Hunter: Gods & Monsters

Chapter 2

Looking around the office, it was unattended and the emergency exit sign created an eerily green light everywhere else. Noticing a glass wall, the shadows that formed behind it were different from the cubicles around me so that's where I headed. By the door, an alarm code gave me the impression this might not be as easy as I had expected, so keeping my hood on and face hidden, I took myself inside and waited.

Nothing happened.

No weight sensors went off. No lasers sliced through me and daring to take a step towards one of the cabinets, still nothing. The Council really needed to upgrade its security. If I could just break in whenever I felt like it, so could anyone. Walking around the small room, it wasn't hard to find what I was looking for and taking the pair of white gloves near the scrolls, I put them on before touching.

One had been completely opened, and I recognised it from Heath's photos. Finding the drawing that I knew from the books that told my story, I couldn't help feel disappointed that the writing was actually just lines of tiny symbols and shapes I had no way of interpreting. There were other pictures too. Zeus was undeniable, holding his lightning bolts above his head ready to strike. I was far from being a historian but was pretty sure something wasn't right with this. Zeus and Co had come after Sobek's people, and I'm pretty the region this was found in, was around that time. Had they come earlier than our history tells us and if so, why the hell was I being thrown in with whatever this was?

"Oh, these look interesting!" Portia is suddenly there, inspecting the scroll from the other side of the table.

I scream, step backwards and have my sword raised in seconds before my brain catches up.

"You're here. Now you're here? What the-"

"Please Elise. I have the whole universe to deal with, not just one girl on one planet!" She clicks her tongue.

"Are you fucking serious?" I shout, forgetting where I was. "After all three of you showing up, being all cryptic with your doom and gloom act, and then, just nothing, now you rock up and tell me that?"

"Did you miss me?" She smiles.

"No! Maybe. Not the point!"

"You really can be so dramatic sometimes," She sighs, glancing over the paper. "What even is this?"

"I don't know. It was found in some old undiscovered tomb somewhere, middle east, I think. I heard about this," I point at my image, and she looks it over. "And had to come to see."

"Oh, it's nothing. It's not even that old." She picks at the paper, sniffing it. "It's actually quite new."

"Heath said he thought a genie left it, on purpose."

"Seems unlikely. Why would a genie do that? I'm sure they have plenty of other things to busy themselves with since the revolution they staged back in, oh when was it, seventeenth century?" Portia gave a little shrug. "If he said Jinn and you were simply not paying attention, they may have. Crafty little demons, though they have been extinct in this world for nearly as long as the genie has been free."

"There is so much there that I need to unpack, but instead I'm just going to ask you, what does this say?"

I tried not to get my hopes up. This could be what I had been looking for. A sign, a warning, something that tells us what is next?

"It introduces the God Killer. This is going to do nothing for your ego," Portia huffs. "Just tells them of the injustices you fought, the wrongs you righted. See, killing Zeus is therefrom paragraph four to seven."

"Who wrote it?"

She unfolds the edge of the page. "No idea. They didn't leave a signature."

"Anything else?"