Riders (Riders, #1)(77)
After a moment, Jode sat on his bed platform. “I’m knackered. I’ll just stay here.”
“You don’t get to pass because you’re tired,” I said. “Get up.”
“I’ll cut firewood tomorrow,” he said, yawning. “I’m more in need of sleep than I am of a fire.”
Marcus didn’t even bother responding. He just crashed on the other platform.
Anger revved inside me. Did they think this was a vacation? Didn’t they understand what was at stake?
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.”