Riders (30 page)

That was the problem. They
didn’t
understand
.
Neither of them had experienced what I had. Neither of them knew how it felt to have a demon crawling through your mind, to feel its evil linger, to be polluted by it.

“Listen up,” I said, drawing on the last of my self-control. Bastian was leaning against the wall, the only one listening. He watched me closely, like he was worried about my next move. “This is how things are going to work. Daryn’s in charge. She gives us orders, we follow them. When she’s not around, I’m the guy you listen to. If you don’t like it, speak up now.”

Total silence. Marcus rolled over, turning his back to me.

Sebastian pushed off the wall and got in front of me, probably saving their lives. He herded me outside, over to the edge of the bluff. We came to an outdoor gathering area that resembled a mini-Stonehenge in the dim light—a half dozen flat stones arranged around a fire pit. Moonlight fell through the clouds in long beams and the air felt so thin and pure, it was almost painful to breathe. I sucked it down in deep drags.

“Gideon…” Bas said. “Bro, you gotta calm down.”

I peered over the edge of the bluff. It was too dark to see anything but I
felt
the drop of hundreds of feet. I took a step back.

“I’m calm,” I said.

“No, you’re not. You’ve been amped for days. What the Kindred did was messed up. It sucks. But you have to try and take it easy on us, you know?”

I looked at him. I had only vaguely described Ra’om’s mental torture to the group—they needed to know what the Kindred could do—and now I regretted even that.

Bas sighed. “I’m just going to say this one thing, okay? I know you’re not sleeping great. If you want, I can help.”

“You’ll …
what
? You’re offering to put me out? You want to be my
sleeping pill
? That’s
so nice
of you, Bas.”

He waved a hand at me. “This is what I’m talking about, Gideon. This right here.”

I checked myself—and yeah. I was being an ass. I knew I’d been this way for days. Tougher to be around. No one was ever going to call me the nicest guy in the world but this was too much. It wasn’t me. I had a wound and it wasn’t fast-healing. It wasn’t healing at all.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” Bas said. “But you gotta nip this in the bum.”

I laughed. Jode was rubbing off on us. “There’s really no bloody right way to take that,” I said. I sat down on one of the stones and rubbed my head. My hair was getting too long. It bugged me. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll manage.”

“Okay.” He sat on one of the rocks and stretched out his legs. Smoke was just beginning to rise from the hut’s stone chimney and the windows flickered with the glow of firelight. Daryn. She’d gotten it handled.

“That’s kind of a relief, actually,” Bas said. “It doesn’t feel right using my ability on you guys.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty worthless.” Our abilities didn’t work on the Kindred. I didn’t understand it. “Why have a weapon that doesn’t work on the enemy?”

Bas smiled. “Figures you’d see it that way. But what if they’re not weapons? What if we have them to learn?”

“To learn? I already knew how to be angry.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Then explain.”

“I feel like there’s a nicer way for you to ask, but okay. I’ll give you my take on it. The things we can do, like your anger thing, Marcus with fear, me with weakness, and Jode with will … I think they’re for us to master. Like, the weakness thing isn’t something I have to
wield
so much as
work out
.”

“You think your ability is weakness to help you face your own weakness?” This was starting to sound familiar. It reminded me of the conversation I’d had with Daryn in Rome.

He lifted his shoulders. “Maybe. What do you think your anger’s for?”

“Pissing Daryn off?”

He grinned. “You are pretty good at that. But let me ask you this. What makes you angrier than anything? Angry at yourself—not at other people.”

“Easy. Failure.”

“Me, too. But failure how? Failure in what way specifically? That’s what I’ve been thinking about. I already had this … this kind of hollow spot inside me. Being from such a big family, I always got lost. We didn’t have enough money, you know, and I got passed between relatives. Live here for a while, live there. I went wherever anyone could feed me. I wasn’t treated badly or anything like that. But I never felt like I was anything
special
. Have I told you what my parents call me? My actual parents? Cinco, because I’m the fifth kid. It means five in Spanish. It started as a joke, I think. But I guess part of me believes it. That I’m just a number. A mouth to feed. Kind of just … invisible.”

He paused and the wind came up, rustling around us and filling the silence. “How’d I end up talking about me?”

“It’s okay. You were explaining your lifelong quest for attention, so it makes sense. All is forgiven.”

Bas laughed. “
Exactly,
dude,” he said. Then he slapped his hands on his legs and stood. “I need some chocolate.”

He headed back to the hut but I stayed out there for a while longer, filling my lungs with cool Norwegian air. Thinking about what he’d said.

I knew what my biggest failure was.

C
HAPTER
47

The next morning I woke before the sun and did some recon around our hut. Our position was good, near fresh water, with great visibility, but I had to get lower in elevation to find a decent place where we could train. It took over half an hour of solid hiking to get down to the water, but I liked the grassy meadow that sloped gradually to the riverbank.

I took everyone there once they were awake, planning my approach as I wolfed down a granola bar on the trail. I was determined to start taking positive steps. It felt like the only way I could fight back against the images and the anger. Time to get stuff handled.

Reaching our new practice ground, I stepped out to the middle of the field as the others formed a circle around me. Steep granite slopes rose thousands of feet on either side of the river, framing us in and providing good concealment. High above, on a rocky projection that looked like an anvil, I could see part of the hut with the collapsed roof. Ours was behind it, just out of sight. Even if the Kindred had somehow tracked us to Norway, which I didn’t think they had, Alevar would have to do a direct flyover to see us in that fjord. I hoped we’d bought ourselves a little time.

“So, here’s how things stand,” I said. “Daryn’s waiting for drop-off instructions for the key, but we need to be ready if the Kindred track us down. That means we need to master our capabilities and our tools.” I went on, explaining how that would require that we each give our maximum effort. We had to make the most of what we had and work hard. The philosophy I’d learned in RASP was not to practice until you got things
right
. It was to practice until you couldn’t get them
wrong
.

As I spoke, my breath fogged in the cool morning. Bas nodded like,
yes, yes, totally with you
. Jode appeared to be filing everything I said away for future reference. Marcus crossed his arms and stared at the grass at his feet. Daryn listened, watching me with her steady eyes. Everyone was still here, still engaged-ish, and I wasn’t yelling or being overly sarcastic. Good start so far.

“Okay, let’s get this going,” I said. “First, we’ll get Jode outfitted with the bow, then go over some safety measures and work our way to doing drills.”

“Can’t we work with the horses first?” Jode asked. “I know how to ride.”

My immediate inner answer was,
well, I don’t
. With regard to that particular topic, I had decided I’d be a horseless horseman. I’d loved my armor during the few hours I’d worn it. I hadn’t battle-tested it yet, but my instincts told me Kevlar had nothing on it. And the sword was starting to grow on me, too. But I wasn’t excited about working with a creature that was essentially aggression in the form of fire.

“We’ll get to the horses,” I said. “Weapons first.”

“If you insist.”

“I do.”

Jode frowned. I could tell my answer had disappointed Bastian too—understandable, since Shadow was awesome—but I kept us moving along, turning to helping Jode call up his weapon. Marcus walked away almost immediately and sat against a tree along the trailhead. Daryn joined him a few minutes later, creating a nice, condensed visual focal point of distraction.

So, I was going to bust my ass while he sat around and talked to her?

Unbelievable.

An hour later, with both Bas and I taking turns providing instruction, Jode still couldn’t call up the bow. Daryn and Marcus chatted away over by the tree. Marcus was actually
smiling
.

“Again, Jode,” I said, rubbing my tired eyes. Last night had been another struggle. I’d tossed and turned on the hard floor in front of the fireplace. I just needed
one night
without seeing my mom standing over my grave. “Keep trying. You only fail if you quit.”

“That’s right,” Bas said. “When you fall off the horse, you need to just saddle it back up.”

I looked at him. “What if the saddle didn’t fall off? What if only you fell?”

“Speaking of horses,” Jode said.

“No horses. Go again.”

Another hour went by. Bas and I started to get punchy.

“Go to the light, Jode,” Bas said. “Your most precious inside light.”

“Just feeeeeeel it. Feel it like you mean it.”

Jode smirked. “I’m English. I don’t do anything by
feeeel
.”

We kept at it, but both Bas and I had exhausted our vocabulary for explaining how we reached our powers. We did it by tapping into a certain purity of intention. A will to do what was best, what was needed, what felt right. Part of it was control, and part of it was surrender. I’d been joking, but in a lot of ways it was like finding a particular thread of feeling. I couldn’t reach in and find it for him. He kind of had to work it out on his own. Finally, though, he did.

The instant the bow came up, his left arm shot straight out. “Now what?” he asked, his eyes flicking to me.

“Breathe, Ellis. Relax,” I said. I took his wrist, keeping it steady, and took a close look at the weapon.

The bow was radiant white, on the verge of being hard to look at directly. In construction it was long and tapered, and looked balanced and light. The bowstring was so thin at points that it disappeared the way spiderwebs did in sunlight. It was the prettiest weapon out of all of them, no question. I thought of my sister, who had a real eye for seeing beauty. Anna would have liked that bow.

I didn’t see any arrows but I had a gut feeling.

“Point it ten feet away,” I said, “right at the ground and draw back on the string—
slowly.
”

“Ground,” Jode repeated as he turned the weapon down. “Draw.” The bowstring brightened as soon as his fingers touched it. He glanced at me, like
if this goes wrong it’s on you
; then he pushed out a breath and pulled the string back.

At roughly half draw, there was a flash of brightness and the arrow appeared. Slender. Luminous. No fletching. Just a streamlined bolt of lightning.

Sebastian started hooting and slapping Jode on the back. I couldn’t keep a grin off my face, either. A complete set now, the bow and arrow were even more impressive. And here was a weapon that actually made sense. That resembled a little bit, sorta-kinda, the weapons I knew.

“About time,” Marcus said as he and Daryn walked up.

“What now?” Jode asked.

“What do you think?” I yelled. I couldn’t contain my excitement. “Let’s shoot something!”

We hiked downriver. I wanted to find a closed environment, minimizing the margin for causing damage. A shooting range, essentially. What I found was a saddle between two hills that would do the trick.

I made everyone stay put on the eastern slope while I jogged down and then back up the scree slope on the other hill. Along the way, I picked up a branch about as thick around as a baseball bat, but twice as long. I wedged it into the loose rocks, piling more at the base to keep it upright. Then I took a step back and congratulated myself. Good target. We were almost set.

Turning, I looked at everyone on the other slope, trying to eyeball the distance. Tomorrow I’d bring the radios and use the GPS to get exact distances, but it looked to be about 120 meters or so.

“Now?” Jode yelled. A flash of white appeared in his hands.

“No!”
I scrambled up the hill like a mountain goat on fire.

Then I heard them laughing.

“
Assholes,
” I muttered. But something inside me loosened up a little. If they were messing with me, it meant they were doing something together. It was a good sign.

When I got back over to them, I found them deep in discussion about the proper archer’s stance.

“I think I’m ready,” Jode said.

He looked overextended and stiff, like he should be planted in a fountain, spurting water from his mouth, but I let it go. He’d gotten mentally prepared and he didn’t look like he was going to injure himself. I’d get my shot at coaching him later.

“Okay, Robin Hood.” I stepped back with Bas, Marcus, and Daryn. “Let it rip.”

No time passed between the moment he released the arrow, and the eruption on the other hill. It happened in an instant.

An explosion cracked into the air, like an entire forest of trees splitting in half. My chest bucked at the pressure. Rocks flew apart.

Then, the aftermath—a dusty cloud lifting up, to the sound of a small avalanche rumbling down the hillside.

We practically killed ourselves rushing over there. The branch I’d set up was nonexistent. Pulverized. In its place we found a small crater about three feet wide and two deep, blackened at the center, surrounded by fine gray ash around the edges.

Serious
explosive power.

“Incredible,” Sebastian said.

I had to agree. It sure as hell beat a sword.