Authors: Alex Archer
An SUV slid to a stop at the end of the pier. Bart paused from inspecting the warehouse fronts. Thick snowflakes dusted the black night sky. The world was strangely silent, save for the rumble of the engine. A huge man with hell in his eyes swung out from the car and stalked toward him.
“Who are you?” he growled at Bart. He reached inside his leather jacket, as if going for a weapon.
Not easily riled, Bart flicked his jacket to expose his detective badge. “NYPD.”
He had no time for a harried husband with a pregnant wife needing to get to the hospital, or a drunk looking for a fight. Annja would not wait for him. He knew that better than he knew his own mind.
Then the guy surprised him by asking, “Where’s Annja Creed?”
“Why don’t you tell me who you are, and—I hope that’s not a gun under your coat.”
“It is.” The man propped a hand at his hip, boldly revealing the weapon. “Annja’s in danger. And I’m Garin Braden.”
That was a name he had heard. A couple of times.
Bart nodded once. “Bart McGilly.”
“I’ve heard of you…”
“Seems we’re both in Annja’s circle. I don’t think we should waste time chatting about her, though, do you?”
“Nope. Benjamin Ravenscroft may have her,” Garin said.
“Shit. You know which warehouse?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
“There’s only a few on this block that aren’t occupied, but the buildings are huge. Let’s split up. But keep your weapon holstered, buddy.”
The man didn’t reply, only rushed down the sidewalk, leaving Bart damn sure his warning would go unheeded.
T
HE THUG’S BODY SLAMMED
into Annja’s back as he took the bullet from Serge’s pistol. Pulled down by the man’s drag on her wrists, Annja stumbled forward, landing on the ground on her stomach.
“Stay there,” Serge commanded her. One of his pistols was aimed at her head. “And you won’t be harmed.”
It was a good option. For now.
Pressing her palms flat, Annja inched onto her knees to assume a ready-to-move position.
Serge’s long strides passed her as he approached Ben. All of Ben’s guards were down. Unless he had some hidden out of sight for emergency. Good villains always stashed a few thugs for such an occasion, she thought.
“We are at an impasse,” Ben said to Serge.
“Only from your perspective. Hand over the skull.”
“And then you shoot me?”
“No. Then I walk away with my freedom,” Serge said. “You’ve been served your part of the bargain. You got the skull. Now it’s my turn.”
“But I’ve not had the opportunity to use it,” Ben argued. “Hell, I haven’t even looked at it. She could have put anything in this box.”
“Open it,” Serge commanded.
Annja tilted to rest on one hip and Serge pointed the gun at her leg. “Be still.”
“Gotcha,” she muttered.
The idea of holding the sword hummed loudly in her brain. It was as if the sword wanted to become whole, while she still felt it wasn’t the right time. She could sweep up and kill the bad guys and rescue Maxfield.
But she wasn’t so sure Serge was a bad guy anymore. He could have shot her. Instead, he’d granted her freedom by shooting her captor. Nothing made sense.
“You must allow me to use the skull,” Ben said as he snapped open the locks on the box. “You would not allow an innocent little girl to die, Serge. I know you. You’re compassionate.”
“I am. But I’ve told you the skull does not hold the power of life.”
“We’ll see. If it can cure my wife, it’ll cure Rachel.”
“Your wife?” Annja said.
“She tried to kill herself earlier. A few hours ago. And my daughter has bone cancer. She’s suffered so much. You see why time is so desperate?”
“Did you call the police about your wife?” Annja asked.
“My secretary is with her. Why do you care, Annja? You, who would ignore a little girl’s plea for help.”
“I’m not following you, Ben.”
“My daughter e-mailed you a few days ago about the skull. She told you about it. You didn’t bother to reply. Busy TV star too good for the little people?”
“She e-mailed me?” Annja didn’t have to think hard to remember. “PinkRibbonGirl?”
“Yes. She was excited to have contacted a woman she looks up to. She watches your show. She wants to be like you someday. And you ignored her.”
She had dismissed the girl’s suggestion the skull was the Skull of Sidon. Until she’d learned differently. “I would have never purposely ignored her, Ben. I get a lot of e-mail. I can’t answer them all.”
But that didn’t make her feel any better. She should have replied to the e-mail.
“Enough! I will walk out of here with this skull. My daughter’s life depends upon it. I can save her!”
Annja caught Serge’s droll look. The bone conjurer said, “He’s not so magnanimous. He’s been using me to steal and extort.”
“Yet you helped him,” she argued.
Serge’s eyes burned into her gaze. “He threatened my family.”
“I gave you a home and pay you well,” Ben interjected.
Annja glanced to Ben, whose focus was on the skull.
“What if the skull doesn’t work for you, Ben?” Annja tried. “It’s been in many hands lately, and hasn’t done a thing. You’re not going to give your daughter hope and then let her down. A caring man would not do something like that.”
“What about the man in the warehouse?” Ben asked. “Garin Braden. He’s with you. He held the skull on you and my man, and defeated you both.”
“He’s not working with me. And that was the wind.”
“The wind! You’re not a good liar, Annja.”
“I don’t care what you think of me, Ben. Just give Serge the skull and be done with it.”
She caught Serge’s hopeful glance. Yeah, I’m on your side, she thought with a shrug. For now.
Ben dug in the wool inside the box. “You don’t want it anymore?”
“Of course I do. Well, I don’t. It doesn’t belong to any of us. It belongs to Mr. Wisdom. And it will be returned to him. But suddenly I’m thinking I’d rather stand on Serge’s side, if I have to choose sides.”
“I want my freedom,” Serge said. “To keep my family safe.”
The ache in the bone conjurer’s voice took Annja by surprise. His freedom? From Ben. The bastard had threatened Serge’s family to get him to perform his necromantic arts for him.
And yet, who was she to judge? Ben had as good a reason as Serge for wanting the skull. Twisted as it may be.
“Can it really prevent death? Cure cancer?” she asked. “Serge?”
He shook his head no.
But hope was a powerful weapon. She’d seen it work in her own life, many times. Some people thrived on hope and prayer. She would not dispute the power of positive thinking.
You can’t be the one to deny a little girl because your beliefs don’t mesh with her father’s, she told herself.
Annja turned to Ben. “Very well. You keep the skull. I don’t want to be the one who destroyed a father’s hope for his little girl.” She lifted a hand at Serge’s sudden gasp. “Do you believe in karma, Ben?”
He smirked and crossed his arms. “Of course I do. Why the hell do you think I donate millions to charity every year? A man can’t employ a necromancer and expect the balance to remain.”
“So charity is your way of covering your spiritual ass?” she asked.
The guy didn’t get it. Probably never would get it. People like him needed a metaphysical smack every now and then. Sometimes they got it, sometimes they didn’t.
Yet she was prepared to step back and let the universe work its mojo. Said mojo was currently itching at the fingers of her right hand.
“It will work!” Ben took the skull from the box. “I will prove its power.”
Ben held the skull up and turned the face toward Annja and Serge.
“No!” Sword in hand, Annja lunged. The sword tip connected with an eye socket on the skull.
The skull soared into the air, turning end over end, high, so high.
Using Ben’s gaping focus on the skull, Annja released the sword into the otherwhere and lunged for him. She shoved his chest, landing both of them on the floor. Straddling him, she grabbed his tie. Ben gripped her by the hair and yanked.
“A sissy fighter, huh?” She punched him in the jaw. He spat out blood. “I never expect much from you business suits.”
The punch to her gut came as a surprise. Ben slipped a leg around hers and twisted her onto her back. Fists to her jaw pounded like iron.
“You think so?” He smirked. A dribble of blood trickled down his chin. “I’ve recently lost my aversion to violence. Let’s see how you like this.”
Out of her peripheral vision, Annja saw the skull falling through the air and a hand reach up to grab it.
Ben’s fist connected with her ribs. Wheezing out air from her lungs, she choked. The floor was hard and cold against the back of her skull. He pummeled her abdomen, taking far too much glee in the process.
“You’re killing an innocent little girl,” Ben growled.
She lifted a knee and managed to swing out, kicking the back of his thigh. He toppled off balance, slapping the concrete beyond her head, and putting his chest to her eye level. And his groin to knee level.
Ben took the kick with a wincing gasp.
“If your daughter is dying, perhaps you should have allocated some of those charitable dollars in her direction.” She instantly hated herself for saying that.
“I have. There’s no cure for bone cancer, you bitch!”
Where he’d kept the knife, she couldn’t know, but Ben slashed across his chest and Annja felt the icy bite of steel below her chin. It tracked a vicious line across her throat. No blood oozed down her neck. It couldn’t have cut too deep.
“Now you’re starting to piss me off.” She reached out to grab for the sword, but something caught her attention.
It wasn’t Maxfield scraping across the floor on the chair in a desperate attempt to escape this insanity.
It wasn’t the wounded thug crawling toward an AK-47 twenty feet away that she knew she’d better dispatch sooner rather than later.
It wasn’t the swinging door creaking in the wind and letting in a thunderous rain that seemed to have come from nowhere.
It was the strange orange and blue light that surrounded Serge as he held the skull aloft over his head, staring up into the empty eye sockets.
“Oh, no, not on my watch,” she shouted.
Standing, Annja struggled with the hands Ben gripped about her ankle. Sword coming to hand, she stabbed him in the shoulder. “Stay there like a good boy, or I’ll have to do more than wound you.” She bent over him. “Got that?”
Gripping his shoulder and cursing her, he managed an acquiescent nod. “My daughter…” he whispered.
“Cannot be saved by an ancient skull,” she said, regretting her harsh words, but knowing there was nothing better to say.
With no time to lose, Annja raced toward Serge. Another man entered the doorway, pausing to take everything in. His broad shoulders dripped rain. Garin.
“No, Serge, don’t do it!” she yelled.
The necromancer didn’t listen. He was making a strange keening noise and the lights spread around him. The floor rumbled, as if there was an earthquake. It literally moved her boots and made traction difficult.
Windows burst. A vicious rain of glass slivers poured over a fallen thug, who screamed as he was repeatedly sliced.
Annja entered the orange light and swung Joan’s sword.
The world slowed to a single heartbeat.
Her sword scythed the air, cutting through the supernatural light as if cleaving open the universe. It swung smoothly, an extension of her arm. The first touch of steel to bone found no resistance. The blade moved forward. Annja followed its lead.
Serge did not cry out in protest. Or if he did, she did not hear beyond the thunder of her own abnormally slow heartbeat.
Annja came to a stop, the blade swinging around in front of her. Momentum tugged her muscles, stretching them tight. She let out a grunt of exertion. Sound shattered like the glass. Heartbeats accelerated.
Two skull halves clattered to the floor. A hollow echo amidst the chaos.
A thin red line opened the flesh on Serge’s throat. A sad grimace tugged down his mouth. Annja waited, panting. The slice did not open wide and begin to gush. She had not injured him mortally.
“You destroyed all that power,” he said sadly.
Staggering, she swung back her sword.
He’d only been seeking freedom. The man had been enslaved to serve a more evil power, at the risk of his family’s lives. He should have that freedom now Ravenscroft had been taken down.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped.
“You were following the sword,” Serge said. “It has power, too. I respect that.”
Somewhere across the room, Ben cursed her.
Annja stepped forward into a waiting embrace. But Garin didn’t hold her or offer comfort. Before her, the sectioned skull wobbled on the floor.
“You had no choice,” he said. His hand squeezed her shoulder. “The sword decided that one.”
“The sword is not a thinking thing. I did this.” She pulled away from his touch. “I took away that man’s hope. Could his daughter have been saved?”
Slashing the blade through the air she’d severed the contact with the immortal. She just needed….
She needed.
To not be responsible for it all. To not feel the weight of the world. To just…walk away from it all. She’d almost done that by granting the skull to Ben. And yet, some greater compulsion had led her to destroy it.
Perhaps Serge was right. The sword held power she merely followed.
Behind her she heard the sound of bone clacking. Garin inspected the damage. He’d been cheated of the prize.
A little girl had been cheated out of the opportunity for a cure. At the very least, hope.
An imprisoned man had been cheated freedom.
Because of her.
No, you did what was right. You know that. Don’t question it. Accept it.
“I can accept it,” she said to everyone. Because it had been the right thing to do at the time.
Turning, Annja scanned the warehouse. Many had fallen. And those standing were not necessarily friends. How had Garin known to find her here?
Striding purposefully toward him she held up the sword and looked aside the blade at him.
She was not ready to give it up. It was hers. She controlled it, when it was not controlling her. She and the sword had an ineffable connection. And she liked that just fine.
“Skull’s broken,” she said. “Hope you weren’t expecting to make a fortune on it.”
“Not at all.”
“Liar.”
“Truth? My initial hopes were to make a couple of bucks, yes. But I had a change of heart. I’ve been considering that empty grave as a good spot for its final resting place. I don’t think it was something that should have been circulated in the first place. I know Mr. Wisdom has taken excellent care of it, but in the wrong hands…?”
“Why do you think it worked for Serge and not Ben or this guy here?” Garin gestured to Maxfield.
“And you?” she posited. “You’ve held it twice, Garin. What’s your suspicion?”
He shrugged. “I wish I knew. Is it because I’m immortal?”
Annja saw Maxfield’s head whip around to inspect Garin, but he remained silent.
“Could be. And the necromancer has a connection to spirits and souls.”
“I expected it to work in your hands, Annja.”
“So did I.” She caught the skull half Garin tossed to her. And she tossed it back to him. “Keep it. Bury it deep, deeper than an open grave.”
“It will give me great pleasure to do so.”
“On second thought, Bart may need it for evidence.”
“Annja!” Maxfield called out. He inched across the floor, still tied to the chair.
“Here.” She handed Garin the battle sword. “Hold this a second, will you?”
The mighty man gaped. Almost reluctantly, he opened his fingers to take the sword. It remained solid in his grip. It did not disappear into the otherwhere. Because she did not want it to leave this realm. Not yet.
Annja nodded and dodged to the side to untie Maxfield. “Sorry about the skull,” she said as she worked the rough hemp rope free from a knot.
“It was the right thing to do,” he offered. “I wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen it. It has power. It is evil.”
“Not evil. Just something that should be lost for good.”
“I agree.”
Hands and ankles free, Maxfield stood and ran his fingers through his sweat-laced hair. He exhaled and then bent forward, catching his palms on his knees.
“You going to be okay?”
“Yes. Just give me a moment.” He clasped her hands and left out a heavy breath. “Thank you. For believing.”
“I try to believe in what is shown to me,” she said.
Garin had not moved since she’d handed him the sword. He tilted the weapon, studying the blade. It caught the light. Each turn of the blade glinted in his eyes, a silver flash. Greed or lust or something deeper, like fear?
Crossing her arms, Annja waited to see what he would do. If he turned and attempted to run off with it, could she wish it from his grasp and into the otherwhere? There was no telling now that she’d given it freely to him.
“I have not held it since long before it was shattered. An exquisite sword. Not so fancy. A fine battle weapon.” He smiled and, with a wistful smirk, handed it back to Annja. “Next time.”
She took the sword, swung out her arm and released it into the otherwhere. “We’ll see. But I must say, what you just did was impressive.”
He offered a devil’s smirk. “I’m just not ready for the adventure to end,” he said.
She lifted a brow.
“Like I said—” he smoothed fingers along his goatee “—next time.”
“If there is a next time.”
“There’s always a next time, Annja.”
She could definitely get onboard with that.
“You want me to clean up the mess?” He strode across the floor. Garin lifted Ben to his feet and inspected his wounded shoulder.
“I’ll have you arrested for murder,” Ben said with a nod toward his men.
“Will you shut him up?” Annja said to Garin.
“With pleasure, my lady.”
A punch reduced Ben to a heap at Garin’s feet. Garin gave her a pleased grin. He inspected the carnage, then started collecting scattered weapons.
Bart charged through the open doorway, taking everything in. Pistol held before him, he didn’t call out until he’d surveyed the entire room. “Annja?”
“You took your time getting here, Bart.”
“You didn’t tell me which warehouse it was. Looks like things are under control. Braden.” He nodded to the bigger man.
Annja noted their acknowledgment of each other. When had they met?
“You okay, Annja?”
“It’s been an interesting day, Bart,” she said.
“Looks that way. You’re safe?”
“I’m fine.”
He lowered his pistol but still held the grip ready, and approached Annja. “You’re cut. On your throat.”
“I’ll survive. The skull is destroyed. Garin subdued Benjamin Ravenscroft over there. Not sure what you can charge him with. Though an accessory to murder comes to mind.”
“Is he the guy you think hired the sniper at the canal? The thug in the warehouse?”
“I’m sure your investigation will prove it,” she said.
“Who’s he?” Bart nodded toward Serge, who knelt over the skull pieces.
“A necromancer. I’m not sure he’s committed a crime beyond communicating with the dead.”
She watched Bart struggle to maintain his composure. “I’m calling for backup. I’ll need you to stick around for questioning this time.”
“I’ll go wherever you ask, Bart.”
His shoulders relaxed and he nodded. He spoke under his breath. “You need another one of those hugs?”
She didn’t respond, and instead embraced him. She noticed Garin’s curiosity at their embrace. Indeed, it had been a very interesting day.