In Love with a Jackal

12.

With heavy legs I trudged up the rocky steps, my thighs burning a little bit more with every step I took. As we got closer and closer to the top of the mountain, the hiking path had not only grown steeper but also significantly more difficult. While I had already downed two water bottles, taken three breaks and had stripped my top off down to my sports bra to get this far, Anubis had not even broken a sweat.

Somehow he always managed to remain a couple of steps infront of me, never breaking his stride unless I fell too far behind for him to keep me in his field of view. As I struggled hard to keep the pace, I watched him as he causually picked his way along the path ahead of me, his feet somehow always able to find the right place without even looking down. It kind of felt unfair.

What felt more unfair though, was the fact that this common tourist attraction of a mountain possessed a lift and that I  hadn't been allowed to use it. Instead Anubis had forced me to follow this older and lesser known hiking path, so adeptly marked with an enterance sign that read "δύσκολος - DIFFICULT".

Despite having lived in Athens for the greater part of a year, trying to help Anubis find this place made me quickly realize that I knew embarrasingly little about where I lived. In the end it had taken the combined brain power of Youmna and two other colleagues of hers, to figure out the location he had been trying to explain to me for about 30 minutes before they decided to intervene and help me find what I'd told them was a "niche tourist destination for intermediate to skilled hikers".

After much discussion and lots of googling, they had been able to narrow it down to this small tourist site on the mountain inside Parnitha National park, on the northside of the city. All the while they had researched, I'd just sat there, listening to them talk as I sipped on my coffee, trying hard to pretend that I was fine and not traumatized from the three near death experiences I'd had not even an hour earlier.

Despite promising Anubis that I would help him immediately, there was no way I could just vanish in the middle of the day without atleast some preparation beforehand. So, with each of our coffees in hand and regardless of how much I dreaded more people meeting Anubis, I had taken him back up to the shared student office.

It was of course in the office, where I then came across Youmna and the colleagues that would later come to my aid. They had been more than happy to meet the fiance everyone somehow already knew was with me today.

To my luck, the introduction ended up going over way smoother than I'd anticipated, based on the fact that they had all been too bamboozled by Anubis's looks to notice anything else amiss with him. It was also then that I realized that eventhough Anubis sadly looked like someone that would be my type, I was very much not his.

For someone else's fiance, he had been way too delighted at the sight of Youmna and it had pissed me off. Not because I cared if he liked Youmna, or me, or anything, but because after everything that had happened, I still couldn't deny that he was hot.

And I mean, this guy had trapped me in his curse, threatened me and forced me to help him. He didn't deserve for me to find him attractive after all of that!

Cutting that initial conversation with Youmna and her colleagues short, I'd taken Anubis straight to my desk, where he'd filled me in on some details that were the opposite of calming, as I once again wrote another brain hurtingly bad email to my professor.

Turns out the reason Anubis had hunted me down at university, was because upon waking this morning he'd  discovered his power of teleportation were fading. Similarly his connection with other gods and entities was murky to say the least. And worst of all, he finally truly admitted in his own words this time, that he really didn't know what the fuck was going on.