Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (28 page)

She realised she was drifting again, which couldn’t be doing much to convince Dawson that she was with it. “I’m fine,” she said, belatedly. “And our source has said she’ll only talk to me.”

“I’ll wear a wig,” Dawson said. He shrugged. “It’s a power play. Wants some attention from somebody with a bit of rank. Doubt it’s going to matter to her who.”

“That’s flattering,” she said dryly. “And no, I’m fine. It’s wearing off.” She was more or less certain that was true, and besides, she wasn’t about to sit this one out. She didn’t trust Dawson to ask the right questions of an informant who’d already proved she was cagey about talking to them at all.

They left their uniform backup parked discreetly down a side street a short way away from the café: out of sight, but within radio hailing distance if things got nasty. Pierce hoped. She couldn’t help but remember just how fast their attacker at the park had moved.

And no amount of haste was going to do them any good if Violet was dead before they got there.

She pushed the what-ifs aside, and instead tried to put her expanded senses to good use as they drove towards the café. Nothing obviously suspicious that she could see—the streets were quiet apart from a pensioner walking a slow-moving Scottie dog and some workmen half-heartedly building a brick wall. But then, it was broad daylight this time: maybe that would be enough of a deterrent to keep the killer away.

Or maybe it wouldn’t, if he was keeping close enough tabs on his disciples’ movements to recognise something amiss. Shit, she should have had Eddie tell the woman not to wear her bat necklace to the meet. But it was too late now—and at least if the cult leader did make a move, it would be their chance to nab him.

Maybe they should have brought more backup after all...

Dawson pulled up outside the café, a small corner building on the end of a row of terraced houses. A sign proclaimed it
Melanie’s Caf
é & Sandwich Shop
; it looked like the sort of shabby little place that guaranteed either the best cooking in town or food poisoning. The blinds were angled half-closed, and Pierce would have been dubious that it was even open, if not for the sign on a string hanging inside the door. Maybe Violet had picked this place for the privacy.

She let Dawson take the lead, still scanning the streets for threats. The woman with the Scottie dog was watching them from across the road, but only with the kind of bland indifference that suggested they were marginally more interesting than watching the dog pee up a wall. The workmen were now out of view, but Pierce could still hear the faint
clinks
and
thuds
of bricks being shifted. All apparently quiet. She followed Dawson through into the shop.

The dimly lit interior was as cramped as the outside had led her to expect, with just about room for three tiny, two-person tables lined up opposite the sandwich counter. The middle-aged woman indifferently wiping it down with a cloth glanced up at them briefly, but offered no greeting before getting back to her task; there was a half-closed door behind her that was marked
E
MPLOYEES
O
NLY
, though Pierce was dubious about the need for the plural. They seemed to have the place to themselves.

Until the door fell closed behind her, and a whisper of movement from the corner made her spin. She saw that there was a fourth table in there after all, tucked in behind the door and next to the bin. Sitting in the corner seat with her back to the wall was a dark-haired woman Pierce recognised well.

“Violet, I presume?” she said, pulling out the chair opposite her, and trying not to wince too obviously as the metal legs scraped on the floor. She was grateful the blinds in here were down, blocking out the worst of the sunshine, but the food smells were overpowering, and not in a good way. The cuts of meat on the sandwich counter stank like a slaughterhouse, the bin smelled rancid, and the vinegar bottle on the table stung her eyes and nose like chemical fumes.

“DCI Pierce,” the woman said with a small nod. She had a low, soft voice that Pierce suspected she’d have had to strain to hear if it wasn’t for the silence of the café and her boosted senses. Her previous impression held: Violet didn’t seem old enough to have been the woman Leo claimed to have seen outside the booby-trapped base. Maybe she was a relative of that woman: a sister, even a daughter. Cults did encourage recruitment, after all.

Or maybe she was very well-preserved. How much of the effects of the blood ritual did their vampire killer share with his followers?

Pierce’s gaze dropped to the silver bat necklace around her neck; as if in nervous response, Violet lifted the pendant from her chest to fiddle with it, winding the chain around her hands. She seemed calm on the surface, but her face was very pale, and Pierce couldn’t help but suspect that her choice of seat hadn’t been random chance, tucked away in the corner here with her back to the wall and the exit close by. Her eyes kept flickering between it and the employee door that must lead to the kitchen and the flat upstairs.

“Got another name to go with that?” Dawson asked, dragging a chair over from one of the other tables to join them. Pierce was uncomfortably aware of the woman behind the counter listening in.

“Yes,” Violet said tartly, and didn’t offer it. “Do
you
have one?”

“This is Detective Inspector Dawson,” Pierce said, before he could steamroll ahead with his questioning. She was already beginning to regret bringing him along; his brand of forceful interrogation was hardly likely to be a help.

Or maybe it would. She was having trouble getting a proper read on Violet: nervous gestures, but a calm expression. Maybe magical youthfulness robbed you of expression much as surgery did.

Or maybe Pierce was just reading too much into tiny movements that she wouldn’t even have noticed without the effects of the spirit charm. She forced herself to focus. “You said you had some information for us?” she said, still wary of talking too directly, with the woman at the counter listening in.

Violet either noticed or she’d had the same thought. “Can I get that coffee now?” she asked, and the woman left the counter with what seemed a rather sullen lack of response, heading through into the kitchen behind to set some whistling, burbling coffee machine noises in motion. Pierce grimaced, the headache she’d only just shaken off digging its claws in again.

But at least the noise of the machine gave them a moderate degree of privacy. If Violet truly had something too important for public consumption to share, then they’d have to talk fast to persuade her to come into the station.

Pierce tried to concentrate on the woman before her, and not the noises from the other room. “You said in your phone call that you could tell us about the vampire cult,” she pressed.

Violet nodded, fiddling with the bat necklace again and looking down at the plastic-covered café table. “I... was very young when they found me,” she said in a low voice. “They made promises: eternal life, strength and speed beyond your wildest dreams, and freedom—freedom to be whatever,
do
whatever you wanted. They made it sound like something very beautiful.” Her pale eyes gazed into the distance.

“Till it got ugly,” Dawson said bluntly.

She gave him a sidelong look that seemed almost annoyed, as if she didn’t appreciate having her monologue hurried along. “They... made me do things I’m not proud of,” she said finally, returning her gaze to the tabletop. “I wanted to get away, but I didn’t know how. Until the police came, and the vampire disciples fled and left everything behind. Left
me
behind. I thought it was over and I was safe. Until I saw on the news that they’d killed someone else...”

She was painting them a picture, but one frustratingly lacking in detail, and Pierce couldn’t help but worry that the woman making her coffee was going to come back in and cause her to clam up before they’d even got anywhere.

Dawson had even less patience for faffing about than she did; Pierce let him take the lead so she could step in to play good cop if needed. “These disciples. You got names? Descriptions? Addresses?” he pressed.

“The disciples took new names when they were reborn in service,” Violet said. Typical cult bollocks, and Pierce tuned her out for a moment as a stray noise from the kitchen caught her ear over the cappuccino machine. No, not the kitchen: a wooden creak that could have come from the stairs. Was there someone else in the building after all?

Or it could have been the roof or the gutter shifting. Dawson didn’t seemed to have heard a thing: probably couldn’t, with the coffee machine burbling away. Or maybe there was just nothing to hear. Pierce tried to drag her attention back to the here and now.

“What about the ringleader, this so-called vampire?” Dawson demanded. “What name did he go by? Could you describe him to a sketch artist? Give us something to work with here. You said you had information that could help us.”

Violet gave a private smile, looking at the tabletop. “I could give you a description, but it wouldn’t help you find him,” she said, shaking her head. “He has the power to mesmerise his victims—he can look however it suits him to look.”

“Yeah?” said Dawson, unimpressed. “Can he mesmerise cameras?”

Before Pierce could decide whether to rein his sharp tone in or back it up, there was another sound from the floor above, this time the distinct click of an opening door. She snapped her head back as if her charmed sight would somehow allow her to stare right through the ceiling. “Who’s upstairs?” she demanded.

Dawson hadn’t reacted to the noise, but he followed her lead, pushing up from his chair. “Who else is here?” he asked Violet sharply.

“Just Melissa,” she said, her face creasing with a fractional frown of confusion. “Unless her husband is home...?”

Dawson strode over to the kitchen door and shoved it open. “She’s not in here,” he said.

“Perhaps she needed something from upstairs,” Violet said. She still seemed oddly, almost serenely calm, considering the way she’d bolted the last two times Pierce had seen her. Pierce felt her nerves kick up a notch.

“Check it out,” she told Dawson. He shot her a sceptical look, probably thinking she was paranoid, or trying to get him out of the way, but he didn’t argue, heading through the kitchen to the stairs. The silence left in his wake was oppressive, Pierce disregarding Violet for a moment to listen intently. Something didn’t feel right here... Was that another sound, hidden under the noise of Dawson climbing the stairs? She reached for her radio, just in case.

“I’m sure it’s just Melissa,” Violet repeated, distracting Pierce from her efforts to listen. Something about that name nagged at her: Melissa, Melissa... The name of the café had been
Melanie’s
, not
Melissa’s
.

Which meant nothing, of course. Shops changed hands, names acquired reputations worth hanging on to, Melissa wasn’t necessarily even the owner...

But something smelled off.
Literally
off: above and beyond the smell of coffee emanating from the kitchen, the rancid odour underneath seeped through. A mix of butcher’s shop with a slight hint of decay; she’d thought it was her enhanced senses overreacting to sandwich meat and food waste from the bins, but the longer she sat here...

A definite scuffling thump from the floor above, and Pierce was on her feet without a thought, lifting the radio towards her mouth. “All units to
Melanie’s Café
on—”

Motion at the corner of her eye. With the enhanced reflexes from the charm, Pierce was moving even before it had fully registered.

Which was the only reason her throat wasn’t slashed open as Violet leapt across the table, knife in hand.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

T
HE KNIFE FLASHED
past her cheek, close enough to shave if she’d had the whiskers to lose. A part of Pierce’s brain inanely registered that it was probably the same blade that had killed Jonathan.

He might have been questioning his association with the cult, but it was clear the woman Pierce was facing now had done no such thing. She’d lured them right into a trap.

There was a violent crash from above, and a masculine grunt of pain: Dawson, either hurt or getting the better of his attacker. Pierce didn’t have the time to work out which: Violet was coming at her with supernatural speed. Even with the lingering magical boost from the cat spirit charm, Pierce could barely stay ahead of the slashing blade.