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

I get to my feet, clear my throat and motion to Kainda. “Mira, this is Kainda.” I shift my arms toward Mira. “Kainda, meet Mira.” I turn back to Kainda. “You know who she is and what she is to me.” Back to Mira. “Mira, Kainda and I are, you know...together.”


She looks at me, not understanding, but then her eyes go wide and she smiles. “Ohh, she’s your girlfriend.”

I start to nod, but then Kainda says, “I still do not know the meaning of this word. Girlfriend. I do not like it. It sounds weak.” She steps closer, into the light cast by a collection of blue stones. Her beautiful face, strong body and scant hunter’s garb are revealed. “I am his passion.”

Kainda speaks earnestly, na?ve to the meaning the word might convey to an outsider.

Mira doesn’t miss it. She gives a lopsided grin and says, “I bet you are.” She lowers the knife and ribs me with her elbow, “Not bad, Schwartz.”

“Schwartz?” Kainda says the name slowly. She’s never heard the nickname before. And I have no intention of explaining it now, not just because it embarrasses me, but because I’d have to explain the Spaceballs movie to someone who has never even seen a television. Winning the war against the Nephilim might be a simpler task.

“Never mind that,” I say. “What we need—”

“Wait,” Mira says. “I want a few answers, the first of which is, what—exactly—am I to you?”

“Huh?”

“You might have a perfect memory,” Mira says, “But mine is pretty good, too. You said, ‘you know who she is and what she is to me.’ So I would like to know who I am and what I am to you.” She crosses her arms. “If you don’t mind.”

This could take a while, but we’re safe here and I get the feeling that I’m going to have to spill the beans to fully gain Mira’s trust. I might be Sol to her, but she is no doubt rattled by her recent experiences. I rub my hand through my hair, trying to think of the best way to start. Do I begin with my kidnapping and do the chronological thing? Do I jump to recent events? I slap the side of my face a few times, lost in thought.

Kainda makes up my mind for me. She answers in her blunt way, delivering the truth like a missile. “You’re Hope.”

Mira scrunches up her face. “Actually, I’m Mira.”

I sigh. “That’s not what she meant.”

“Then what did she mean?”

“You’re...” I wander away, crossing my arms as I remember those years spent underground, in hiding, with nothing but a Polaroid photo of Mira and me for company. “You’re my hope.”

She looks even more flabbergasted when I turn around. “You might want to sit down, this is going to take a while.”

I start at the beginning. My birth. I tell her about her mother and the words she spoke to me at my birth, “You are a precious boy.” I do my best to summarize our trip, my kidnapping, breaking and transformation into Ull. I’m not sure she’s buying it all, but there are tears in her eyes. Even Kainda looks sullen and I realize she hasn’t heard me tell the whole story, starting from my birth and moving forward.

When I get to the final test I faced as Ull and reveal that I was the person who took her mother all those years ago, the tears disappear. But when I quickly relate what happened next, how her mother saved me and how we’ve been allied since, the tears return.

“You were just a kid,” she says, after I tell how I swallowed the physical body of Nephil, escaped from Asgard and killed the Nephilim, Ull, son of Thor—my master. “That you survived at all is a miracle.”

I’ve always been too busy feeling guilty about my failures to consider that most people would have died. I was strong without ever knowing it. But part of that strength came from the memory of the woman now sitting across from me.

I relate the rest of the story, trying to focus on major events, but I find myself talking for almost an hour. By the time I’m done, she’s heard it all. The photo. Tartarus. The Titans. Cronus. Hades. Kainda, Em, Luca and Xin. Everything. Including the angel’s proclamation about faith, passion, focus and hope, and my subsequent revelation that those qualities were, in fact, people—Em, Kainda, Kat and now, Mira.

To finish things off, I retell the story of her rescue and how we ended up in a cavern several hundred feet below ground.