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That wasn’t scouting. That was lying in wait. Which meant—
“You lied to me,” Seth snarled, stalking toward Raider, whose bare torso was a mess of yellow-brown dirt, nasty scrapes, and fast-blooming bruises.
Raider’s quicksilver shoulder guard was out, this time extending down his left arm in complex ridges and brutal studs. Seth only got a quick look at the intricate, pearlescent armor before it retracted with a slithering sort of movement and a hissing shhhhkt. It left a bleeding puncture wound in his shoulder—and its absence revealed a clean slash inside his forearm.
Seth pointed at the cut. “Unless one of those gigantic fucking jackals had a knife, you did that to yourself to lure the pack. What the hell were you doing?”
Raider squinted at him. “My job.”
“The hell that’s your job! Your job is whatever I say it is!”
Without the least reaction to Seth’s words, Raider went to put one of the jackals out of its misery.
With a growl, Seth stalked over to the dead jackal whose skull was housing his chakram. He yanked the weapon free and wiped it clean on the jackal’s coat. After hooking the weapon onto his belt, he triggered his bracer to retract its glove. Without the glove, the chakram’s razor edge would cut his hand when thrown—or when the glove summoned it back. Lodged in bone, however, the weapon hadn’t been able to answer the glove’s call.
The mechanism unfurled from his hand and slid into its housing, not unlike Raider’s armor. At least the glove didn’t cut him every time he used it. What on earth could induce a man to accept such a thing into his body? How the hell had it even been implanted?
Finished dispatching the jackal, Raider straightened, swaying. Seth wasn’t surprised he was hurt. He was lucky he hadn’t been killed in a fall like that—a fall that had been completely unnecessary. If they had worked together, made a plan, divided the pack, it wouldn’t have happened.
“Sit the fuck down,” Seth ordered. “I’ll get the horses and my medical kit.”
He didn’t wait to see if Raider complied. If the idiot fell on his ass, that was his own fault.
Relief flooded Seth when he found the horses where he’d left them, hastily tied to a scrubby tree. They sidled and whinnied at his approach, clearly unnerved, but at least they were there. He’d been afraid they might break their reins and bolt—and what a goddamn mess that would have been.
They had enough of a mess as it was.
Seth needed to get his temper under control and deal with whatever injuries Raider had sustained. He had to be coolheaded, objective, goal-oriented. Raider’s lying and endangerment of himself (and by extension, Seth’s mission) could be dealt with later.
When Seth returned with the horses, he found Raider leaning against a boulder. The man squinted at him.
Seth handed him the reins and went to dig through his saddlebags for his medical kit. He barely had the flap open before his horse started wandering off.
Raider had dropped the reins and was crawling his way onto his own mount.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Seth called, lunging for his horse’s reins. “Get your ass down here and let me look at you.”
“Every scavenger within a mile will be here soon,” Raider said as he flopped into the saddle, his words slow but coherent. “Worse than jackals. We need to go.”
“Is anything broken? Because if it is, we need to go back to Shalaa, not onward.” Seth gritted his teeth at the idea.
“I’m not hurt.”
“You’re clearly hurt.”
“It would take more than that to hurt me.”
“Don’t be absurd. That was a serious fall.”
Raider set his mare into a walk. “We have to go.”
Unbelievable.
Grumbling, Seth mounted his horse and followed Raider through the channel between hills until they emerged into open scrubland. Seth pulled on his white kaftan and told Raider to do the same. Raider fumbled his way into the red silk.
Seth was tempted to see how far Raider would make it before he fell, but after a mile of Raider swaying in the saddle, Seth grabbed Umae’s reins, stopped both horses, and dismounted.
“Get down.”
