Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) by E. E. Richardson Read Free Book Online Page A

room—if you move beyond the demarcation line on the floor or the prisoner gets violent, the interview will be terminated immediately.”
    It was a familiar spiel to her, but Leo listened with a level of serious attention that seemed to placate the prison officer’s obvious dubiousness. “I’ll be monitoring from outside, as will the main security office,” he said as they reached the suite of secure interview rooms. “You’ll be recorded the whole time you’re in the room. Interview room two, on your left.”
    They entered the interview room, a sparse affair with the table and chairs securely bolted to the floor and nothing else on hand for the prisoner to grab. Not that he could have anyway: his arms were fixed to the metal frame of his chair with silver cuffs, leaving him unable to lift them more than a few inches or properly stand up. The chair was set well back from the interviewers’ table, inside a magic circle etched into the concrete floor. Pierce glanced up, and saw a mirror of the design marked on the ceiling. Heavy duty magical containment; it shouldn’t be necessary for a shifter stripped of his pelt, though it might well be for other prisoners who couldn’t be so easily separated from their magical enhancements.
    There were two chairs on the other side of the interview table; Leo took one, but Pierce stayed standing, leaning back against the rear wall to observe Tate in the flesh for a short while.
    His hair had grown back a little from the close crop he’d had when he was arrested, and he’d developed a scruffy beard, suggesting he wasn’t shaving himself and no one else was prepared to do it for him; there was something in his near-smirk that suggested he wouldn’t be above snapping his teeth at anyone who got that close. He was a well-muscled man perhaps in his mid-thirties, and even cuffed there was an air of coiled menace to his posture that put her in mind of a cat ready to pounce. His loose-fitting prison T-shirt didn’t quite cover the intricate tattoo that spread from the back of his neck down across his shoulders: an hourglass made up of interlocking strands that resembled a stylised letter S.
    The skinbinder Sebastian’s mark, a perfect match to the rune inside the pelt that would allow him to use its magic.
    Pierce watched him jitter in the chair, restless in spite of the restraints. When she’d first interviewed him, shortly after his arrest, he’d been much more collected; perhaps the prison officer was right, and he was starting to go feral after too long deprived of the chance to shift into his animal form.
    But she wouldn’t bet it wasn’t a performance. His head was always shifting, tilting in a not quite natural manner, as if trying to make use of eyes and ears that weren’t the same shape as the ones he actually had—but when his eyes passed over her, there was too much intelligence there for a man completely gone over to animal instinct. He recognised her, that much she was certain. There was something here that she could work with.
    A strained silence filled the room as they sized each other up. When she’d seen enough, Pierce moved forward unhurriedly to take the seat beside Leo, folding her arms on the tabletop—a posture that meant leaning forward slightly, showing no fear of the potential threat across the table.
    “So, Mr Tate,” she said. “How’s incarceration treating you?” No response, but he was watching her. “I imagine you must be getting a little bit restless by now. Muscles giving you trouble? I hear it’s hard, getting used to being stuck in one shape when you’ve spent your time shifting at will.”
    She didn’t make more than a cursory pretence of waiting for a response. Always better to proceed calmly and casually as if everything was going to plan and the interview was a mere formality; let the interviewee know they had knowledge that was worth something to you and they’d do their best to skew the bargain further in their