The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(54)

Some folk left the Territory, gave up whatever they’d hoped to find and left. Her own parents had come and then gone again, leaving her behind.

“You should leave,” she said again. “Not the Territory, I mean . . . here.” She made a vague motion with one hand, meaning the meadow they were in, and the valley they’d traveled through to get there, all the way back to Duck’s village, and maybe even before. “At least until I . . . do what I need to do.”

He said something in a language she didn’t know, pungent in tone, then, “You said it ignored me. And the horses. We’re not at risk.”

“For now. The haint . . . Something wards it here, contains it. But it’s not . . .”

“It’s not a friend,” Gabriel finished for her, and she nodded. Sky and bone, they had pressed against her when she tried to reach the haint, had done something to her when she was within it, changed her . . . but the memories were mist-swept, foggy, and she was afraid to look closer.

“And you won’t leave.” It wasn’t a question, but she shrugged helplessly, then looked up at him. “The sorrow and the pain. If I don’t ease that, this meadow, this entire valley . . . nothing will come back. Nothing will live here.” She paused, wondering how she knew that but knowing it all the same.

“You’re not going to try and reach it again.”

She would have argued with him, save that he was right. If she tried again and whatever had protected her before failed, the haint would consume her easily as the Reaper hawk ate a rabbit. “There’s one thing I can do, I can try to do. But I’ll need to summon the magicians.”

Gabriel sat down next to her, his hands resting on his knees, and she had a moment’s irritation that he could do that so easily, without having to worry about skirts tangling. “You said the remaining ones had fled; even if you did track them down, they owe no allegiance to your boss; you have no hold over them.” Unspoken: that if they’d scattered, each looking out only for themselves, it would take them a lifetime, or more, to find them.

“Not them,” she said, pressing her thumb deeper into the sigil until it hurt. “The ones who died.”



Gabriel made her promise to wait, to rest, but neither made even a token effort to sleep that night. Their bedrolls untouched, they sat by the fire and listened to the horses grumble and snore, the mule’s occasional flatulence loud in the too-quiet night air as the moon rose overhead and passed through the sky, the stars faded, and the first hint of pale red appeared in the east, heralding the return of day.

Isobel’s eyes were still sore and crackly, her nose was running, her legs ached, and her back felt as though she’d been riding hard for a week, not sitting on soft grass next to a warm fire. She had taken her boots off at some point, and her toes were cold, and her scalp itched, reminding her that it had been days since she’d been able to wash her hair, and the cleaning powder she’d been given was long gone.

“Devorah was right,” she said. “I’d kill for a bath right now.”

It was the first either of them had spoken in hours, and the sound of her voice made Gabriel jump.

“I could find water for you if you needed,” he said finally. “The stream isn’t enough, but . . .”

“When we’re done,” she said. “When we’re done, we’ll ride down out of here and find a town with a proper bathhouse. With soap.”

Her words had the feel of an oath, the weight of inevitability, and she took some comfort in that. She would get her hot bath. And soap. And everything that came with that.

When they were done. If they were still alive.

“Best get to it, then,” Gabriel said, although he didn’t move.

Isobel groaned and reached for her boots.

What she planned to do wasn’t forbidden, either by Territory Law or the devil’s Agreement. It was simply . . . wrong. The dead were to be respected, protected. Boneyards were warded to ensure that, the rituals performed to allow spirits to be at rest, not linger in the pains of the living.

But magicians . . . could they ever truly rest? They gave themselves over to the winds in exchange for power, let madness fill them like a fever, and she had seen how they did not die easily, if at all.

Except they had died here. Died and been trapped with the creature they’d sought to summon, unable to break free, unable to pass on. Had it been their own working that trapped them mid-death? Or something else?

And the haint . . . its bones were likely so ancient, they not been warded at all, the rituals unperformed. Whatever she did could affect it as well, and to what end she could not imagine.

“I should be accustomed to uncertainty by now,” she said, torn between resigned bitterness and dark amusement.

“The surest way to get killed is to stop to think about what you’ve already decided to do,” Gabriel said, not looking up from his task. “You’ve been given the tools for the job, Isobel. Trust that.”

She looked at him, carefully scraping grains of salt from the stick, gathering them onto a scrap of cloth, and then looked up at the sky, thinking about what he had said. About trust, and tools, and if the boss had truly sent her out unprepared. If Marie, who had likely packed her things, would have sent her out unprepared, without whatever she might need.

Opening the pack she’d just taken off the mule, she dug her hands deep along the sides, trusting instinct, sliding questing fingers past her journal and pencil, past the seemingly essential odds and ends she’d taken with her from her bedroom and never unwrapped, until her fingertips found a bundle wedged into a corner of the pack, slick and hard and unfamiliar, and curved her fingers around to pull it free.