Riders

by Veronica Rossi

  I spent the next thirty miles trying to figure out what it could be. Rage seemed to make sense for War, but what about Famine? I was pretty hungry right then. Was he working his power on me? But I couldn’t see how wielding hunger would be an asset. Then again if I got hungry enough I got angry, so … Did we have the same power? Then I remembered his audition. Was acting his power? If so, then I was really glad I wasn’t Famine.

  With my Jeep running on fumes, we stopped for gas. I filled the tank, then pulled a twenty out of my wallet and handed it to Bastian.

  “Get us a couple bottles of water and some food, would you? I’m famished.”

  Bastian cracked a grin. “That’s my line.”

  I left him and went around back to the restrooms, where Daryn had headed. I didn’t want to crowd her so I hung back a little. She didn’t see me as she slipped into the women’s room. About three hours later—okay, it just felt that long—she came back out.

  She froze when she saw me. “What are you doing?”

  I spread my hands. “I was just … standing here.”

  “Seriously?” She twisted her hair over one shoulder, then touched the necklace. I thought I saw her fingers trembling. “Were you waiting for me?”

  “Yes. It’s the middle of the night, Daryn.” This was a truck stop at the edge of the desert. There was nothing around us except great places to dump bodies.

  “I can take care of myself.” She shook her head, scowling like I’d insulted her, and walked away.

  I stood there for a second longer, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. Oh, right. I’d tried to be helpful.

  When I came around the corner Sebastian was pulling pretzels out of a brown paper bag, crunching away. I knew he’d heard my exchange with Daryn. He wasn’t even trying to hide his smile.

  “Shut up, Famine.”

  “I didn’t say anything, War.”

  When we got to the Jeep, Daryn was in the driver’s seat. “You should get some sleep,” she said, without looking at me.

  I had the feeling this was about more than just who’d drive, but whatever.

  We got back on the road and shared the bag of pretzels. Then we split two Twix bars three ways—which, believe me, wasn’t easy—and talked about nothing of consequence. I think we had a debate about the best pretzel shape. Daryn liked the classic twist. I liked sticks. Sebastian liked them all. Then it was full dark and there was only the sound of my Jeep eating up miles on the freeway.

  I settled in and stared at the stars. Millions and millions of them. We were in true desert now. The Mojave. And I’d never seen so many stars.

  After a while, I couldn’t look at those stars without thinking God. And then thinking, Oh my God. You’re really real. I had the answer to the greatest mystery of all time, and I hadn’t even stopped to think about it.

  Why? Why hadn’t I lost my mind over this? I had proof. Why was I so … so relaxed about the biggest, most mind-blowing part of all this? But then this trickle-down effect happened, and I started thinking about every last crappy thing I’ve ever done in my life.

  There’s a lot, Cordero. I’ve told you a few things already, but it’s a pretty healthy list. I swear a lot. More than I’ve been doing. I’ve been trying to keep it clean for you. I have anger issues. I think I’ve established that. I didn’t go to church more than a few times a year. I hadn’t prayed since my dad died. I’d literally signed up to kill people for the protection of my country if I had to, and … The list goes on.

  Point is, I came back to that question—why me? I was nowhere close to being an ideal candidate. I mean, I believed. I think inside, in my heart, I’d always believed. But was that enough? Was it the start, or the end? Or … neither?

  As I watched that desert sky, all that going on inside me, I felt my mind rearranging itself. It wasn’t that I understood better, or that I’d made peace with anything. I still had that zero-gravity feeling, like all the anchors in my life had been pulled up. It was more that space had opened up. I realized I hadn’t even had the capacity to understand before. And that night, with all those stars over that open freeway, all I felt and saw and felt was endless capacity.

  CHAPTER 22

  My eyes wouldn’t stay open, so I slept. I dreamt about my family. My dad pitching to me—weird because he never used to. He couldn’t because of an old shoulder injury. My sister and my mom dancing to salsa music in our living room—weird because that had never happened. And other things that made no sense. That were just a wacky stew cooked up by my subconscious. But part of what I dreamt was real. A memory that replayed perfectly for me from when I was a little kid, in kindergarten.

  It was circle time and we were all sitting on this carpet map of the United States. I was sitting on New York, Anna was over by Arizona. Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, my teacher Mrs. Alexander was reading a book to us.

  The story was about this little monster who wanted to be terrifying but was too cute to pull it off. I couldn’t sit still as Mrs. A read it. It was my favorite book and I’d brought it in that day. I wanted everyone to think it was as funny as I did. Mrs. A had just given me a second warning to stop wiggling around when the classroom phone rang. She marked her spot by slipping a pencil between the pages and went to answer it.

  Everyone started goofing off but I watched Mrs. A because she was acting strange. She had turned her back to us—and she never did that. Her head was bowed and I could tell she’d started crying because her back was jiggling. She hung up, wiped her eyes with a tissue, and sat back down.

  She kept reading to us with the tissue in her hand. Her grip on the book was tight and her voice sounded too high.

  I’d stopped wiggling.

  Anna and I always downplayed our twinness at that age, but I crawled next to her and sat close enough that our arms were touching. I didn’t know what was happening but I knew I should be next to her.

  Before Mrs. A finished the book, my dad marched into the classroom. He picked Anna up like she was a baby, grabbed my hand, and took us straight home.

  Anna and I were sent to my room to play, but we didn’t. I stared at my Star Wars Legos and listened. The television was on in the living room. My dad was on the phone. Something bad was happening in New York—New York, which I felt close to because that was where I always sat on the map.

  Anna had colored half a tree then given up, pushing the paper aside. She kept telling me she was scared and I kept telling her not to be scared because Anna scared made me anxious, and sometimes it even made me mean.

  The door swung open and my mom was there, checking on us.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” Anna asked.

  Mom looked like she’d been crying, but she said, “Nothing, sweetie.”

  “Who is Dad talking to?” I asked. I knew she’d protect us from whatever was happening, so I went straight for facts. If I gathered enough facts I could figure it out on my own.

  “Some friends of his from work.”

  “Uncle Jack?” I asked. Jack wasn’t an uncle but we called him that. He was my dad’s foreman in the roofing business.

  “No, honey. From the Army. His old work.”

  It was September 11, 2001, and the call he’d made was to his commanding officer in the Reserve. I’d figure that out later.

  And I’d learn that he’d done ROTC through college, then served with the Fifth Special Forces Group in Desert Storm. I’d learn that his shoulder injury had come from shrapnel embedded in his rotator cuff. I’d learn, just from watching him, from listening to him talk to his buddies, about Ranger School. Jump school. The Ranger Battalions. The Scroll. The Creed. That Rangers lead the way.

  But I didn’t know any of that then. I knew my dad as a roofer. A fisherman. A lover of Pearl Jam and Giants baseball. He was the guy who launched me over the waves on the beach, and who bench-pressed Anna because it made her giggle in a way that nothing else did. He was my mom’s best friend, with some additional elements like kissing that seemed pretty gross because, yo
u know, I was six. But I learned something new about him that morning.

  I learned that when bad things happened, my dad stepped forward first.

  I learned he was a hero. A real one.

  And that I wanted to be like him.

  So much. I can’t even tell you how much.

  Maybe I wanted baseball because of that. If I played ball then I wouldn’t have to find out if I was made of the same stuff as him. Because what if I wasn’t? What if I had nothing great or worthy inside me? Nothing to offer the world?

  Forget the world. I couldn’t imagine disappointing him.

  That would have been the worst.

  But then he died and that redefined what I considered The Worst.

  The Worst was watching the pencil and paper fall out of his hands as he stood on a roof. The pencil roll into the gutter. My dad fall forward and roll too—and then keep going.

  He fell through the air and landed on the red brick walkway a few feet from the front door.

  When I reached him, he was on his side.

  One cheek pressed to the bricks, like it was a pillow.

  His eyes were open but there was blood pooling in his ear.

  He was so strong, my dad. My height, but much bigger than me. But he looked small to me half on that walkway, half on the grass. Then again, I’d never stood over him like that. I’d never been on my feet, looking down at my dad lying on the ground.

  I just had never seen that.

  The stroke was what had probably killed him, the doctors told us later. But it’s the fall that I remember. Every little piece of it. The pencil. The pad. The last look he gave me. The blood welling up in his ear. The fact that I stood there holding a cell phone while blood spilled down his cheek. The fact that my skin felt cool because I’d been blasting the AC in the truck on that hot, hot day. The fact that he looked small to me, and I hated that new perspective on him. The fact that I hadn’t been with him on the roof, and that if I had, I could’ve caught him and kept him from falling.

  The fact that I didn’t think the doctors had told me the truth, so.

  I could’ve saved him.

  CHAPTER 23

  “Gideon. Gideon, wake up.”

  I lurched out of a dead sleep and looked around. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t in the barracks at Fort Benning. I couldn’t figure out why I was in my Jeep at night with a girl. And asleep. Then everything came back in a flash—the cuff, Daryn. Being War. The Kindred.

  Daryn was leaning over the center console, watching me. She blinked, her eyelashes a pale flutter in the dimness. “We’re here.”

  I sat up and scrubbed a hand over my face, trying to get some brainpower going. “Where’s here?” I asked.

  Moonlight filtered through thick cloud cover but I could see enough. She had pulled off the freeway onto a dirt road surrounded by hard earth and scrub brush. We were in the middle of the desert. Black mountains rose in the distance, thunderheads flashing above them. Fifty meters ahead of us, another car was pulled over—just a dull shape in the darkness.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Daryn said. “But this is where we’ll find Death.”

  I stared at her for a second, kind of amazed that that didn’t faze me as much as it should’ve. Then I noticed a light buzzing sensation from the cuff, similar to what I felt from Sebastian, but faint, and deeper in tone. I turned to the backseat to see if he felt it, too. He was asleep in a jackknife position, his head on my duffel.

  “How do you know he’s here?” I asked. “Death?”

  “Because I know,” Daryn said.

  That wasn’t enough for me and she could tell. “I saw him here. At the gas station, I had … visions of this.” She winced. “I hate that word.”

  “Wait. Visions? That happened at the gas station?” I thought back. She could only mean the time she spent in the women’s room. “Daryn, did you—” I was suddenly seeing these horrible images of her curled up in a metal stall with her eyes rolled to the back of her head. “Do you pass out?”

  “If you’re asking whether I can’t see anything else while I have them, yes. Yes, okay? I get headaches beforehand. That’s how I know they’re coming. Then I fade out and I can’t see anything else. Stop looking at me like that, Gideon. And take the anger down, too. I locked the bathroom door from the inside. I was fine. Can we please focus on what’s important?”

  She kept talking like I’d said yes. She had no idea how hard I was trying not to lose my mind. She’d been in that bathroom alone, totally defenseless. Did she think the Kindred would be stopped by a locked door?

  “He was in that car right here,” she was saying, shaking her head. “But I don’t know. Sometimes what I see isn’t perfect. Well, actually it is. I’m the one who has to catch up. Figure out the clues and trust that—”

  “Trust that what? Trust that what, Daryn? Talk to me.”

  She looked out the windshield.

  “Right. You want to write in your notebook for a while and pretend I’m not here?”

  “No. I want to get this done.”

  “Weird. I want this to go on forever.” I bit down, making myself shut up. This was going in a bad direction. Why was I so wound up? Was it being in the open, at night, with no concealment and a pack of murderous psychopaths coming after us? No. That wasn’t it.

  It was Death. I’d never had a good experience with death. My dad’s still haunted me. And I had died and come back to life as War, so. Not a big fan, but it couldn’t matter. Time to suck it up and go meet him, face-to-face.

  “Was he alone in your vision-download?” I asked.

  “Yes. Should I wake Bastian?”

  “No. I’ve got it.” Sebastian had negative combat instincts based on what I’d seen at the studio.

  I climbed out of the Jeep. The air felt thick and hot with moisture. Charged with electricity. Thunder rumbled, close. The storm was heading our way.

  “We’ve got it,” Daryn said, jogging up beside me. “I’m coming with you.”

  The anger I’d pushed down a second ago came right back up. “Do you have any comprehension of danger?”

  “Me? I wasn’t the one who confronted Samrael at a party.”

  “But you did march into a high-rise in LA with no regard for whether he’d be there, which he was.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. We should assume the Kindred are everywhere.” I had to readjust. Switch tactics. “I’ll make you a deal. If you come with me, then I want to be there when you have the visions. You tell me as soon as you feel the headaches and I’m right there. From here on out.”

  In the moonlight, I saw tears pool in her eyes. Once again, I had no idea where I’d gone wrong. Not a clue.

  “I’ve been on my own a long time, Gideon.”

  “Okay. I get that. But now you’re not. I told you I was going to help.”

  She didn’t say anything, and I was done. She kept too much from me. She didn’t trust me. It felt like she was working against me. “Whatever, Martin.”

  I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my Jeep. It felt solid and heavy in my hand. Sebastian’s scales would’ve been about a hundred percent better but he was still out and I wanted him to stay that way. I hesitated a moment, my eyes drifting to my cuff. Sebastian had said we all had weapons. What was mine? I should’ve asked him earlier. How the hell had I missed that? But too late now. It wasn’t like I knew how to access the weapon anyway, whatever it was.

  As I came around the Jeep, Daryn planted herself right in my path. She stared up at me, her expression all determination. “I’ll take the deal. I’ll tell you before the next time.”

  I nodded. My focus had already moved onto finding Death. “Is it safe to assume you don’t have any experience approaching an enemy force in the dark?”

  “He’s not the enemy.”

  “He is Death and the Kindred could be out there waiting for us, so we’re damn well going to proceed with caution. I’ll make the initial co
ntact since—”

  “I think I should.”

  “Negative.”

  “I’m less threatening.”

  “Exactly.” I got a quick mental snapshot of her shaking fingers touching the chain after she’d stepped out of the gas station restroom. “But way to act fearless, Martin. You and Sebastian should swap tips, share some tradecraft.”

  Nice, Blake. Nice one. But no taking it back now, and I’d hit my argument quota for the night. My head needed to be on the mission. “Keep behind me. Stay to my right so I don’t hit you on the backswing if I have to use this.” I lifted the tire iron. “Got it?”

  Her eyes flashed with anger. “I think I can handle that.”

  “Good.” I stood there for a second longer, telling myself to keep a clear head. Our safety depended on it. Then I adjusted my grip on the tire iron. “All right. Let’s do this.”

  “Ten-four,” she said.

  CHAPTER 24

  As I approached the sedan with Daryn a few steps behind me, my pulse pounded a steady beat. I’d been taught to use all my senses to assess an environment for danger. I did that now, tuning in to the rustle of tumbleweeds, the occasional car passing on the highway, the scurrying movements of small desert life. The Kindred could be staked out in the darkness, just waiting for the right moment to strike.

  My weapon was foreign, and my backup and objective, but stalking like this felt right. It was the trade I’d signed up for.

  The thrumming from my cuff was still present. I tried to adjust to this new source of input. It had to be Death’s energy I was sensing. If I could tune in and let it guide me, it might work as a homing beacon.

  Lightning flashed, illuminating the area around me and giving me hints of what was out there. Flat land. Brush. A larger rock formation to the south. I’d have killed for some night-vision optics.

  As we drew to within thirty meters I quickly reviewed my objectives. Neutralize any threat presented by Death. Get him on the team. Clear out of there. With a glance at Daryn, I closed the last stretch at a brisk pace as she followed close behind me.