed corners, and jerked back with a hiss as she saw pale, worm-like tendrils squirming in through the gaps, crawling across the floor and up the walls like...

Roots. The tendrils were roots, she realised, spreading across the metal walls like a scene watched in time-lapse photography; forcing their way in through the gaps around the doors like questing fingers probing for weaknesses.

They found one in the join between the shipping unit’s doors, held together only by the padlock on the outside. The container creaked and strained as the ever-growing mass of roots began to force the doors outwards, warping and buckling the metal with a succession of sharp cracks.

Pierce glanced back at the others, and saw Greywolf still sitting cross-legged at the centre of the ritual spiral, his face tense with concentration. Was this his doing?

Even if it wasn’t, it was something that they might be able to take advantage of. Inching as close as she could to the doors without stepping on the web of roots, Pierce adjusted her grip on the set of keys in her hand, letting the penlight fall to dangle from the ring and instead threading a pair of keys between her fingers like spikes. A feeble weapon against Tasers—she’d been thinking as much earlier—but perhaps with the advantage of surprise...

She turned to jerk her head at Freeman, gesturing for her to come up closer to the doors, and Freeman began to move along the length of the container to join her, careful to skirt around the edges of the chalked design on the floor.

Pierce had only just turned her gaze back when the over-stressed padlock finally gave way with an audible snap. With a metallic screech like a car accident, the roots ripped the doors open, blinding light flooding into the container. She lunged forward, half blinded and almost tripping over the crawling carpet of roots.

She was a sitting duck—but the guard outside the doors was gone. As Pierce blinked teary eyes, scanning the area, she saw that plants all over the field had exploded with the same wild growth. The tufts of springy grass around them had grown up to waist high, mounds of weeds erupting between them like Mesozoic megaflora. Roots snaked everywhere along the ground, a squirming, tangling mesh.

The barriers around the sheep pen had been heaved up by the growth, setting the animals free to fight their way through the grass in bewildered bleating panic. The guard who should have been watching the prisoners had run down to close the field gate before they could escape into the lower field and trample over the ritual. He was struggling to move it, the gate already half buried by a thickening grass mound.

The field below had been stripped down to bare earth for the ritual, but the burrowing roots were spreading down the hill. Pierce heard frantic shouts from the Red Key forces below as they scrambled to defend their preparations for the ritual. Just how far had the Archdruid’s enchantment spread?

She turned back to see the shipping container behind her was now almost completely covered by layers of roots, the roof buckling ominously as they cinched in tighter. “Get out of there!” she barked. Freeman was already on her heels; Doctor Moss hurried to join them, offering a hand to the Archdruid. He snapped out of his trance and stood up just as the roof creaked and began to bow inwards with a groan of over-stressed metal.

“Come on!” Pierce yelled. She stepped back in to grab Doctor Moss’s hand and haul her out past the mound of roots. The metal container was crumpling like cardboard, Greywolf forced to duck down as he scrambled out just before the whole roof caved.

The sound of a vehicle’s engine coughed to life behind her, and Pierce whirled to see that the guard at the gate had abandoned his efforts and run to one of the parked JCBs, revving as if he hoped he could tear free from the high grass that held it mired. Maybe he still planned to try to block off the gate; maybe he was thinking of nothing but a chance to make his escape.

Either way, his luck had just run out. The crawling roots burst through the windscreen like groping fingers, and he ducked beneath the dashboard with a yell. More roots were winding up the scoop at the back of the digger, gradually tilting it backwards despite the thick grass that mired the tyres.