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

The wind dies suddenly, as though finally accepting my presence. When I look up, I don’t see fire and brimstone. There’s nothing inherently Biblical or hellish about the place. An endless expanse of barren hills and gorges laid out beneath an angry orange sky. I can’t see any sun to speak of. This could be another planet. It could be underground. Or it could be something beyond my understanding.

I crane my head side to side and see nothing. Endless nothing. A deep sense of loneliness twists around inside me and makes a nice spot for itself in my gut. A shiver rises from my legs and shakes through my core. My body, it seems, has just remembered how it’s supposed to respond to freezing. My muscles twitch so hard I find it difficult to stand.

What’s the point of standing? I think.

There is no place to go. Despite the cold, I’m not going to die. In fact, I might already be dead. So I should probably just sit down, grit my teeth and wait for eternity to end.

A moment later, I shake so bad that I don’t have a choice. I fall down to my butt and pull my legs in close. But there is no escaping the cold. Nor the loneliness. This is the fate I chose when I stepped back into the gates of Tartarus. This is the sacrifice I made to save Luca. As I begin to weep, a shift in the orange sky at the horizon catches my attention.

There’s something there. Something different from the endless rolling stone hills and swirling sky. It’s sharp. And vertical. A tower, I realize.

I stay rooted in place. In this place, the tower can’t be a good thing.

But it’s something.

Where’s Ull? I wonder. Ull is my middle name, given to me by Dr. Merrill Clark, a friend of my parents, husband of Aimee Clark, whom I kidnapped and delivered to the Nephilim, and the father of Mirabelle Clark, the first girl I had any kind of romantic feeling for. But Ull became my one and only name after I was broken by Ninnis and turned into a hunter. I served the Nephilim Ull, son of Thor, before killing him, too. But ‘Ull’ is now how I identify that dark side of me—the side that enjoyed being a hunter. He is part of me, but also separate from me. In fact, we generally loath each other, though we worked together to force Nephil from my—our—mind. But I have yet to sense his ferocity, his strength. I fear that aspect of my personality has either been suppressed or removed. Ull’s passion would help me now, and I suspect helping someone, even a split personality, might be against the rules of this place.

With shaking hands, I dig into one of my pouches and take out the telescope given to me by Ninnis on my birthday, back when I was still Ull. I fight to extend the frozen metal as it clings to my skin. But I get it open and peek through the lens, careful not to let my eyeball touch, and flash freeze to the metal. The tower comes into view, still distant, but clearer. It’s not natural, I think. Someone built it. But why? And when? And for what purpose?

Where Ull is passionate, I am curious. And in this case, the resulting action is the same. I push myself up against the cold and set out toward the tall tower. I could probably figure out how far away it is, but have no need to figure out how long the journey will take.

I have eternity.





2



I wish I could say, “I can’t remember the last time I felt this desperate for warmth.” But I can’t say it. I remember everything. The last time I should have felt cold was a few years ago when I first climbed down the airplane stairs and stepped onto the Antarctic ice. I wore only pants and a long sleeve shirt. The cold should have stung me then, like it does now. But I felt nothing. Immunity to the temperature on, and under, Antarctica was the first manifestation of my connection to the continent. For the past several years, I’ve experienced the elements somewhere around seventy-five degrees, night or day, covered in snow or standing in a fire pit.

But now…

A shudder quakes through my body.

I push through it, walking in what I hope is a straight line, toward the distant tower now hidden by the rising grade before me.

As I walk up, I search my memories for warmth. Before coming to Antarctica, I was a cartoon junkie. At least, I was on Saturday morning, when the good cartoons were on. But it’s not the shows I focus on. It’s my afghan. My mother knitted the rainbow colored blanket for me and it rested at the end of my bed, every night of my life. My father turned down the heat at night, which left the downstairs bitterly cold on winter mornings in Maine. So the afghan found its way around my shoulders most winter mornings and warmed me while I ate my cereal, watched cartoons and drew.

The memory warms my heart, but does little to improve my physical condition. I’ve heard that just thinking about fire can warm your body, but I’m now positive that’s a bunch of malarkey.