The Last Hunter - Pursuit (Book 2 of the Antarktos Saga) Page 5

I don’t give Xin time to finish his query because by the time he does, Nephil and Ull will have figured it out, too. I don’t need to force Nephil back into the old door. I just need to make a new one. Raising my hands out to either side, the walls of my mind stretch out, wrapping around Nephil and Ull.

  The blackness of Nephil swoops through the air, heading straight for me with a roar. Ull charges beside him, teeth gritted with anger, but eyes filled with fear. He realizes what’s about to happen and it actually frightens him.

  An open door, four feet wide and eight tall, is the only space left open.

  Nephil is nearly upon me, but just moments before he passes the threshold, a door appears and slams shut. Unlike the old dungeon door I had conjured up before, this is a bank vault. The locks clank in place.

  Nephil is contained.

  Thanks to Xin. I look toward my mental projection of him and find him lying down. His face is twisted in pain. Flowing red blood from several wounds catches my attention. It’s only then that I realize we are no longer in my mind and what I’m seeing is real.

  Xin is dying at my feet.

  “Go,” he says with his mouth, not his mind. “Before it—”

  He fades before finishing. I kneel down beside him and place my fingers to his throat. He is alive.

  A new mental battle begins. I am faced once more with an enemy in need. But this time, Ull is not attracted to the enemy. In fact, the voice of Ull has been completely silenced, locked away with Nephil, behind a door that will not open again until I want it to. Of course, the spirit of Nephil I now contain is but a tiny fraction, carried over to me when I consumed his physical body. I have no doubt that the full spirit of Nephil, locked away in Tartarus, would have no trouble overwhelming me. But that is a challenge I hope to avoid indefinitely.

  Xin, on the other hand, nearly killed me. If not for his mental prying I would have surely been captured. If he regains consciousness, who's to say he won’t take control of me again? I feel more prepared for a mental attack now, but it’s a risk. I also don’t know much about his physiology. The Nephilim heal from wounds in seconds and Xin is half-Nephilim.

  But perhaps that’s just on the outside? I wonder. His blood is red.

  I think about what I saw while reliving his past. The mocking and taunting. A lack of purpose. A craving for affection. For acceptance. He is an outcast, a pariah among his own kind. We are more alike than either of us would have ever admitted. But maybe now, after we’ve shared our minds, and experienced each other’s pasts, desires and fears, he will see that we have much in common.

  And if not? Will I kill him?

  I wait for Ull to chime in with a resounding, yes! But his voice does not rise. And the matter is put to rest in record time. Xin is only half-human, but that’s human enough for me. I cannot kill him. Of course, if he gives me trouble I won’t have any problem knocking him unconscious and leaving him to fend for himself. A part of me knows that’s what I should do now, but Xin believes my greatest weakness is my compassion.

  I intend to prove him wrong.

  I just hope it doesn’t get me killed.

  8

  Carrying Xin’s limp, seven foot tall body saps my energy. His wiry build holds more muscle than I would have guessed. By the time I get him to a tall mound of oversized bones, my legs burn. I slide him gently off my back and feel a slick ooze of blood left behind. I’ll have to scrub hard to get his scent off of me. Of course, it might also come in handy in concealing my own scent.

  The concept of covering my scent with another living thing’s blood should repulse me, but it doesn’t. For a moment, I wonder if Ull is back, but then I realize that it’s just me. And I’m changing. How could I not?

  I turn my full attention to the bones and see a large intact ribcage at the base of the pile. It’s concealed within the pile, but also holding the mass of bones at bay, creating a boneless nook. By the looks of it, it belonged to a massive cresty, perhaps even larger than Alice. I shift a few bones out of the way, clearing a passage to the open space.

  With the path clear, I hoist Xin up over my back again and pull him inside. No one will be able to see our white bodies hidden inside the bone mountain, but anything with half a nose will sniff us out. Xin’s bloody trail across the enormous chamber guarantees it. Of course, that’s also part of the plan, because the first scavengers to follow a trail of blood are always the oversized albino centipedes. The creatures are numerous in the underground and are the staple food for many of the denizens here, but their cottage cheese flesh is also good for sealing wounds and fighting infection.

  I lay Xin down on the stone floor, propping his head up on a loose bone. A sigh escapes his mouth as he settles down. I expect his eyes’ll pop open and he’ll slice into my mind, but he doesn’t move. I can see his pulse thumping behind the flesh of his neck. Still alive.

  After covering the passage into our hideaway with bones, I sit down and think about how much I miss things like couches. It’s been so long since I was comfortable. Though I have to admit, the beds in Asgard, made from layers of egg-monster skins, can hold their own against the best memory foam. But out here, in the wilderness, on the run, the best I can hope for is to not have my throat slit while I sleep.

  Thinking of sleep pulls on my eyelids. I don’t think I’ve been awake for a full day, but since I last slept, I’ve battled Alice, nearly drowned, was chased through the underground and slugged it out with Xin, Ull and Nephil in my mind. My body is fairly well conditioned so I think it must be the mental battle that wore me out. Then I remember that Xin took control of my body and used my abilities, which taxes both body and mind. Add to that several adrenaline highs and crashes and it’s no wonder I’m tired.

  I sit up cross-legged, determined to not fall asleep. The risk is too great. Aside from Xin, there are countless dangers in the underworld that could be drawn by his blood. But my head is spinning now. I close my eyes to fight the rising nausea.

  “Hey Schwartz,” my father shouts.

  A memory.

  One of my favorites.

  We’re at the beach, scouring the rocky shore in search of tide pools. The sun is shining, warming my shirtless torso. Clouds roll past in the distance. The air smells of sea water but is tinged with the odor of grilling burgers.

  Justin’s head pops up from behind a large rock. He’s wearing his tinted sports glasses, as usual. “I see your Schwartz is as big as mine.”

  I laugh.

  “Justin, I swear,” says my father, standing from his position nearer the breaking waves, “Can I call my son by his nickname just once without you saying that? Just once?”

  “Not likely,” Justin says.

  My father looks at me.

  “What?” I say with a shrug. “I’m not his mother.”

  My father grins and motions with his head for me to join him. “Found a good tide pool. Lots of crabs. A few shrimp, too. Water is nice and clear, so I’ll get some good close-ups out of it.”

  I climb through the rocks carefully. It’s not uncommon for me to go home from the beach with a fresh wound, if not several. My parents call me clumsy, but it’s an understatement because I seem to walk into doorframes and slip down stairs just as often as I trip on rocks at the beach. But I make it to my father okay, and I grin at the size of the tide pool. It’s the perfect contained ecosystem, at least for a few more hours, and it’s mine to explore.

  While my father takes photos, Justin and I explore every nook and cranny of the tidepool. No rock is left unturned, no shell left submerged.

  “What are we up to?” Justin asks me, knowing that I’ll have perfectly retained the number and name of each creature we’ve discovered.

  I could give him the Latin names for the animals in this tide pool, but he hates that, so I keep it simple. “Five crabs, three shrimp, eleven hermit crabs, thirty two snails and too many barnacles to count.” That last part is a lie. There are three hundred and seventy-two barnacles, but sooner or later, I think Justin wil
l decide I’m too weird to be around.

  “There you are,” my mother says as she climbs over the rocks toward us. She’s far more agile than me or my father, even with the four boxed lunches she’s carrying. The scent of burgers and fries arrives a moment before she does. We eat in silence, enjoying the view and the sunshine. I eat the tin foil-wrapped dill pickle first, then the fries before they get cold, and then turn my attention to the burger. This is a perfect moment. The food. The view. The smells. The company. With a smile on my face, I bite into the burger and wince.

  It tastes wrong.

  I spit out the food in my mouth and bring the burger up for inspection. I peel open the bun, expecting to see a large flat cheeseburger patty covered in ketchup and pickles. Instead, I find a crab. One of its claws is missing, a casualty of my first bite.

  I drop the burger and step back. The crab crawls from the burger, but then it’s not a crab at all. It just keeps on coming. Shell and legs emerge from the burger bun in a never ending chain, just like a big…centipede.

  I’m dreaming.

  I’m dreaming!

  Wake up! I shout at myself.

  Wake—

  “up!” I flail as I awake, flinging the centipede on my chest against the rib ceiling, where its shell cracks. It falls to the stone floor, cracking some more, oozing white now. I turn to Xin and find three more centipedes gathered around an open wound on his leg. I can hear the munching of their mandibles as they fight to chew past his tough scales.

  Whipsnap sails through the air bludgeoning one of the centipedes. As the dying creature twists in on itself, writhing as death takes it, the remaining two scurry away and disappear into the mountain of bones. When I hear the tick, tick, tick of the centipedes’ sharp feet fade to nothing, I stab the two dying creatures to put them out of their misery. In the past, when I was fully Ull, I amused myself by watching a mortally injured centipede writhe around for fifteen minutes. The sight now makes my stomach twist. I hate seeing things suffer.

  Have since I was a kid. One of my mother’s favorite stories about me is about how after my father did a poor job of stepping on a carpenter ant, I crouched down and watched it squirm around on the floor. The thing was broken, and oozing and appeared to be trying to straighten itself back out. I looked up at my mother, tears in my eyes (not uncommon for me at the time…or any time before Ull took control) and asked, “Do ants suffer?”

  My father heard the question and joked, “Yes, now let him crawl back to his colony and tell them to stay out of my kitchen.”

  This didn’t help any, but my mom understood. She knelt down next to me, shook her head sadly and then stepped on the ant again.

  “Better?” she asked.

  I nodded, and wiped my eyes. I’ve always had a hard time accepting the suffering of others, whether it is a person, an ant or Xin—a half-human, half-Nephilim, who nearly killed me.

  After retrieving a small stone bowl from my pack, I crack open one of the centipedes and scoop a dollop of its white flesh into the bowl. Using the knobby end of a bone, I mix the stuff, crushing away the lumps. When it’s the consistency of yogurt, I bring the fresh ointment to Xin. He has three wounds that need tending. I move from one wound to the next, prying them open with my fingers and filling the gap with the creamed centipede meat. While the meat on the inside will ward off infection, the outside will harden into a protective, flexible shell that will slowly dissolve as the wound stitches back together. I’ve never actually used the technique on myself, but I saw Ninnis do it once.

  With all three wounds sealed, I sit back and wait. I’ve done what I can. Whether Xin lives or dies is now up to him. But I’ll watch over him. Make sure the centipedes don’t come back. When he comes to, he might try to kill me again. It’s a very real possibility. But until then, I’m his protector.

  The ground shakes.

  An earthquake, I think. Antarctica sits atop one big tectonic plate, but that doesn’t mean the earth never shifts. With so much ice bearing down on the continent, the plate can actually shift up and down during times of rapid melting or freezing.

  The earthquake repeats.

  An aftershock?

  Maybe, but the vibration felt stronger the second time.

  When the ground shakes a third time I know this is not an earthquake. Something approaches. Something large.

  Keeping Xin alive might be harder than I thought.

  9

  “Run.”

  The voice of Xin startles me and I flinch away from it. His eyes remain closed and I wonder for a moment if I’m hearing things. Then I see his tiny lips twitch.

  “Run,” he repeats.

  The ground shakes. Xin’s eyebrows turn up. The tremors have him worried. Which isn’t good—it’s hard to picture him being afraid of much—but it changes nothing. I’m committed to the task of protecting him. “I won’t leave you.”

  His eyes blink open, yellow and serpentine, and he looks at me. “I tried to kill you,” he says. “I took control of your body. Violated your mind.”

  “You’re like me,” I say.

  He sighs and shakes his head. “I am nothing like you.”

  “You saw my thoughts,” I say. “My past. You felt what I felt.”

  The ground shakes again. I keep thinking the thing is nearly upon us, but each tremor is more violent than the last and I’m starting to think this giant might still be a ways off.

  Xin stays silent.

  “I experienced your past, too,” I say.

  His eyes widen. He did not know our thoughts were shared simultaneously.

  “We’re both…broken,” I say.

  He stares at me with those yellow eyes, but I see no malice in them now. He turns away, staring at the ceiling of our bony hideaway. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s going to kill us both.”

  I can see he’s resigned to his fate. Whatever is coming, he has no doubt it will be the end of us. But that can’t be true. I’ve killed cresties and even a Nephilim warrior—who are supposed to be unkillable. I control the very air, water and land of the continent. And Xin…not only is he a formidable tracker and fighter, but he can manipulate the mind as easily as I can the weather. What could we not face together?

  The ground shakes so hard that the bones above us rattle and shift. If the ribs give way we’ll be buried beneath a mountain of the dead.

  “You know me, Xin. Perhaps better than anyone else. You’ve seen who I am and know I wouldn’t lie.”

  He nods.

  “You are a better hunter than any I’ve met,” I tell him. “Far better than even Ninnis and Kainda, both of whom I have beaten in combat. And you beat me. Beat Ull. I have never faced a foe as dangerous as you. The Nephilim are fools for not realizing it.”

  “And yet it is a boy, Solomon, that has defeated me.”

  My face scrunches. I have no idea what he’s talking about. I didn’t beat him in combat. That was Nephil. And without Xin, I wouldn’t have been able to contain that evil spirit, either. “It wasn’t me who beat you.”

  “But it is,” he says. “Because I cannot kill you now. I can’t even bring you back alive.”

  Despite the question being absurd, I ask, “Why not?”

  “Because you have shown me a different path.”

  Small bones drop through the giant ribcage as a thunderous boom sounds from just outside our shelter. Xin grunts and sits up.

  “You shouldn’t move,” I say.

  He grunts a wet laugh. “If we are to survive the next few minutes, we will both need to move. And quickly.” He looks me in the eyes, deadly serious now. “Behemoth is here.”

  Behemoth? “What is it?”

  “I saw in your mind that you call them egg-monsters. Ninnis once told you about what happens to them in the wild. The size to which they grow? Their insatiable appetites? Behemoth is one of the three. It guards the gates to Tartarus. And though its hearing is all but useless, it will soon sniff us out.”

  “Tartarus! We’re ne
ar the gates?”

  “Yes,” he says. “They lie at the other end of this cavern, ten miles from here. That is the second reason the other hunters will not follow. They fear the gates will open and consume them.”

  “But you don’t fear the gate?”

  “It is hard to feel fear when losing your life means little,” he says sadly.

  “Then why do you look so afraid now?” I ask.

  I think I see a small grin on his face. “Because you have given me a reason to fear losing my life,” he says. “Hope.”

  The sound of loud sniffing surrounds us. I can actually feel a breeze float past me as the air is siphoned past us. There is no doubt Behemoth will soon discover us.

  “How do we beat it?” I ask.

  “The Nephilim have been building an army for the specific task of killing Behemoth, so they might one day access the gates of Tartarus—the day you are to be bonded with the spirit of Nephil. In fact, if word of you being here reaches them, they might bring that army to bear immediately with the hopes of performing the bonding ritual now.”

  A new sense of urgency fills my body. “Then we’ll run.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you,” he says. “You might be able to hold it at bay with your considerable abilities, and I might be able to attack its mind. But not today. We are both weak. And achieving the task alone might kill us both, if we’re not eaten. Running is our only choice.”

  He climbs to his feet, stooping under the six foot high ceiling. He’s moving fast for someone I thought nearly dead.

  He notes my attention and says, “My blood is red, like a human’s, but I still heal quickly. A gift from the genetic tinkering of my creators.”

  The concept of being created rather than born makes me feel even more empathy for Xin. He has never known the love of a parent, the comfort of family or even the concept of having come from somewhere. He has no ancestors. No lineage. He’s truly alone.

  Bones rattle as something large digs into our hiding space. The creature is testing our fortifications. A vibration pulses through the air, shaking my body and making me feel nauseous.