Riders (11 page)

“You attacked him.”

“I did. I got him down on the ground and I hit him until people pulled me off. I only threw a few punches but I messed him up. The guy had to have stitches around his eye and his mouth. He needed one of his teeth replaced.”

I pause and notice that my legs and my arms have tensed up and my muscles are twitching. Thinking about that night always starts an earthquake inside me. It makes me want to run until there are no thoughts left in my head.

“The only reason his parents didn’t press charges was because Half Moon Bay’s a small town and, as it turned out, his dad had met my dad once or twice. This guy, Mr. Milligan, he was an ex-Marine and I guess some kind of loyalty among warrior brothers kicked in. No police report was filed. I wasn’t eighteen yet. Nothing went on my record, so … I got away with it.”

Cordero thinks for a moment. “You think what you did makes you bad?”

“It doesn’t make me
good
.”

“Would you have kept going?”

“I might have. I know I wasn’t slowing down when they pulled me off him. I might’ve kept going. How many people have you met who have the potential to kill, Cordero? How many people have that capability?”

My eyes drift to Beretta and Texas, who’ve become marble lions at the door. I know they have it too, this ability to turn to darkness.

“More than you think,” Cordero replies. “You’d be surprised. Sometimes the most average-seeming people are killers. You’d never know it by looking at them.”

It’s my turn to study her this time. Psychiatrist? Is that what she is? Something stressful. Small lines of tension crackle away from the corners of her eyes. I hadn’t noticed them before.

I wonder what she’s seen.

Has she met worse than me?

Cordero shifts in the chair. She rubs her knuckles, then laces her fingers together. “I probably shouldn’t say this, Gideon. I
know
I shouldn’t but”—she purses her lips, unhappy with herself—“I don’t think that incident necessarily defines you as bad. I think it makes you human. And I believe you would have stopped yourself. I think that’s what makes a person good. Not that you make mistakes, but that you recognize them. You feel remorse for them. You want to correct them and do better.”

It’s a surprisingly decent thing to say. And I think she’s right. When I think about that day, I can’t ever imagine that I’d have kept going. I do think I would’ve stopped myself. That day was a low point, but it woke me up. It turned me around.

Thank you
doesn’t seem like the right response, considering Cordero’s pretty much interrogating me, so I nod.

She gives me a nod back and then draws a deep breath, putting that small moment of humanity behind us. “Where were we? I think you’d just agreed to help Daryn, and the two of you were heading to…?”

“LA. To find Famine.”

C
HAPTER
16

Before we left Cayucos, I snapped my Jeep’s soft top into place. It wouldn’t eliminate all the noise on the freeway, but Daryn and I would be able to hear each other a little better. The day was sunny and clear as I drove us south, the ocean and sky to my right, blue and bluer.

I kept the conversation going. We’d finally started talking and I didn’t want to stall out. I told Daryn about my parents and Anna. People get extra curious when they find out I have a twin, so that took some time. Then I told her I used to play ball before senior year.

“Catching is like quarterbacking. It’s a real mix of strategy, aggressiveness, and quick reaction. You’re managing the pitch count, watching the runners on base. You control the whole game behind the plate.”

“Is that what you liked about it—being in control?”

“Definitely. Control’s my favorite.”

Daryn’s smile was a quick flash. I could tell she didn’t hand them out easily. “Baseball. That explains this sweatshirt. Thanks, by the way. So why did you stop playing? You said you played until senior year.”

Why had I said that? “Outgrew it, I guess,” I replied, avoiding the truth. I’d left out the part about my dad not being alive when I’d mentioned him. “Decided to go the Army route.”

“But you didn’t enlist during high school, right?”

“My contract started right after graduation, but I wanted to be ready. I spent most of this spring working out, doing stuff that would prepare me.”

I was building a pretty good house of cards. The part about me doing all that stuff was true, but I didn’t want to get into the trigger that got me to enlist.

The guy I’d messed up at the baseball game? His dad, Mr. Milligan, had come to the house a few weeks after it happened. Evidently he and my mom had been talking on the phone a lot. He came by one afternoon and sat on the couch in our living room and told me I needed to get my shit together. Except he said it in a really decent paternal way that made me feel like crying my head off. I didn’t, though. I’d tried a bunch of times after my dad died, but I could never manage it. I had a jam in my tear ducts or something. As he left, Mr. Milligan gave me an Army recruiter’s number on a yellow Post-it, which lived on my desk for a few weeks until I finally accepted that it was exactly what I needed.

I had no idea why I was lying to Daryn about my dad. Lying sucked. I guess I didn’t want her pity. Being pitiful sucked more than being a liar. At least right then that was how it seemed.

“Were you? Prepared when you got to Fort Benning?” she asked.

“As much as I could be. More than a lot of other guys. All the PT we do in RASP? The physical training? Grueling. But it could’ve been worse.”

“You look like you’re in good shape.”

My brain took a quick vacation. When it came back I had to crank the wheel to keep us on the road, which was embarrassing. And confusing. Because why? I didn’t like her. I mean, I didn’t think so. But still.

“How about you?” I asked, trying to keep words happening. “Play any sports?”

“I might have.”

“Instruments?”

“No.”

“Did you grow up in a state that starts with the letter A, M, or T?”

Her lips did this twisty thing to the side.

“Isn’t that how we’re doing this? Process of elimination?”

Daryn brushed some sand off her jeans. “The less we do of
this,
the better it’ll be for both of us.”

I started laughing. I didn’t know what had just hit me. Daryn laughed too, more at me than with me, but it didn’t matter. I enjoyed it.

“You run a pretty good defense, Martin. You know that?”

“I’ve gotten better.”

“Does this mean you’re not going to tell me about the downloads you get? Or how often you get ’em? Or how long you’ve been doing this? Like, is this your first assignment, or have you been seeking—seekering?—your whole life? And, like, when you saw me—you said you saw me—was I excelling at protecting secret powerful objects? Doing epic War shit? How amazing was I, is basically what I want to know. But in specifics. Did I look really-really awesome or just kind of good? Wait, wait—I looked prime. Didn’t I, Martin?”

“Are you done?”

“With my opening questions?”

She shook her head. “Wow.”

“You don’t have to answer.”

“I know I don’t.” She reclined her seat and put her feet up on the dash. I thought the subject was closed because she shut her eyes, but then she said, “It’s not often you meet people who are so persistent.”

“How often do you meet people who are War?”

She peered at me and gave a little shrug, like
you’re really not all that special
. Then she closed her eyes again. “I can’t tell you what they’re like. Seeing the things I do. Knowing things I can’t actually explain. You’d never understand.”

“Okay.” I got that. It was like telling someone what jumping out of a plane felt like. I could
describe
how it felt when your feet left the deck and the air came up and hit you. How the world looked spread out below you. I could try to explain the feeling of falling. Of being so far up you felt protective of the earth, proud of it, of the entire planet. I could talk all day but it was nothing like actually experiencing it. Some things you just had to live through.

Daryn looked at me. I think my reply surprised her, the fact that I understood that I couldn’t understand, and this cool sort of vibe happened, both of us connecting over things we could never really share.

I hadn’t been joking when I said I’d only just scratched the surface of the things I wanted to ask her. I had questions about the Kindred. Samrael, specifically. I wanted to know if I was mortal. Could I even die? Fast healing was one thing. Being immortal was a whole different ball game.

I also wondered about the red horse and whether it had really been on fire, and if I controlled when it showed up or not, and what its purpose was in everything because I didn’t need a horse. I’d never ridden one in my life. And riding something that was on fire seemed like a truly bad call. Really, no thanks. Pass.

I had an endless amount of questions. They were all I had. My world felt like it had entered a zero-gravity chamber. Things that had had weight my entire life suddenly seemed to be floating around me, moving without reason or order. There was so much to try to understand. My level of confusion was so extreme that answers didn’t seem like they’d even cut it. I was on overload and Daryn was done handing out intel, so.

I reached down and pushed the Pearl Jam cassette into the player. The song that came on was “Nothingman.” Hands down, my favorite. Even on cassette and through crap speakers, Eddie Vedder’s voice laid down the law.

He sang to us the rest of the way to LA because it turned out Daryn loved Pearl Jam too, which was a cool coincidence. No one our age loved Pearl Jam. I only did because of my dad, and I didn’t ask why she did. I didn’t want her to ask me that back. But it was okay. It didn’t need qualifying. We were rock solid on it.

Pearl Jam?

Awesome.

It was something. One thing that still had gravity.

Right then, I needed it.

*   *   *

As we approached the LA area, Daryn sat up and twisted her blond hair into a knot on top of her head. “Don’t freak out, okay?”

I wanted to tell her that was the worst possible way to keep someone from freaking out—aside from just screaming in their face—but I nodded and said, “Okay.”

Her hand drifted over the silver necklace, then came to rest on the dash. She watched the freeway, studying the exits, the buildings in the distance, her stillness and concentration growing more and more intense.

“We should take the next exit,” she said.

I did as she instructed.

Her directions continued.
Take a right here. Left at the next signal. Stay in this lane.

How was she doing this?

I kept having to consciously relax my grip on the steering wheel. Awe didn’t begin to cover what I felt. I’d seen a lot I couldn’t explain over the past days, both with regard to me and to Samrael, but this was my first direct experience with Daryn doing something that was literally unbelievable.

We ended up at a high-rise in Studio City, where I pulled into the underground garage and parked. In a short amount of time, everything had changed. No more long sunny stretches of highway with the roar of my tires, the rattle of the soft top, Pearl Jam playing. Now the quiet hummed in my ears and we were surrounded by concrete lit by the glare of fluorescent lighting.

On the road, the part of me that scoped out danger had been able to take a break. It’d just been me and Daryn and we’d been moving. Not much I could do but drive to keep us safe. Not anymore, though. The second we ventured into the dense population of the city, the threat factor would multiply. The Kindred could be anywhere. They could track Daryn, so we had to move quickly. The faster we located Famine and got to a safe location, the better.

“You know where he is in the building?” I asked. The things I’d been learning as a soldier came up, quick and clear. We had a lot to go over. Knowledge of terrain, routes to and from our objective, contingencies.

“Yes.” Daryn yanked my sweatshirt off, tossed it in the backseat, and hopped out of the car.

“Daryn.”
I shot after her. “You can’t barrel in there without a plan.”

“We don’t have time to plan. We have to move fast, before Samrael finds us.”

“Fast doesn’t mean reckless. Fast should be slow—efficient. We need to move in a coordinated—” The garage elevator door opened. I was tempted to physically keep her from entering it, but a humming in my arm distracted me.

The cuff.

Magic metal was talking, sending energy flowing into me. I pulled my sleeve down, covering it.

Daryn pressed the button for the eleventh floor. “I know we’re rushing but we have to get to him before Samrael does.”

“Hold up. You said the Kindred track the object. That’s what they’re after. Are they after us, too?”

Before she could answer, the door slid open on the lobby level and a flood of humanity poured inside. I grabbed Daryn’s arm and swam against the tide, keeping us right up front by the door as I checked every face that went past us for Samrael. Bad enough we were in a metal box. I wasn’t going to get cornered in the back.

A guy in a pinstripe suit crashed into my shoulder as he rushed through the closing doors. “Dumb couriers,” he muttered, shooting me a look. “Use the service elevator next time, moron.”

“Gideon,” Daryn said quietly. I still had her arm. I let it go. “Just ignore him.”

Easier said than done. The lid on my anger had started to clatter the minute she’d jumped out of the Jeep. As the elevator went up, so did tempers. People started getting huffy, their griping filling my ears.

“—never heard of the concept of personal space—”

“—way over capacity in here and it is just
rude
to disregard the safety of others—”

“—idiot up there thinks he can use the regular elevator—”

I knew it was my effect on them. Daryn kept looking at me, but I couldn’t ratchet it back. We were making a blind charge. This was a bad idea.

Finally, we reached the eleventh floor. I launched through the doors like I was back in jump school. Then I followed Daryn down a hallway, around a corner.