A brilliant researcher and professor of archeology and folklore studies, Dr. Jacob Engel is a man who prefers to be left alone. His life went off the rails badly at age thirty-five, when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Desperate to live, he agreed to experimental treatment. During that treatment, he was placed in an induced coma, and while there, had one heck of a crazy dream with a gloriously beautiful woman who had four wings and an apparently carnal desire for him. Absorbed in his fight to stay alive, he kept the sensual memories of that dream, but thought little of it – until she showed up at his door four months later with a sickly baby boy.
Jacob treasures two things: his life and his intellect. He had no time for a baby, but had no idea what to do other than care for the thing. He hated it. But he couldn’t deny it was his son. The boy – named after Alexander the Great – grew beautiful but sickly, enchanting to look at, but in the hospital nearly as much as Jacob himself. He was already one of the less than 7% who survived pancreatic cancer past year one, but that wasn’t enough. He needed more time. Jacob knew he had something valuable with this impossible son, and also knew how to take advantage of it: his extensive knowledge of myth and archeology allowed him to find one of the few remaining entries to the land of Death, who calls himself HadesHis father, Cronus ate him, for reasons unknown; his sister Dis defeated Cronus and freed him, but he wasn’t right when he.... Jacob traded his four-year-old son, AlexAn impossibility. Half-Broken, half-Ever-Dying, it seems he was conceived in a dream., to Death for extra years, and went back to his struggle to live without looking back. As far as Jacob was concerned, all the effort he’d put in to caring for his only son finally paid off.