Riders (Riders, #1)(80)

“I know it ain’t me,” he said. Then his attention moved to Daryn, who was coming along the riverbank from our firing range.

Marcus flipped the scythe around, offering me the end of the staff to help me up. Did he care what Daryn thought of him? Or did he want to highlight who was on the winning end of our sparring exercise? Like me sitting in a river didn’t make that clear enough.

I pushed the scythe away, got up, and broke into a jog. The sun had already dipped behind the mountains and my teeth were rattling. I had to get up to the hut and in front of a fire.

Daryn jogged over and met me, blocking my path to the trail. She looked at my sopping clothes. At how I was shivering. She couldn’t seem to decide what to say and I couldn’t look at her without picturing Samrael’s arm wrapped around her, the two of them smiling.

“Gideon…”

Don’t ask.

Don’t ask if I’m okay.

“I think we should train with the horses. I think it would help.”

Right. That was what I needed.

I couldn’t even respond. I went right around her, back to the hut.

We ended the day around the stone circle. All of us together, but not together.

Jode and Bas hadn’t done well in their training either. Daryn had grown quieter than normal. Marcus and I had gone backwards. We sat around the fire pit and ate rice and beans out of a pan. Passed around a couple of cans of peaches and some chocolate bars. Then I got the fireplace going in the hut and we crashed.

The next few days weren’t any better. In fact, they got worse. I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a night. Ra’om’s images started haunting me during the days, too. I’d find myself staring off, divided between what I was doing and seeing the worst things I could possibly imagine. I imagined them over and over.

I kept us all on a strict training routine, though. Sunup to sundown we worked with the weapons and even drilled with armor, but we made meager progress. Bastian and Jode’s marksmanship with the scales and the bow held at a constant level—the suck level of marksmanship. Every day, I ran them through the basic principles of good shooting. I set up new targets and had them try different firing positions, but nothing helped.

Jode overthought everything. He was too much in his head. I’d tell him to shoot and he’d go into the history of longbowmen. He’d detail the Battle of Agincourt and how his weapon would fit in with our overall strategy. I knew the rambling was his way of stalling. When he did shoot, he was okay. Really, not bad. But he’d take a shot that was off by a few feet and that was unacceptable to him. He’d want to quit. He expected perfection, which I appreciated. But he had no patience for the failures that needed to happen along the way.

Jode kept pressing me to start our training with the horses. Bastian, too. But I kept shutting them down.

I knew we should be training with the horses. We were horsemen. But our weapons were higher priority—so I thought—and my horse? Didn’t want to go there.

Bastian didn’t give up like Jode, but his confidence with the scales was shaky, and the guy didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body.

“I’m just not like you, G,” he told me on the fourth day of missing targets by a mile. “I think you’re barking up the wrong wall.”

“You’ll get it, Bas,” I said. “You only almost decapitated me twice today.”

“Man, I’m so sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry about it. Let’s go again.” I gave him the scales and stepped back, feeling hopeful. Ready to duck.

He got them spinning in the air above his head. He looked pretty solid with that part. The problem was the release, which was a lot like hitting a baseball. A series of precise movements that had to flow in just the right order, culminating in a single, perfectly timed instant.

Bas let them fly. They sailed behind us, tearing the hell out of a patch of wildflowers. I wanted to laugh, but I was worried it would break him down.

“I suck at this, Gideon. Besides, I don’t even think this is the right thing. How’s this the right way to do good?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean fighting.”

“You’re asking a soldier this?” I had to believe it played some part in doing good. Otherwise, what was my life? Or my dad’s life? Or Cory’s life? Or anyone who fought for good’s life? “Dude, are you drowning in a sea of gray?”

Bas laughed. He shook his head and looked out over the water. “You said it yourself. You’re a soldier. I’m not. I don’t even know how to fight people. What do I know about fighting demons?”

That question legitimately worried me, too. How long did we have before the Kindred found us? How much more time did we have to prepare? Right then, a year wouldn’t have seemed like enough.

Our best-case scenario relied on Daryn. Our Seeker needed to bring us information, a mission plan, a drop-off point. I’d have killed for a goal. For actual actionable plans, instead of the hide-and-train holding pattern we were in.

The only clear benefit from working with Jode and Bastian during that first week was that I started getting pretty good with the bow and the scales. The bow was my favorite—the arrows appeared to have limitless range and their accuracy was off the charts—but the more I used the scales, the more I took to them. The chains could be used to lasso, the disks were sharper than knives, and, thrown the right way, they came back like a boomerang. The weapon had serious versatility.