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

She speaks through gritted teeth. “The tattoo is given to people who are taken from the outside world and brought here.”


“But I was taken—”

“From Antarctica,” she says. “These are people taken from far away. From the other continents. Often from their homes. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, they’re marked with a tattoo. The one you described. It means…” She pauses to take a deep breath. “It means I wasn’t born here.”

The ramifications of this news are like a slap in the face. I take her hand. “Em, it means you have a family. A mother and father. Maybe even brothers and sisters.”

She pulls her hand away. “I already had those things.”

She’s right, of course. I’m now included in that family, but she hasn’t thought this through. “A family in the outside world means you have somewhere to go. Somewhere to take Luca. When you get him back, take him to McMurdo. Someone will help you. People are looking for you somewhere. People are—”

She takes her knife from me, slips it back in her belt and stands. “We need to keep moving.” She strikes out into the adjoining tunnel that will take us to Asgard, where we will be Ull and wife. If we are recognized there is the potential for trouble, and I must hide the fact that I’m there to see Aimee from anyone that we might come across. So I push Em’s harsh reaction from my mind and focus on the task at hand.

Be Ull, I tell myself.

Be ruthless.

Arrogant.

Strong.

Everything I’m not.

We’re dead, I think, and I follow Em toward Asgard, like a lemming over a cliff.





27



By the time we reach the outer fringes of Asgard, Emilie hasn’t said two words. The only way to know you’ve entered Asgard is the mark of Odin carved into the tunnel wall. Asgard isn’t like New Jericho—a city with buildings inside a giant cavern. It is a series of tunnels and chambers carved out of stone beneath a mountain. Ninnis once told me that if the snow ever melted, much of the city would be exposed. Daylight would pour in through windows. Fresh air would seep through the cracks. At the time, I found the notion disagreeable. Now, in the depths of the Earth, I wouldn’t mind a little fresh air. It might sweep away the stench of blood and rot that plagues this place.

Em stops and traces her fingers over the mark of Odin—three interlocking triangles—carved into the tunnel wall. She stares at it, remembering.

“I grew up here,” she says. “Trained here. With my fath—with Tobias. And Kainda. And Ninnis. Ull, too. I can’t say it was a happy place. We had no concept for that word. But when I lived within these walls, the halls of Asgard…” She looks at me. “I felt safe.”

I’m not sure what to say to her. Safety is an illusion in the underworld, especially in the presence of the Nephilim, who might randomly decide that you look delicious and eat you. I’ve never heard of that happening, but they eat their own young, so it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility.

“It was all a lie,” she says. “Everything they told me. About my mother. About my father. I never belonged here.”

“It wasn’t all a lie,” I say, surprising myself.

She whips an angry eye toward me, suspicious of why I’d say such a thing.

“Tobias loved you,” I say.

“He wasn’t my father.”

“This kind of thing happens a lot where I’m from. It’s called adoption. Children are adopted by a father and mother that aren’t biologically related. But they’re raised as though they were. And they’re loved just the same.”

“No one tells the child?”

“It’s up to the parents. Some do. Some don’t. But the ones that don’t usually have a reason. Maybe Tobias was protecting you from something?”

She pulls her hand away from the wall. “My father told me—told everyone—that I wasn’t born here, in Asgard. Or any of the cities. My mother, a hunter named Dalia, delivered me deep in the tunnels and died of childbirth complications. Tobias emerged from the tunnels with a baby girl and the story of Dalia’s death; no one questioned it. He raised me on his own. I suspect that’s why they gave Luca to him, too.”

“So he lied about your birth, to you, and everyone else.”

She nods slowly. “Outlanders that are deemed unfit are given to Behemoth.”

“Is it possible,” I say, “that your father and mother were meant to give you to the monster?”

She sniffs and wipes her nose. “I’ve never heard of a baby bearing the mark being kept.”

“Then his lie saved you,” I say.

She rubs the tattoo with her hand. “And now?”

“Now,” I say, puffing out my chest, “You are married to Ull, scourge of the underworld.”

A smile creeps onto her face. “C’mon, scourge, let’s get this over with so we can go be eaten like I should have been all those years ago.” She turns and steps past the mark of Odin, officially entering the halls of Asgard. “Sorry,” she says.