The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(48)
If it did, the distraction might give Isobel more time to do whatever it was she was doing.
With that thought, he turned his head to check on her one more time; she hadn’t moved, far as he could tell, save both her hands were now resting palm down on the ground, her head bowed, the brim of her hat hiding her face entirely. The grass under her seemed tipped with a greenish light, the strands moving as though brushed by a breeze, but the air was unpleasantly still where he stood, sweat forming under his arms and under his hat in a way that couldn’t be blamed solely on the sun. His mouth was dry, and he rubbed the back of one hand against his lips, feeling the chapped skin catch and pull. The air was dryer here than he was accustomed to; it burned the inside of his nose and throat unpleasantly.
Irritated by his own hesitation, Gabriel leaned forward, keeping his weight on his heels, and closed his fingers around the source of the reflected light. His brain told him it was small, and metal, and cool, even as he was standing up, moving backward, away from the dubious patch of grass, back toward Isobel—and the stick of salt still resting on top of his pack.
Only then did he open his hand and examine what he’d found.
“Hail and high water,” he swore, closing his fingers over it as though that might make the object disappear or change into something else. But when he took a deep breath and opened them again, it was still there, a simple bronze circle with three words stamped into it: JUSTICE. INTEGRITY. SERVICE.
The badge of a US Marshal.
Gabriel had encountered more than a few of that breed in his time, and for the most part they’d been straightforward, solid men. Not the sort to be found so far from their domain, and assuredly not without orders.
“What were you doing here, Marshal?” he asked the badge. “And what did you stumble into?”
. . . Our new president has determined the need to send a surveying team across the Mississippi and into the Territory you call home. He names it a ‘Corps of Discovery’ and claims it a simple excursion to survey this new land beyond our known borders.
“You wouldn’t . . . ,” he breathed to a man sitting in a faraway city, who could never hear his words. “Oh, you couldn’t.”
No. If Jefferson wished to send men into the Territory, he would use the scouts that already had clear passage by the devil’s mercy. Not a marshal. Not someone with official standing, consequences.
Mayhap the badge had been stolen? They were not particularly valuable, conferred no particular authority without a letter of warrant. One of those gathered here might have picked it up: who knew what a magician might take; they were all mad, and as prone to mischief as a crow.
He tried to imagine a marshal coming west, turning magician, and failed utterly. Impossible. Or improbable enough to be impossible.
Gabriel turned the badge over in his hand, as though studying it might give him some better answer. It was a simple hammered circle, the star embossed on one side, words on the other, similar if not identical to the ones he’d seen back in Philadelphia.
It had been years since he’d been in the States, but he remembered it well—the energy, the vigor . . . and the sense that they were already pushing at their limits, the eagerness among politicians, farmers, and merchants alike to expand their hold.
Exhausted, worried, uncertain, Gabriel admitted to himself that Jefferson’s initiative was not merely academic curiosity, nor that it would end with a simple survey. The reports the scouts carried back would speak of expanses of open land, and in those distant rooms, someone with more greed than sense would think the tales of the devil myth and superstition, that the land waited only for a steady hand to take it.
He thought of Isobel’s friend April, who looked to the east, who hungered for the things modern civilization could bring. Her friend, and others who thought that way, were fools. Gabriel had lived in the civilized world, if only for a few years. Had spent time in the web that its politics and laws wove, binding them to each other, constantly compromising. He knew what came with civilization and the cost those things demanded.
He closed his fingers around the badge once again and slipped it into his pocket. Marshal or no, surveyors or no, it didn’t matter. The devil had held the Territory safe against Spanish and French incursions for hundreds of years. If the States thought they would have a different result, they would learn otherwise.
And with that thought, Gabriel turned back to Isobel and forgot everything else.
With a dizzying jolt, Isobel dropped back into the cage of her own flesh. One shuddering breath, then another, and she settled within herself again, the keening memory fading to something more bearable. But she could see it now: sinew and hide stitched with power, dry channels of bone without blood or sweat to soften it, a raging spirit caught within it.
Trapped.
Isobel stood, her knees still uncertain under her weight. Her toes were cold within her boots, her fingers numb, as though it were winter and not nearly mid-summer, and she was hollow as though she’d not eaten for weeks, a dry scraping hunger that made her thoughts muddled and her limbs weak.
It had tried to consume her and nearly succeeded. Nearly. But she had its measure now: immense pain and rage, bound by sorrow. It could not rise into the winds; it could not dive into the earth. Trapped, not within the circle the magicians had carved, but in the narrow band of the living, trapped between stone and air. What had the magicians attempted, what had they thought to capture, and how had it gone so horribly wrong?