The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(11)

Nothing. Worse than silence: an emptiness where silence might be, a hollow unfilled, unfillable, driving her out and back into herself.

Fingers clenched, jaw tight enough to ache, Isobel was uncertain how much time had gone, save they all still waited, the men looking away, the women staring, near rude but so hesitantly hopeful, she could not take offense. Not for the first time, she wondered why the boss had sent her out so woefully unprepared?—and how she was supposed to function once her time with Gabriel was done and he moved on.

“Something happened here,” she said. “Tell me.”

They all looked at Duck, who merely shook her head and lowered her gaze to her hands twined together in her lap. Isobel felt a snap of impatience: how was she to help if they would not tell her? Was this yet another test? Was she supposed to know?

The tension stretched, filling the air until it became hard to breathe, Isobel’s impatience becoming a thing she could feel, knocking at her bones. The older woman was their leader, they would not say anything if she would not. And Isobel could do nothing if they did not speak.

“Jumping-Up Duck. Please.”

“The ground rumbled,” the woman said finally, not looking up from her hands, rough-skinned knuckles clenched tight.

“A quake?” They were not common in Flood, but they happened, and the boss had said that the ground had once rocked hard enough, farther west, that those who lived there told stories of it a hundred years later, of ground crumbling and waters rising, and those who could not run, died.

“Jordskalv,” Karl said. “As though waves underfoot, on a ship, in solid ground. Three times yesterday, one after another.”

Isobel, trying to read him, thought his expression was less worry and more irritation at the world not behaving itself.

“The land shakes often to the west of here,” Four Wolves said. “Where the ground steams and ancient spirits rest. If the dwellers-below are restless enough to stretch their hands this far . . . they are best left alone. It is nothing we need worry about. We have done nothing to offend.”

There was utter certainty in his body: whatever was happening, he did not think it a threat, and he was tired of repeating himself.

Isobel remembered Ree, after the boss had told that story of the great quake, his fingers stroking the jagged ink that ran, blue against black, from wrist to elbow. “The deep bones ache,” he’d said then. “They stretch and wake, then go back to sleep. Best to let them be.”

“This is not the rumble of birthing,” Jumping-Up Duck told Four Wolves, scowling. “It is a rumble of pain.”

Four Wolves opened his mouth to argue with her, then closed his mouth and lowered his gaze, as though she had cowed him.

“Margot? Elizabet?”

The sisters glanced sideways at each other, then each shook their head.

“The earth shook,” Elizabet said. “I was sleeping, the first time, but awake for the others. It was . . . disturbing. The children cried.”

“They were the most upset,” Margot added. “But they could not tell us why.”

Isobel thought that the ground shaking needed no more reason than that to upset them, but simply nodded. “Three quakes, one after another. How long apart?”

“The first when the quarter-moon was bright,” Catches in Teeth said. “The second soon after, and the third well after sunrise. We stayed in the lodge for the first. When we came out . . .” He looked distressed, his gaze flicking to the barn where Uvnee was stabled. “We had goats, not many, but enough to give milk, meat. They all fled. Only the dogs remained.”

“The earth is in pain,” Duck said, as though Catches in Teeth’s words had opened something within her. “Pain that does not care the cause, only to find something within reach to hurt in turn.” She was looking at the children as she spoke, five of them, comfortable in bare skin and clouts, their hair reddish black in the sunlight as they played with the dogs in the grass.

They should have been living with a tribe, or a village, or in a city back East, Isobel thought. Not here, isolated, alone, with parents who seemed as helpless as babes themselves. And yet there was something in her that envied them, born to nothing less than the plains and mountains, the four winds above and the bones below.

She had been born on a farmstead somewhere. Luck and her parents’ foolishness brought her to Flood, to the devil’s house, to become his Hand. But for that . . . what would she have become?

Isobel felt something stir at that thought, slow and deep. The sigil on her palm remained cool, but her fingers closed over it nonetheless, and her right hand crossed over to rub at the silver ring on her finger. Power, building somewhere, rising to that thought. This place might have been cleansed, but the Devil’s Hand carried power within too.

Show me, she asked it, remembering the feel of the boss’s hand on her shoulder, his voice in her ears, the comforting smell of his cologne and the unlit cigars he carried but never smoked. She closed her eyes to chase them, suddenly dizzy with the sensation of layer after layer like an onion under her hands, forever unpeeling until there was nothing left but tears.

Stone tears, white with heat, deep in the center of it all, and a molten whisper tracing burning scars along her skin, under her skin, searing her bones with words she could not understand. A story, and a warning, and something else beyond, below the silence, beyond the emptiness, seething like a pot overboiling, odorous as a blacksmith’s forge.