The Bone Conjurer

by Alex Archer

  Serge stood, hands near his shoulders. He was not surrendering by any means, just making nice. “Proficient sword work. I didn’t notice the weapon earlier.”

  “Because you were so busy throwing things about.”

  He blocked her thrust with a jerk of his elbow, the flat of Annja’s blade sliding along the suit fabric. Serge gripped her left wrist, twisting it. Annja had to duck forward, bringing her sword arm down and away from attack. Moving with the twist, she spun under his arm, but came up to meet his fist. A backhand slap put her on the floor, arms spread and legs landing on a sofa cushion.

  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…something should 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.

  The walls were paneled in bamboo. A sisal mat s
tretched before a small dark wood shrine, bare right now.

  At the far side of the room a stainless-steel counter stretched three feet along the wall. Above it a glass shelf held many vials, syringes and jars. His work area.

  On the topmost shelf he kept a small library of grimoires and herbal references. It had cost a pretty penny to have these precious items shipped overseas. Yet shipping expenses had been covered. Not exactly a perk of his job, more like a necessary evil.

  Touching a flat switch set above the counter focused a spotlight on the table. Thumbing a box of small waxed papers, he drew one out. The snick of paper leaving cardboard pleased him.

  Serge tapped the blade handle against the steel counter. The tiny bit of Annja Creed dislodged and landed on the small rectangle of waxed paper.

  Using surgical tweezers and looking through a magnifying lens, Serge separated flesh and muscle from bone. He used his forefinger to swipe away the blood and marrow from the bone. It was a good sample. It didn’t crumble as some did. Sickness, age and addiction tended to weaken human bone, which was made of minerals, collagen and water.

  “Strong bone structure.”

  He was impressed. In his experience, women generally had honeycomblike bones, especially those living in the United States. The American female’s diet was atrocious. Copious sugar and caffeine, and never enough calcium. Of course, this woman was still young and, judging from her physical skills—and ignoring her kitchen inventory—took good care of her body.

  He tapped a few drops of alcohol onto the pencil-eraser-size sample to clean it. It wasn’t necessary to sanitize it. He just needed the bone clean. A small wet tissue cleared away the remaining flesh and blood. He would deposit the bone in a mortar and crush it—

  The cell phone vibrating in his pants pocket disturbed his concentration. Serge reached for a glass vial and coaxed the bone into it. A rubber stopper closed it securely.

  He answered on the fourth ring. He did not say his name. Only one person in the city—the entire country—had this number.

  “Serge, I’ll need you in the office by three. I’ve got a necessary task. You’re not busy?”

  For a moment Serge stared at the phone. That was an odd question. Busy? When had the caller ever been concerned with his private life? For that matter, the caller was his only employer; he should know if he were busy.

  Did he suspect?

  “Serge?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  He hung up. Something wasn’t right.

  9

  Annja woke on her living room floor. Something smelled off. Her wrist pulsed with pain. Rolling to her side, she was startled to see the drops of blood beneath her left hand. For a puncture wound, she’d lost a lot of blood.

  She examined the wound. It no longer bled. Skin tissue had puckered around the tiny entry circle on the underside of her wrist. She didn’t want to probe it. It hadn’t gone through and out the other side, though it had damn well felt as if it had.

  Serge, her less than welcome guest, had shoved something deep into the bone. And he’d twisted.

  “Like taking a freaking core sample or something,” she said, testing her voice.

  She sat up, cradling her wrist, and blinked away the wooziness still toying with clear thinking. The light in the room was dull, which told her she’d passed out for some time. It must be late afternoon. It started getting dark early this time of year.

  “Not smart, Annja. Why didn’t you pull the sword on him?”

  Because when he’d slammed her against the wall, impact had stolen the senses from her. She hadn’t been thinking clearly.

  Looking around she saw her door was still open. “Oh, man.”

  Dragging herself to a half-conscious stagger, she closed the door. Her neighbor across the hall hadn’t noticed? The guy was a night owl. He was probably still sleeping. It was very likely he hadn’t heard a thing when Serge had been tossing bits of her life around.

  With a glance at the carnage of said life, Annja shook her head. Earlier she’d only been worried about dusting. Now she was going to need a bobcat with a loader on the front.

  She wandered into the bathroom to clean her wound. Shampoo bottles, face cream and tubes of toothpaste and athletic rub were splayed across the floor. The towels she kept tucked beneath the sink cupboard were strewn, half of them landing in the tub. There wasn’t much in here she worried about getting broken or damaged.

  She didn’t want to look at the green screen setup. That had cost her a few grand. Though she received money from royalties on her books, and Chasing History’s Monsters paid her a nice fee, Annja was a penny pincher. And it was never a day at the park explaining things like this to the insurance company. She’d have to report a break-in again. But she couldn’t tell anyone about Serge if she wanted the insurance check.

  If the guy had been looking for a skull why would he open her toothpaste and squeeze that out? This vandalism was just plain malicious.

  Clearing out the sink, she turned on the hot water, then some cold. The phone rang while the water was running. Watching the pink blood trickle over her wrist, Annja vacillated whether or not to answer.

  Remembering her call to Bart last night she dashed for it, spraying water across the bathroom floor.

  She picked up on the fifth ring. “Hello?”

  “Annja, we got an ID on the body lifted from the canal this morning,” Bart said.

  “That was quick.” She stepped across a scatter of books, noting the volume on Scythian metalwork was cracked down the spine. Stupid Serge. Even if insurance did cover it, she’d never find another; it was irreplaceable.

  “Who and, more important, what was he?”

  “Marcus Cooke,” Bart said. “He also goes by the alias Travis Traine, and a few others. He’s a thief, Annja, and a damn good one. He’s hit museums in the States, Europe and a few royal caches in Germany and Poland. The guy likes colored stuff, rubies and emeralds. Interpol has been after him for years.”

  “Big-time thief. So why was he interested in a crusty old skull?”

  “Exactly. Jewel thieves don’t usually go in for anything they can’t immediately fence.”

  Annja leaned against the desk. “There is gold on the skull, but I doubt that would amount to any more than a few hundred bucks in value.”

  “You didn’t mention gold before. An infant’s skull with gold on it? I’d have to stretch the definition of colored stuff to think it would interest a thief who has only stolen jewels.”

  “Maybe he was hard up? When was his last big job?”

  “That we know of? In 2003. It’s been years, which means little. The man could have changed his M.O. So if we allow he’s changed his habits, or had just added artifacts to his repertoire, there’s still one question. Why do you think Marcus Cooke chose to contact you, Annja? Have you ever heard of this guy or come in contact with him before last night?”

  She remembered Serge expressing his surprise the thief had come to her. You’re just an archaeologist.

  Just. As in no better than any other.

  It was true. Just because she hosted a TV show didn’t make her better than half the archaeologists who devoted all their time to their passion. But the way Serge had muttered it had offended her. And she didn’t upset easily.

  “He saw me on TV and probably thought I looked trustworthy.”

  “Professional thieves do not fence stolen goods with television personalities, Annja.”

  “Oh, so now I’m a fence?” She toed a plastic file of recipe cards detailing notes from a dig in Wales that had toppled on the floor. “Bart, please. Like I told you, I exchanged a few e-mails with the guy, then bam.”

  “You always arrange to meet strangers?”

  “Not always. Sometimes they arrange to meet me.” Or she found them waiting in her living room with nasty tools and a taste for bone. “You know I can’t resist a mysterious artifact, Bart. A skull to me is like a cache of stolen credit cards to you. Yes?”

 
“I hate credit-card scams. So much paperwork involved. All right, so we’ll agree the answer to why the thief chose you will never be solved. And he probably didn’t intend to make you a fence, just wanted your opinion on its value.”

  “Agreed.”

  “You get a clue on the skull yet? Someone killed for it. Is it made completely of gold?”

  “There is some decorative gold between the cranial sutures. Total? Probably less than a few ounces. I left it with Professor Danzinger at Columbia this morning. He’s unable to date the thing because they don’t have the proper equipment at the university, but he did find some interesting markings on the skull interior.”

  “Inside it? How does a person get anything inside a skull?”

  “Very carefully.”

  Should she tell him about Serge’s visit?

  Annja was always cautious about telling Bart too much about the fiascos she found herself involved in. But she wasn’t stupid. If having a detective back her up would advance the case, and she read Bart’s mood as helpful, she’d ask.

  She wasn’t sure if police involvement was wise at this point in the game. It may hinder her by requiring she turn over the skull as evidence.

  On the other hand, Serge had hurt her. The stab wound still pulsed with a dull ache. But what had he been trying to accomplish with the weird instrument?

  She’d have to see if she could find a match on the Internet. If she knew who used a tool like that, and what for, that may give clue to who the heck Serge was. But what would she look under? Bone core samples? Bone biopsy tools?

  She did not like knowing someone was walking around the city with a literal piece of her. Her DNA. The last time someone had gotten a piece of her DNA she’d come close to being cloned.

  “I need a look at the evidence you have, Annja.”

  “Of course. I’ll pack up the tools and get them to you.”

  “What about the skull?”

  “Not in my hands at the moment.”

  “So you’re going to sit tight until you get word from the professor?” Bart asked. “Or do I sense you’ve already formed a plan to track the origins of this thing? Something that’ll see you in more trouble than a pretty young woman like you should be in?”