Servant of the Skull: Skullspeaker Series, #1

By Edita A. Petrick

She was sixteen years old when a terrifying jumble of images invaded her head. The swirl of lives lived was terrifying and fascinating at once. The former made her conceal her gift with education. She became a student of history—forensic reconstructive specialist. It was the only way she could let her talent drive her hands—to recreate images of those who lived, loved and lost their lives thousands of years ago. The latter made her accept a dangerous consulting job in Greece. It sounded simple: reconstruct skulls of three plane crash victims. A positive identification was needed for insurance purposes. A tragic, but seemingly routine job of identification. Except her abilities show her it's anything but…and suddenly Dr. Gianna Pontiac finds herself poised over a cliff….

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edita A. Petrick
• Release date: Sep 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996637183

Edita A. Petrick

I'm a writer. That's all that can be said here. I love writing and I absolutely hate marketing. It just goes to show you where your natural talents lie. Writing comes easy. Marketing...that's something I will be learning until the day I die. All I can say about my books is that they're meant to entertain.

Book preview

Prologue

Saqqara not Alexandria – translation of inscription on the El Halaswan Stone by Dr. Howard T. Dufresno, Royal Quarter Museum, Alexandria, as published in Caravan, AUC Student Newspaper, September 17, 2003.

On his deathbed, Alexander the Great gave his ring to Perdikkas, one of his trusted generals, appointing him the regent of his huge empire until his wife gave birth to their child. It took Philip Arrhideus, another general chosen to make the funeral arrangements, two years to build a magnificent funerary cart that would hold the mummified remains of the emperor on its way to Aigai, back in his native Macedonia. Alexander’s body was placed in a gold sarcophagus that was encased in a second gold casket and covered with a purple royal robe. The coffin, together with Alexander’s armor, was placed in a gold carriage with a vaulted roof, giving it an appearance of a crown. Five hundred slaves attended the funerary cart, day and night, guarding the remains as well as the fabulous treasures that would accompany the glorious warrior into afterlife, particularly his golden sword with a jewel-studded hilt.

One night, when the clouds obscured the gibbous moon, two soldiers attached to the funerary contingent ordered the slaves squatting around the cart such that not even a finger’s width of its perimeter was left unprotected, to lie face down in the sand. They used their heads as stepping-stones to mount the raised dais and enter the carriage. They dared not touch the purple robe draped over the gold casket but the emperor’s armor and his golden sword lay beside it, glistening in the steady light of the burning torches. The Oracle of Amon, at the Siwa Oasis, had not only revealed emperor’s divine origins but told him that upon his death, his sword would turn to gold and jewels would sprout from its hilt because only such a weapon was fit for the great one who joined the gods in their dominion. A mortal man who’d dare to touch the sword would be cursed for eternity.

The soldier, who only wanted to see the great man’s weapon, turned to leave. His companion used the moment when his friend turned his back to run his finger along the blade, to feel its edge. A trickle of blood on the gold blade spoke of sharpness that the soldier thought was not possible to achieve with such soft metal. The torches flared and suddenly, the sword flexed and its gold color turned obsidian black. It curled around his wrist and continued spiraling up his arm, hissing menacingly as only an Egyptian asp can. The serpent took command of the soldier’s hand, making it point at the man’s chest, at his heart, then the black shape solidified into a corkscrew and drilled through the flesh and ribcage into his heart. His friend ran to help him and when he grabbed his hand he touched the black glass and it took possession of his hand too. When his arm turned on him and a black serpentine shape drilled straight into his heart, he swayed on his feet for a few moments then fell down beside his friend.

Just as the early dawn washed away the last vestiges of twilight, the two soldiers lying next to the gold casket stirred. A few moments later, they rose and realizing that night would not give them a protection of its cloak much longer, ran out and rejoined their comrades. A few days later, when Ptolemy Lagos, another one of Alexander’s generals attacked the funerary procession, wishing to bury his emperor in Egypt, the two soldiers fell in the battle, their hearts pierced by spears and arrows.

In the morning, just as darkness yielded to the rising sun, the two bodies lying in the sand stirred to life. Then they rose to live another life. And another, and another, and another....

Chapter 1

June 2012

Mills Museum of Natural History

Columbia, Maryland

H i, Gianna. How are you? Five little words. Five innocuous, toneless words. Five bullets that scored dead centre of their target. There was no need to answer. He wasn’t concerned about her well-being. His presence in her workroom said it all. Ironically this was the fifth attempt by the State Department to reach her and this time they chose the right tool, the kind that didn’t rely on electronics to deliver its message. He simply knocked on the door and then walked in without waiting for an invitation.

The moment she saw him the bile rose in her throat. The only reason she didn’t throw up was because she knew Nick wouldn’t understand the true nature of her discomfort. He might even ask if it was something she ate for breakfast. She knew that the State Department wouldn’t give up trying to coax her to do a small ‘favor’ for them, but she truly didn’t expect to see Nick Penney walk through the door of her work room. She had already ignored then blocked their emails. She was under no obligations to respond to unsolicited emails, even if they were from the government. She turned off her cell phone, shredded their couriered mail un-read, recycled faxes and turned deaf to phone calls through the landline. Once the situation reached this stage, she knew a live presence was inevitable, but she expected a couple of humorless bureaucrats to walk through the door and start threatening her into compliance—not the man she woke up to every morning these past two years.

He tried to smile, failed and then settled for a small hand-wave at her messy work bench, and said, Dr. Pontiac, I see you’ve been so busy that you probably didn’t even take a coffee break. You must be starving. How about I take you out to lunch?

What a surprise to see you, Agent Penney, especially since you said this morning that you were taking me out to dinner to that new sushi house you found in Bethesda, she said, putting down a brush she was using to clean the surface on the mandible where she was about to apply glue. She was working on the last skull. The other three already rested in their holding webs, ready to be scanned.

He turned to a side but not fast enough. She caught a tail end of a smile fragmenting into a grimace which was a much better expression, given the situation.

I couldn’t wait until tonight, she heard him say but the urgency that should have driven those words wasn’t there.

And yet Nicolas Penney I know is very patient—as a man and as our country’s policeman, she said, keeping up her end of the feeble charade. For the first time in four years she’s known him, she didn’t want to be in the same room with him. He was thirty four years old, well over six feet tall and built to carry the world on his shoulders, and still as lovingly earnest and honest as a boy-scout…until today.

He turned his back to her completely and parked one hand on his hip, while rubbing the other over his light brown brush-cut. She knew he wasn’t comfortable with what he came to do but obviously not enough to refuse when the bureaucrats knocked on his door. Did they threaten him into it? Probably not that much. He was already a senior agent with the Bureau, stationed at the Washington headquarters. He was a rising star…or so his buddies teased him. But he was a son of a Senator, born into an old Virginia family regarded as America’s home-grown aristocrats. Senator Randolph Boyden Penney died when Nick was still in high school but once a Senator’s son, always a senator’s son—with stellar connections, whether in the Bureau or in Washington’s social circles. He could have refused…could have found a dozen valid excuses why he shouldn’t be the one to stand before her work bench, scratching his head.

He spun around. Look, Gianna…. his voice trailed off. He must have seen something on her face that made him halt.

She stared at him, not really seeing his features or the gray eyes she kissed every morning for good luck and to protect him since he was, after all, an FBI agent with a gun that had left its holster a few times that she knew about—and probably many more times he didn’t tell her about. She was trying to recall the way he looked the first time they met, on a rusty-red stained wooden porch of the main house at Betty-Boo Dude Ranch, a Nevada bordello just outside of Veritas Junction, ten miles west of I15. At twenty-four, she was a freshly minted PhD, and was there as company for Jena, her masochistic friend who was doing research for her doctorate thesis in social work. Special Agent Penney was there as a member of a task force, tracking what they believed was a mobile serial killer. A busload of tourists persuaded their driver to pull off I15 onto a shoulder in the middle of nowhere so they could rush outside and take pictures of rocks and barren ground. That’s how they discovered human bones strewn in the desert. They’d been picked clean. The skull was found with its mandible—and every single tooth was missing. They weren’t lost to desert scavengers either. They’d been pulled out, just like all the rest of the seventeen victims believed to be the work of the Tooth Collector as the media dubbed the killer.

Dr. Gianna L. Pontiac, University of Colorado, Anthropology Department, he’d read her name carefully when she handed him her business card. You’re long way from home, Doctor.

Not really, Agent Penney, she’d said. Colorado’s just next door.

What are you doing here? He wanted to know.

My friend’s doing her thesis in social work. She’s doing research into legalized prostitution. I’ve come along for company and moral support. Bordellos aren’t exactly fun-houses, in spite of what their operators would want you to believe.

So you don’t know anyone here personally?

You mean did I graduate and just came back to see my sorority sisters out here? Or am I too old for this environment? It’s my first visit to this bordello, honestly, Agent Penney, she’d said, managing to keep a straight face.

For a moment he looked confused by her gentle sarcasm then he rallied.

Where are you staying? he asked.

Jena and I’ve rented a trailer. It’s in the Eldorado Trailer Park, just outside of Caliente.

Why not a hotel or at least a motel?

I’m a teaching assistant and Jena lives off grants and loans. We’re not tourists in Nevada.

Well, just be careful, he mumbled, pocketing her business card and handing her his own. A day later, when she heard a knock on the trailer door and opened it, she found him standing there looking at her with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension.

Grant Hillroy was one of my instructors at Quantico, he said breathlessly as if he’d run through the trailer park. I spoke with him last night. He spoke very highly of you…your work and said you can literally work miracles with skulls….

I know how it works and what it does to you, he started.

She interrupted him. Do you, Nick, do you really know how it works for me?

He moved his head uncertainly from side to side. You told me…you explained…yeah, I do but this is a rare situation and it’s quite urgent…. his voice trailed off.

She held in a sigh because if she allowed it out it would come out as a sob and crying would follow; that was a given. They’d spent two years, carrying on a long-distance relationship between her job in Boulder, Colorado and his in Washington, D.C., before she agreed to let him reel her in as he called it. She took a contract job with the Mills Museum of Natural and American History in Columbia, half-way between Washington and Baltimore. While her business card now identified her as a Forensic Reconstructive Specialist, it wasn’t the kind of job she envisioned when she left Colorado. She was a forensic anthropologist but she wanted to do field work, not be the one receiving its yield. She consoled herself that she went back to the East Coast because her mother still lived in Preston, North Carolina and she’d be able to visit her more often.

Nick, I’ve already faxed a list of half a dozen excellent forensic reconstructive artists to Lingstrom Tan, in the State Department. I’m not doing this job. I can’t, she said, and banged her work bench for emphasis. She didn’t want to look at him; didn’t want to stare at the empty darkness that yawned behind him. He stepped through the portal of lies and deceit and it was lurking behind him, waiting to swallow him because once he’d allowed himself to be used as the emissary of hell, there was no turning back, towards the light—towards her.

I know, he said, not lifting his head to look at her. But they want you. It’s very important. The Patriarch of Serbia, His Holiness Kristof Luka, Archbishop of Pecak, has been waiting in London for ten days now.

I don’t care. It was so easy to say those words with flat resignation since they were true.

Their Homeland Security is stressed to the limit, keeping a watch on him. We’re practically a global network now. We promised to help….

I don’t care, Nick. I’m not doing it.

It’s just four skulls, Gianna.

She finally let out a sigh that had been crowding her chest, but the fresh air she expected to rush in didn’t. It felt as if with that expelled sigh, she lost substance. These last two years she may have slept next to the man, shared quick breakfasts at the kitchen counter, jumped in the shower with him, and spent a few relaxing weekends on his boat, but it had all been just silent living. Oh, they talked. In fact she took every opportunity to communicate everything that bubbled up in her pot, whether at work or socially with those few friends they had, but he didn’t hear a thing.

Four skulls, she echoed, nodding with her head at her work bench. Just about the same as what you see here now.

Right, he said quietly.

These four skulls you see here came from Mesa Verde in Colorado, an Anasazi settlement. There are visible signs of trauma on each of them. Their owners bashed each other’s brains out—literally. However, they’re about fifteen hundred years old, Nick. That’s where the difference lies. The four skulls that your Archbishop has in London belonged to my contemporaries, all victims of a vicious civil war. I will never again touch any skull that’s less than a hundred years old. Not if I can help it.

I know it’s frightening and unpleasant for you, but it’s just impressions, Gianna. This is a very important matter.

Frightening and unpleasant, she whispered, hugging herself to contain shivers that threatened to attack. A year after she’d touched the skull of the teenaged prostitute whose bones were found strewn in the Nevada desert, she still woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat and shaking so badly her muscles started to cramp. The girl was tortured for several hours in the back of a tractor-trailer. The vile monster pulled out all her teeth while she was still alive. The moment Gianna’s fingers brushed over the temporal bones while she pressed her thumbs against the frontal bone, pain flooded her world and images started to flash behind her closed lids. She saw the killer’s face, undistorted as his victim first saw him and then stretched out into a grotesque mask by the victim’s pain and fear. The onslaught of terror and agony was relentless. Her mind couldn’t cope and fled into oblivion. She woke up to find Agent Penney’s face above her and saw his lips move but there was no sound. Grant Hillroy thought she was a very talented forensic anthropologist. He did not know her real secret, what lay hiding beneath her talent. She’d never told anyone about her gift because she didn’t want to end up as a case in some psychiatrist’s office. Not even her mother knew because it was something she’d discovered by pure chance when she was sixteen years old. The only one she ever told was Agent Penney. But when she finished ‘confessing’ her secret, she saw from his expression that he only half-believed. A month later, when they caught the Tooth Collector, working solely from a sketch she’d produced with the police artist, an uncertain flicker of his gray eyes told her he was still struggling to believe her—completely. Four years later, two of them spent living together, he still wasn’t convinced that skulls had the power to pull her into their world through a mere touch. Whenever the subject came up, he’d start, Gianna, you know I love you but…. And that was the problem with ‘buts.’ They were like a destructive aspect of any natural element with a potential to turn into disaster. Flame flicker could become raging fire, a drop of rain could turn into a flood. Nick’s disbelief turned into a virus that threatened to infect their love and ultimately kill it—like it did today.

Gianna, is there anything you can take that would make it….?

Oh, you mean for a headache that’s standing in my work room or for the curse I was born with? Sarcasm was like antiseptic. It sterilized but not without pain.

There are techniques that can be used to de-sensitize…. his voice trailed off.

I don’t suffer panic attacks, Nick, and there is no medication to alleviate my sickness.

That’s not what I meant and you know it.

What I know, Nick, is that you haven’t heard a word I said to you these last couple of years. When I touch these skulls, she said, motioning to the Anasazi skulls resting in their cradles. Images start to flash through my head but even though I see the violence that these four men endured, even though I feel its sting, it’s like a tiny pinprick. It’s uncomfortable but it’s like I’m watching a play on a distant stage and my seat is pinching me. I see and feel…history that’s long dead or at least history that wasn’t made by my parents, much less history that was lived by me. Tanisha Brown, the young woman, whose skull was found in the Nevada desert, was nineteen years old when she died. At the time of her death, we were barely five years apart. Do you understand what I’m saying here, Nick? She was my contemporary. I didn’t just see what she saw in her last living hours. I felt it—all of it! She faced him, hands balled into fists and softly smacking the work bench.

I know, he said quietly and she knew it was just an automatic response. He didn’t know because if he really knew, he’d not have agreed to come and plead the State Department’s case. Any one of a dozen forensic anthropologists and reconstructive artists would be able to do the job for the Serbian Archbishop in London. But it was her name that came up on the top because Grant Hillroy was now an Assistant Director for Homeland Security and he had an excellent and long memory. It was true. No good deed went unpunished. Grant Hillroy was the sole reason why she’d passed up a scholarship and left the University of North Carolina and went to do her Master’s Degree in Colorado. Hell, she’d have gone to Hawaii if their graduate program had forensic anthropology, just to get far away from Grant Hillroy, her most ardent supporter, her mentor.

So, what will be the consequences for you if you fail your mission? she asked, picking up the brush and sweeping it across the plastic surface of the work bench.

Gianna, it’s nothing like that, he said, raising his voice. But the vibrations she caught weren’t anger, merely frustration.

Well, if your next promotion or pay raise doesn’t hinge on getting me to agree to abuse my sanity again, why are you here, Nick?

He walked down the length of the work bench, stopped, squared his shoulders then turned around and walked back. It’s just really important, Gianna. One of those four skulls presumably belongs to Darik Ilved Hasanovic, a commander in the Bosnian Muslim Army. Had he lived, he’d have been brought before the Hague Tribunal for sure. For nearly ten years everyone believed he was dead. Then about a year ago, Adrian Prosic literally ran into him in one of the shops in Soho. Dr. Prosic is a Christian, a Sarajevo Serb who lost his entire family in a Mujahedeen attack. The irony is that Hasanovic was one of his students at the University of Sarajevo. Obviously, Hasanovic is now much older but Prosic maintains he’d recognize him anytime, anywhere. The British Homeland Security doesn’t want to mount a campaign to apprehend a war criminal who might be hiding in their country unless they’re absolutely sure the skull is not Hasanovic’s. The other three skulls are thought to belong to Hasanovic’s lieutenants, all mass murderers. There are moral and humanitarian issues at stake here, Gianna. I wouldn’t be here if that wasn’t the case.

She suspected that everything he said had been presented in detail in the couriered mail she’d shredded without reading, but that still didn’t make it right. She could reconstruct the likeness of four war criminals without touching the skulls, using tweezers to place her tissue depth-markers and spatulas to apply clay but then the results would be no different than those produced by her colleagues. Oh, they’d get eighty percent likeness accuracy but was that good enough considering the moral and humanitarian stakes here? She knew Grant Hillroy didn’t think so. It’s why her name came up as the only acceptable expert, though Hillroy only suspected there was more to her ‘academic’ talent, while Agent Penney knew exactly the nature of it…but never quite believed it either.

They were criminals, Gianna, not victims, she heard his soft comment, meant to remove the last of her resistance. As usual, he was missing the point. Whether criminals or victims, the skull owners had suffered a violent death as recently as fifteen years ago. They were her contemporaries. The horrors of their world and everything in it would assault her as vividly as if she had stood beside them in their last hours.

Are you to accompany me to London? she asked, moving the brush languidly up and down the table surface.

Only if you want me to.

Her hand with the brush halted in mid-stroke. Such a simple, innocent reply and yet so revealing. She was wrong. He had given it much more thought than she initially believed. He came, already resigned to see their relationship dissolve, regardless of the outcome of his mission. He came, knowing she may not want him to accompany her or ever see him again. He came…prepared to sacrifice their relationship for the moral and humanitarian cause. He came for his country. But did his country, which was also hers, demand such sacrifices of its people?

When do they want me to leave?

He jerked his head up. She perceived the motion but it was her turn to avoid looking at him.

As soon as possible, he said.

She nodded. Fine. You go upstairs to talk to my boss, while I’m going home to pick up a few things.

Gianna….

Go, before Dowling leaves. He usually has a ton of appointments in the afternoon, she said ignoring him as if invisible, she busied herself logging-off the computer.

A week later, she stepped away from her work bench in a small laboratory of Carstairs Museum, so Branko Vazic, the Serbian envoy attached to the Archbishop’s party, could inspect the final results. The museum was part of a large research foundation in Greenford, fifteen miles east of London.

Magnificent, absolutely magnificent, the envoy murmured, inspecting the four clay busts lined up on the work bench. She’d given each head a set of shoulders out of habit because all her reconstructive work for the museum back home would go on display adorned by period clothing. As well, neck and shoulders were essential to have for display of chains and pendants or whatever ornaments ancient people chose to mark their ranked members.

She backed up until she felt the edge of her work stool and sat down. She was so tired she couldn’t even manage to take a deeper breath. She did opt for tweezers—most of the time—but it wasn’t possible to use them all the time. And on those few occasions when her fingers necessarily came in contact with the bone, images burst in on her as if the proverbial gates of Hell had been thrown open. The pain that accompanied them was indescribable. Two of the skulls didn’t have mandibles. When her fingers inadvertently brushed over the zygomatic bone in a cheek that was relatively intact, she found what happened to the mandible and how it felt to have the jaw bone crushed by relentless stomping of heavy boots. At night, she sought refuge in sleeping pills. During the day, she had to settle for strong herbal tea. She’d finished reconstructing two heads when she finally allowed the suspicion, which had crept into her mind the moment she saw the four skulls, to surface. While the four skulls definitely belonged to men who had died within the last ten to twenty years, they were not soldiers, whether Serbian or Mujahedeen. She wanted to ask Vazic and feared to discover the truth. If she could at least pretend these four men were what the State Department and Nick told her they were, then she could finish the job.

I can tell you now that it is definitely Dobrilo Yakic, she heard the envoy’s voice and struggled to focus on its source. He was pointing at the last reconstructed head of a man in his fifties who was beaten, burned with branding irons, and had battery acid poured over his head, while the man in charge of the torture sat behind a metal desk, using folded playing cards to cut lines of coke he’d then snort, no doubt to heighten the pleasure of his victim’s screams.

Who was he? she asked, and felt acid surge into her throat.

The envoy kept staring at the head as he spoke. She got an impression that he wasn’t fully aware of what he was saying. He was a wealthy land owner and a developer. Much of the land in the Sakija District was his but he was a good Christian and promised it to the Church. Mirjan Yakic was his son, though by looking at him next to his father you’d not know they were related.

And the other two were also wealthy Serbs who promised to leave their lands and holdings to the Church, she said in a musing voice because she had nothing left.

Yes, yes. His Holiness will be pleased. He can go ahead and allocate the lands for development without fear of repercussions…. the envoy finally realized he was giving vent to dangerous musings and stopped.

They were not soldiers, and they were not criminals, she said, not caring what the envoy saw on her face. She slid off the stool and moved toward him. She could have used a baseball bat but her work spatula would have to do.

Dr. Pontiac, no, no! You mustn’t….

She hit him on the side of the head with the spatula and then pounded the first clay head. It had long air-dried. The first smack dislodged only a sliver from the shoulder. She turned around. She needed something bigger and heavier.

She only managed to take a step toward her work stool when everything spun around.

Chapter 2

May 2012,

Peloponnesus, Greece

Whenever he chose the life of a soldier, killing someone within a span of forty years wasn’t a problem. Other lifetimes he’d lived as a merchant, a politician; even a cleric had offered him many opportunities to thrust a dagger into a man’s heart or swish a blade across his throat—without penalty, whether from his fellow man or a deity.

Particularly when he entered his fiftieth year, he used to be able to kill on a whim.

One evening in Florence, he’d left the cathedral while Savonarola was still shouting his apocalyptic visions from the pulpit. He disliked doomsayers because it made his next transit choice that much more difficult. Words like eternal damnation and end of the world" spread like plague and people started to see signs of Apocalypse in everything. Their paranoia would increase the church’s control. If there was one thing he’d learned in the course of centuries it was that religions sought to fill a man’s head with fear and empty his pockets. He’d long stopped to believe in divinity of anything and the only inevitable thing was change. His servant brought his horse and he was about to mount when he reconsidered. It was a beautiful summer evening. An earlier rain had washed the streets so the blowing breeze was fresh though by tomorrow it would be once again pungent with the smell of garbage. He motioned for the servant to precede him since he only meant to take a short stroll, and as he listened to the horse’s hooves clatter on the cobblestones, the rhythmical ditty of the metal horseshoes nudged his memory. He was in his fiftieth year and had long settled on his next choice. Ten years from now, in time for his next transit, the young Giulio dei Medici would be nineteen years old. However, his current life as a Medici banker had been peaceful and profitable. Odd how a pursuit of wealth could make a man almost forget that he had still one condition to satisfy before he moved on to the next life.

Occupied by such thoughts, he lifted his head when he heard a dissonant hoof clatter and realized the horse must have stumbled. It was a moonless night and residents didn’t see it fit to light the torches yet. He saw the movement just ahead, a man’s shape seeking cover in the wall shadows so he could take a piss. It took seconds between the recognition of the opportunity and the execution. He approached on tiptoes, dagger held ready. He heard the feeble splashing of urine on the stone, smelled its sour stench and then drove the dagger between the man’s shoulder blades. After a thousand years spent mostly on battlefields, he didn’t need to plunge the dagger in over and over. He’d long learned to do the job right on a first drive.

He cleaned the weapon with the edge of the man’s tunic, slid it back into its sheath and quickened his step until he caught up to his servant and the horse. Now he could spend ten years grooming young Giulio to become a worthy vessel without having to think or plan the kill. The final condition of his next transit had been satisfied.

Today, almost a thousand years later, he was twelve hours away from his sixtieth birthday and whatever opportunities to kill a man had come along in this lifetime, were either feeble and not worth the risk. Or he’d foolishly squandered them all.

The proverbial eleventh hour found him bouncing on a moped through narrow city streets, congested with traffic until

Reviews for Servant of the Skull

[Karol Peterson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent read finished in two days!!
First time reading this author. Loved it!