The Alphas’ P**n Star Mate

Rodger

POV

My head was pounding. Cold coffee has been fueling me for the past few days as I sat in that disgusting room in the basement of the hotel, trying to make sense of the writings on the wall. "Here, boss," Kai sat down a steaming cup of green tea in front of me. He cut off my coffee consumption for the day, but I needed something. Decaf green tea will have to work for now. "Thanks, Kai."

"Yup," he stretched the back of his head, looking over the texts in the books I was studying. "Have you gotten any further?"

"Not much," I sighed. "These writings are not something I can just look up on Google. Scholars study for decades to even gain a minor understanding of what they could mean."

"So you have no idea what any of the writing on the walls says?"

I pointed to a group of pictures that looked like stairs, random oval-like shapes, and then a human-like figure. "This is a symbol for a type of goddess. It appears the most together, so it was easier to find references too, but everything else is a mess. It's like there are two or three different types of hieroglyphs here, and I only have a few sparse books on Egyptian."

"Then couldn't you look up goddesses that appeared in different ancient cultures? See if you get any hits on any of the other stuff?"

"You mean by using Google?" I scoffed with amusement. "Hey, if it works."

It was worth a shot. I pushed the textbook out of the way and opened my borrowed laptop again. Cindy brought it over a few days ago with a change of clothes for me, so I could get cleaned up while the Alphas had the pictures of Chloe dealt with. They were all taken down finally. I couldn't stomach being in that room with them up all around me, knowing I had failed to protect my daughter from such exposure.

She had been living under my protection. I protected her from nothing in the end. Nothing has changed.

Cindy also told me that Chloe knew. She knew I was her father and apparently had a meltdown during some meeting because of it. "Stormed out, she was so upset," were Cindy's words.

I can't really blame her, though it did hurt something awful to hear she took the news so negatively. I hadn't received a missed call, a text, or anything from her asking to speak either. It was eating away at me a bit more each day.

I need to figure this out more than ever. Who is this Mr. Smith really is and why he is after her so that I can do whatever it takes to stop him. I need to show in just one way that I have something redeemable in me as her father, so maybe she can accept the truth without anger one day.

"Oh, your sister called. She said that the dog creature we found in that huge jar was an ancient shifter, like a werewolf, but was only found in Northeastern Africa. She said the spell to determine how old it was finished early this morning. It died 1200 years ago." "That old? How did he preserve it for so long?"

"Magic. That's why the spell took her so long. She also said the sifter was female and was young when it died. She wants to do another spell to try and recover any lingering memories the thing might have, but she doesn't know if the head will last. It's starting to decay." "Great." A smelling dog's head in their house is sure to put both my sisters in good moods. They're already upset that I haven't gone to see Chloe yet ever since she discovered I am her father. Driana is under the impression that a simple conversation will resolve all my regrets and Chloe's resentments, but I'm far too much of a coward to test that theory just yet.

How can I simply just talk to her? What could I possibly say to her? Cindy had already said she was upset. I failed to protect her mother. I'm now failing to protect her.

I sucked down the tea, barely registering its temperature as the hot sting of remorse made my throat swell. A new bout of emergency was coursing through my veins, driving me to continue on in my search for something that could be useful.

"What's with all the weird snakes?" Kai asked out loud, looking at one of the jars left there by Driana. Most of the others were taken to her house. "Did you ever figure out what those were used for?"

"I barely got the word 'goddess' out of the scripts. There are pictures that could mean snakes, but they could also be for different sounds, so it is impossible for me to tell."

"Maybe he just likes snakes," Kai mused. "He seemed like a snake himself. I've never heard of a snake sifter before, but he makes me wonder the more I look around this place."

"I know what you mean." Snakes seemed to be a reoccurring theme with this man.

I continued scanning through all the hieroglyphics in different languages for all the different goddesses of ancient times, until my eyes landed on one. The symbols beside it were close to the ones written on the walls, but so were many of the others. That wasn't what stood out to me. It was an ancient statue beside the text of a voluptuous woman holding a staff that was in the shape of a snake. The caption of the picture read, 'THE GREAT GODDESS AND HER STAFF OF REGENERATION'

"Look at this," I called Kai over, and his eyes widened as he read the lines under the picture too.

"Is that what I think it is on her cane?"

"A snake? I think it is. Look at the top where she is holding it." The handle was definitely a snake's head, with a pair of eyes that seemed haunted even in statue form. The snake's head was a stark contrast to the statue's beauty. It really stood out.

"Mr. Smith had a cane shaped like a snake," he whispered. "Estel even mentioned it. She said something was off about it."

"What if that cane had something to do with his black magic being undetectable?" I thought out loud. "Storing magic in an object is an easy way to conceal it. She would have had to touch it to feel its effects."

"That would make sense. I'll go over the reports the Beta took again, and see if I can find her mention of the cane."

He found several statements from Estel, and even one from Boyd about the cane Mr. Smith always carried with him. He also found where Estel said the necklace reacted from touching Mr. Smith.

It was starting to feel like we were on to something.

We started going down the rabbit hole of links related to this Great Goddess and all the legends surrounding her. She seemed to be like a Mother Earth figure in mythology, relating to all the elements. In other myths, she was the goddess of rebirth or fertility. Some, she was a protector figure, taking on any form needed to protect a tribe or an ancient city. She even turned into a river in one story, and caused volcanoes to erupt when evil came over civilizations in another.

The rabbit hole was vast, and there was a lot to pick through. A lot of the myths were ruled out, but then others would send chills through my body.

In many of the myths, snakes were her deity. In some of them, the snake was her spouse, ruling the earth with her. In these, the snake spouse seemed to symbolize evil while she symbolized good, and the two ruled together to balance the world. These were the myths that we clung to the most. Squeezing every last conspiracy from all of them, even the ones that were the most far-fetched.

"Does this guy think he's some snake god?" Kai asked. "Maybe."

I opened a new page to another legend, one older than even the Egyptian and Roman ones we had been looking through. It wasn't even a real link at first, just a comment left by a reader on another article. I clicked the commenter's profile, and it brought me to a list of his other comments, and I found a link he had provided to someone else.

This guy looked to be some kind of independent researcher, running his findings off a blog instead of an actual website. Its review link had a picture of the same goddess with the snake staff that first caught my eye, which was why I had clicked it.

The blogs dated back decades, but luckily there were short entries submitted once every few months, like a public diary of the man's discoveries. The first post was the longest, with a detailed depiction of a goddess used by a snake god to try to produce his offspring. He seduced her, and even married her, but his evil intentions were made clear on the night of their wedding. She ended up killing herself to save the world from his destructive agenda, but there was a promise of rebirth due to her immortality. In his later research, he posted discoveries of this snake man still existing to this day, searching for a viable womb or the return of the goddess herself.

The creepiest thing about the entire blog was that it was filled with pictures of hieroglyphs like what was all over those basement walls. There were even two different pictures of rooms similar to this one, with multiple sources of heat like fire pits or furnaces, and nest-like structures on the ground. One of the pictures also had a large jar with the head of a bear and smaller jars of snakes around it.

"Kai. Read this and tell me what you think," I passed the laptop to him. But just then, the entire computer crashed, making the screen go black.

"What the hell," Kai hit the power button over and over again, but nothing happened. "What was it?"

"A guy's personal blog," I muttered, growing frustrated as the laptop continued not to work. "Damn it. I felt like that man was onto something big. I didn't finish reading it." "Something big, like a picture of Mr. Smith and what the hell he was up to? Because that would have been helpful."

"Almost. There were pictures that were very similar to what we found here. It can't be a coincidence."

"Do you remember the site?" Kai started to click on his computer to find a new search engine.

"No. I got there from a comment and link listed on another page. I don't even know where to look to find out."

"Well," Kai sighed, "I'm about as good at computers as you are. I don't know how to fix this."

"We'll have to get Cindy. It's his computer, anyway. I'm sure he can figure it out."