The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(4)

But that night, she missed Gabriel, his low voice telling stories of how Badger pulled first man from stone, or Buffalo created the plains, or teaching her to identify an animal by the flick of its tail, or a plant by the turn of its leaves. She missed the sound of his breathing as he slept across the fire from her, the snort and mumble when he dreamed. She missed the collective sighing and grumbling of his horse, Steady, and Flatfoot the mule when they were picketed together with Uvnee.

Even the Jack would have been welcome company, simply to feel another person nearby.

“Foolishness,” she told herself, startling a stripetail that had crept close to see if she’d left scraps for it to scavenge. She kicked the ground to discourage it, and it fled.

Unwilling to sleep just yet, Isobel took her journal out, wetted her pencil, and wrote down what she had seen, how many bodies and how they had been butchered, what had been taken and what had been left, and a description of the hollow where she’d found them, the shape of the hills from where she’d stood. The boss might want to know. More, she had promised to remember.

When she slipped the journal back into her pack, her hand touched something else, not cloth, that crinkled under her fingers. She’d almost forgotten about the letters. Two waxed envelopes had been at the postal drop, one addressed to a Matthew Smith someplace called Tallahatchie, and one . . .

And one for Gabriel. The envelope had been battered at the edges as though it had traveled a long way, but his name was written in clear script on the dun-colored envelope. Master Gabriel Kasun.

You didn’t meddle in another’s business in the Territory. You didn’t ask questions you’d no need the answers to. She left the envelopes where they were, refusing to indulge any curiosity in who might be writing to her mentor, and lay down, pulling the blanket more closely around her shoulders. Sooner she slept, sooner she’d be on her way again, sooner she wouldn’t be alone.



Wake, Hand.

Isobel couldn’t move. Nothing bound her, nothing held her down, but she could not convince her limbs to lift, a soft indolence encasing her as securely as if she were swaddled like an infant.

Wake, Hand.

The voice was insistent, the shape of it poking, prodding. “I am awake,” she tried to tell it, then realized that she wasn’t. She was dreaming, and the voice needed her to wake.

Her eyes opened, the stickiness on her eyelashes evidence that she had been asleep for several hours. The belly-rounded sliver of the moon was sinking, the stars beginning to fade, and she estimated, groggily, that it was a few hours before sunrise. The coalstone glimmered faintly within its circle of rocks, and she could hear Uvnee shifting, but it was a peaceful, sleepy shift; whatever had woken Isobel had not disturbed the mare or roused her to defense.

What had woken her?

Gut feeling made Isobel turn her head away from the coalstone, scanning the dark air next to her for the shadow of a snake, its tongue flickering secrets; a native stepping quietly through the night; a demon lurking, intent on mischief. But there was nothing there save grass. Nothing came visiting tonight.

You must go.

Her bedroll was packed away and the coalstone cooled before Isobel realized she had been directed to do so. She paused, drawing a sharp, shocked breath. An owl called twice in the darkness, and she waited, half-expecting a third call that never came. If an owl called three times in the night, it meant medicine was being worked. Two calls, it merely hunted unsuspecting mice.

Beyond that, there was only an echoing silence, the night creatures stilling, the dawn birds not yet singing.

An empty space in the world, through which other voices could be heard.

Go.

It did not feel the same as what had drawn her to the slaughtered buffalo. That had been a feeling, a pressure, a pull. This was . . . like the boss, when he used a particular tone, but nothing at all of that warm, familiar voice. There was nothing human in this at all, and it would not be refused.

Isobel finished breaking her simple camp, waking Uvnee and replacing her blanket and saddle with a soft apology. “We’ll make up breakfast later,” she said as she mounted. “We need to be on our way now.”

The sigil in her palm remained cool in her skin, the black lines invisible in the darkness, and yet she knew the way she knew things now that the whispering voice was a summons she could not refuse.

Was it about the buffalo? The spirits of the dead lingered until they were laid to rest, protected. Did the spirits of animals do the same? She had made a promise . . . Was she now being driven to satisfy it?

“Boss?” She knew he couldn’t hear her. The devil might have long ears, but there were none that long, to cover the breadth of the Territory; she was months from home, and he had more to do than listen for her.

Uvnee snorted, her warm breath almost visible in the chill air, and turned her head to nip at Isobel’s skirt, as though asking why she’d been woken and saddled if they weren’t going to go anywhere. Isobel patted the mare’s neck with the hand not holding the reins, reassured by the solid warmth of muscle and flesh. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She buttoned her jacket and tucked the fabric of her skirts under her legs, then gave the mare the signal to move forward, both of them keeping their eyes on the grass in front of them: traveling in the dark was always dangerous, and the grass could hide any of a dozen threats, from gopher holes to snakes, to ground suddenly wet and slippery from a hidden creek.