The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(27)

A flash of annoyance?—she knew that—was tamped down. He wasn’t scolding her, only telling her what the day would be like, seeing if she had anything to add. He’d done such before, often enough; why did she react now?

“Sky looked clear,” she said instead. “If the ground stays still . . .”

Her mood was uncertain, some tingling sense of unease she’d learned to heed, not a push or a pull, but a sense of something wrong. Gabriel frowned into his mug, and she wondered if he felt the same, the sense of needing to look and at the same time needing to turn away, to ignore everything to the north, pretend that the ground had not shaken, that Jumping-Up Duck had never spoken, that she had never felt the push to . . .

Something didn’t want her there, was pushing her away. Why?

“Douse the fire,” she said abruptly, and as though he’d been waiting for those words, he dumped what remained of his coffee on the ground by his feet. “I’ll fetch the horses.”

Rearranging the packs to keep weight off Flatfoot’s wounds took a little time, but soon enough, the camp was cleared and they were ready to go. Isobel shifted a little, trying to find her balance with the additional pack slung over Uvnee’s rump.

“Clear to ride?” Gabriel asked, as relaxed into his saddle as he’d been the day they left Flood, although his long coat was now rolled and stowed on the back of his saddle, and the look he gave her was less judging than expectant.

She listened the way he’d taught her, taking in the feel of her surroundings as well as the sounds and smells, expecting that sense of being watched to return, for the smell of something wrong to touch her nose. It didn’t. “I think so,” she said, but didn’t move. She remembered how she’d known something was wrong the day before and then how she’d frozen just before the attack, remembered the size of the ghost cat, the weight of each paw and the curve of its claws, and the starveling look of its ribs.

“Iz?”

“Yes,” she decided. The cat had been ill, and hungry, its prey fled. With the cat dead, the threat was gone. “Clear to ride.”

Despite her continuing unease, Isobel found herself enjoying the morning ride. Although the trail still climbed through chalky red hills, it occasionally led them through long, narrow valleys filled with summer grasses and the dusty green of sagebrush, dotted with short-trunked pines and white-barked firestarter. There was the occasional waft of something unpleasant on the breeze, similar to the cat’s musk but less sickly-sweet, but it was offset by the smells of green growing things, and the warm spicy scent of horseflesh and sweat that Isobel had come to know as well as the scent of fresh linens and liquor from the saloon.

Home. Isobel took off her hat and wiped her forehead where sweat had gathered. Home had always been the saloon, the town of Flood, the farmlands and riverbank that bordered it: her entire world within the safe-wards, the familiar pulse that surrounded her, fitted itself to her, and she to it. She had thought it all there was, all that was important.

Did they miss her, Iktan, Molly, and Ree, Catie and the others back in Flood? Did they wonder what she was doing, or had she faded from their lives already, only mentioned in stories of things that happened a long time ago, maybe told to the new girl who slept in her bed, did her chores?

When the boss had sent her out with Gabriel, she had thought it punishment. Had thought being sent away the price for what she had bargained for. Respect. Power. The ability to shape and change things, the way she’d seen the boss and Marie shape and change things.

She hadn’t understood what power felt like then. Hadn’t felt the sickening dizziness, the way it stretched her thin, burned and broke inside her. The understanding that it wasn’t hers, none of it: that she was only a tool, a barranca for waters to run through.

Her right hand, still holding the reins, reached for her left, the thumb pressing into the palm where the lines of the sigil had appeared so many weeks ago. They had been faint at first, thin raised lines she could feel to the touch. But now it was as much a part of her hand as the lifelines crossing it, the marks dark and clear, the double-ended loop enclosed within an open circle. An infinitas, Gabriel had called it.

Infinite. Endless.

Then Isobel paused. Marie had no such mark on her hand. Surely she would have noticed it: Marie’s hands were always visible, resting on a shoulder or directing where things should go, carrying a tray or wrapped around a glass. . . . Did the mark fade? Or was she the only one identified that way, like a saddle or some other object, claimed so that it couldn’t be stolen. . . .

“Iz.” Gabriel’s voice cut into her increasingly uncomfortable musings, and she looked up with a sense of relief, to see what had caught his attention.

They’d come to another valley, this one with a creek cutting across it, and on one side of the creek she saw now what he had seen: bare skeletons of wood, curved and bent into the ground, and piles of black ash. It took looking-for, but once she did, Isobel could identify the structures that had been there, imagine the hide stretched over the wood, the placement of campfires and the food cache, now dismantled and taken away.

“A hunting camp?” It did not have the feel of a settled camp, the grasses not worn enough to show well-trod trails or refuse piles.

“Likely,” Gabriel agreed. He had pushed his hat back in a gesture that meant he was thinking about what might have happened, his gaze moving over the scene in front of them carefully, taking in all detail, even the things that she would miss, the things that didn’t seem important, and putting them together to mean something.