The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(23)
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, reaching for the ever-familiar pull of flowing water. For a moment, he couldn’t find it, his pulse racing in near-panic, then he felt the steady trickle of an underground spring, muffled and distant, as though he were hearing it through a heavy fog.
“No fresh water nearby,” he told her, sparing her how difficult it had been to discover even that. “Good thing we refilled the canteens.”
“I thought springs were common here?” She was untacking the mare already, setting the saddle carefully to one side of the fallen trunk, then pulling out a brush to clean sweat-matted hide and hocks.
“Further west,” he said, doing the same for the mule, who had come to stand next to him. “But from what I’ve heard, even the ones that aren’t burning hot aren’t ones you’d want to drink from. Ask me before you drink from anything, unless I’ve already checked it.” He wasn’t willing to risk a bad case of flux, or worse, when simple caution could avoid it. He finished untacking the mule, placing the packs on the ground, and turned back to start working on Steady. “Are you sure?—”
He never got the chance to finish the sentence. Something hit him in the side, a heavy blunt blow that he was able to identify from past experience as hooves, and the world went dark red, and then black.
“Gabriel. Gabriel Kasun. Open your eyes.”
The voice was familiar, strained with panic, tied to a sense that he needed to be up, needed to . . . do something.
Open his eyes. He could do that.
The knife clutched in his hand was bloody, but so were his arm and chest, either from the old wounds reopening or new ones he couldn’t tell, and from the way Isobel’s wide brown eyes kept flicking back and forth, he suspected there was blood on his face as well.
“What happened?”
Isobel shifted back on her heels, and behind her, sprawled on its back, was the largest ghost cat he’d ever imagined?—no, larger than that, nearly as long as a horse, its tawny pelt marked with black at head and tail.
But even from that distance he could see its ribs through the pelt, and when he took a deep breath, the same smell they’d both picked up earlier: something dying.
“Waters of Jordan,” Gabriel said, and collapsed onto his backside, wincing as the scarring on his ribs joined the new welts in a chorus of argument. “Waters of Jordan, the size of that thing.” Then the last seconds before the attack came to him, and he twisted, trying to see the rest of their camp. “Flatfoot?”
Isobel paled, and shifted on her knees, both of them seeing the mule down on its hocks and struggling to get up, its own hide striped with claw marks and blood. “Oh!”
“He took it down, not me,” Gabriel was saying even as he crawled toward the mule. Steady was already there, muzzle down against the mule’s neck as though to give comfort, Uvnee whickering her own concern but unable to move closer, unwilling to step over the cat’s corpse. “Flatfoot became Flying Foot.” He reached the mule and spoke softly to it, running a hand over the heaving flanks. “Get the mare before she bolts,” he snapped. Isobel started, then jumped up, stepping cautiously over the corpse, draping a cloth over the mare’s eyes to lead her to where Steady waited. Gabriel turned back to the mule, looking him over again before doing anything.
“Will he be all right?” Isobel crouched to the side, her gaze switching between him and the mule, her face ashen, her eyes too wide and wild.
“If we can get him up, I think so.” Gabriel tried to infuse certainty into his voice, knowing he failed when she flinched. “Need to see how deep those claw marks are. They’re not too bad, I don’t think.” He ran his hand gently over one, and the mule shuddered, but new blood didn’t gush from it.
“Just scoring,” Gabriel said. “No worse than mine. We’re a matched set now, you little idiot.” He coaxed him up gently, hands under thick-furred belly. “Come on, up, there you go, old man. Iz, water and the coneflower salve now!”
She scrambled to her feet again, racing to dig the items out of their packs. She came back with the salve and a canteen, and a pale blue cloth clutched in her hand.
“Good. Clean the wounds,” he told her, taking the packet of salve from her other hand.
“But your—”
“Iz. Now.”
He waited to watch her uncork the canteen and splash a little water over Flatfoot’s side, using the old shirt to wipe away the blood. He’d been right; the claw marks were ugly but shallow, and the bleeding had mostly stopped already. There were deeper wounds by his tail where the beast had tried to bite down that looked ugly but weren’t bleeding. She cleaned those out too, keeping up a steady stream of nonsense words while she worked, her left hand stroking the mule’s flank as she worked, reminding him that it was her touching him there, not another predator.
The mule shuddered under her touch, its eyes rolling nervously, but it allowed her to work. Gabriel added a little of the water to the salve and let it soften, then stepped away to check on the horses, running quick hands over their sides, murmuring nonsense into their ears. He didn’t have time to picket them, but when the salve had reached the proper consistency, he dabbed a pinch of it on their muzzles, near the soft skin of flaring nostrils. The bitter smell would not mask the dead cat, not entirely, but it should be enough to distract and calm them.