The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(35)

He kneed Steady closer and spoke softly. “Tell me.”

Her gaze flicked ahead to where the old man and his pony rode, seemingly unaware he had companions, then back to him. “How do you know . . . How do you know if a Contract’s been broken?”

He almost laughed again, then realized that she was serious. “Isobel. You can’t break a Contract. That’s what makes it a Contract. What’s bitten you, to even wonder that?”

“I can’t . . . I can’t touch anything. I’ve been trying. Ever since . . . I’ve been trying,” she repeated. “I can only get so far, and then it stops me. And I thought . . . I was afraid that meant . . .” Her voice dropped almost too low to hear. “That the boss’d decided he didn’t want me anymore.”

He was about to tell her, again, that she was being foolish, when her choice of words stopped him. “It?”

She frowned at him, clearly not having realized what she’d said.

“You said ‘it.’ Not ‘something’: ‘it.’?”

Her shoulders lifted in a shrug, a one-sided flip he recognized from his own movements. “It,” she agreed. “Does it matter?”

He had been trained as a litigator; word choice mattered. But he let it go for now. “To calm your fears, if the devil were to cast you aside, you would be in no doubt of it. But he did not. He never throws away a thing of value.”

She gave him a wan smile at that, but it was better than she’d looked before.

“That settled . . . are you all right?”

“Gabriel.” Now she sounded exasperated, which suited her better. “No, I’m not all right. Something dragged me?—us—all the way up here, I can’t feel, and I don’t know what to do, and now we’re following some old native who won’t even give us a name, to somewhere we don’t know, to find we don’t-know-what that’s doing we’re-not-sure-what, on the chance that maybe I’ll be able to stop it from doing whatever it’s doing, and I can’t even . . .”

She ran out of breath, or words, and heaved to a stop, her jaw tightening again. She stared over Uvnee’s ears, reins tight in her fingers, and shook her head, a tic jumping in the side of her face. “No. I’m not all right. But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

No. It didn’t. That was the other thing about being of value to the devil, he supposed, and thought again of the exhaustion in the eyes of the Jack, unable to stop save at his master’s order.

“What does it tell you?” He glanced at her left hand, and her gaze followed suit without prompting.

“It’s quiet. I don’t think it knows either.”

Gabriel didn’t like that. The sigil was more than a sign of who she belonged to; it was her connection, the conduit of whatever power she wielded. More, it had warned her of danger before. For it to be silent, when she needed it . . . The devil’s hold only extended the length and breadth of the Territory, be it by his own decision or another’s. Maybe they were too close to the borders . . .

No. Her mark had flared when they were in the Mother’s Knife itself, in places once ruled by the Spanish. Here, he should be able to reach her.

“I can’t feel,” she had said.

Unless whatever blocked them from touching the Road blocked the devil as well.

The idea that something could stop the Master of the Territory within his own borders was not one Gabriel wanted to consider. The devil had sent Isobel to be his eye and his ear as well as his hand. If something were able to circumscribe his reach . . .

. . . what else was happening that the devil might not know about?

Gabriel thought of the letter in his pack, of the forces pressing against the Territory, and remembered the half-dream and Old Woman’s words. Be wary. Be wary, and step lightly.

It might have meant nothing, might be nothing. He should have told her of the letter. It was too late now.



“Ici.”

Isobel recognized that word when the old man finally spoke, so she reined her mare in and looked around.

It didn’t seem all that different from any other valley they’d ridden through. The sunlight was beginning to fade, but there was enough light to see that the grass appeared undisturbed, the rocks unshattered, none of the devastation that the boss had said would happen where the earth shook so violently. She looked at Gabriel for a lead, but he was swinging out of his saddle, briefly out of view on the other side of the gelding.

She made a face and followed suit, letting her boots land lightly on the dirt, not aware that she was braced for something to happen until nothing did. Her feet pressed against the ground, and nothing pressed back. It was as still and silent as it had ever been before she took Contract with the devil. No, even more silent. In Flood, she had felt the town itself, the protective boundary-wards that encircled it, the constant flow of power through the very floorboards of the saloon, though she’d not realized then what it was. She had grown up in proximity to the devil; power had been as present in the air she breathed as the sulphured smoke from the blacksmith’s forge.

Here, there was only the sharp, bitter smell of the trees covering the slopes around them, a perfume of flowers she couldn’t identify, and under it all, the faint acrid bite that had met them when they entered the hills that they’d ascribed to the ghost cat.