Under the Skin (Ritual Crime Unit) by E. E. Richardson Page B

didn’t answer, walking two slow circuits round the pillar as he squirmed. “Feeling warm yet?” she asked in a conversational tone.
    “What did you just do , you bitch?” he repeated, metal scraping against concrete as he pulled against the cuffs.
    She kept pacing in circles, forcing him to try to twist his neck to follow her. “Just a little enchantment we have on the cuffs for awkward prisoners,” she said. “Don’t worry, it’s harmless—as long as it’s stopped in time.” She smiled again. “Tell me if it starts to get too hot.”
    He spat obscenities.
    Pierce kept walking, watching as his struggles against the cuffs grew more frantic. “Of course, we don’t really understand how the spell works,” she said. “Magic’s funny like that. We know the cuffs will keep on getting hotter until someone deactivates them—but what if they don’t?” She gave a theatrical shrug. “No one’s ever toughed it out long enough to find out. It could be that the cuffs’ll melt, or maybe they’ll even get all the way up to cremation temperature... Hell, maybe the spell’s got a built-in limit and it’ll shut off before you lose your hands.” She grinned. “Ready to risk it?”
    “Fuck off,” he said, but she could see the way that he was fidgeting. Those cuffs had to be pretty warm by now.
    Well, naturally. They were silver, after all: guaranteed to cause a reaction with the enchantments on shapeshifting skins. And while a properly made pelt would insulate its wearer from the worst effects of silver burn, she’d seen what happened with the shoddier ones before. This one was disintegrating fast, and whatever protections it might have had to start with, they were failing now. The longer he wore those cuffs, the more the touch of the silver was going to burn.
    There was no magical activation phrase to cause it, and it wasn’t likely to get much worse than a sunburn or a bite of too-hot pizza—but the power of suggestion was an amazing thing.
    “Take your time,” Pierce said. “I’ve got all night. I’m sure that you can take a little pain. Of course, the nerve damage might be a bit tougher to deal with, but—”
    “Look, just get these things off of me!”
    She dropped the pleasant smile, deadly serious now. “Tell me who you’re working for. Tell me where to find the skinbinder who supplied you with that skin. And tell me why you killed Tim Cable!” Her voice broke a little on the last demand.
    Her prisoner grinned nastily. “Oh, was that his name?”
    She yanked on the handcuffs, pulling him against the pillar with a thump.
    “Listen, you moronic little shit,” she said, leaning close. “You’re dependent on my goodwill not to die a painful death, and let me tell you now, my feelings of love and joy towards all God’s creations are not at their highest. You’d better hope you’ve got information worth deactivating those cuffs, because the price tag on that is going to keep rising higher with every moment you dick me around.”
    He gave a sulky grimace, and Christ, she could have killed him then and there just for that look. Tim had died to give this little shit his chance to come after her, but it was clear that he was no fanatic ready to take his own life like the panther shifter—just a petty thug who pouted when things weren’t going his way.
    A couple more seconds of resentful squirming, and he cracked.
    “Look, I didn’t kill anybody,” he said. “They just gave me the skin and told me to keep you out of the way. I don’t know why they picked your mate! He was probably just there. They needed somebody police so you would listen to them.”
    ‘Probably just there.’ Hell of an epitaph for a good man who’d died far too young and in the most horrible way. Had he been alive when the skinbinder had—No. Don’t think about it.
    “Who’s ‘they’?” she demanded.
    “I don’t know, do I?” he said with as much of a jerky shrug as he could manage. “Bunch of blokes from