The Last Hunter: Collected Edition (Antarktos Saga #1-5)

“It’s us or him!”


“I don’t want to kill you,” I say with a grunt as an arrow forces me to twist around. A knife handle strikes my leg. For a moment I think I’ve been stabbed and take my eyes off of the hunters to look at the wound. I realize the distraction will probably cost me my life, but it doesn’t. Instead, the subtle downward shift of my head saves my life.

The arrow headed for my right eye grazes my forehead and pierces my hood instead, yanking it off my head.

But the sudden shift of my hood has removed my sunglasses as well. The bright sky and sun glaring off the snow blinds me. My eyes clench shut. I’m blind.

The girl shouts, “Father wait!” A knife flies toward me. I can hear it whipping through the air.

Father? Since when do father and daughter hunters work together?

I hear the twang of an arrow being shot.

The weapons will reach me simultaneously.

There is a loud crack in front of my face. I flinch away from it, wondering if I’ve been hit, but I haven’t yet felt the pain.

“Em, why?” the father says. I can hear him nocking another arrow, but he does not fire. “You cannot hesitate with their kind.”

“But that’s the problem,” she says, her voice devoid of the man’s German accent. I can hear her walking toward me. “He’s not their kind.” She stops next to me and whispers, “If you move I will bury my blade in your throat.” She takes hold of my hair and lifts it up. “He’s our kind.”

The man hustles toward me. “Don’t move. I’m too close to miss.”

“I’m not moving,” I say.

He stops above me. I can feel him looking at me. At my hair, but why?

“Show me your face,” he says.

I look up and try to open my eyes, but the brightness is unbearable.

“I do not recognize him, father,” Em says.

“What is your name?” the man asks.

“Solomon. Solomon Vincent.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was taken from here.” I point to the buried roof of Clark Station Two. “I stayed there. With my parents.”

“What kind of parents would bring a child here?” the man asks rhetorically. “When did this happen?”

“Time is different in the underground,” I say.

“The year,” he says.

“Nineteen eighty-eight.” Having answered, I can’t help but wonder, “How long has it been?”

“I’m asking the questions,” he says. “And if I do not like your answers, I will kill you.”

“Father…” Em says.

“Quiet, Em,” he replies. “We did not survive this long by entertaining guests.”

His attention shifts back to me. “Who took you? Who broke you?”

“Ninnis,” I say.

I hear the girl give a faint gasp.

“And your breeder? In the pit?”

“Gaia.”

Another gasp.

I feel the tip of the man’s arrow tickling my hair.

“And your master?”

I feel like the answer will be my death sentence, but giving another name might be just as bad. “Ull.”

“No…” The girl whispers.

“You speak lies,” the man says. “Ull would not lose another hunter. Certainly not one broken by Ninnis. It’s not possible.”

A single word repeats in my mind. Another. A puzzle begins to unravel in my mind. The man’s voice sounds old, but not quite as old as Ninnis. His daughter is young, but here that means little, especially because of the way the underworld modifies time. And he’s German. My mind flashes through pages of history books. Not a lot of people have come to Antarctica, and the majority of them have come in the past twenty years. In 1939, before World War Two, the Nazi’s sent a large expedition to Antarctica. Some speculate that they were looking for evidence of an ancient civilization. Atlantis even. Some think they built a secret base where many Nazis escaped after the war. No one really knows what they did, but several men were reported missing. I flash through their names and ages and pick the most likely candidate.

“Anything is possible, Tobias.”

He takes a step back, surprise disarming him for a moment.

“No one here knows my name,” he says.

“You came to Antarctica in nineteen thirty-nine with the Nazis. You were a pilot. Your plane crashed while mapping the interior. The two men serving with you were later discovered, dead. But your body was never found. Because you had been taken. And broken. And you became a hunter.” Images of Tobias handling the bow shift through my mind like a slideshow.

Another.

“Ull was your master, too. But you remembered yourself. You escaped with your daughter. And now you live on the surface, hiding from the hunters.”

I can hear nothing but the wind for a moment. Then a sound like a growl rises up, and he kicks me in the gut. “Breeder abomination!”