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.

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.