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

She looks back, meeting my eyes with hers. Her dark brown eyes look almost black, perfectly matching her tied-back hair. “You would do far more for me.” She scrunches her nose and then corrects herself. “You have done far more for me.”


I want to kiss her. The moment is perfect. Her face looks soft. And her tan body, clad in the scant coverings of a hunter, has a sheen of sweat mixed with humidity that makes her glow. Focus, says the voice of Kat in my head.

Focus, I tell myself. Mira is in danger.

I pull my eyes away from Kainda and search the jungle around us. The trees—a species unknown to me—rise hundreds of feet into the air, their branches twisting and splitting into a thousand different directions. They remind me of when I used to drop ink onto a page and blow it with a straw. But the diamond-shaped leaves are sparse, and large patches of sunlight beam to the ground, allowing thick vegetation to grow. Moving through this jungle on anything but this path would be very time consuming...unless...

I look up. “Let’s take the high road.”

Scaling the tree’s craggy bark is a simple thing. Soon we’re moving through the jungle faster, more silently and without any fear of being set upon by an ambush. Not that we see one. It appears that whoever left the tracks is just sloppy.

Twenty minutes and a little more than a mile later, the trail splits ninety degrees in either direction, skirting the base of a cliff. We climb down to the jungle floor and inspect the tracks.

“They head in either direction,” Kainda says. “And they’re all equally fresh.”

“She could have been taken in either direction,” I say.

“We need to split up.”

I don’t like this idea, at all. Not because I don’t believe Kainda is capable of rescuing Mira on her own, or that I don’t trust she really wants to. But there are some things in the jungle that she can’t handle alone, and if I manage to find Mira, but lose Kainda, I won’t be any better off than I am now. Before I can say any of this, I spot something that keeps me from having to.

I quickly inspect the tracks on one path, and then move to the second.

“What is it?” she asks.

I ignore her, and move back to the path leading up to the T junction. “There they are,” I say.

“What?”

“The lion tracks.” I point to the large paw print.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she says, while I move to the path leading to the right. “Do you think this could be the lion from Edinnu? What did you call him?”

“Ookla,” I say, before pointing to the path. “No lion prints.”

I move to the path leading to the left.

“Do you think this could be Ookla?” she asks. “And other creatures from Edinnu?”

“No,” I say. I point to the path. “No lion prints.”

“How do you know?” she asks, sounding frustrated at being dismissed so quickly.

“Because,” I say, stepping closer to the rock wall and looking up. The cliff rises higher than I can see, stretching up into a bank of clouds. “I don’t remember Ookla being able to fly.”





2



“Fly?” Kainda says. She’s about to ask what I’m talking about, but then seems to understand. She glances at all three trails. “The lion tracks stop here.”

“And since there are no tracks through the jungle, no tracks heading back or into the trees, there is only one direction left to go.” I look up.

“I don’t see how this helps,” she says. “Now we have three choices instead of two.”

“We need to go up,” I say.

“Is that what your instincts tell you?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say, hoping she doesn’t hear the lie. The truth is, lions have sharp claws and big teeth. If Mira is with the farm animal gang, I’m a little less afraid for her, but if she’s with the flying lions, well, that’s a bigger problem.

Kainda steps up to the wall and lifts herself up.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“The climb will take most of the day,” she says. “I don’t want the sun to go down while I’m a thousand feet above the ground, do you?”

“Who said anything about climbing?” I say. She flinches when I pluck her from the wall and put her back on the ground. If I’d been anyone else, I’d be dead right now. The look on her face says I still might be.

I put my hands on her hips.

“You’re testing my patience,” she says.

“You love it,” I say.

She tries to squelch a smile, but fails.

“Hold on,” I say.

She puts her hands on my shoulders. When a sudden wind kicks up around us, she’s pressed up against me. My hands slide around to her back and her arms wrap around the back of my neck. The embrace distracts us both and by the time I open my eyes, we’re a hundred feet off the ground and climbing.