King Solomon's Journey (The Dominguez Adventures) Read Free

Wait, he was knocked-out cold. It had to be a dream. The entire experience must have been a vivid hallucination. Unsure, Antonio could not shake the loneliness that he now felt. The woman was a phantom, a ghost, but the Scrolls were corporeal, real, and possibly the discovery of a lifetime.
                Dim light further distorted his impaired vision. He needed to get out of the cavern, now. Carefully, he placed the precious bundle of Scrolls in his pack.
                His head was still bleeding, so he improvised using his belt to compress the bandage against the wound. Secured and ready to make his escape, he looked back into the dark with the light. He shook his head. Dumb ass - she isn’t there, she never was.
                In reality, his fall wasn’t nearly as far as he first imagined. He hoisted himself up to the height of the small ledge. Above him, a large overhang was close enough to reach. Gripping with his hands, he used his feet to climb as he swung his body up, and his legs around. Struggling to reach the top of the ledge, he threw his rope and found an anchor that could hold his weight.
                One last time, the light shone into the cavern’s depths. Feeling the woman’s presence still there, he feared that he was leaving her behind in the nothingness.
                Damn...I must have brain damage. He gripped the rope and lifted himself out. Once standing safely on top, he secured the holes opening by covering it with the surrounding rocks. He needed to get away before anyone saw what happened.           
    ***
                Back at Raven, Antonio popped the trunk, laying the pack down, he opened it inside the trunk checking the condition of the Scrolls; he would not investigate them until later. Checking his head, the bleeding stopped. The bloody shirt came off replaced by a t-shirt from the trunk.
                He got into Raven glad for the prescription sunglasses he had left on the console, with his regular glasses broken from that fall, he would have been unable to drive. The engine started. “Okay, Raven, take us home, we have hit our ‘eureka’ moment and our 'oh shit' moment all in the same day.”
                "Raven you will have to get used to me talking to you." Antonio was turning the car around and spoke to it just as he did Es Fuerte.
                "Damn my head hurts. Lucky I didn't break my neck, but then again a concussion can kill you. Or at the very least give you hallucinations."
    Antonio was silent for a moment as he navigated away from the mountain.
                "Although if the scroll is real, what does that tell us about the old man or the woman?"
                "Do ghost generally leave presents, even priestly ghosts? Does a beautiful woman who captures your soul with one look have your best interest at heart? After all Raven, in Jewish myths that date back to the early Sumerian times, Lilith was a succubus, and beautiful."
                That thought made Antonio's headache even worse. His mother had been right; all his youth she had told him the story of Lilith; one day if he did not behave, she swore a succubus would come for him.
                Overall it had been one helluva day; the extreme high of finally picking up Raven to the absolute low…literally of tumbling down inside the mountain. Was the scroll still in the trunk, or had he dreamed that part as well? It took all he had not to stop every 20 minutes to ensure it was actually there, between that and the frequent looks into the backseat checking for succubus and ghost kept his mind off the pain. Antonio just wanted some aspirin, his lab and a clean shirt, only maybe not in that order.
     

 
    Chapter 2
     
    “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”
    — Albert Einstein (The World As I See It)
     
                The hour and a half home was an