The Last Hunter - Ascent (Book 3 of the Antarktos Saga) (6 page)

My flung expletives are as useless as my weapons and skills.

The grip tightens, constricting my lungs.

I can’t die
, I tell myself. This is Tartarus. The afterlife.
I can’t die
.
I can’t die
.

The two massive heads watch me and then speak, each one saying a single word, forming complete sentences by speaking one at a time. “You
can
die in Tartarus,” they say. “Again. Again. And again.”

It’s the first time I sense any kind of emotion from the thing.

Pleasure.

It’s going to enjoy what it’s about to do.

The fist holding me turns to the ground and then stabs forward. With me in its grasp, the giant punches the stone ground. I shriek in pain. The impact breaks several of my bones and causes who knows how many internal injuries. Shock washes over me and the pain subsides some, but my mind begins to slip away.

I feel a breeze over my face as the fist draws up. My stomach lurches as it punches down again. The impact knocks the air from my lungs and my ribcage implodes. Consciousness fades quickly, but before I slip away, I feel my body rise and fall several more times. The monster is punching the ground, with me in its grasp.

Again.

Again.

And again.

7

I wake to the smell of blood. My keen nose, sharpened by my time as a hunter, recognizes the scent. It’s
my
blood. But it’s no longer fresh. Without opening my eyes, I reach out with my other senses. The first thing I notice is that I feel no pain. My body is healed. I can’t smell anything beyond the strong scent of my blood. But I can tell that the blood is old. Dried.

How long have I been here?

I listen and at first hear nothing. But then there’s something. Wind? I can hear the air moving, but cannot feel it on my skin. For a moment, I wonder if my immunity to the elements has returned, but then I feel the biting cold anew.

“You can open your eyes, little one.”

The voice is deep and the words are spoken slowly. It’s not the two-headed giant. The voice is different and comes from a single mouth. But I can tell the speaker is large, because despite being restrained, nearly a whisper, the voice still booms and echoes. I realize I’m in a large enclosed space, and then I open my eyes.

The ceiling above me is red and at least a hundred feet up. It reminds me of a cathedral, all arches, pillars and angles. But it lacks the decorum and opulence. This is simple, red stone. In fact, I think the space might have been carved from a single stone because there are no seams.

“You are impressed with Nyx?” The voice says.

You can hear my thoughts, I think at the thing.

“I prefer to speak.”

“In English?” I say.

The Nephilim learned English from human teachers they kidnapped over the years. People like Aimee, who I kidnapped for them. But I seriously doubt there are human teachers here in Tartarus. Certainly not any that speak English, which in the grand scheme of humanity, is a relatively new language.

“I know all languages,” says the voice. “You will have to face me eventually.”

Mind readers can really be annoying sometimes. The conversation was bearable while staring at the ceiling. When I get a look at this thing, I suspect things might take a turn for the worse. But he’s right. I’ll have to face him eventually.

So I do. And what I see confuses me. He’s a Nephilim. Maybe thirty feet tall, but he’s seated on a slab of red stone jutting from the wall, so his height is hard to gauge. He has six fingers on each hand. I can’t see his mouth, but I’d be willing to bet he has double rows of teeth, too. The problem I’m having is his hair. It’s black. Not red.

The Nephilim, and the hunters, myself included, have blood red hair. It’s an outward sign of their corruption. When a hunter leaves the Nephilim behind and seeks a life of goodness and peace, the color fades, to be replaced by the original hair color. And there is not a trace of red in this Nephilim’s hair, not on his head, nor in his long beard.

He’s dressed simply, in a white robe, and his six-toed feet are bare. Even more uncharacteristic, there is no metal band over his pulsing forehead. The Nephilim have many abilities granted to them by their unnatural parentage, including the ability to heal almost instantly. But their one weak spot is in the center of their forehead. It is an area usually protected by a golden band. But perhaps that weakness means nothing here in Tartarus, where things can die again, again, and again, as was so delicately proven to me by my two headed friend.

“You are confused?” the Nephilim says.

I get my feet under me. I’m typically afraid of Nephilim, but the fact that this one has black hair puts me at ease. I’m dressed in my normal clothes and Whipsnap lies on the floor beside me. I bend and pick up my weapon. The giant just watches as I wrap it around my waist and clip it to my belt.

The fact that this Nephilim hasn’t shouted at me for not answering is also surprising. They are not known for their patience. I decide not to push it and say, “You’re Nephilim?”

“You know I am,” he replies.

“But, your hair?”

He gives a slow nod, acknowledging my confusion. “I am not corrupted.”

“But your father…”

“A demon,” he says. “Yes. I was one of the first born. An accident. Overlooked by my father. Despite my…deformities, my mother kept me. And loved me. And raised me…as one of you.”

A mother. A loving human mother with a Nephilim child. It sounds unbelievable, but if everything I’ve been taught about the twisted early days of mankind is the truth, then such a thing must have happened. And more than once.

“But my size soon made me stand out. As word spread, we learned that there were others like me. We were the first of our kind. Twelve of us. Titans among men. And soon, our fathers took notice.”

Titans…

“Our fathers sought to corrupt us, to turn us against mankind, whom they detested. But we resisted them. Our human mothers, who had all passed away by that time, had taught us to care for, and protect mankind. But there was one… The eldest of us, the first born, who desired power more than anything else. He was seduced by our fathers, and quickly corrupted.”

“Nephil,” I say. The story is beginning to make sense.

“Nephil. Lord of the Nephilim, his followers. That is the name you know him by,” the giant says. “I know him as Ophion.”

I know the name. All of this is in my mind somewhere. I reach for the knowledge, seeking out the familiar words. Nyx. Ophion. Titans. Tartarus!

The information arrives in a flash. “You’re a Titan,” I say. “You were the Greek gods before being overthrown by Zeus and the Olympians, who are also Nephilim. When the Titans were defeated, they—you—were imprisoned in Tartarus!”

Before he can confirm or deny this information, I continue, “Ophion. He was an evil Titan. The serpent. He ruled over the Earth long before the Olympians. But he was overthrown by Cronus, whose time on Earth is referred to as the Golden Age.”

“Some of what you say is true. There was a war between the Titans and the younger generations of Ophion’s followers now known as the Nephilim, but the Titans were not
confined
here. It is the Nephilim who
escaped
. Tartarus is a prison only for those whose hearts are dark. For the uncorrupted, it is an oasis. When the Titans realized that our time among men was causing more harm than good, we requested sanctuary. We were given Tartarus.”

“Given by whom?” I ask.

“By the only one able to give such a thing.” It is a horribly vague answer, but the story continues without elaboration. “When the Nephilim felt the weight of what they had become, and refused to change, Tartarus became unbearable. They fled. Fearing for mankind, the Titans fought to imprison the Nephilim, but most of them escaped.”

“But not Ophion,” I say.

“Ophion escaped Tartarus. But I gave chase and slew my brother before he could begin dominion over humanity.”

“
You
defeated Ophion,” I say. “You—you’re Cronus!”

The giant actually grins and dips his head in a bow.

“It pleases me that my name is still known among men.”

I don’t tell him that very few people would actually recognize the name, let alone remember the history of it. He’s generally not given more than a few sentences in history books or encyclopedias, often as a footnote to the more popular Greek gods.

“And what about the giant with two heads?” I ask

“Eurymedon, king of the Gigantes,” he says. “My friend. The Gigantes, like the Titans and the Nephilim, have unnatural parentage. But they are not conceived; they are created—designed—from our blood. You would call them experiments.”

“Like science?” I ask, a little surprised.

“Science is the word humanity uses for the supernatural once it understands the processes involved. Some would call the creation of the Gigantes science. Others would call it magic. It’s just a matter of perspective.”

“That’s why he looks different?”

The nod is nearly imperceptible.

“How many Gigantes are here?”

“An army,” he says. I want to ask more, but Cronus continues his story. “With Ophion’s spirit freed from his body, he returned to Tartarus, occasionally causing unrest among the other Nephilim still confined to Tartarus.”

“Do they ever try to leave?” I ask.

“From the inside, the gates no longer open to the unworthy,” he says.

“But from the outside,” I add, “anyone can open the gates.”

He nods. “The Nephilim outside Tartarus fear this place. To return would mean staying for eternity. But
someone
did open the gates.” The emphasis he puts on the word “someone” is angry, and directed toward me. “And Ophion left.” The giant shakes his head, confused by the notion. “Ophion returned to the world as a spirit, which cannot last for our kind. I did not wish this fate on my brother, but it was the fate he chose.”

My limbs suddenly feel heavy and I nearly vomit.

He doesn’t know.

“What don’t I know?” His voice is loud now. Barely contained anger. He might not be Nephilim, but that doesn’t mean he won’t get angry, and as the two-headed giant proved, violence isn’t exactly forbidden here.

Before I can answer, I feel him enter my mind. Before he was simply listening to my conscious thoughts. Now he’s digging through my memories. And he doesn’t have to dig far. The events that led me here are still fresh in my mind. I feel myself transported back. I’m standing before the gates of Tartarus, facing the black spirit of Nephil as he enters my body.

I fall to my knees, screaming, reliving the most horrible experience of my life. And as I feel Nephil’s darkness take control of my body and reach out for the world, the weight of Tartarus constricts me with pain beyond description. But the experience is different this time. I’m not just seeing things from my perspective. I’m in Nephil’s head, too. And in that moment, I feel exactly what he did when his power merged with my own. The Earth’s crust rotated, quickly, causing tidal waves, volcanoes, flash freezing. Catastrophe on a global scale. Billions. Billions dead. And it was just the beginning of Ophion’s vengeance. The memory concludes with my rejection of Nephil and his subsequent bonding with Ninnis.

I fall back on the floor as though flung by a powerful force. My body convulses several times and I dry-heave. I wish I could erase the memory, now complete with Nephil’s perspective, from my mind. I clutch my eyes shut, willing it away, but it’s not until I hear, and feel, Cronus’s heavy feet pounding toward me that I can think of anything else. When I open my eyes to see Cronus above me, what I see is nearly as bad. A long segmented tail, like a scorpion’s, slides out from behind the giant. It is tipped with a curved, blade-like stinger that looks like a sickle.

Cronus’s sickle.

The tail rises above me, poised to strike.

8

The strike comes so fast and sudden that my eyes don’t even register the movement. One second the tail is wavering above me with menacing intent. The next, it’s stopped, just inches from my face. A bead of liquid forms at the tip of Cronus’s sickle-like tail.
It’s a stinger
, I realize. And I have no doubt the effects of being stung will make me wish I could die.

“Wait!” I shout. “We’re on the same side!”

Cronus stomps his foot. The impact shakes the floor beneath me. “You gave yourself to him!”

“And I rejected him!” Cronus saw this in the memory, but he might have been so distracted by the rest that he failed to register why Nephil left my body.

“You set him free!”

This, unfortunately, is the truth. Without me present, Nephil would have remained bound to Tartarus forever. “I had no choice!”

The tail pulls back a few feet so Cronus can look at me. His yellow eyes burn into me, searching for deception. “There is always a choice.”

“You understand what it means to surrender something important to save the ones you love,” I say. “You did the same thing for humanity. You left and came to Tartarus, but the Nephilim escaped. You tried to do the right thing, but there was a negative consequence.”

Cronus says nothing. He’s listening.

“I did the same thing,” I say. “Nephil needed me to leave Tartarus. It’s true. And I willingly offered myself to him. That is also true.”

Cronus tenses, so I speak fast. “But I never intended to let him survive. I thought he would cease to exist once I forced him out. I didn’t know he would find another vessel. I didn’t realize how strong Ninnis was. You have to believe me. Search my memories again. Go back further.”

And he does.

Since I’m a willing participant this time, the experience is far less disturbing. We watch my life in reverse: my recent merging with Ull, the battle with Nephil outside the gates of Tartarus, Luca—the reason for me being there. Cronus pauses.

“You were there for the boy?”