Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (37 page)
“If the book doesn’t exist, then I suggest you write it,” Snow said crisply. “You may be dealing with the unknown, but I still expect you to communicate, coordinate, and document your work. I’ve allowed a little leeway given your time off on leave and the fact that the majority of your unit is new, but there will be no cowboy operations under my watch. Is that understood?”
“Understood,” she said.
He graced her with a regal tip of the head. “Then... well done.”
“Thank you, sir.” She moved to leave.
“Oh, and, Pierce?” he said as she was reaching the door.
“Yes, sir?” She turned back.
“I looked into the matter of my predecessor’s retirement, since you were so keen to know the details,” he said. “It seems that there’s no longer anyone at the address Mr Palmer left with the police force.” He cocked his head and regarded her coolly over his glasses. “Did you have any reason to suspect that there might be foul play at work?”
She had
every
reason to suspect foul play... but would admitting as much to Snow win her a powerful ally, or only confirm to the enemies above she knew too much? The organisations she was dealing with were breathtaking in scope, far too powerful for her to defeat by herself—and far too dangerous to her and her team if she made the wrong move. If she wanted to survive and seek justice for those who hadn’t, she couldn’t afford to make a mistake.
Pierce looked back at Snow as she grasped the doorhandle, professional calm fixed firmly in place. “No, sir,” she said. “Just curious.”
He nodded, once. “Well, that’s a valuable trait in a police officer,” he said. “Just see that it isn’t turned to idle ends.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
P
IERCE HEADED BACK
up the stairs to the RCU, bypassing the main office for the moment to head through to Enchanted Artefacts. Both Cliff and his assistant Nancy were at work today, for once the ever-present headphones absent from his ears as the two of them catalogued a mountain of boxes of evidence.
“Ah, Claire,” Cliff said, with an affable smile. “I gather we have you to thank for the early Christmas? You’ve sent us quite a bounty, it appears.” Indeed, they were overrun with evidence; so much of it, Pierce suspected rather grimly, that they wouldn’t have a hope of getting half of it processed before the new cases piled up to push it down the list.
But hope sprang eternal. “And has last night’s bounty yielded any fruit?” she said.
“Early days, yet, early days,” he chided, but he did cross the room to lay his hands on a plastic-wrapped bundle, which he unrolled to show a mass of thick black fur. “However, you might recall that just before things went
quite
mad, you arrested a young man in a feline romper suit.” He shook out the fur to reveal the dead-eyed stare of the black panther pelt.
“He’s in the cells downstairs, but he’s not talking.” Not that she’d had the chance to try questioning him herself yet; one more task on the never-ending list.
“Ah, but as I always say, why listen to the criminals when you can listen to the evidence instead?” Cliff said. He flipped the pelt over, revealing the maker’s rune marked on the inside. “Recognise this?” It was one of the more intricate examples that she’d seen: multiple interlocking strands forming an hourglass design that, glimpsed from another angle, looked rather like a stylised letter S.
She recognised it well, from various seized pelts and the tattoo on the back of the neck of another shapeshifter they’d once arrested.
“Sebastian,” she said. The skinbinder who’d stabbed her in the shoulder last October, the one who’d made the human skins; the one she’d been assured was dead after a road traffic accident when he was transferred. She snapped her gaze up to meet Cliff’s. “Can you find out how recently this pelt was enchanted?” she asked.
He drew his lips back from his teeth, prevaricating. “Not... with any precision,” he admitted.
Pierce laid a hand flat on the lab bench in between them. “Be precise,” she said. “Make it as precise as you can.”
Because if that pelt had been made after Sebastian’s ‘death’... then that might just be the first domino that brought the whole lot down.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Cliff promised her.
Pierce left the lab and strode back to the office. Freeman might be absent, but with the rest of the team all in their chairs the place still looked busy. “Dawson—anything new to report?” she asked.
He looked up from the sheaf of papers in his hand. “Just heard back from the Firearms team that were hunting the bear shifter across the moor,” he said. “Got away, but their silver bullet man’s prepared to swear he winged it before it did—said the bloke definitely shifted back before they lost him. Odds are that the pelt’s too damaged to be used again.”
“Good.” Not a perfect result, but better than a clean escape, at least. “Deepan. How are things going with the prisoners from last night?”
“Fourteen people brought in. We’ve shipped them off to different stations, kept them held separately,” Deepan said. “So far none of them are talking, but the rumblings I’m getting from the local police are that one or two are sounding a little bit unnerved about the way that things went down last night.”
“Excellent,” she said. “Tell them to keep the pressure on, and if anybody suddenly decides they’ve got something to say, we’ll send our people over to do an interview.” After seeing the sheer scale of the thing that had almost broken through the stone circle last night, she was willing to bet there might be a couple of Red Key guards reconsidering their career choices.
The office phone rang, and DC Taylor rolled his chair across to grab it. “RCU,” he said. He listened for a few moments, making brief interjections and scrawling notes down on his battered pocket notebook. “Right. What time was this? Okay. All right. We’ll get someone out to you.”
Pierce raised her eyebrow as he put the phone down and stood up.
“We’ve got a new case, Guv,” he said. “Haunting at a warehouse in Wakefield. Sounds pretty legit—staff turned up this morning to find the night watchman had his head pulled off, and the CCTV footage they’ve pulled up from last night is, quote-unquote, ‘mental.’”
Pierce clapped her hands together and straightened up.
“All right, people!” she said. “Let’s get back to work.”
A conspiracy the scale of the one that she suspected might take months, even years to unravel—but in the meantime, there was a job to be done.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E.E. Richardson has been writing books since she was eleven years old, and had her first novel
The Devil’s Footsteps
picked up for publication at the age of twenty. Since then she’s had seven more young adult horror novels published by Random House and Barrington Stoke.
Under the Skin
is her first story aimed at adults.
She also has a BSc. in Cybernetics and Virtual Worlds, which hasn’t been useful for much but does sound impressive.
A tough, hard-nosed career officer in the male-dominated world of British policing, DCI Claire Pierce of North Yorkshire Police heads Northern England’s underfunded and understaffed Ritual Crime Unit. Unregarded by the traditional police, struggling with an out-sized caseload, Pierce is about to tackle her most shocking case so far.
Following reports of unlicensed shapeshifters running wild in the Dales, DCI Pierce leads a failed raid to capture the skinbinder responsible. While the dust is still settling, a team from Counter Terrorism turns up and takes the case off her.
Pursuing the case off the record, she uncovers something murkier and more terrible than she suspected. Has her quarry achieved the impossible and learned to bind human skin?
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Five years ago, it all went wrong for Cason Cole. He lost his wife and son, lost everything, and was bound into service to a man who chews up human lives and spits them out, a predator who holds nothing dear and respects no law. Now, as the man he both loves and hates lies dying at his feet, the sounds of the explosion still ringing in his ears, Cason is finally free.