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

Kainda picks the most obvious reply. “She has legs.”


She’s right, of course. Mirabelle Whitney, daughter of Merrill and Aimee Clark, has legs. She could have walked out on her own, but when I saw her here, through the eyes of Amaguq the shifter, who had impersonated Mira and who would have killed me if not for the sacrifice of Xin, she didn’t seem hale enough to get far. The shifter had beaten her, near to death, before taking her form. That she survived is a testament to her strength, but escaping this cave in her condition doesn’t seem possible. Still, it did take us three days to reach the cave. A lot could have changed in that time.

Part of me is angry at myself for not arriving sooner, but we really couldn’t have traveled any faster. Grumpy and Zok, a pair of large cresties—my personal term for the green with maroon striped Crylophosaurs that populate the continent—moved at a sprint for a full day before nearly collapsing. Kainda and I considered continuing on foot, but the ground covered by the cresties was far further than we could go on foot, even without resting. So we stayed with our dinosaur companions, traveling faster and conserving our strength.

The cave is a quarter mile below ground—a shallow hole by hunter standards, but it’s slick with moisture and moss, and it’s coated in jagged stones. If she managed to climb out, she will have left a trail.

I sniff the air first. The scent of vegetation decomposing is the strongest, followed by a faint trace of human blood—Mira’s—and then something else. A lingering odor that is unfamiliar to my nose. I sniff again. “What is that?”

Kainda breathes in, long and deep, through her nose. She lets the air out, looking confused. “I have no idea.”

This is disconcerting. Kainda has been a hunter far longer than me and has experience with everything this continent has to offer, both natural and unnatural.

“Something from the outside world?” she asks, smelling the air again.

I shake my head. The scent is decidedly non-human. “It’s not Amaguq, either.” I got a big whiff of him before I removed his head. I can detect traces of the shifter, but they’re not strong. “I don’t think it’s just one scent.” I try to separate the commingling tang. It’s a bouquet of stink unlike anything I’ve smelled before—part Nephilim, part animal—like rotten milk and musk. It’s far too well mixed for me to sift through.

“There were at least eight of them,” Kainda says.

Surprised that she could get this out of the scents, I turn and find her crouching over a patch of moss.

“They weren’t too careful, either.”

I squat next to her and look at the moss. It’s been trampled. But the marks are confusing and unfamiliar. “What are they?”

Kainda just looks bewildered.

Looking more closely, I spot something familiar, but out of place. “That looks like a hoof.”

She nods. “Like Pan’s feet.”

We nod in unison. Pan, the Greek god of shepherds, flocks and music had goat-like legs and hooves. In that way, he was unique from other warriors I have seen. He kept a flock of human prisoners, eating them one by one until we freed them, gave them guns and sent them to the U.S. forward operating base. But Pan didn’t leave these footprints. The first indicator is that these prints are far too small. The second is that Pan is very dead. After Wright removed the protective metal band from Pan’s forehead, Em buried one of her blades in it—the Nephilim’s only weak spot. The only other way to kill them is to drown them...or cut off their heads entirely.

Thinking of Wright and Em twists my gut for a moment. Wright was a U.S. Army Captain who joined my small strike force along with his wife, Katherine Ferrell, a freelance assassin who worked, off the record, for the same government Wright served openly. Wright gave his life for our quest to locate the Jericho shofar, staying behind to fight an army of hunters and Nephilim while the rest of us fled. Katherine, who prefers to be called Kat, managed to forgive me for leaving him and was eventually identified as my Focus, by the Kerubim, Adoel, guardian of Edinnu, the mythological Garden of Eden.