The Last Hunter - Collected Edition (72 page)

12

I dream of home. Of the house I grew up in. I’m in the front yard. Small details leap out at me. The tall tree that arcs over the street is heavy with the red buds of early spring. Its thick bark peels off in great chunks, perfect for building action figure forts. A slab of sidewalk is lifted up by the tree’s roots, perfect for jumping bikes. The puddles in the driveway are the same familiar oblong shapes, filled by a recent rainstorm and full of wriggling worms drawn out by the moisture. After the puddle evaporates, they’ll die and dry out—food for the ants.

I breathe deeply and catch several distinct scents: salty ocean air, the residue of the red berries growing on the evergreen shrubs, melted crayons and cut grass. I’m sitting on the stairs to the front door. There are eight of them. Chipping black paint curls up from the cast iron railings. I peel off a flake and snap it between my fingers until all that remains is dust.

Everything about this place feels familiar.

Safe.

I’m suddenly gripped by sadness, as deep and profound as any I have felt.

My old friend is dead
. The thought pulls tears from my eyes and as the saline slides down my cheeks, a snowflake drifts down and settles on my knee. It’s joined by a second. And a third. And now the sky is full of white. A blizzard.

My first blizzard was in nineteen seventy-eight. I was four, but I remember watching the storm in amazement, my breath fogging the windows as the snow slowly grew taller than me and then taller than my father. This storm is worse. In minutes, I’m buried up to my waist. The neighborhood around me is reduced to a solid sheet of white, as though erased from the page.

My old friend is dead
, I think again.

The cold shakes my body, just a shiver at first, but then violently.

I don’t want to leave
!

I want to be home
!

I want this life
!

“Solomon,” Kainda says, shaking me awake.

I blink my eyes, focusing on her face, and for a moment, I’m not happy to see her. The faint memory of ocean air is destroyed by the strong scent of Nephilim blood. I remember my childhood home perfectly. But at times, it is a curse. My dreams can recreate the past so realistically that I feel like I’ve just been there. The memory of that place clutches my heart. Tears, real this time, drip down my cheeks.

“Solomon,” Kainda says with uncommon softness. “What’s wrong? Who died?”

“W—what?” I ask. Did the others somehow experience my dream?

“You spoke of someone dying. An old friend.”

I don’t feel like explaining. “Just a dream,” I say, wiping away the tears with my bare arm. “Wasn’t even a person.”

With the last pangs of regret fading along with the dream, I sit up. Em and Kat aren’t far away. They’re helping Wright get to his feet. Kainda offers me her hand. I take it and stand.

“What happened?” Wright says, rubbing his head. “Feels like I got hit with a hammer.”

“Me, too,” Kat says.

I can tell by Em’s squinted eyes that she feels the same, though she’d never admit it, at least not in front of other hunters. Kainda probably has a headache, too, but she’s so stubborn and tough that she’s managed to erase any sign of pain.

“How about you?” Kainda asks me. “Is your head—”

I smile at her continued concern.

“What?” she says defensively.

My smile widens.

She grunts and says, “Shut-up.”

“My head is fine, by the way,” I say before stretching. “Slept like a baby.”

Kainda eyes me and with all humor gone from her voice, and asks, “What happened?”

The others hear the question and come closer. They’d all like to know.

“Hades,” I say. All of them tense at the name.

“He was here?” Em asks.

I nod. “Put the four of you to sleep with that purple powder.”

“The four of us,” Wright says. “What about you? You were sleeping, too.”

“Oh, I was just tired,” I say. Four sets of glaring eyes tell me I need to elaborate on that statement, and fast. I point to the next room, which is now full of drying Nephilim blood. “I was in there.”

Kainda is the first to realize the implications of the plasma-coated ceiling, floor and walls. “In
there
? How?”

“Like this,” I say. Their faces, when they turn around and see me hovering a few feet above the floor, are priceless. What I wouldn’t give for Mira’s Polaroid camera right now.

“You...can fly,” Kat says, sounding dubious.

“I didn’t know, either,” I confess. “But I didn’t have much of a choice. It just kind of happened.”

Kainda stays on task, nonplussed by my new ability. “But you spoke to Hades.”

“Yes,” I say. “And he’s not as bad as everyone thinks, or rather, as he wanted everyone to think.” I tell them about my encounter with the giant, summarizing as best I can.

When I skim past his instructions about the shofar’s location, Em asks for more details. I explain Hades’s warning about mind readers and she and Kainda agree. We’ll figure out each step as we go along. Knowing the location ahead of time could be dangerous, especially if one of us is captured on the way.

I reach the end of my story, explaining how my energy waned, how Hades caught me and laid me on the floor with the others. When I mention Cerberus, neither Em nor Kainda show any recognition. Wright and Kat, however, go wide-eyed for what must be the thousandth time since they arrived on the new world of Antarktos.

“Seriously?” Kat says. “A giant three-headed hound?”

I shrug. “It wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve seen. But it’s something or someone none of us has seen before. So, if you happen to come across a three headed...something, maybe be sure it’s trying to kill you before shooting at it.” Then I finish my story with, “Ave atque vale. That’s what he said when he left. It’s Latin, but I’m not sure what it means.”

“Hail and farewell,” Wright says.

“You speak Latin?” Kat asks, sounding surprised.

“It’s from the Army,” he explains. “When a new commander takes over, there is a dinner where the previous commander speaks those words. It’s a sign of honor to the new leader and a goodbye. Historically, the words have been spoken to generals, sometimes kings.”

There’s that word again. King. I ignore it with a casual shrug and say, “Weird.”

All four of them turn to me like I’ve just farted.

Em shakes her head. “Hades, the most feared of all Nephilim, honors you as a new leader, perhaps a king—
his
king—and all you can say is, ‘weird?’”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” I say. “There isn’t time.”

No one argues the point, but I suspect this conversation will be continued at some other time.

“The shofar is deep,” I say. “Very deep. We’re going to have to move fast.”

“We’ve been moving fast,” Wright notes.

“Faster,” I say. “Time is...different in the underworld. What feels like a day could be a week. I spent two years down there and later found out that twenty years had passed on the surface.”

“Won’t we be discovered?” Kat asks. “Aren’t there hunters, and other...things looking for us?”

“If we’re fast enough, they won’t catch us by the time we reach the gates. After that, I don’t think anyone will follow us.”

“The gates?” Kainda says. “We’re not going to Tartarus?”

The fear in her voice seems out of place. Having seen the truth of Tartarus, I no longer view it as a land of eternal torture, but a place of freedom. Granted, to those unwilling to be separated from the burden of their personal darkness, it is a land of torture. But for those like Cronus, Hades and me, it is a paradise—a land of mercy, even for those born with the unfortunate circumstance of having a demon for a father.

“We’re not going through the gates,” I tell her. “We’re going past them. Deeper. I don’t know how, but we’ll figure that out when we get there. But we can’t stop. Time will not be on our side. If we linger, we might return to find the battle already lost.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Kainda says.

I turn to Kat and Wright. “Can you keep up?”

Kat just looks insulted.

Wright nods. “I survived hell week. This can’t be much worse.”

“I hope you’re right,” I say, and then head for the exit. I pause by the closed door. “Stay quiet until we’re out of Olympus.”

Wright pats me on the shoulder. “Then we’ll run like hell. Got it.”

Despite looking twenty years apart, Wright and I are the same age. I feel a kinship with him. In some ways, he reminds me of Justin. “Right,” I say, and then push the door open.

I take one step and stop. The open door has revealed two figures. One is fifteen feet tall—not quite a full-grown warrior, but close enough. He’s got long red hair bunched in messy dreadlocks. He holds a large double bladed ax in each hand, and he looks like he can use them.

The other is thin and wiry, like Xin, but green skinned and sporting tufts of wildly growing red hair. He’s dressed in rags, and seems to be covered in some kind of caked on muck. Given the odor rising off him, it could be something worse. His chosen weapon is...Whipsnap! I’m confused for a moment, but then recognize the stone mace and bone tip. He has the original Whipsnap that I created. This offends me deeply, like he’s taken an old friend of mine hostage, but I don’t linger on the weapon.

Something else has caught my eye. While I have never seen anything like these two before, they share a matching feature I know well.

Their blue eyes.

My eyes.

Like the thinker clone, these two share my eyes.

These are two of my three remaining duplicates. My stomach twists with revulsion. I felt the same thing upon discovering Xin was my duplicate, but he turned out to be a brother, more human than Nephilim despite his appearance.

But these two, the hatred in their eyes is easy to read. They are the hard-hearted sons of Nephil through and through.

The pair snaps into action. I’m not sure what they’re going to do, but I respond with overwhelming force, thrusting my hands out. A gust of wind flows past me. My whipping hair stings my forehead.

Then they’re airborne. Part of me wants to stay and take care of these two, but I hear shouting voices echoing from distant hallways. We are found.

“Change of plans,” I say to the others. “Run. Now!”

13

The slapping of feet on stone pursues us downward through the network of subterranean tunnels. The hunters giving chase have abandoned stealth. Their numbers have bolstered their confidence, and since we’ve given up stealth in our flight, tracking us is a simple thing. This has become a race.

Wright and Kat, who had been saving their flashlight batteries earlier, click their lights on, illuminating our path. Kainda, Em and I don’t need the flashlights, having long since grown accustomed to the pitch black, but the light brings out details that would normally remain hidden and allows us to pour on the speed.

Our path is winding, but downhill. There are more direct routes to the gates of Tartarus, but they would be tight fits for a group of five and might require squeezes that Wright and Kat are not accustomed to navigating. So I stick to the under-ground’s version of a freeway, following a shallow stream that was once a raging river. The stream leads toward Asgard and more familiar territory. It eventually merges with a larger river—what I call the High River. In the past, it flowed to a waterfall that emptied out in the massive chamber containing the ruins of New Jericho. But the last time I saw that cavern, after leaving Tartarus, it was nearly flooded. If we can make it to the water, we’ll be okay. Hunters are good at many things, but swimming, since there is little call for it, is not one of them.

Several miles into our downward run, I slow to a walk and sniff the air.

“What are you doing?” Kainda says, sounding urgent and confused.

“Trying to get a sense of the—”

“Is your nose not working?” she says, taking a deep breath through her nose. “They are nearly upon us!”

“If it makes you feel better,” Wright says, his hands on his knees, his head lowered. “I can’t smell a thing.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “We’re safe for now. You can only smell them because I am pulling the air toward us more quickly. They’re miles behind us now.”

“I thought you hunters were supposed to be real hotshots,” Kat says. She looks winded, but ready to keep going if need be. “How come they can’t keep up?”

Em smells the air. “Because they’re not trying to catch us anymore.”

I nod. “At least half of them have separated from the main group, though the two...creatures are still with them.”

“It’s a trap,” Wright says, doing a half way decent impression of Admiral Ackbar from
Return of the Jedi
.

The quote and memories of seeing the movie with my father and Justin makes me laugh. Wright and I are definitely part of the same generation.

“Seriously?” Kat says. “You’re quoting movies?”

“The point is,” I say, “Sooner or later, we’re going to be cut off. Those that make it ahead of us will try to stall us long enough for the rest to catch up.”

“Hunters working together, against us,” Em says. “This isn’t normal.”

She’s right. Hunters typically think only of themselves, at least while they’re still loyal to the Nephilim. They must have a very good reason to cooperate. “It’s Ophion.”

“Who?” Em and Kainda ask together.

“Nephil. Ophion was his original name. He’s a Titan, like Cronus, one of the first twelve born of human mothers and demon fathers. He must have promised rewards, or more likely threats. They’re being compelled.”

“Which gives us an advantage in combat,” Wright says, standing back up. “They might be moving together, but they’re not going to fight together. Not like us.”

“Right,” I say, starting downward again, though at a slower pace. If the group behind us starts closing the distance, we’ll speed up, but I don’t want us to be exhausted when the hunters, who are likely already ahead of us, spring their trap. “Just steer clear of the two clones, if—”

“Clones?” Wright says, sounding surprised.

I’ve tried to fill Wright and Kat in on as much as I could since I met them. I left nothing out, including my explanation of Luca, Xin, the thinker clone and the three mystery clones, all created in a failed attempt to duplicate my abilities. So he understands the implications of what I’ve said. He just hadn’t seen it.

“Are you sure?” Em asks.

Apparently, neither did she.

Kainda shakes her head, looking angry and confused.
None of them noticed.

“The eyes,” Kat says. “They had your eyes.”

“That’s all they have,” I say. “I should have killed them before we ran.”

Silence falls over the group as we jog downhill for what feels like several hours, merging with the High River’s vast tunnel, full of stalactites and stalagmites, and continuing down. I can still smell the group following us. When we slow, they slow. They’re keeping what they believe is a safe distance, so they won’t be detected. They’re following our scent trail, left every time we step on the stone floor, determining our distance by the odor’s strength.

Wright jogs up next to me. The glow of his flashlight bounces over the terrain ahead with each step. “So I think I have this time paradox licked.”

It’s the last thing I’m expecting him to say, and I stumble when I glance at him.

He looks at his watch. “We’ve been running for
twelve
hours. I’ve never run for twelve hours straight before, have you?”

“Occasionally,” I say, recalling the times I have fled for my life in the underworld.

“Down here, right?”

I nod. Good point.

“I’m tired, but I’m not about to collapse,” he says. “I should have passed out from exhaustion long before now. And I sure as hell shouldn’t be able to have a conversation right now. So my mind perceives the passage of time the same way it would on the surface, just like my wrist watch. But my body perceives time differently. I feel like I’ve been running for an hour. Not twelve.”

His observations are sound. I’ve experienced these things in the past.

“But, here’s the kicker. Assume we’re the world’s best marathon runner, able to complete a twenty-six mile race in just over two hours. Hell, lets round it to two hours. I’m no good with math.”

I smile and don’t bother telling him that I am, in fact, good with math. I sense he’s getting somewhere and don’t want to ruin his train of thought.

“If a marathon runner could keep up the pace for twelve hours he would travel...”

When his pause lingers, I say, “One hundred fifty-six miles.”

He shakes his head at the absurdity of it all. The idea that we’ve run so far is—I gasp.

Wright smiles. “You’re figuring it out? Using that memory of yours?”

When I run, I subconsciously count my steps. I always have. Since leaving Hades’s chambers, I have taken one million, two hundred twenty six thousand, nine hundred and sixty steps. With an average three-foot stride, that’s three million, six hundred eighty thousand, eight hundred and eighty feet. Divide by five thousand two hundred eighty feet in a mile and you get, “Six hundred ninety-seven miles.”

Wright smiles. “Which is—”

“How far we could travel in two and a half days on the surface if we maintained the pace twenty-fours a day and never took a break.”

“A little more precise than my guess, but yeah. So now we know that two and half surface days have passed in the last twelve hours.”

“But the effect grows more significant the deeper we go.”

“Then it’s been growing more significant this whole time. As long as you keep moving, and counting your steps, we can figure out how much time has passed.”

He’s right. It won’t work if we’re standing still, but we can guesstimate how much surface time has passed based on the number of steps we’ve taken. Our minds and bodies don’t perceive actual time down here, but miles are miles and it takes the same number of steps to cover them.

A distant sound tickles my ears. The rushing water of the High River sounds muffled ahead. Quieted. I pull the air from below toward us and smell it. Water and stone. That’s all there is. There are no hunters cutting off our passage.

I test the air from behind, counting the seconds it takes the hunting party’s scent to reach me. My eyes go wide. “They’re closing in.”

“Are the others near by?” Kainda asks, testing the air. “I smell nothing.”

“No,” I say, “they’re gone.”

“Gone?” Em sounds flabbergasted. It doesn’t make sense to any of us.

Then we reach the strange silence of the river and everything is clear. The downward sloping tunnel ends at a flat pool of water that rises several feet by the minute as the river adds to it.

The New Jericho chamber has fully flooded and the waters are rising up toward the surface. There’s at least a half mile of water between us and the chamber and then several more to cross to the other side.

“This is the trap,” I say.

“What about the—”

I cut off Em’s idea, saying, “The side tunnels leading to New Jericho will be flooded, too. To get to the gates, we need to backtrack—”

The sound of slapping feet on stone rises in the distance.

“—through them.”

Wright and Kat are quick to take up positions behind a pair of boulders, aiming their modern weapons up the tunnel. Wright looks at me. “You don’t kill people, right?”

“I don’t,” I say, though I’m not sure how we will escape this if I don’t. I think he’s about to tell me as much, but then he says, “Then you focus on the two clones and we’ll take care of the hunters. I have no qualms about taking them out.”

“Nor do I,” Kainda says, unclipping her hammer.

Em draws two knives. “Nor I.”

Kat looks down the site of her rifle. “I think you all know where I stand.”

I’m glad for their willingness to take that burden from me, but I would still like not to kill these hunters. They aren’t our enemies. They just haven’t figured that out, yet. But if I hinder the others’ ability to defend themselves, it’s likely that some or all of them will die. The worst part is that we’re in such tight quarters I’m not sure if I can use my powers without also affecting my friends.

I remove Whipsnap from my belt and prepare to fight the first real battle of the war for Antarktos.

And the world.