The Last Hunter - Collected Edition (71 page)

10

If I’d been asked, I would have said I’m standing on the floor. Not because I feel the stone beneath my feet, but because it’s the only thing that makes sense. I jumped from the ceiling, and without thought, instinctually placed my feet on dry patches of floor. That makes sense. But what I see when I look down...that’s something else.

The floor is ten feet below me. And there are no dry patches. Had I landed in the blood, I’d have likely died. At least I got something right; my instincts
had
taken over. But not in a way I would have predicted. The wind that normally carries me higher when I leap, cushions a fall or shields me from projectiles, now whips around my body, holding me aloft. I can feel its strength pulling at my limbs. My hair whips about. And my scant leather clothing is being pulled in a way that makes me fear I will soon be flying
and
naked.

“I
can
fly,” I say dumbly, as much to myself as to Hades.

The giant settles back in his blood bath, as though lounging in a hot tub.

I focus on the wind currently being generated by instinct and test out this new found trick. I move higher and then closer to Hades. “So you weren’t trying to kill me?”

“You could have died at any time,” he says.

“Then you
were
trying to kill me?”

“Yes,” he says with a sick grin. “But I was hoping you would survive.”

I don’t know why I’m trying to understand the methods of a Nephilim, especially one with the reputation of Hades, but I understand now that it was some kind of test. Pass or fail. Live or die. There was no in between. And I don’t think Hades intended for me to fly, only to see how I would escape his trap.

“Are my friends okay?” I ask.

He rolls his eyes at my concern. “They will survive.”

Thinking about the others reminds me of the corpses scattered around the room. I look down and see a hunter below me. He’s covered in purple blood now. I point to him. “And them?”

“They are very dead,” he says, still smiling.

“Why are they dead?” I ask.

“In service to you,” he says.

“Me? I didn’t ask for this.” I look at the human hunter. “I don’t kill
people
.”

“But they would have killed
you
had I not intervened,” he explains. “Not all hunters are loyal to your cause. You haven’t eluded capture on your own, boy.”

This surprises me almost as much as the fact that I’m flying, which is actually starting to take its toll. I’m slowly, but steadily growing tired. “You’ve been protecting me.”

“Not me,” he says. “My servant.”

The stench of Nephilim blood turns my stomach. “And the blood? Where does it come from?”

“You don’t care where it comes from. It is Nephilim blood. If I slew my fellow warriors, gatherers, seekers, breeders or feeders, you would be indifferent to its origins. Nephilim are deserving of death, of being erased.”

I agree with him, but saying so to a Nephilim who’s supposed to help me doesn’t seem like a good idea. Instead, I chew my lips nervously, which doesn’t exactly exude confidence, either.

“Do not worry, boy. I would agree with you. Our kind...was not meant to be. We are...unnatural.” His eyes look down at the floor and I think I see a flash of shame cross his face, but then it’s gone and his gaze turns back to me. “What you really want to know is why. Why do I bathe in the blood of my brothers? I have heard you have an intellect worthy of your namesake. You tell me. Why do I bathe in blood?”

I’m not sure if this is another test, but I decide to treat the riddle like it is, just in case. I look at the pool of purple blood. There are dark, almost black, stains around the edge. Dried blood. So this is not the first time he has done this. My eyes fall on the blade he used to shave his head, and likely his whole body. He is hairless. He looks like a Nephilim, but the blood red telltale sign of his corruption has been removed.

Why?

The answer hits me like a cannonball to the gut and I blurt out, “You’re not corrupt.”

He opens his arms and smiles, this time lacking any kind of sinister intention. “And yet my dark heart is feared more than most.”

“You shave to hide your hair.”

“As yellow as your own,” he says.

“You bathe in blood to mask your scent.”

“And to further my mad reputation. I make no secret of it when I pluck a lesser Nephilim from the halls above and drain its blood into my pool. As a result, I have very few visitors and have been left alone to watch, and wait...for you.”

“Why didn’t you help me before?” I ask.

“Even the finest ore must be melted in the hottest flames before it can be forged into a great weapon. You needed to...suffer. You needed to break. Without these things, you could not have been remade.”

When I was ten, my uncle Dan lost his job. I heard my mom talking to my father one night. They thought I was sleeping, but I was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, listening to every word. Uncle Dan had some kind of mental breakdown, but not from losing the job. It was the job itself that created a wellspring of depression and anxiety in the man who wanted to be a painter. He didn’t want to sell insurance. But he had bills to pay, and mouths to feed and a mortgage. All the things that trap people into thinking they are stuck, like mice cowering in front of a cardboard cutout of a cat despite the exit to freedom being just beyond it—my father’s analogy, not mine. And finally, his despair overwhelmed him.

Broke him.

And my parents, who were not the kind of people to be trapped by circum-stances of their own creation, weren’t worried about Uncle Dan. They were excited for him.

“It’s too bad he had to get so low to realize his life was his to shape,” my father said. “But I’m glad he did.”

“Rebirth is never painless,” Mom replied.

I couldn’t see them from my position on the hallway stairs, but they shared a quiet laugh. In my mind’s eye, I could see them smiling, and I smiled with them. I heard kissing after that and went to bed, but the next day we went to visit Uncle Dan. He was a different man. A happy man. A remade man.

The idea that I, like Uncle Dan, had to be brought to my lowest point so I could reach my highest is horrible.

But true.

That doesn’t make it okay, though. Uncle Dan chose to sell insurance. He chose to buy a big house. And nice cars.
I
was kidnapped. Taken against my will. I’m not reaping the results of my own poor choices. I’m adapting to an abusive world that would have killed me a thousand times over. What did Uncle Dan have to worry about? Bad credit?

Uncle Dan would have made a horrible hunter.

“I didn’t choose this,” I complain.

“Who would?”

No one, I think. And that’s the point. No one would choose to be broken and remade in the way that I have been. No one with half a brain anyway. So whoever was chosen, or fated, or whatever to defeat the Nephilim would be remade unwillingly.

“Your kind never come willingly,” he says, “but once you do...”

“You mean humans?” I ask.

“Moses,” he says. “Jonah. Noah. Thomas. Paul. All resisted at first. All of them eventually broke.”

He sees my skepticism. “Would you prefer examples from other sources of literature? Or perhaps modern history? Your United States didn’t enter World War II until it was broken at Pearl Harbor.”

My deeper confusion prompts a smile on the beast.

“I’ve had many teachers over the years,” he says.

“Your examples were all old men. And a country. I was thirteen years old when—”

“King David slew my brother when he was just a boy.” He shifts in the pool, getting comfortable.

“He also did horrible things,” I counter.

“As have you.”

I tense. My anger builds. But I reign it in, remembering Cronus’s gift. “I have been forgiven.”

Hades concedes with a nod. “As was David.”

Arguing with Nephilim who have been alive for thousands of years is really annoying. I’m not accustomed to being on the receiving end of a verbal checkmate, but there it is. So I change the subject. “I’m here for the Jericho shofar.”

“I have been waiting for you since you entered the gates of Tartarus,” he replies. “I knew who you would find there. And I felt confident you would return, and eventually find me. But...despite having seen you do great things, worthy of the chosen ancients, I am not convinced you will return with the shofar, and your life. One must be sacrificed for the other.”

11

Out of all the confusing things Hades has said thus far, “One must be sacrificed for the other,” takes the cake. If
I
am sacrificed, how can I retrieve the shofar? If the Jericho shofar is sacrificed,
how can I retrieve the shofar
! I decide that this riddle can wait because, obviously, both the shofar and I need to make it through in one piece. If we don’t, then all of this is for nothing. “Do you know where it is?”

“I know where it
was
,” he says. “If it is still there?” He shrugs. “But not even I could retrieve it now. It is beyond my reach.”

“Tell me,” I say. “Where is it?”

“To the deepest realms you must go,” he says. “Beyond the dark gates.”

He’s speaking of the gates to Tartarus, but I thought that was the lowest point of the underworld.

“In the roost Edinnu, you will find the great horn.”

I clear my throat. “Sorry. That sounds poetic. It’s nice. Really. But do you think you could be a little clearer?”

“If you can resist a direct encounter with a seeker,” he says.

I can’t. We both know it.

“Then the less you know the better,” he says. “You will not forget the things I’ve told you. They will remain with you until the end of your days, whether that is today or a hundred years. You know where to start. Do not think about your path until you’ve arrived at the beginning. In this way you will protect the path from those that would seek out the shofar to destroy it.”

“They know about the shofar?” I ask.

He nods. “But not who protects it.”

“If I’m caught,” I start, worried that my knowledge of Hades could compromise his covert activities.

He rises from the blood bath, standing to his full height. Like me, he wears minimal leathers, though his are the size of ship sails. “I,” he says, “will not be here, or anywhere my brothers will follow.”

For a moment, I’m lost, but then I figure it out. “You’re going back to Tartarus?”

He nods slowly. “I have lived with the stench of blood and filth, death and torture for as long as this old heart can bear. If I do not leave for the release of Tartarus, I would rather return this body to the dust from which it came and be no more.”

I have never once seen sadness in the eyes of a Nephilim, but there is no disguising the emotion as it grips Hades. He shakes the blood from his arms and steps out of the pool.

The wind carries me back, giving him room to move. It’s a subtle movement, but it drains my energy more quickly. I glance back at the large doorway one hundred feet away. Will I have enough energy to cover the distance in the air?

“How is my old friend?” he asks.

The question is so casual that it catches me off guard.

“Cronus,” he says. “Is he well?”

“He was concerned for you,” I say. “Said it had been a thousand years.”

Hades confirms the time with a nod. “A necessary break as more of my kind, and yours, populated the underworld. And Eurymedon?”

My muscles tense at the memory of the winged, two-faced Gigantes that pummeled me in Tartarus. Cronus explained that the Gigantes, like Nephilim and Titans, are born from half-demon blood, but they are not conceived and born to human mothers. They are created. Like Xin. Like Luca. But while Luca and Xin were created to mimic me, the Gigantes were created for one purpose. Destruction. Eurymedon dwarfs even the tallest of Nephilim. “I can’t say I’m fond of the Gigantes.”

He laughs and it sounds genuine this time. “Perhaps you will change your mind if given another chance?”

“I’ll pass,” I say. I sense the conversation drawing to a close, but there is one last question nagging at me. And next to the shofar’s location, it is the second most important question I have. “Hades, what does it do? The shofar.”

“You know the story?” he asks.

“Joshua, an Israelite general and forty thousand men marched on Jericho...a Nephilim city. They marched around the city once a day for six days while seven priests blew into these shofars. On the seventh day, they marched around the city seven times, all the while blowing their horns. Then when the people shouted, the walls of Jericho fell.”

“The walls of Jericho,” Hades says thoughtfully. He closes his eyes, drifting. “The walls...”

“You were there,” I say. “Weren’t you?”

“The walls that fell at Jericho were more than mere physical walls. The shofar’s blast shook the city walls, but they decimated the walls protecting the blackened hearts of the Nephilim. Some power in the sound strips the darkness away and exposes us to the truth of what we are, how we live and who we fight against. The pain is unbearable to a Nephilim. Four thousand Nephilim warriors were slaughtered that day. More than enough to kill forty thousand men.”

He’s right about that. A ten to one ratio isn’t a challenge for a Nephilim warrior especially when the Israelites were armed with Bronze Age swords.

“But when Joshua’s army stormed the walls and entered the city, they found four thousand warriors bowed down and weeping.
Weeping
! Not one of them fought back when the swords pierced their heads. They craved death. All were slain.”

“Except for you,” I note.

“On the sixth day, I defiantly stood atop the wall when the horns sounded. I was the first to feel the shofar’s effect. When night came, I fled, and in the morning, I watched the stronghold’s destruction from a distance. But it was the shofar’s lasting effect that prepared my heart for Tartarus and the mercy granted there. If not for the shofar, I would have returned to the world with a dark heart, like the others. And if not for the shofar, I would not have returned at all.

“There were seven in the beginning. But they were sought out and destroyed one by one. I volunteered to lead the seventh and final raid. When the shofar was found, I slew my brothers, hid the weapon in the depths and claimed failure. Ambush. Then, as now, I bathed in the blood of my brothers and my intentions were never questioned. And here I have remained. Until now.”

He steps past me, heading for the door to the front room. I follow him, floating over the spilled blood, but my energy quickly wanes and my altitude drops.

“Hades,” I say, fearing I will fall into the blood and die.

He looks back at me from the doorway where he stands over clean floor. “You have a strength within you that has been granted to fewer men than I have fingers. You can make it on your own.”

Just two feet from the floor, I grit my teeth and push. I’m carried faster, but my vision fades in response. I’m not going to make it! A wellspring of fear pumps adrenaline into my body. My vision fades and for a moment, a jolt of energy carries me up and away. I’m crossing the distance now, but not in a protective bubble of air. I’ve simply managed to shoot myself as though from a cannon and now I’m sailing, limp, across the chamber.

My eyes close. I feel myself falling again. I think I should brace for impact, but have no strength to do so.

Just when I think I’m going to strike the floor, I’m caught.

Hades.

A grin slips onto my face as he places me on the ground.

“What makes you smile, boy?” the giant asks.

“You passed my test, too.”

“What test?”

“You didn’t let me die.”

“Nor will I,” he says. “Watch for Cerberus in the days to come. He will protect you if need be.”

Cerberus
? I think, but don’t ask. I feel the hard stone floor beneath me now. “You’re leaving?” I ask, drifting off to sleep.

“I will prepare the way for you,” he says. “Ave atque vale, Solomon.”

I hear the large door open, and then close. Hades has left. The last of my energy wanes and I drift off to sleep, surrounded by blood, bodies, skulls and hope.