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

With the door closed I sit on the bed and weep silently. Aimee sits next to me and rubs my back. Her affection only makes me cry harder, but I think that’s what I need—to pour the vileness out. The tears are purifying.

Thoughts of my father and how we parted fill my thoughts. “My father,” I say.

Her hand pauses on my back. “Misses you horribly. As does your mother.”

“They believe I’m dead?”

After a pause, she whispers, “Yes. They stayed for a year searching for you.”

I remember seeing them now. Looking through the telescope. They looked so sad. A sob escapes my mouth. I know how heartbroken they must have felt. I’m feeling it now.

“You’ll see them again,” she says confidently, but it’s hard to believe.

It’s ten minutes before I’m able to speak again. “I’m sorry. For taking you.”

“I forgive you,” she says with missing a beat.

“Why?”

“You weren’t yourself.”

This is true, but, “If I had been stronger, this wouldn’t have happened.”

She turns my face toward hers. Dry white lines streaking over her cheeks from her eyes reveal she’s been crying too. “What did they do to you, Sol?”

I relate the story as best I can, concentrating on the important events: the night I was taken, my time in the pit, my first kill, my training, the three tests that ended with her capture. She listens to it all silently, reacting to everything with an array of facial expressions. When I’m done, tears fill her eyes again.

“My poor child,” she says, touching my cheek with her hand. “Why? Why did they do all this to you? Who are they?”

“I think you know who they are,” I say.

“The men of renown,” she guesses.

I nod.

“The Nephilim?” She shakes her head. I can see she thinks it’s impossible, but she looks around the room, seeing the reality of things. She can’t explain it. “But how?”

I relate the story Ninnis told me. About the Nephilim living among men, how they were worshipped, how they were our heroes, and then how we eventually turned against them and drove them away. “We pushed them underground,” I say. “And they’ve been living here since.”

As I relate the story, I feel a stirring of sympathy for my masters.

They’re not my masters!

I feel an invisible hand clutch my throat. They still have some hold on me. Like a trapdoor spider, everything they turned me into is waiting for my guard to drop. Then it will strike out, fill me with poison and consume my soul again. Ull, the hunter, is fighting for dominance.

I clear my throat and tense my body, mentally shoving Ull down deeper. Never again, I think. I will never be you again.

“Sol,” she says, “That’s not who the Nephilim are.”

I look at her like she’s crazy. Of course that’s who they are. Ninnis told me.

Ninnis is a liar!

Ninnis is your friend.

“No,” I say aloud.

She takes my shoulders. “I don’t know all the details, only what Merrill has told me. Which is actually quite a lot. But I’m not an expert.”

Merrill. Merrill is my friend. Merrill can be trusted.

NO!

Listen to her.

I clench my eyes shut, willing the voice of Ull to shut up.

I am Solomon. I am Solomon.

“The Sumerians believed they were gods. That much is true. And they record that the Nephilim were also referred to as the Elohim and Anunnaki, both of which mean: those who from Heaven to Earth came.”

“Heaven?”

She gives a quick nod.

I fail to hide my skepticism. I’ve seen and experienced the unbelievable, but Heaven? When I speak, my voice is layered with doubt. “Angels?”

She shakes her head and actually manages a small grin. “No, Sol. Not angels. Angels that come to earth, and make their home here are—”

“Demons,” I say. This word rings true. There is nothing heavenly or angelic about my mast—the Nephilim. They are, in every way, demonic. But are they really demons? Fallen angels? I still don’t think so. “The Nephilim aren’t demons.”

“You’re right,” she says. “They are the children of demons. The heroes of old. The men of renown. There is more to that quote, you know. ‘The Nephilim were on the Earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God (demons) went to the daughters of men (human women) and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.’ There are several more references to them in the Bible, but that’s just one ancient text. There are records of the Nephilim in every ancient culture on Earth. Stories of giants with red hair—”

She takes my hair in her hand and holds it out for me to see. The blood red color makes me sick. I can now remember my real hair, so blond it was almost white. Like Andy Warhol.

“—half human, half animals, double rows of teeth, horns, and strange means of transportation. There are carvings of them all around the world created by cultures separated by thousands of miles and uncrossable oceans. The Nephilim once ruled over mankind, Sol.”

“Then what happened?”

“A flood.”

“The flood?” My skepticism is brewing again. “Like in the Bible?”

She nods. “But not just the Bible. The Sumerians divided time into two Epochs.”