The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(12)

This is not for you, it warned.

She clung to it nonetheless, searing the skin of her nonexistent hands, charring her bones into dust, ignoring the pain that rattled her like venom surging in her veins, until it snapped sharply and thrust her through the cooling mantle of dirt, back to the surface, into her own bones and skin.

Forcing her eyes open, Isobel focused on the people in front of her, their faces anxious and drawn, the dirt-streaked children stilled in the games, watching their adults watching her.

The boss had said the left hand was the quick knife, the cold eye. Gabriel had told her she was the devil’s silver, cast down on the road to find danger, find it and clear it.

She only knew that if there was pain, if there was danger, she needed to find the cause and end it. But the source was not here.

The boss hadn’t explained anything to her, hadn’t taught her how to do anything. She didn’t know what it was she did, only that she could do it. It wasn’t enough.

It was all she had.

Isobel stood from the table, circling around the children, and came to a patch of ground where the grass had worn thin, the dirt a dry red crumble underneath. She could feel the others watching her still, although they turned their faces away now, unwilling to be rude. It made something between her shoulder blades itch, not the way that told her a demon was watching but something else, more immediate, and more disturbing. She ignored it.

If something was making the ground move, logic said it would be in the ground. Something that pushed her away. Ree and Molly had told stories of spirits who lived in the world below, but Isobel had only ever felt the bones, the deep-set stones the world rested upon.

Isobel looked at the sigil in her palm, thick and fine lines twisted in the doubled circle within a circle. Burnt into her mare’s tack, drawn in her own skin. As Hand, she was nothing but an extension of the devil’s will, and the Territory did not answer to him.

But she was also a rider, thanks to Gabriel’s mentorship, and the Road that looped through the Territory could not hide from a rider once they learned to find it.

She reached, feeling the familiar rush, unlike a crossroads in that its power flowed rather than being trapped, diminishing and refilling rather than building until it burst. Southward, where she’d been, felt the strongest; the hills rising grey-brown to the east were fainter, but she could feel them, something pulsing at their heart, neither welcoming nor forbidding, simply there, healthy and full.

West lay the northern edge of the Mother’s Knife, the farthest edge of the Territory. Northwest, Gabriel had told her, were hills and forests bordering the Wilds, trees as old as the devil, deep springs hotter than the mid-day sun.

She felt nothing to the northwest.

Isobel tilted her head, listening harder. I’m here, she thought, sending the thought as widely as she could, stretching herself out rather than deep, thought-fingers stroking the skin of the earth the way she would Uvnee’s hide, testing for uncertainty, sending reassurance and control. . . .

Silence. No, not silence. Denial. A refusal.

this is not for you.

Isobel withdrew, found herself within her own body again, testing the limits of flesh. Her throat was sore, her back aching, and her lips were cracked and dry as though she’d been riding all day without water.

The Road had refused her. Isobel rubbed at her arms, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the fact that she’d taken off her jacket, or the clouds that slipped across the mid-morning sky. She didn’t understand, didn’t understand anything.

She needed to talk to Gabriel.



“Drink.” Margot held a wooden cup to her lips, and Isobel drank, unquestioning. Honey-water, sweet and cold.

“Slowly. A sip at a time.”

Isobel knew that, her hands coming up to wrap around the cup, the sides smooth against her skin, almost too smooth to hold.

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m all right.”

Margot’s blue eyes studied her, and Isobel thought that this woman would have done well in the Saloon, would have gained the boss’s approval.

“You need to rest. Come,” and she tried to lead Isobel to the nearest cabin, but Isobel pulled back. “I’d rather be outside.”



Margot sent one of the older children to fetch Isobel’s pack, helped her make camp on a flat patch of ground distant enough that she could breathe, but still within the wards, then let her be. The others had disappeared, back inside or elsewhere. Margot was kind, they had all been kind, but they did not trust her entirely.

“Not everyone welcomes the reminder that they live at the devil’s sufferance,” Gabriel had said once. He had been speaking of the folk who settled in Patch Junction, but she supposed some tribes resented him too. The agreement their elders had made however many generations ago bound them as tightly as it did newcome settlers. And those caught between, like these children, given the comfort of neither tribe nor town yet bound by both.

If this place was not safe for them, where would they go?

Isobel took a deep breath, then exhaled, her hands moving in a familiar pattern as she groomed Uvnee’s hide. The mare’s coat was dry and clean of mud and road dust, but Isobel kept running the flat brush over her flanks, letting her other hand trail across the warm horseflesh in reassurance?—although to reassure whom, she wasn’t quite sure?—until the long, coarse brown strands of the mare’s tail were untangled and smooth. Isobel briefly considered braiding them like her own hair before admitting defeat. Hoof to ears, the mare was spotless.