Jesus Triumphant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 8) Read Online Free PDF Page B

the bear’s esophagus ripped from its throat.
    But it could not get out.
    Demas approached the lion.
    The crowd gave a standing ovation. This was true entertainment worth the price of admission.
    He walked up to his fighting partner with heartfelt sadness. He said to it, “Thank you, old friend,” and plunged the sword into its heart. The lion opened its mouth in a silent roar and died.
    The crowd fell silent. Their cheering stopped almost instantly at Demas’ surprise finale. They could not believe it. Booing peppered the crowd. It was anticlimactic. It was animal cruelty to the very creature that had saved him from the claws of the bear.
    Demas looked around him at the mob. He didn’t trust their passions. They were fools carried along by their lust for blood and circuses. Of course he had to kill the beast. No amount of partnership against a common enemy could change the fact that this beast was still ultimately an enemy. It would turn on Demas, kill him and eat him after it had killed the bigger enemy. No temporary friendship would change its inbred natural instincts. The masses were idiots to project a relationship between man and beast. In the long run, a lion is a lion and a human is its enemy.
    Damn the mob to Gehenna. He limped out of the arena to his iron gate.
     
    When he arrived inside the gathering area for fighters beneath the stadium, he was accosted by the sight of two bestiarii hanging dead by their necks from the rafters. They were beaten bloody. One of them had his tongue hanging from his mouth in a hideous contortion. A gladiator in iron armor stopped on his way out to the arena. “Those are the two culprits who released the animals upon you.”
    Demas stared with amusement at the hanging corpses. The gladiators had discovered the betrayal and reinforced their code of honor. Maybe this gang of guilded thugs was not so bad after all.

Chapter 2
    Demas made his way through the graveyard of tombs just outside Scythopolis. His wounds had been dressed. His shoulder ached with the pain of vicious animal punctures. His ribs and left arm were bruised from the bear brawl, but he was whole. He was not too sure he was glad to be alive though.
    He found a tomb marked with his adopted family name, “Samaras.”
    He paused, unsure if he could follow through with this. It would have been so much easier had he just been mauled to death in the arena. Then it would be his brother here, bringing Demas’ body, or what remained of it, to lay in the crypt. Demas would no longer have the dark shadow over him that followed him everywhere he went.
    He had to do this. He used a large wooden post as a wedge to move a circular stone that covered the grave opening.
    He bent down and entered the four foot high entrance.
    Tombs were the luxury of the upper classes in society. The average poor man was buried in a shallow grave with nothing but a mere stone with markings to indicate who it was who awaited their resurrection from this spot. The rich were able to afford crypts where entire families would be able to “go to sleep with their fathers,” as the saying went. Sleep was the common metaphor used to express their hope that one day Yahweh would return and resurrect the dead for judgment. There was a debate within the Pharisee and Sadducee circles about resurrection. The Pharisees believed it, but the Sadducees did not. Demas was inclined to agree with the latter, more liberal group. But in the end, such petty debates over dogma didn’t really matter to him anyway. He would never get his beloved back.
    The burial chamber was just tall enough for him to stand with a slight stoop, and wide enough to contain several “beds” carved out from the walls to lay corpses upon. Enough sunlight leaked in through the entrance to light the interior with few shadows.
    He walked up to a carved out shelf at the back where several ossuaries rested. They were small stone boxes, about three feet long and two feet wide, marked with prayers