Under the Skin (Ritual Crime Unit) (2 page)

“Drop the knife!” Leo demanded, moving closer but not yet ready to raise the pistol. Henderson followed a few paces behind, pivoting to look into the shadows as he passed. Sally moved after him and bent to lift one of the tarpaulins, pulling her torch from the clip on her vest and peering underneath.

Pierce kept her eyes on the skinbinder, not willing to trust he was as absorbed as he seemed. He was still humming, maintaining his focus as he made ritual incisions in the carcass. She was damn glad Leo and his people were professionals, not trigger-happy hotheads looking for a chance to fire. This could still end without tears, if they were careful.

“Holy
shit
.” The curse from Sally drew her eyes away from the standoff. Pierce saw the young constable drop the raised tarp and jerk back. “Guv, we’ve got skins here,” she said, swallowing as she looked up. “But I think they’re—”

In the moment of distraction, the skinbinder made his move.

A flash of silver motion at the corner of her eye. Pierce spun just in time to see Henderson reel backwards, clutching his arm where the skinning knife had gashed it.

“Drop the knife!” Leo shouted again, raising his gun, but before he could fire a dark shape dropped from the roof beams, slamming into him and sending him staggering into the hanging carcass. As the thing bounded forward, launching from his shoulders, Pierce glimpsed gold feline eyes and a flash of yellow fangs.

A black panther.

Not a real one. “Shapeshifter!” she bellowed.

“Fuck!” Henderson scrambled backward, fumbling for the Taser at his side, but it was a clumsy move, reaching across himself with his uninjured arm. Before he could draw the weapon, the shapeshifter was on him, its jaws crunching down on his shoulder. It shook him like a toy and tossed him aside to slam against the wall. Pierce heard the crack of breaking bone.

“Officer down!” she shouted into her radio. “We need backup in the barn! Shapeshifter in the building!” Leo shoved the swinging wolf carcass aside to get a clear shot, but with everyone’s torches moving at once the barn was a blur of shifting shadows.

“I’ve got Henderson, Guv!” Sally said, darting across the barn toward the injured man. But the shifter spun about as fast as any real cat, claws flashing out to rake across her throat. Her cry of shock strangled into a gurgle as she staggered back, a spray of blood spattering the dirt floor.

“Shit!” Pierce saw the shifter’s head swinging towards her, and she grabbed for her spray. Wouldn’t stop the damn thing, but it might drive it out, save the casualties from any further harm...

The deafening blast of a close-quarters gunshot echoed in her ears. It plunged her into instant ringing, muffled deafness, like the world heard from the bottom of a pool. Even that didn’t soften the retort of the next shot.

The big cat jerked back as the bullet ripped into its shoulder—and, like an optical illusion, it was no longer a panther, but a man crouched on all fours with the pelt draped across his back. Taking no chances, Pierce lunged forward and slapped her silver cuffs on his tattooed arms, yanking his wrists together with no time to be careful of his shoulder. The man snapped his teeth towards her, still half lost in the mind of the beast.

But neutralised for now. If the silver bullet hadn’t ruined the magic of the pelt, the cuffs would definitely stop him using it. Pierce straightened up—and spotted the skinbinder she’d half forgotten running towards the back of the barn. “Freeze!” she yelled, her own voice dulled in her ears to the point where she could hardly tell how loud she was shouting. “There’s no way out!”

The skinbinder ignored her and took a running leap towards the window. It was an impossible jump... but as he left the ground, his body collapsed in on itself, bones folding away at impossible angles like a closing umbrella. The heavy wings on his back moulded into his outflung arms; his bent legs sunk inwards and curved into talons; his moonlit face elongated, stretching out into a hooked beak.

The great shape of the eagle soared away out of the window, disappearing into the dark night. Leo swore and ran forward to aim after it, but too late to take the shot.

“Eagle shifter coming out of the back of the barn!” Pierce shouted it into her radio, but she knew that no one outside would have a chance to stop him.

She turned to move towards the injured officers. It was clear that neither one would be getting up without help. Didn’t look much like they would get up at all.

Jesus Christ. What a clusterfuck.

CHAPTER TWO

I
T TOOK LONGER
than Pierce liked to get the injured off the scene and the prisoner on his way to the station. She sent Deepan back to accompany him; she didn’t trust jittery uniforms with a shapeshifter. The bullet should have rendered the pelt’s enchantment inert, but that was still no reason to take chances. The panther’s wound hadn’t transferred to the man; small injuries were repaired in the flux of shifting bodies. It took major organ damage to kill a shapeshifter in animal form.

Police officers weren’t so lucky.

Pierce would have liked to send one of their own off in the ambulance with Sally, but they were stretched far too thin as it was with a crime scene this size. In a perfect world, she’d have had two prisoners in custody right now, and Sally here to check the barn over for magical traps. Instead they had a loose skinbinder to watch out for, and she was stuck here waiting for Tim Cable to show up.

Tim wouldn’t have been her first choice to bring on a bust like this. Three months in the Unit and still earnest as a puppy, he was textbook perfect on all the procedures—which might do him some good if they ever actually drew a textbook case. The books weren’t even written to cover RCU work; when Pierce had first joined up, the only reference to consult was George, the cranky old sergeant who’d been around longer than God’s mother-in-law. What she hadn’t learned from him, she’d picked up through trial-and-error, and things that hadn’t killed her yet.

Tonight was a grim reminder there could always be a first time.

She chewed the lip of another cardboard cup of coffee as the forensics van pulled up. The crime scene photographer who got out was half familiar, a weary-looking blonde woman with her tripod in hand. “Why is it you lot from Ritual always call us out to scenes in the middle of the night and the middle of nowhere?” she asked.

“Ritual magic. Brings out your average criminal’s flair for amateur dramatics.” Pierce turned her torch toward the open barn door. “Through there.”

The photographer assessed the scene with a practised eye. “Just the barn?”

Slim chance they’d get much of value from the rest of the scene, with the number of feet that had been trampling over it. “Just the barn,” she echoed with a curt nod. “Bloodstains on the left and most of the footprints are from the attack on our people. We need pictures of the rear window and the rafters—one of our suspects went out the back, and the other one came from above. Make sure you get that knife there on the ground.”

The skinbinder had dropped the ritual blade in his escape—the silver would have stopped him from transforming. With any luck, they’d be able to lift some prints from it. In the shadowy dark of the barn she hadn’t seen if he wore gloves, but she doubted he’d have risked it. Complex magic took precision, and the smallest bit of clumsiness could compromise a ritual.

“The dead wolf is relevant too, I’m guessing?” the photographer said. She wrinkled her mouth at the gruesome sight. “Poor puppy.” She snapped off a few establishing shots.

“Guv?”

Pierce turned to see Tim hurrying towards her from the collection of cars. A lanky boy with short spiked hair and glasses, he wasn’t quite as young and gormless as he looked, but sometimes it was easy to forget that.

“Sally was injured?” he asked, his eyes wide.

“They’ve taken her to hospital. You can call them for news later, but right now I need you to assess the scene. We need to know there are no magical surprises around the place before forensics start disturbing things.” Self-destructing evidence was her least favourite kind.

Tim nodded solemnly. “Right, Guv.” But he hovered for a moment, clearly at a loss for where to start. “Um... I should... check outside the thresholds for trigger runes?” He looked to her for approval, still caught up in the habit of treating every case like an assessment.

She’d have to shake that out of him before she sent him off on his own to butt heads with local forces who thought rank outweighed specialist expertise. She flicked a hand to send him off to do as he thought best.

A cultured voice interrupted from behind them. “That won’t be necessary, thank you, Constable.”

Apparently being a DCI didn’t spare her from butting heads either. Pierce turned to face the new arrival.

He was a tall man in his late thirties, with thick dark hair and the kind of blandly handsome looks that were a nightmare of anyone trying to take down a useful description. He wore a black cashmere coat, the shirt collar and dark tie beneath as crisp as if he’d come straight from the ironing board.

Never trust a police detective who didn’t look like he lived in his clothes. Assuming this man
was
with the police; if he wasn’t and he’d still got through the cordon, heads would be rolling very soon. Pierce fixed him with a hard stare. “Sorry, you would be?”

He strode forward to meet her, unsmiling. “Jason Maitland, Counter Terror Action Team.” That was a new one on her, but then they changed the names on these things more often than she changed her sheets, and the ID that he flashed at her looked real enough. “I’m afraid my people are going to need to take over this site.”

And if that didn’t smell rancid, she didn’t know what did. She narrowed her eyes. “There’s no reason for Counter Terrorism to take an interest in this case.” A rogue skinbinder was a threat on several levels, but none of them involved national security.

“We have our reasons. I’m afraid I can’t discuss them.” Stock phrases, no apology behind them.

Dark suited figures were already moving across the site, herding the uniformed officers away. They even had their own forensics people, pouring out of an unmarked black van in coveralls. Terrorism was a buzzword with plenty of political clout—but Pierce had her own field of authority.

“This is an RCU case,” she said, standing firm. “We can’t allow anyone to start handling the evidence until it’s been cleared as safe by our experts.”

By her side she sensed Tim shifting, uncomfortable at being caught in a power struggle, but she wasn’t about to concede ground by breaking eye contact with Maitland.

If he was ruffled by the challenge, he didn’t show it. “We have our own specialists in ritual magic,” he said.

“Specialists? From where?” She raised a sceptical eyebrow. True experts were thin on the ground, and ones with police training even more so. She could count the members of the RCU’s northern branch without resorting to toes, and its southern counterpart wasn’t much bigger. Either Maitland was overestimating the knowledge of his specialists, or someone was playing silly buggers with the allocation of police resources. The RCU was struggling to put together a useful crime database as it was without some shadowy subdepartment out there duplicating their efforts.

“All fully PRMC certified,” Maitland said. The same qualification the Unit required—and stuck with a wet-behind-the-ears rookie as she was right now, Pierce couldn’t even claim to have greater field experience on her side. She stepped back out of his way with a scowl.

“Two good officers were injured making this bust,” she reminded him. “This suspect has been top of the RCU’s most wanted list for months.”

“I assure you, we’re not going to let him go free.” Maitland’s flash of teeth was more predatory than reassuring. “He’s been top of
our
most wanted list for even longer.”

“But you can’t tell me why.”

His smile broadened into an even less likeable expression. “I’m sure you understand the realities of these things.” He straightened up, already dismissing her from his attention. “Now, if you could please have your people clear the scene as fast as possible. The longer we delay here, the greater our suspect’s lead on us becomes.”

Our
suspect. Her lips curved in bitter acknowledgement. They weren’t going to win any concessions here. “Of course,” she said, and held his gaze for a few seconds longer before turning to stalk away across the long grass. “Come on, Tim. Let’s go.”