The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(114)

“That won’t work.” She was unsure if she spoke the words or merely thought them, unsure if the barrier she sensed was aware enough to even know she was there, much less hear her. “You’re doing more harm that way, can’t you see?”

It was useless; the bones knew only the bones, knew only the earth they were buried in, the deep slow movements and the sudden cracks; the barrier was there to protect itself, not those who lived above.

She thought of the elk’s advice and the Reaper hawk’s. To save herself, to do what she had been sent out to do. To leave the bones to themselves, to meddle in it.

The Agreement gave the devil dominion over those who came into the Territory but not those who were of the Territory—the tribes, and those born of the bones themselves, the creatures of spirit and medicine. And not the magicians, who came from outside but gave themselves over to the winds.

But what of the Territory itself??? She could feel it spreading out under her hand, though they were far off the Road here, in this deserted hollow, the cool fire of stone and bone rising from below to tower overhead, everything resting just so, and she thought again of Gabriel’s story of the Black Hills. Too large, too strong for even the devil to comprehend. He thought to control this?

She bit her lip until she felt blood in her mouth, her thoughts hurt as badly as the burning thorns, prickly discomfort that made her shy away.

You know. The whisper, molten threads, no longer outside but within, running through her bones. The Master of the Territory saw what you are, but we have the greater claim.

She lifted her hand to her mouth, smeared the blood there across her palm, mixing with soil on her skin, the bitter taste of dirt on her tongue. The Territory had been given into the devil’s keeping, and she was of the Territory by birth and touch and claim; she could do what the devil could not.

Living silver, wrapped in her bones.

Magicians could not die, a spirit pulled back to being could not fade; the fury it felt would last a thousand and a thousand years, until nothing lived in this valley, in these hills, anywhere for a day’s ride or more, spreading over time. If they released it . . .

That fury would scorch the ground, burn dirt and rock, turn water to steam and every living thing to ash. But then it would be free, and the damage would be contained, the land?—the people?—beyond this valley safe.

Gabriel. Her stomach dropped. No warding could protect him if that happened. She should never have let him come with her if she’d thought it through, if she’d thought at all.

Another rumble, this one stronger, more violent, and she swayed on her knees, feeling the beating of massive, invisible wings below her, and curled around it the shadowed tendrils of something else, thick and clinging, reeking of want and need.

The magicians who had died here were not destroyed; they lingered by the power of their own desires, and for the first, for the truly first time, Isobel understood why they were told to run when they encountered magicians.

They had no care for anything save power, not even themselves. They would willingly spend their very blood and bone to become something greater. Would willingly destroy the world below them to achieve what the winds contained. Just as the ancient spirit would destroy everything to be free.

Isobel pulled her palm from the ground, her other hand scrabbling for the knife at her side. The silver along the handle and edge no longer gleamed in the sunlight, tarnished to a dull black just in the time since they’d ridden into the valley, just the same as the silver band on her little finger.

“Tell me something useful,” she muttered to it. There was no need to toss silver here to know that something was wrong, something was dangerous, and not all the silver they carried on them was enough to clear the way.

Living silver. Living silver clears all things.

She laid the edge of the knife across her palm and drew a line deep into the flesh until blood welled, rising up to the black lines embedded into her palm. She dropped the knife into the grass and slammed her hand down onto the ground again, the dirt under her fingernails and pressed into the whorls of her fingertips mixing with the blood running down her fingers, aching pain driving from her palm up into her arm, coiling around her elbow and up into her shoulder, her neck, and down her spine, spreading throughout her body until all she could feel was the ache. When the ground trembled underneath her again, as though trying to buck her off its skin, she shoved all of that down, the ache and the pain, the blood and the fear and need she felt, to feel the ancient one move freely, for the magicians to disperse into the winds, for the land to settle back onto its bones and be calm once again.

She was the Devil’s Hand, the cold eye of justice, and she would do what was required to keep the Territory whole.

And if that meant destroying everything within this valley, she would do so.

“But it doesn’t have to be,” she told it. “Let it go.” Neither a command nor a plea: a suggestion, a better way. “Trust me.”

The bones wavered, and she felt the warding crack and splinter. The spirit howled itself open, the tattered remains of the magicians fell away, and the spirit broke free.

There were no words to describe it, nothing in Isobel’s thoughts that could contain it, save the dismay that even a brace of magicians had thought to control this, the air above them filled with a presence that made clear the form she had sensed before was barely the shadow of its shadow: endlessly stretching wings, and eyes and claws and elongated head, the rattling scream of a tornado above her, the wind no longer laughing but howling with outrage. Immense, ancient, powerful as only the long-dead become, fed on the blood of the Territory and the flesh of the winds. And she, petty and puny, daring to?—