The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(58)

You choose to go no further, a voice reminded him, and he brushed it away irritably.

Isobel . . . Each time, he saw her sink deeper, reach further. Each time, it changed her. She saw things, felt things, was connected to things in a way she could not explain and he didn’t want to think of.

Uncanny. The magician, Farron, had tried to warn him. Had told him not to think of her as a girl, or woman, but as a tool. A weapon. A Hand. The Reaper hawk and the wapiti had said the same thing, differently.

He couldn’t. She was the Hand. He knew that. Watched her discover that fact herself, over and again, each time coming away different, the weight of what she was becoming not obvious to her yet, not entirely, but clear enough to those around her.

But she was also Isobel. And he had promised to stand by her. To train her. To keep her alive.

To not leave.

“Can you sit up?”

She looked puzzled, as though not even aware that she was lying down, then nodded. Her eyes were still glassy, flitting back and forth as though she didn’t quite have control of where they looked yet. She hadn’t taken a blow to the head that he’d seen, hadn’t moved except to slump forward, but he would take no chances.

“All right. Slowly . . .” He eased her up, keeping his hands on her shoulders until she was settled on the grass again, looking around her as though not quite certain where she was still. He wanted to ask what had happened, if she’d learned what she’d wanted to know—but held his tongue, waiting.

It didn’t take long.

“I was wrong.” Her voice was flat, scraped and thin. “I didn’t understand.”

He had grabbed a canteen when he went to her side, he realized only as he was pulling the cork with his teeth, gently tipping it to her mouth, allowing her only a scant swallow before taking it away again.

“The spirit they called was hungry, so hungry. So old. They thought to bind it to them, to consume its power, to . . . split it among them? Or duel until only one remained. But they failed, and it consumed them. Burnt them to char, burned them from the inside out, even as they forced it to take form, warped it into something it was never meant to be. The ones who fled . . .” She shuddered, her entire body trembling in his arms. “They did not escape. They are unmanned, unminded.”

Mad dogs, loose in the Territory. Magicians were bad enough but single-minded in their pursuits: only rarely did mortals get tangled with them. Unminded . . . they might lash out at anything that crossed their path. Lash out and destroy—a single rider, or an entire town, it would make no difference to them. They needed to be back on the Road, find a badgehouse, let the marshals know. They carried their own medicine, marshals did, for the protection of the Road.

For now, Gabriel could only worry about what was in front of him.

“And the dead?” Had she been able to free them, to bind them, to send them to wherever resting souls went? Or would they now come back mad but whole, the way Farron had?

She shook her head, a hand reaching up to pluck at her braid, tapping the feathers still tied there, a nervous tic. “Shards of what had been, all the madness, and none of the control. There’s no one being there but the tangled mess of what was, seeking power to replace what was lost.” Her hand left off her braid, reached up to touch his fingers where they curled over her shoulder. Her skin was cold, the calluses on her fingers rough as cording.

Her eyes cleared, but she wasn’t seeing him. “There’s illness here, Gabriel. Worse than any pox or fever. I only touched part of it before.”

“How bad?” Could she cure it, he meant, or control it, the way she’d cleansed the land before, against the Spanish curse.

“It’s caged for now. Held. But the quakes . . . There’s a thread tying them all together now, woven of power and blood. The spirit’s trying to break free. Scraping what it can find, fighting. . . .” She took a deep breath through her nose. “And if it does, if it breaks free, it will take them with it.”

“And that’s bad.”

“The story you told me, about the Hills That Danced?” She shook her head, eyes now wide and wild. “It will be much, much worse.”

He didn’t want to ask it of her, but he had to. “Is there anything you can do?”

It was as though she didn’t hear him at first, her head tilted, listening to something he could not hear, had no wish to hear.

“No. The Reaper had the right of it there, at least. The spirits will do as they must, the air will press down and the ground push up, and they will contain as they can. . . . They will not allow the madness to spread. But it pains them to do this, and that pain is a real thing. This will become a barren place. The animals will not return, the grass will die, the creek run dry. It will become. . . .” She struggled for words, and he realized, as a chill touched his skin, that he was not hearing her words but another’s, pushed through her throat.

“Poisoned,” she finished finally. “Envenenado.”

“Forever?”

“For many lifetimes. Maybe all the lifetimes.”



Half a day passed, the sun warm overhead, and Isobel could not shake the chill from her skin. She could feel the blanket over her shoulders, the heat of Gabriel near her, the flickering of the fire he’d built up, making her a tisane he said would warm her blood. None of it mattered. The cold ran deep inside, pushing everything else away. Her gaze dropped down to her hands, and she spread her fingers out in front of her, palms down, looking at them as though they were not her own.