The Last Hunter - Lament (Book 4 of the Antarktos Saga) (2 page)

Many hunters, with the exception of those born hunters, like Kainda, were comprised of men and women who had been kidnapped, either from the outside world or from the surface of Antarctica. Their future mentors dragged the kidnapped victims underground and violently broke them. All memory of their lives before were blocked out and forgotten, hidden behind a mental wall forged by torture and starvation. Once broken, the victims could be remade into hunters, loyal to their Nephilim masters.

Ninnis kidnapped and broke Solomon. The boy became Ull the hunter, serving the Nephilim also known as Ull, son of Thor, son of Odin, leader of the Asgard warrior clan. But the boy’s memory later returned, and though damaged, Solomon became himself again—something that had never happened to a hunter before.

But it happened once since.

When the blood and spirit of Nephil healed and took control of Ninnis’s body, there was an unforeseen side effect. Memories of a life before Antarctica returned as flashes.

A smiling face.

A gentle kiss.

And a name.

Caroline.

His...wife.

His
real
wife.

Ninnis had been given a wife—a fellow hunter—in the underworld, but he did not love her. He did not love
anything
. She bore him a child, Kainda, but that was all. However, the woman he now remembered—Caroline—he loved her. Nephil claimed Ninnis, body and soul, but Caroline had done likewise long before.

The memories flickered through his mind as images, words and feelings that he couldn’t hold on to for more than a moment. He remembered Caroline. Her aquiline face. Her soft touch. Her existence. But he could not remember everything. Where they met. When they married. If they had children. And why he left such a woman to join the ill-fated expedition to the South Pole that brought him to Antarctica in the first place.

The incomplete memory of something so...beautiful caused him intense pain, far greater than anything he’d ever experienced. Because he detested it. Despite his reforming memories, he was still Ninnis, the hunter.

Ninnis had been the greatest hunter, feared and renowned by all others. For a time, he contained the very spirit of Nephil. He had attempted to exert his will over the spirit again, but it was no use. His weakness had been exposed.

Caroline.

The name came to him as a whisper, but not in his ear. It was the voice of Nephil, in his mind. Taunting him.

Caroline.

The emotional weight her name carried struck his heart like a sword. It filled him with regret. Made him weak. Controllable. But it also infused him with a deeper hatred than he had ever experienced before.

For Solomon.

The only time Ninnis found himself freed from the influence of Nephil was in his dreams, and his subconscious envisioned detestable violence against a sole victim. The boy.

There would come a time, he knew, when Nephil and the Nephilim warriors and hunters he once again commanded would find the boy. When they did, the dark spirit would leave Ninnis’s body to claim young Solomon, whose unique abilities had earned him the high honor of being deemed the true vessel of Nephil.

In that moment, when the spirit of Nephil fought to control Solomon again, the boy would be defenseless. That was when Ninnis would strike, and Solomon would die. Nephil might die along with him, but it was a sacrifice Ninnis would gladly make to have his revenge. Nothing else mattered.

So he stopped fighting for control.

He ceased replying to Nephil’s voice in his head.

And the beast forgot about him.

Ninnis watched Nephil’s progress through the underground, as he led a troop of hunters through the subterranean realm, searching for some sign of the boy’s passing. He listened to the plans being made, the reports being delivered and the battle plans that would bring destruction, first to the humans who had dared set foot on the Nephilim continent, and then to the rest of the world.

I could have found him already
, Ninnis thought to himself, careful not to let the boast reach Nephil’s consciousness. He had seen several clues already. A scuffmark on a cavern floor. The faint scent of the boy’s passing several days previous. He knew Solomon better than any other hunter. Most of the skills the boy employed had been taught to him by Ninnis. But Ninnis could not help Nephil. Offering advice would reveal he wasn’t as defeated as he seemed. So he waited.

And he watched.

Nephil, in the body of Ninnis, stood in a wide cavern, deep underground. Five hunters stood by his side. One of the men crouched by a shallow river that ran through the center of the cave. He sniffed the air. “They’ve been through here,” he said.

Nephil smelled the air. Ninnis detected Solomon’s scent, but Nephil knew nothing of tracking. “When?”

Days ago
, Ninnis thought.

Perhaps distracted by the god in their midst, the man said, “They’re just hours ahead of us.”

“Very good,” Nephil said.

The hunter brimmed with pride.

A lie
, Ninnis realized. The hunter sought only to elevate himself in the eyes of Nephil. So he exaggerated his claim, not realizing that he was merely sealing his own fate. The hunters who had failed to track down Solomon earlier had all been slain.
This group is not long for the world, either
, Ninnis thought,
unless
...

“Which way?” Nephil asked.

All five hunters scoured the cavern, searching for tracks—there wouldn’t be any—and smelling the air for a scent, which they found.

“Downstream,” one of them pronounced. The others quickly agreed.

Dead men all
, Ninnis thought.

Solomon had simply sent some article of clothing downstream, scoured himself clean in the river and then headed the opposite direction from the easily followed scent trail. It was a simple tactic. Had Nephil sent these hunters in pursuit of Solomon on their own, they would have seen through the ruse. But with lord Nephil in their midst, they were all but useless.

As Nephil looked around the cavern, Ninnis noted the glitter of glowing crystals, their light blue coloration and the rounded stalactites hanging from the ceiling. He knew this place. The river ran for hundreds of miles, casually snaking its way through the subterranean realm and ending at the great feeder graveyard where the bones of countless meals were discarded. As Solomon’s scent trail neared the graveyard, the overpowering stench of death would conceal it. The trail would end there, far away from the boy.

As Nephil followed the hunters downstream, Ninnis turned his thoughts in the other direction. If Solomon wasn’t heading downstream, he was heading upstream. Ninnis followed the path in his mind.

Olympus
, he thought.
Solomon is headed to Olympus
. He couldn’t conceive of a reason why, but if the boy could be caught within those ancient halls, surrounded by the likes of Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo and the worst of them, Ares, there would be no escape.

But Ninnis would not reveal himself or what he knew. He was a patient man. He believed he could wait for his vengeance. But he was wrong. Every step away from the boy fueled his outrage. When he could no longer contain his vehement disapproval for these hunters, Ninnis settled on a course of action, or rather, inaction.

It’s a false trail
, he thought calmly. The phrase was simple and lacked any trace of his true emotion. He thought it again and again, repeating it like a mantra until it filled the small portion of his mind to which he had retreated. He let it seep out slowly with the hope Nephil would notice the phrase and treat it as an original thought, rather than as Ninnis’s inner voice. If Nephil could just speak the words, these hunters would see the truth.

It’s a false trail.

It’s a false trail.

It’s a false trail.

“It’s a false trail,” Nephil said, seven days and nearly two hundred miles later. In the minutes that followed his realization, Nephil tore all five hunters apart and turned around.

1

“Get down!” I shout, but the warning comes too late. A ten-foot long albino centipede lunges from a hole in the cave wall, its mandibles flexed open and ready to snap shut on Kat’s face.

But Kat, aka Katherine Ferrell, is far from easy prey. In the short time I’ve known her, I learned that in the world before the cataclysm that rotated the Earth’s crust, repositioned Antartica to the equator and killed several billion people, Kat was an assassin. She is a skilled fighter, but is most dangerous from a distance, with a sniper rifle. In the modern world, she is a killer without match, but underground without a rifle and being tackled by an oversized monster unknown to her, she is out of her element.

Nevertheless, she reacts with skill and without fear. Falling backward under the long creature’s squirming girth, Kat takes hold of its mandibles, forcing the centipede away from her head, and keeping the deadly pincers from snapping shut.

Em, aka Emilee, the closest thing I’ve ever had to a sister, draws one of her many knives to throw at the creature, but she’s stopped by the actions of Steven Wright, who insists we refer to him by his last name.

Wright tackles the centipede and grapples with its body, but he’s unable to move the creature and ends up just hanging on while the thing bucks him around.

I raise my hand toward the melee, intent on separating the group by controlling the wind and smashing the centipede into the wall. But Kainda places her hammer—a human sized version of Thor’s mighty Mjölnir—on my arm and pushes it down.

I turn to her. “Why?”

“They need to learn,” she says plainly.

Through grinding teeth, Kat growls, “A little help!”

Kainda moves the hammer out in front of my chest, but it’s not needed. I don’t move. She’s correct. If Wright and Ferrell are to join us in the underground, they need to learn how to survive it, and overcoming this obstacle, which Kainda, Em and I could handle without breaking a sweat, is their violent initiation.

A knife appears in Wright’s hand. He jabs the body, punching the blade through the pale carapace. Thick, white innards seep through the puncture holes, but the creature is undaunted. Wright sweeps the blade along its body, severing fifteen of its limbs, but all he accomplishes is making the body slick with gore and removing his handholds. The centipede flings him to the floor, leaving Kat to face the beast alone.

With a grunt, she shoves the centipede back, draws her own knife and slices the thing’s throat. Only, it’s not the creature’s throat. It’s a sack of fluid the thing uses to predigest its food. Like saliva but far fouler smelling. On the bright side, nothing will pick up her personal scent for weeks.

“Ugh!” Kat says, as the fluid spills onto the black military fatigues that she wears. But she doesn’t slow. As Wright regains his feet and starts hacking at the creature again, Kat withdraws her blade, redirects it and plunges it up through the bottom of the centipede’s head, finding its small brain.

The centipede curls back, taking the knife with it, and flinging Wright to the cave floor once again. It twists and coils, writhing around in death throes before falling still.