Alexander appeared at his side raging with anger. He shouted and punched a marble statue of himself, breaking it in two.

King marveled at the man’s power. Whatever he had drunk before joining the battle had boosted his strength amazingly. But it hadn’t made him impervious to harm. The hand he’d just punched with was a crumpled bloody mess.

“It seems we share a common nemesis,” Alexander grumbled as his hand stitched itself back together.

King nodded. “Ridley.” He looked at Alexander. “You mentioned a physicist-ex-rabbi who might be able to help. Still think so?”

Alexander looked at his fully healed hand, his nerves calming. “He’s in Haifa. Israel. At Technion Institute of Technology. He shouldn’t be hard to find.”

Alexander led the way out of the gallery, explaining that they would exit into one of his Roman homes, where they could rest and coordinate. As they left the gallery amid the chaos of sounding alarms, flashing lights, and the occasional slam of stone golem against steel bars, King and Alexander failed to notice Pierce pause at one of the gallery displays, taking the ancient contents and hiding them in his pocket.

Chapter Forty

THIRTY-NINE

20,000 feet

KING LOOKED OUT the window of Alexander’s Gulfstream G550. The Mediterranean sparkled like an azure crystal, twenty thousand feet below. Alexander sat next to him, his eyes covered by a blindfold. The man was sound asleep, looking like nothing more than a tired businessman on his private jet. Pierce had insisted on coming, but King wouldn’t place him in harm’s way again, so he remained behind in Rome.

King leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes. Despite the freakish things he’d witnessed in the past few days, his thoughts were on family. He’d been trained in combat, survival, and intelligence gathering, but none of that prepared him for the emotional upheaval he’d been going through. His dead mother had been resurrected while his deadbeat father was redeemed and returned from jail. Add to that the revelation that his parents were in fact Russian spies, and then the kidnapping of a girl who called him Dad despite him not wanting the title and doing a piss poor job of protecting her.

Giant killer golems had some fierce competition for his attention.

Thoughts of Fiona came to him as vivid images. She’d been wary of him at first, waking up in the backseat of his rental car. She remembered flashes of the attack, of a man who had saved her from the wreckage, and then King. He did his best to smile at her, to put her at ease, but he’d never been good with kids. Then, his awkward first words to her—“You’re a girl”—had made her laugh. He still didn’t know why he said that. It had just come out, as though she’d just been born to him.