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King translate them and decipher the location of the gateway.”
    Elisa smiled as she offered a mock salute. “Yessir!”
    Max rolled his eyes. “Don't get cute with me.”
    ***
    The home of Elisa Hill had been in her family for generations. She descended from a long line of so-called myth hunters, those who explore the legends of the world for knowledge or for profit. Her parents were the former and they trained her almost since birth in the methods and procedures of the myth hunters. Following the death of her parents when she was nineteen, Elisa fell into the latter category, taking the skills she learned and using them for monetary gain.  
    After she experienced one too many close calls, Elisa retired from that former life. She went to Max and asked him to give her a second chance, wanting to change her ways and follow in the footsteps of her parents. He proceeded to train her as his protégé and even helped her get a job at Burroughs University as an associate professor. With Max retired from the world of myth hunting, Elisa took up his position in the ranks, sometimes working directly for him.
    She flipped the switches once she reached the foot of the stairs. The lights illuminated the spacious basement. Walls were lined with ancient weaponry—swords, bows, staffs, daggers, and ranged weapons of all different shapes, sizes and originating from different cultures across the world.  
    Padded mats lined the floor, perfect for training. In the next room, there stood a row of target boards for practice with arrows or throwing knives. Another room linked to the main basement held free weights, exercise bikes, and punching bags.  
    Elisa approached the weapons and looked through her choices. The kukri daggers, as always, accompanied her wherever she went. She took several shuriken—Japanese throwing stars—from the wall and gathered them up in a small box. She opened the large suitcase held under the workbench and set the shuriken inside. Her hands lifted a khopesh, an Egyptian sickle-sword with a crescent blade that was held by a long hilt, and laid it beside the shuriken box.
    Next she picked out a hunga munga, an African melee and throwing weapon with a metal pointed blade that had a curved back section and a separate spike near the handle.  
    Elisa's final two weapons were a Chinese sheng bao or meteor hammer, two weights linked by a long cable which she wrapped up and laid down in the case. She followed with a kampilan sword, the longest of the Filipino blades. A single-edged sword with a tapered profile—narrow at the hilt and wide at the tip. The most interesting thing was the hilt itself, called the pommel, shaped to represent a mythical snake called the Bakunawa.
    With the weapons selected, Elisa took a pouch belt as well as various straps and laid them in the hard case atop the weapons. A few other pieces of equipment, such as light climbing gear completed the suitcase and she closed it up.
    Although she had used firearms in the past, she found them uncomfortable, by and large. Since her childhood, she had been trained in the use of ancient weapons such as these. Some, like Davalos, may feel comfortable with a pair of semi-automatic handguns, but she always felt guns were cumbersome and noisy and that the use of them lacked the same skill it took to fight with weapons used in close combat. After all, anyone with a good eye and a steady hand could fire a gun properly, but it took considerable more skill to use these older weapons.  
    The next step was a simple matter of buying a plane ticket online for a flight in two days to Mumbai. As Max said, he'd handle her transportation from the airport. With all the arrangements taken care of, now she just had to wait it out and hope that Lucas Davalos didn't have too much of a head start on her.  

C HAPTER 6

    At approximately five thirteen in the morning, Elisa Hill found herself detained by customs in Mumbai. Just happened to be her bad luck that she found