Oh well… Live to fight another minute.

  Zeus grabbed the back of Ares vest and manhandled him through the opening. Apparently, Ares wasn’t moving fast enough for the more impatient Zeus. He turned and saw why. A large male was right on their asses, teeth bared and ready for its next meal.

  Instead of trying to outrun the fleet-footed creature, the two men instinctively dove to the ground. As it leapt over their falling forms, their instincts quickly took over and they both aimed their weapons at the thing’s back, Ares drawing his pistol, having lost his more preferred rifle.

  They didn’t get a chance to fire.

  Someone else attacked instead, shredding the lizard like a savage herself. The two highly-capable killers were in awe as Fayng dove for the Nsanga’s throat and began slashing and ripping at the thinner flesh encompassing its underbelly, including its throat and chest.

  The combatants were at a stalemate for a moment, but once Fayng slid inside the creature’s reach, the fight was all but over. She swung her right arm down and back like she was going to uppercut the beast in the sternum, but instead of doing that, she did something far nastier. Fayng’s already extended claws plunged deep into the Nsanga’s chest, eliciting a screech of pain. It tried to pull itself free from her deadly embrace but couldn’t, she’d already locked her other arm around its neck and squeezed, staying out of reach of its venom laced bite.

  The only sound the team could hear was the slurp of her hand burying itself deeper as she pushed harder, grunting like a monster herself. They all watched as her body flickered and flashed different shades of green. Most were coming from her upper body, neck, and face as she flexed and shoved. It was like hell had its own Aurora Borealis in the form of an enraged Amazonian warrior.

  By the time Zeus and Ares climbed to their feet, the Nsanga lay dead at Fayng’s feet. She just stared through them, breathing hard, a wicked set of vampiric k9’s, keeping them from moving any closer.

  “You okay?” Fitz asked, stepping up beside her, inspecting the kill. The man was fearless of her, trusting her completely.

  The two Americans stared in disbelief, not understanding how Fitz could just casually stroll up to her like that while she was still in kill mode. But amazingly, she just nodded and blew out a long breath, relaxing herself some. As she did, the razor sharp teeth and claws retracted back into those of an average human.

  “No wonder the Wohn Tod wanted their DNA,” Zeus mumbled to himself as he checked his weapon over for damage.

  “You ain’t kidding,” Ares agreed, holstering his sidearm. “Could you imagine what it would be like to be able to do that on the battlefield. We’d be invincible.”

  “No thanks,” Zeus replied, shaking his head, “I like what I am.”

  “And what’s that?” Ares asked.

  Zeus stopped what he was doing and looked up at his friend, concerned. “Human, Pete. I’m happy to be human—normal.” He walked passed Ares and squeezed his shoulder, stopping. “Aren’t you?”

  “Of course,” Ares replied, taking a second to react. Still…

  “You guys good?” Logan asked from further ahead. He and CJ were checking things out in what Kiani noticed was at one point a similar underground settlement. They were currently in a main hallway with rooms cut directly into the stone surrounding them. She moved into the first of the spaces to her right and pulled out a small flashlight, clicking it on.

  After one quick search of the room, Kiani saw all she needed to. “Over here,” she said, ushering everyone over. Zeus and Ares stayed put outside the alcove and watched for anything trying to squeeze through the newly formed access hole. “I think I know why they walled up that entrance.”

  Logan, Fitz, and CJ joined her as the other women gathered deeper into the corridor. The only one to join them was a woman Logan called, the medic.

  As soon as the younger local saw what laid inside the room her hand went to her mouth. She started mumbling something in her native language, getting Fayng’s attention. The older woman had moved deeper into the room ahead of everyone else. Her keen eyesight in the darkness around them had become an invaluable asset so far. As the two women conversed, Fayng knelt to the ground, translating as she inspected something.

  “She says she heard of this place a few years ago. One of the Ka warriors mentioned something about the ‘home of the ancient fathers’ in passing.” Fayng stood, holding a large bone in her hand, getting a whimper from the medic who quickly left upon seeing it. After looking it over, Fayng handed it to CJ, remembering she was an expert in the anatomy of animals. “What does that look like to you?”

  CJ cautiously accepted it, turning it over several times as she inspected long, thick yellowed bone. She stopped at a large bulbous knot on one of its ends her eyes squinting in the aura of artificial light. As realization set in, her mouth quivered and then frowned, meeting Fayng’s similar expression. “You said you aren’t sure of your ancestry, correct?”

  Fayng nodded. “None of us are. The ones who came before us didn’t leave records of who they were. The legends of our culture’s existence were passed down verbally in stories.”

  “Stories often change with the generations,” CJ added. “Each who tell it will often add something of their own, altering it.”

  “What is it?” Logan asked, staring intently at the bone.

  Instead of telling her brother, CJ simply lowered it to line up with her leg…more specifically her femur.

  “No way,” Fitz said, shocked. “That has to be two feet longer than yours. It would’ve belonged to a giant and…”

  “What?” Fayng asked.

  Fitz shook his head. “It’s probably nothing, but when I was young, my nan would tell me stories about a very specific race of giants she’d learned about when she was a little girl.”

  “Who?” CJ asked.

  “She called them the Nephilim.”

  “Nephilim?” Zeus asked from outside the room. “You sure?”

  Logan looked at both men. “What in the bloody hell are you talking about?”

  “They were the biblical race of giants,” Fitz replied. “Half-blood demon children born from fallen angels mating with human women.”

  Fitz stopped and looked back towards the chamber’s opening. He hadn’t realized it earlier, but the arch above the doorway was unusually tall. Everyone else looked as well, giving the dreadful feeling the room already had, even more life.

  Logan looked at Fayng, whispering, “the others…”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Others?” Kiani asked, holding Logan’s arm tightly. She was on edge and instinctively went straight to Logan’s side.

  He tilted his chin towards the medic who was leaning against the adjacent wall just outside the room’s open entrance. “They’re human women in an inhuman world, kept as slaves. Their captors are seven feet tall, have otherworldly strength and a nasty temperament. Sound familiar?”

  “You think the Ka are descended from a race of giants?” Fitz asked. He shrugged and shook his head. “Never mind, screw it, sure, why not? It can’t be crazier than anything else we’ve come across so far.”

  “Not just the Ka,” Fayng added. “All the Ru’kan are, including me.”

  “Now look…” Fitz said. “You aren’t like them. You’re different.”

  “I wasn’t always this way, Fitz, you know that. I told you how I was in my younger years—ruthless, barbaric…demonic.”

  “Tell me more about the Ka,” Logan said.

  Fayng blew out a long breath. “They’ve been around as long as the Ru’kan, cousins some say. Centuries ago—millennia even—we used to live in peace with them, living side by side with their kind. While we advanced in our ways, the Ka continued on in their darker ways, worshiping the night and all the things that came with it. After several confrontations, my ancestors warred with them and banished them to the caves.”

  “Have you ever crossed paths with the Ka before this?” Logan asked.

  “Not in a long time. They’ve become reclusive, only coming to the surface when needed. The only ones to see them are some of the more nefarious hunters. They…” She stopped, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “I should have seen it years ago.”

  “What?” Logan asked, stepping towards her.

  “How do you think the girls got here, Logan?”

  Logan’s face fell. “The hunters brought them. They stole them from surrounding villages.” He looked out and saw the medic and nurse quietly conversing with one another.

  “I’ve been so blind,” Fayng said, internally berating herself.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Logan said, standing tall. “You’re here now, helping us—helping them,” he pointed to the two women, “atoning for your sins against mankind.”

  “Nice one,” Fitz said, nodding his approval at Logan’s choice of words. “Inspiring even.”

  “So are you saying that the demons from the Bible were real?” Kiani asked. “Fallen angels from heaven.”

  CJ shrugged. “I honestly don’t know what to believe. Yes, there were giants but are they demonic in their source or just a natural mutation… I have no idea. But what I do know is that our situation is still the same.”

  “She’s right,” Logan agreed, “regardless of what this history lesson has taught us, we still need to get out of here and call in Night-1. All of this,” he motioned around him, “means nothing if we die down here.”

  “You’re on a roll, mate,” Fitz quipped.

  Ignoring him, Logan stepped deeper into the room. It was cut into a perfect circle with a short rectangular entryway, giving it the shape of a rounded lightbulb. “Weren’t the Biblical giants supposed to be immortal?” Logan asked. “I remember hearing about them years ago but can’t remember where.”

  “Yes and no,” Fitz replied, following him. “Remember that big bloke, Goliath?”

  Logan glanced at him, eyebrow raised. “Come on, Gray, really? David and Goliath?”

  “He’s right, but only Goliath,” Zeus said, stepping into the room for the first time. Kiani and CJ traded spots with him for the time being, standing guard with Ares. “I grew up in a very religious family. My grandmother was a devout Catholic, raising my brother and me on Bible lore when we were young back home in Puerto Rico. We didn’t have a lot to keep us entertained so she used to read the Bible to us, mostly the battles between good and evil. As I got older, I looked into it myself and found that some scholars believe Goliath and the other Philistine warriors living in and around the city-state of Gath may have been Nephilim. I thought it to be a cool story as a kid, but now…” He trailed off, glancing around the room.

  He didn’t need to explain further. Logan knew exactly how the man felt. This was far from cool. It was downright horrifying, actually. So the Nazi’s were experimenting on actual demon blood? he thought, shaking his head. Fucking psychos. Did they know something else, something they didn’t record in the files we found in Tanzania? He turned back towards the room’s entrance. Hmmm, we may need to give that bunker another look, see if we missed anything.

  “You seem to know a lot about this sort of stuff,” Fitz said.

  Zeus shrugged. “My abuela wasn’t all there sometimes—thought she saw them in her sleep.”

  Fitz questioningly gaped at Zeus, unbelieving. “She dreamed of demons?”

  Zeus patted Fitz’s shoulder as he passed by, moving towards the door. “Don’t we all?”

  He had a point. Logan and Fitz both tossed and turned with nightmares. Apparently, Zeus did too.

  “Okay,” Logan said, breaking the eerie silence surrounding them, “let’s move out. The quicker we can call in for EVAC the better.”

  “Logan?” CJ asked from outside.

  “What?”

  “You need to see this.”

  He joined his sister, Kiani, Fayng, and the group of women a short distance further down the central corridor. The mass of bodies parted one by one and let him pass. “What is it, Cass?”

  He watched as she pointed her flashlight forward. “There’s more.”

  Clicking his own light on, Logan shined it deeper into the passage before him. He sighed, seeing countless more rooms situated to either side of the high-ceilinged hallway. The only audible noise emitted from Logan was a groan of disapproval as he exhaled his held breath.

  I swear, if any of these things are still alive…

  29

  Twenty rooms in all, ten on each side. Logan wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to feel excited or sick over their discovery. An ancient civilization of giants has just been unearthed and he and the others would be remembered forever because of it.

  Doesn’t feel right, he thought. Too many people have died over this. Plus, like most soldiers, Logan wasn’t in it for the fame or fortune. No, he was in it for the love of it. It just felt right to do what he did.

  CJ, on the other hand, was in overdrive, rambling on about what this meant for history as a whole. Being a zoologist, CJ didn’t normally go to great lengths to study anthropology—the study of human civilization. But even she recognized the potential ramifications of the findings.

  “We can’t tell anyone what we’ve found here,” Fitz said, breaking her mental stride.

  “What—why?” she asked.

  He stopped and faced her. “If we do, they’ll be people scouring this place clean, destroying everything they touch.”

  “But—”

  “I made Fayng a promise,” he interrupted, turning towards the tribeswoman. “I told her we’d leave her be if she helped us. Releasing any information about this place would be a slap in the face.”

  “But—”

  “He’s right,” Logan added, also cutting CJ off, “we owe her that much—Baird too. We’d already be dead ten times over if it wasn’t for them.”

  Fayng bowed slightly. “Thank you.” Then, she faced forward and continued on, glancing in the last of the round rooms. Each of the twenty spaces had a skeleton similar to the one from before. They were all unnaturally tall and in various stages of decomposition. The relative airtightness of the hallway had preserved some of the skin accompanying the bones. Not all, though. Some looked to be long dead, maybe thousands of years, while others looked to be somewhat fresh. It was hard to tell sometimes depending on the state of the body when it’s found. If preserved properly, a corpse may look fresh but really be a few millennia old.

  “Cass…” Logan said, wanting an answer.

  Fayng stopped and looked at CJ.

  “Fine,” CJ said, forcing a smile, “your secret’s safe with me.”

  Fayng bowed again and then continued on until the passageway opened up and the ceiling disappeared overhead. The walls to each side curved outward like the smaller rooms behind them.

  “Oh boy…” Ares mumbled at the massive space, flipping his night vision device down. “Kill your lights, if you don’t mind.” Once he powered them on, his shoulders sank. “Just wonderful.” Everyone who still had one of the devices did the same.

  “What is it?” Fitz asked not being able to see anything.

  “You don’t want to know,” Zeus replied, seeing it too.

  “It’s a city,” Ares said, stepping further into the space. “Full of buildings and a central street running down its core.”

  Kiani likewise was looking at the ancient city before her, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. Each of the structures reminded her of Greek inspired temples like the Parthenon. They even had the same pillars as the ones in Athens but these had strange symbols carved into them instead of the vertical grooves you’d normally see.

  “Wow.” It’s all she could come up with.

  “My thoughts exactly,” CJ said, smiling in Kiani’s green tinted light. While she was generally a chipper person, Kiani hoped all this stress wasn’t going to CJ’s head. She did, however, feel better knowing that neither Logan or Fitz seemed to worry about it at all. They knew her the best and would be able to see it for sure. If she became a problem they’d step in when needed.

  “I can’t believe this is here.”

  Logan spun and found the speaker ten feet away, closer to the city. As the others flipped up their devices, Logan switched his flashlight back on. “No one does,” he said, joining Fayng.

  “I’ve been here for three hundred years, Logan. I thought I’d seen it all.”

  “Stay with me, Fayng.”

  She smiled. “I’m fine, just amazed. My people have been here for as long as history remembers and yet there was an entire city beneath us, just beyond the Nsanga nesting grounds.”

  “You never tried to get through it before?” he asked.

  “No, like I said before, I’ve only been there once before. It’s not like they give you a lot of time to look around.”

  Logan grinned. “That they don’t.”

  “So,” Fitz said, stopping next to Logan, “am I to assume no one here has any idea where the hell we are or if there’s even a way out?”

  The ensuing silence answered his question.

  “Right…”

  Logan slapped his back. “Keep your spirits up Gray, I believe there’s a way out.”

  “And how would you know that?” CJ asked from behind.

  He turned and faced her. “Because, the giants that built this place wouldn’t have sealed themselves in without a way out. I can’t imagine a race as intelligent as them to just hunker down and wait for death.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” she replied.

  “Unless the giants were immortal,” Zeus said, “what if they didn’t need food or water to survive? Then, they could have easily waited things out.”

  Everyone went silent again. No one had anything to add.

  “Speaking of death…”

  “What?” Logan asked, facing Fitz again.

  “What was with the bones back there? Were those bedrooms or crypts?”

  “Maybe both,” Fayng replied. “The Ru’kan have a tradition when one of us passes. We leave the dead’s home be until nature reclaims it. What if when they died, these ancients laid the room’s owners to rest in their living quarters—forever theirs.”