“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.
38
“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.