Serge leaned over her. Annja twisted her head to the side. Knuckles cracked the hardwood floor.

In no position to deliver a masterful riposte of sword, Annja thrust blindly. The sword slashed across his back. He didn’t cry out. Hell, she had only cut through his suit again. Must be some kind of Kevlar-reinforced stuff.

Before she could lever herself to stand, Serge gripped her hair and tugged her upright. She met the wall with her palms, dropping her sword. It slipped into the otherwhere, the sound of steel hitting floor lacking.

Knuckles bruised into the base of her spine. No knife? So he didn’t want her dead. Or maybe he liked to play before he did real damage.

“You like doing things the hard way?” she grunted.

He didn’t wait for her answer. A slam from his knuckles at the back of her head crushed her cheek into the brick wall. Blood spilled into Annja’s mouth.

“I have been doing it the hard way for longer than you can imagine. It’s my game, baby. And I can play it all night.”

Baby? Oy.

She coughed on the blood trickling down her throat. Blood from her nose. The sword’s image formed in her mind, but then streams of blood spilled over that image and Annja quickly lost the idea of summoning it.

Her body slung about, shoulders impacted against the brick wall. Serge grabbed her left wrist and smashed the back of her hand high on the wall over her head.

Seconds stretched as he peered into her eyes. His gray irises were wide, the pupil too small in the centers. Demonic, Annja thought. But she didn’t believe in demons. There were logical explanations to all things supernatural. And Serge was just a man.

“I’ll give you twenty-four hours to bring the skull to me. If you do not comply, at precisely five minutes beyond the twenty-four hour mark, I will kill you. Got it?”

She nodded. To argue might earn a broken nose. “How am I supposed to find you?”

He reached inside his coat. Would he pluck out a business card? Why did the hard edges of his jaw go all fuzzy? Damn, she was losing consciousness.

The flash of bright steel summoned her to a semiconscious state. He held some kind of weapon. He hadn’t been in position to retrieve the bowie.

Serge leaned close and hissed in her ear. “The Linden Hill Cemetery off Starr Street. Tomorrow morning, this time.”

“A graveyard? Swell,” she mumbled.

Something sharp pricked her wrist. And the pain only increased. The stab became a searing poker. Annja let out a yelp as what felt like a knife entered her flesh and, with a forceful shove, traveled through to bone.

Serge gave the instrument a twist. Annja screamed. He tugged it out with a gruff exhale.

Agony felled Annja to her knees. Serge stepped back.

Struggling to maintain consciousness, and looking up to see the weird tubelike blade he tucked inside his coat, Annja reached out—for what, she didn’t know. It seemed as though… somethingshould come to her hand. Something that could protect her.

Instead, she fell forward and blacked out.

8

So far as apartments went, it was unassuming and quiet. Tucked in a dark corner of Lower Manhattan, in winter it got about an hour’s worth of sunlight around two in the afternoon, but grew dark before four due to the surrounding tall buildings.

The most crime the neighborhood saw was old lady Simpson going after the postman with her cane, or the occasional burglary. A diminutive Russian market stood three blocks west and sold dozens of varieties of caviar, and a homemade borscht that tasted excellent served with heaps of sour cream.

Serge closed the door, sliding the chain lock deftly behind his back. The room was dark. Peaceful. He breathed in and exhaled. Palming the smooth hematite globe sitting on the key table near the door, he released anxiety, ego and any anger the outside world had put upon him.

He tapped the globe once.

Moving around behind the black leather sofa with the low back, he scanned the living room’s cool shadows. There was but the sofa and a coffee table sitting before the slate-tiled hearth he used every night in winter. No nooks for anyone to hide.

Assured he was alone, he paused before the entry to the spartan kitchen and placed his palm upon the second hematite globe he kept on a hip-high iron stand. The cool stone took him farther from the world—into sanctity.

A glance assured the kitchen was empty. The short narrow aisle down the center was bare. Doorless cupboards revealed glassware and plates. A grocery list stuck to the refrigerator awaited Serge’s precise scribbles for the next trip to market.

Two taps to the hematite globe.

He crossed before the window looking over a chain-link fenced-in yard behind a textile factory but did not look outside. His sleeve brushed the cheap shades that had been in the apartment when he’d assumed rent. He liked the sound the thin tin strips made when agitated.

As with the kitchen, there was no bedroom door. It was a small, efficient room he used only for sleeping. He did not bring women home; sanctuary would be lost. Though certainly, he did go home with a woman when opportunity arose. His shoes creaked the fifth board on the floor, reminding Serge he had yet to pick up finishing nails to fix the squeak.

A queen-size bed was covered by a taut black bedspread and two pillows encased in matching black cotton covers. Beside the bed on the nightstand, the white lilies he’d purchased two days earlier from the Russian market were beginning to wilt.

Serge touched a bedpost. A smooth hematite globe. He tapped it three times. The next post received four taps.

Shrugging off his suit coat, he tossed it on the bed. He wasn’t a neatnik, but his home did remain pristine. He didn’t spend much time here. Since setting foot on American soil a year earlier he’d been kept busy. He liked to be busy.

But a busy mind was not always favorable. Distilling, releasing the outside world upon arrival home, was always important.

A shower felt necessary after picking through the Creed woman’s home. How one person could collect so much material stuff and jam it all into the small loft was beyond him. Though it had been an interesting collection of things. The artifacts and books had clashed oddly with the baseball team pendants and pink ruffled pillows.

Inspecting the shine on his loafers he inadvertently noticed a streak of peanut butter on one of his shirt cuffs. He rubbed at it but it smeared. He should tend it with an ice cube and some spot cleaner. The dry cleaner never pressed his shirts the way he preferred, with the collars creased.

Unhooking his cuff links, he then unbuttoned the crisp white shirt and discarded it on the suit coat. Unbuttoning his pants, he let them hang loosely at his hips. Starting for the shower, he remembered, and swung around to probe the inner pocket of his coat.

He drew out the biopsy tool and inspected the bloodied tip. The stainless-steel blade was curved, curled the length much like the large cheese corer he’d used as a child. A bone extractor. A tool of his trade.

The contents—skin, blood and bone—were still intact.

Foregoing a shower, he pushed open the closet door—the only door in his small apartment beyond the front entrance—and padded inside. Groping through the darkness, his fingers snagged a hanging chain and tugged. A fluorescent light beamed across the interior. The closet was as large as the bedroom. Two suits hung from the bar just inside to the right.