The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(21)

“What?” she demanded, suddenly angry at him.

“People ask me if I’m not bored, riding the Territory day in and out,” he said without opening his eyes, still smiling. “Every day, exactly the same . . .”

Isobel remembered the pain wracking her body, the look in Jumping-Up Duck’s eyes, the rage shaking the ground below her feet. Nothing about any of this was amusing. And yet, she sank to her knees on the dirt, surprised to hear hiccuppy laughter matching his own.

“Too much,” Gabriel said finally, when they’d both calmed down. He handed her a square of cloth, the red fabric sun-faded but clean, and she blew her nose, then tucked the square into her own pocket rather than handing it back filled with snot.

“Ow.” He shifted, placing a hand over his ribs, shaking his head at Isobel when she would have scolded him. “Scabbing held, just aches a bit. Laughing hurts, but it helps, too.”

He was right. Isobel didn’t understand why, but some of the pressure she’d been feeling had lifted off her, some of the echoing emptiness filled.

More than just today, just then, she thought. Weeks she’d felt that pressure, maybe longer. Since she’d felt the Spaniard’s spell break against the Territory, seen it cause illness, death, where it landed? Since she discovered what carrying the devil’s sigil would require of her, would make her?

Maybe longer. Maybe since the morning of her sixteenth birthday, when she’d told the boss she wanted to stay . . . only to have him shove her out of the house like a second-hand tool loaned to someone else.

Isobel knew every bargain had a price. She’d read her Contract, she’d seen the words, but she hadn’t understood what it would feel like to pay it. Maybe nobody ever really did.

She took her own hat off, wiped the line of sweat away from her hairline. Molly would be horrified at how tangled her hair was, how cracked and ragged her nails were. Neat and presentable, Izzy, she’d say. Always be neat and presentable, no matter what you were doing.

Isobel felt a giggle trying to rise up again, imagining doing what they did wearing a saloon dress and slippers. Then she imagined Gabriel in a saloon dress and slippers, and the horror of that sobered her faster than running water in winter.

She thought about what Gabriel had said. “Would having a magician here be better or worse?” Bound to the winds and craving power they stole from others, a magician had been no soothing thing to travel with, but Farron had been useful, and Isobel thought that perhaps, in his own way, he had been fond of her as well.

“Worse,” Gabriel said promptly. “He may not have been our enemy, in that time and place,” he added, as though reading her thoughts. “But he wasn’t our friend, either. Never forget that, Iz.”

“I know.” She did. Even the boss gave magicians a walk-around when he could. Dream-walkers and medicine folk, people with skills, they remained themselves, no matter how skilled they became. Magicians did not. The winds rode them, filling them with power, and that made them changeable as the winds and twice as mad. They were not to be trusted.

She still missed him.

“If this is another spell-creature . . .” Isobel put her hat back on her head, the weight against her hair like an embrace, the shadow it cast over her eyes a welcome relief. She looked down at her hands, curling her fingers over the black sigil on her left palm, the circle and infinitas that told anyone with sense that the thing so marked belonged to the devil.

“If it is another spell-creature, you will track it down and deal with it,” Gabriel said, so matter-of-fact that she had no choice but to believe him.

It didn’t matter that she hadn’t understood, not entirely. Maleh mishpat, the boss had said, and even if she hadn’t understood them, she had felt the words in her own bones, in the marrow and blood like a thunderclap. She would become the cold eye and quick knife, the final decision-maker in the isolated expanses of the Territory when the devil himself could not be.

Gabriel’s responsibility was merely to keep her safe, to teach her what she needed to know to survive. This . . . whatever waited in the hills above them was her responsibility, not his.

“Back in the saddle,” Gabriel said before she could marshal an argument to that point, checking to make sure Steady’s saddle was still cinched tight, and then swinging himself onto the gelding’s back. His look told her clearly that they were in this together and she was to stop being foolish about it, and she wondered if she should worry that he could read her that well. “If the quakes are worse as we ride to the north, then that’s where the source is, most likely. Into the hotlands. Another day’s ride at least, assuming the ground stays still for us.”

A day’s ride without the guidance or safety of the Road, into hills that refused to let her see them, where the ground underfoot could hide boiling pools, to find a creature, possibly spell-born, that was in such pain and rage that it wanted to do nothing but destroy. It was nothing to laugh about—none of this was anything to laugh about—but as Isobel remounted, she felt a bubble of that laughter lingering nonetheless.

She’d been so proud of herself before. She had traveled with a magician, conversed with a dream-walker, outwitted Spaniards, defeated a creature of power, and she had thought that she’d conquered a mountain—only to discover that she was standing on the plateau of foothills, the larger range still to come.