CHAPTER 22
C HAPTER 22
R AIDER HAULED SETH up and slung him over his shoulder again. He was so damn angry with Seth. And fucking terrified. Seth had lost a lot of blood. The emergency staples were a temporary measure. Seth needed real medical treatment.
Would he get that if Raider let the palanquins catch up? They might catch up anyway. Slowed by his heavy burden, hampered by his own cuts and bruises, Raider wasn’t exactly at racing speed.
Raider also wasn’t very confident in himself as a caretaker right now. How could he trust himself when his head was so fucked up?
Ever since that bad incident in the palace, Raider had felt uneasy about his own awareness and control. Seeing things that weren’t there, reacting all wrong to what was happening around him …
It was too familiar. Too much like his time with Kahzir.
Raider tried not to think about that period of his life, but he knew full well that it was still within him. It was still part of both his body and mind. Between the drugs and Kahzir’s mind games, Raider had lost track of reality for a long time.
Was it happening again? Was that why he kept seeing someone watching? Kahzir used to watch him like that. There and gone, like a mirage. Maybe it was Kahzir he was imagining.
What if he had another bad incident while Seth was incapacitated? He had attacked Seth that night. What if he did it again? What if he hurt Seth? What if he … killed him like he’d killed Hassan? Raider hadn’t meant to. He hadn’t even understood what was happening that night until the quicksilver had already punched from Raider’s fist into Hassan’s chest.
Raider couldn’t risk hurting Seth. So he already half knew what he was going to do, but something kept him moving forward, some kind of automatic flight response.
He couldn’t look back, but he could hear their pursuers catching up. He almost stopped, but there was a slight rise ahead. Straining under Seth’s weight, he climbed it—
“Oh, fuck,” Raider muttered as he took in the impossible gap between the canyon’s two sides and the long, steep drop to the bottom.
He carefully lowered Seth to the ground then walked to the edge. He stared down the nearly sheer rocky slope to the thin river. Greenery dotted the edges. Somewhere upstream, movement caught Raider’s eye, but he didn’t have a chance to take a better look. He was more concerned about what was behind them.
The palanquins were close enough that Raider could tell it was Nasrin driving the lead vehicle. She would be catch up in less than a minute.
It was just as well. Raider should have let her catch them earlier. Seth needed help. He was pale, his breathing shallow. His pant leg was soaked with blood.
Despite all that, Seth sat up, looking back at the palanquins.
“It’s okay,” Raider said. “We’ll just have to hope—”
Seth got to his feet faster than Raider would have thought possible. Raider tried to stop him but could only steady him as he staggered to the edge of the canyon. Raider grabbed hold of him, afraid he would fall.
“Seth, your plan was insane. There’s no way—”
Seth snatched his multi tool from his belt, aimed it at the ground, and fired the harpoon. It punched into the hard pack.
“Seth, no—what the—”
Seth grabbed Raider and launched them both over the edge.
Raider yelled as they plunged down. The harpoon’s wire, doling out its length, offered just enough resistance to keep them from plummeting straight down, but they were still moving fast.
Raider looked up to see Nasrin at the edge—Nasrin and a black-robed arcanist. The one who had found Seth’s notes. The one whose face had made Raider’s mind trip and stumble when he’d burst into the circle of palanquins. His thoughts had scattered and he’d found himself with blades at his throat.
If Seth hadn’t arrived and hurled his chakram at Nasrin, snapping Raider out of it, he didn’t know where his mind might have gone. Or what he might have done.
He’d shoved all that to the back of his mind as they’d fled, but it came back to him now. He knew that face. He’d seen it in the shadows a thousand times.
The arcanist knelt beside the lodged harpoon and touched it with something. When a current raced down the wire, the shock that exploded through Raider’s body seized his limbs and whited out his thoughts. It was an all too familiar sensation. Even freefalling through the bright sunlight, the shock took him back to the dark, closed-in space of the Box. A thousand times he’d been trapped in that darkness while the electrical pulses shattered every connection between his body and mind. Until he became an empty thing.
That’s what he was now.
Until a greater, more important reality screamed in through the white noise.
Seth.
Also falling.
Also about to die.
A sharp avian cry split the air, but Raider had no attention to spare for it. He tried to twist in the air, desperate to see Seth, but he couldn’t get turned, couldn’t find Seth in the blur of sky and canyon wall. Sorrow and rage seized him.
It wasn’t fair—
Raider was seized around the middle. The sudden clench stole the breath from his lungs. His fall became an arc, swinging him up into a huge shadow.
For a moment, stunned and uncomprehending, Raider simply stared down at the river rushing by below him. Then he jolted at the sight of huge golden talons curled around his middle—and Seth caught in the other clawed grip.
At first, there was only relief. There was life. Seth’s life. His own. Then there was understanding.
There was only one creature to which these talons could belong. Raider twisted to look up at the enormous tawny bird that had caught them. A roc. A creature known to snatch horses, camels, and men from the desert. They had been saved from death only briefly.
It must have been the roc that Raider had spotted moving in the gorge when he’d had no time to really look. Their fall must have caught its predatory gaze.
The roc beat its wings, lifting out of the gorge, veering east. The wind rushed past Raider. He shouted over it.
“Seth!”
There was no response. Seth hung limp in the roc’s talons. Gods, if he was dead—
Raider cut that off. He wouldn’t think about that. He couldn’t even consider it. He could only think about what he needed to do.
The roc would take them to its nest. It probably had young to feed. Otherwise it would have already killed him and Seth. When it landed, Raider might have a chance to fight it—if the quicksilver would answer his need. It had before, when desperation had overpowered his horror of it.
The landscape shifted from hard pack to sand. Too much time was passing. Seth was badly hurt. Besides, atop some lonely crag, stuck in a roc’s nest, how could Raider possibly help him?
His plans shattered. Despair weighed his body so heavily that only the mighty wings of a roc could possibly have held up so much weight.
Then, in the distance, something shimmered. It startled Raider from his despair. He zoomed in with his arcane eye, but whatever he’d seen abruptly vanished, just as the watching figure had vanished multiple times today.
He blinked the zoom away. Whatever it was shimmered into sight once more. Rich green. Piercing blue.
It was a vast, undulating oasis.
Hope stirred. If the roc’s nest was in an oasis, if Raider managed to kill it, maybe there was a chance he could save Seth after all.
Raider zoomed in again and it disappeared. A mirage? He closed that eye—and the oasis shimmered into sight once more.
“Seth!”
Still no response.
“Seth, goddamn it!”
Raider squirmed in the roc’s grip. Gods, if Seth was already dead—
He wasn’t. He couldn’t be.
But if …
The roc can have me, Raider decided. Without Seth, there is no reason to save myself.
Maybe he would have a chance, just a moment, to touch Seth again before the end.
As they flew over the oasis, it was a wild rush of shocking green and sparkling blue. So much water. Lakes, rivers, tumbling waterfalls. It was impossible. Amid that rich life was pale stone. In places throughout the oasis’s shifting elevation, the stone’s natural roughness was carved into ornate buildings.
Raider’s breath caught. This was no simple oasis. The roc had brought them to Jannat. This was the eternal garden. The land of the djinn.
Seth had said they were in the borderlands, that the scorpions had been the first sign. Of the djinn, he had meant.
As they reached a tower-like building, the roc flared its wings and swung its legs forward, pumping to slow its descent. A waterfall tumbled from a peak above the building to plunge straight through a cleft in its roof, spilling into the building. Atop that peak, a large gold figure flashed, but Raider had no time to discern its shape.
The roc released him and Seth on the intact portion of the roof. Raider scrambled to Seth, putting himself between Seth’s prone form and the massive bird. But the roc alighted atop a section of stone balustrade and folded its wings.
Raider jammed his fingers against Seth’s jugular. Relief dizzied him at the dull throb of Seth’s pulse. He tore away the strip of his blood-soaked kaftan to find Seth’s pant leg shiny with blood. Raider clamped a hand on the still-pumping wound and checked on the roc. A man— the man—shimmered into sight beside the bird.
But he wasn’t a man. Raider could see that now. Not with his eyes glowing like molten gold. Not with the blue gleam of his skin.
The djinn was wearing a white sarong with a belt of emeralds. Sapphires flashed at the lobes of his pointed ears.
“Help,” Raider gasped. “Please—help him.”
The djinn turned and spoke to the roc. “Thank you, my friend.”
The giant bird launched itself into the sky, its huge wings pumping and lifting it.
“Help! I’ll do anything, trade anything! Just help!”
Seth was terrifyingly pale and horribly still. His chest barely rose and fell.
Frowning, the djinn walked toward Raider. He said, “I am not an ifrit. I do not bargain.”
“Please,” Raider begged.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help.”
The djinn knelt beside Seth’s wounded leg. Raider shifted to crouch by Seth’s head. He bent down, pressing his lips to Seth’s.
“Don’t you dare leave me,” he whispered against Seth’s lips. “I’ll forgive you anything but that. Don’t you dare leave me.”
Suddenly, Seth’s body arched. His lips parted against Raider’s as he gasped. Raider drew back, staring at Seth as his emerald eyes opened wide.
Seth’s arms came up and wrapped around Raider, pulling him down. Raider was so startled that he didn’t react as Seth rolled over top of him, grinding his hard cock against Raider’s groin. Arousal flooded Raider’s body, his own cock hardening as he lifted up against Seth and held onto him in return.
Raider’s hands roamed over Seth, shocked by the abrupt change from near death to vital, hungry life. Then Seth collapsed over him, suddenly limp.
Raider cried out in alarm.
“He’s fine,” the djinn said quickly.
Raider pressed his fingers against Seth’s neck and found the steady pulse. The warmth was returning to his body. Raider looked past Seth’s shoulder to see the djinn’s eyes dancing with apparent amusement.
“It is the healing,” the djinn said. “But he should rest first before doing any of that.”
“Who are you?” Raider asked as he cradled Seth’s unconscious form, unwilling to lose one inch of contact.
“My name is Tarjan. Welcome to Jannat.”