The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(28)

Isobel was getting better, but he had years of experience and training. So, she settled herself deeper into the saddle, patted Uvnee’s neck, and waited.

“Not a hunting camp,” he said finally. “Summer camp, maybe. They were here for a while, a few months, and then they left. And they left quick.”

Camps weren’t abandoned; she knew that much. They were chosen carefully, returned to every year. “Like something scared them away?”

“If I were to place a bet . . . yes.”

“The quake.” She said it with certainty, although she knew nothing for a fact.

He shifted in his saddle to look at her. His face was scruffed again, the lack of fresh water meaning he didn’t bother to shave, and the shadows under his eyes were darker, making his face look sallow. She suspected his wounds were giving him pain but knew he would not admit it if she asked.

“Mayhap.” Something about his tone was odd. “Probably,” he went on. “But this is their land, Isobel. They know it like . . . like you knew your saloon. There’s nothing here that they should be that afraid of, to run rather than face it. Not even the ground shaking.”

“Duck said?—”

“Duck wasn’t born here.” His words were sharp, stopping her objection mid-throat. “There’s something you know when you’re born a place. You feel it, different from anywhere else. You know when the wind’s wrong, or the water’s running slow, if the birds are flying too low or too high. . . .

“I’ve never been up this way before,” he said, “but stories say the ground’s always been unsteady. There are places out there where the land cracks open on a regular basis and steam rises into the sky.” He sounded almost wistful, as though he’d enjoy seeing that. “Duck and her people, they came here from elsewhere east. Hearing stories isn’t the same as understanding. But the people who hunt here . . .”

“The people who hunt here?” she prompted when his voice trailed off.

He looked up into the sky then, and she followed his gaze to where a single raptor was now circling, far overhead. Not a Reaper, something smaller. She had a sudden thought it might be an owl, even the one she’d seen, but it was daylight: owls were creatures of dusk and dawn.

“This is their home,” Gabriel said. “Even if they thought they’d offended a spirit, angered enough to shake the ground, they’d try to appease it, not run. This”—and he indicated the abandoned camp in front of him with a jut of his jaw—“doesn’t make sense.”

“Neither does a cat that can check its prey before leaping,” Isobel said without thinking, and then stopped when his attention skewed directly, fiercely, on her.

“What?”



Gabriel had been born to the Territory. He’d seen and heard more oddities than most would believe, walked in true-dreams, and broken bread with creatures of legend. Isobel’s tale should not have made his hair curl—and yet it did.

“Tell me again,” he said, after Isobel finished explaining her reaction to the cat’s attack the night before.

They had dismounted, walking the horses as they moved through the deserted camp, and he could see when she took a deep breath and then exhaled before she responded.

“It will not change no matter how many times I tell you,” she said, her voice terse. “I knew we were being followed in the valley. And when we were untacking the horses, I knew there was something behind me, and I wanted to turn around, but I couldn’t. It was like . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she shivered once. “Like dreaming, when you know you have to move but you can’t; your limbs won’t respond.”

“And you’re sure it wasn’t simply fear? There’s no shame in that,” he added quickly. “A ghost cat, up close, can turn even the hottest blood into ice.”

Her eyes narrowed in a glare, and she looked like she would have liked to’ve taken a swipe at him, had she claws. “I wasn’t scared,” she said with asperity. “I didn’t even know the cat was there, not until it was already on us. I was uneasy, I knew something was wrong, and then I couldn’t move.”

She was aware of things he was not. It was possible, Gabriel supposed . . .

“And I wasn’t afraid,” she repeated. “I know what fear feels like now. This was . . . I just couldn’t move. My body wouldn’t listen to me.”

He sucked at the inside of his cheek, thinking.

“Gabriel?” Her voice had lost that edge; no longer defensive, she was asking her mentor for reassurance.

“These are strange hills to begin with,” he said finally. “And becoming stranger. If you feel . . . odd again, Isobel, tell me.”

“If I can speak, I will.”

“Brat.” He glanced sideways at her, relieved to see some of the tension gone from her face, although he was not fool enough to believe that she had let the worry go. Fair enough; neither had he.

Nor was the deserted camp easing his fears. There were no indications of illness or attack, nothing to suggest an outside cause for this to have been abandoned in such haste.

They’d seen abandoned settlements before, in Clear Rock, where the Spaniards’ magic had touched and eaten all that was flesh. But this ruin lacked the uncanny echo of that place, the sense of something having passed through. Those living here had gone of their own will. He couldn’t say why he was so certain of that, but he was. And yet.