The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(30)

“Because they don’t.” Gabriel’s voice was still terse, but she could hear the faint tinge of amusement underneath, and it infuriated her. The need to do something pressed from the inside, struggling to reach into the bones below her, even knowing that it would push back, that she was somehow unwelcome, unwanted, despite being a rider, despite the sigil in her palm.

And yet Gabriel rode as if nothing had ever bothered him, shoulders loose, his entire body practically melting in the saddle, like the ground might not shake under them at any moment, nor some beast or native leap out.

Isobel reined herself in, Marie’s voice in her memory schooling her. If Gabriel was calm, there was a reason. If he was amused by her worry, then there was a reason. It might not be one she liked, but there was much that she did not like, and that did not change the fact of it.

She exhaled through her mouth, reaching out to stroke Uvnee’s neck, tangling her fingers in the mane briefly for comfort. Learn, she told herself. That is why you are riding with him.

“Fine. Why don’t they?”

His shoulder raised in a shrug. “Because they don’t. If you’re aiming to ask me the whys and wherefores of how a native behaves, Isobel, I’m going to think you haven’t learned a thing in all this time. They do as they will, and each tribe does it different, and none of them do it as we might.”

He laughed a little, a faint chuckle. “If it makes it sting less, I’ve observed we confuse and confound them equally as much.”

“The boss understands them.” She knew she sounded like a sulking child, but it seemed unfair, that this was the way it was.

“Wiser men than I have failed to understand what the devil knows or why he does as he does. No one even knows why he came here, Isobel, nor why he cares what happens to us. Let it be enough that he chose and trusted you to act in his stead. Trust that; it’s carried you through so far.” He paused. “Well, that and me.”

“You have a high opinion of yourself, even for a rider,” she said, and had the pleasure of seeing a flicker of amusement on his face, fading into an expression that reminded her of the man she’d met that first night, wryly amused, his attention split between the cards in his hand and the girl bringing him drinks.

Isobel still did not understand why he’d noted her, or what had driven a passing stranger to offer mentoring, or why the boss had decided to intervene after she had turned his original offer down, but she could not imagine taking the Road with anyone else?—or worse, alone.

That gratitude did not ease her unhappy sense of misuse. “But why won’t they speak to us? They know we’re here to help.”

Gabriel slowed Steady down a pace so that the horses were side by side. His profile was the same as it ever was, dark blue eyes and dark-stubbled cheek, deep lines around his eyes, the narrow white scar from the spell-beast’s claws clearly visible in the sunlight. She still thought him a handsome man, card-slick when he chose to be, but he was Gabriel now.

“Are we?” he finally said.

“What?” She thought at first she had misheard him or he had misunderstood her.

“Are we here to help?” He looked at her then and then looked away. “I’m here to help you, and you’re here because the devil sent you to ride, and we’re here because you’ve a feeling, but does that help them?”

Isobel felt like she’d been slapped. “Jumping-Up Duck said . . .”

“She said something shook the land from sorrow. Did she ask us to find the source?”

“I . . . No.” Isobel forced herself to consider the words and motions of the adults at the table. They had refused to leave, had said Duck trusted the devil to protect them, but at the same time . . . they had never asked her to discover what it was. Almost as though they knew and were resigned to their fate.

A growl echoed in her thoughts, that anyone should be so resigned. “We need to know what’s happening.”

“Yes.” His voice was stripped of argument. “We do. But you need to consider why you need to know.”

“Now you sound like the boss,” she said, petulant, and that got another chuckle out of him.

“Then maybe you should listen.”

When the boss said something like that, he didn’t mean for her to spout back with a sharp-tongued reply. So, Isobel shut her mouth carefully and paid full attention to the ground in front of Uvnee, the smell of the summer-warm air around her, the feel of the saddle pressing back against her seat, the feel of sweat slicking down her spine, and the weight of her hat on her head, the brim shading her eyes but not her chin. The feeling against the back of her neck, of being watched. And then she set it all aside and paid attention to what remained.

This wasn’t like the kind of test Gabriel used to set, for her to identify a bird on wing, or the trail of an animal, or a plant by a single leaf. This was like what she used to do for the boss, to look at someone and tell what they wanted, what they were thinking. What they needed.

Only, she thought she had. She’d studied Duck and the others. She’d seen their worry, their fear. And, a faint voice inside her said, she’d added that to what she was feeling, the push that had driven her there. The wrongness of the land there having been scraped clean, when they’d been there long enough for some power to have gathered.

“It wasn’t wrong,” she said out loud. “Something is wrong.”