The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(91)

“They used bones.”

That was a new one to him, but it didn’t surprise him overmuch: bones had strong magic and remembered for a very long time. Likely even forever. “You touched them?”

She bristled under him like a cat splashed with water. “I did not. They were . . . I can’t remember. But there was something about them that . . .”

Her voice trailed off, and he slid his arm back over her shoulders, not pulling her closer but just to reassure himself that she was there, that she was upright and breathing. The memory of her laid out on the bench, her nose bloodied and her eyes vague, still made him feel ill, but his responsibility was to teach and support her, not coddle her.

“Whatever you felt, you didn’t like it?” Her skills were still raw but there had been nothing wrong with her judgment, and if her gut was reacting like his, the odds were high something was wrong.

Her breathing steadied a little, and she leaned in toward him. “Lou couldn’t feel them. She can’t feel her own boundary-wards. She said that not many of ’em here can.”

That surprised him—usually, you went into the wilderness, you found more folk with the touch, not fewer. Insular, he thought again. Incurious. He’d give pure silver to speak with some of the younger ones, those out working the field, see if they were the same. “But they were working?”

“Yes. They were . . . alert?” She wasn’t asking him, he thought, but testing the word for herself. “Awake. They were awake, and that . . . that didn’t seem usual. So, I tried to listen closer.”

Of course she had. Gabriel swallowed a rebuke, knowing it was at least partially his fault, and waited her out.

“They were layered, old over older. And I could hear this . . . noise. Like a hive readying to swarm.”

She stopped, swallowed, the noise of it loud in his ears. He waited, gaze fixed on a spot somewhere between the drop of the ceiling and the rise of the wall, where some discoloration of the planking made it look as though there was a hole. It was easier to speak when you could pretend there was no one listening; he had spent a few nights like that, in a starlit camp, speaking things that could only be said to the fire, the ashes of your words gone cold and scattered in the morning, never spoken of again.

“And I didn’t touch them, but I almost did, Gabriel. I reached out, and then the world went dark, and . . .” Her left hand flexed and clenched, resting on her lap as though it didn’t belong to her at all. “They burned me, Gabriel. The bones, the oldest bones. When I reached out to them.”

“It was warning you away?” His fears returned that the old medicine left here had taken insult by her arrival. The settlement was non-native now—the devil held dominion. But the wards might not realize that . . . They needed to talk to Possum, and this time the man would be more forthcoming.

“I don’t know,” Isobel was saying in answer to his last question. “I don’t think so. But I don’t know.” Her face scrunched in concentration and distress. “There was something they told me, something important, and I can’t remember . . .”

Her wording eased some of his fears—“told,” not “warned.” “Leave it be,” he told her. “It’s easier to remember when you don’t actively dig at it.” He rested his right hand over her left, still tight-clenched. “Is this telling you anything?” The sigil, he meant.

She glanced down, and an expression he couldn’t read passed over her face. “No.”

“Then leave it be for the nonce. There’s only so much you can pack on a mule and then it’s got the sense to kick off the weight. You’d best be at least as smart as a mule.”

She looked as though she were about to argue, pulling in breath to speak, but they were both distracted by movement at the other end of the hall, the judge pushing himself away from the wall, shaking down the line of his coat and fixing his vest, the image of a man about to make a pronouncement.



Isobel had never understood fury, whiskey-hot rage that made her stomach roil and sparks crackle in her skull, until the judge told them his decision.

“You’re as mad as they!”

“Iz . . .”

Isobel shook off Gabriel’s calming hand, turning to stalk after the judge as he paced the width of the hall. Behind him, LaFlesche looked nearly as unhappy as she felt but said nothing.

“You can’t simply—”

His voice was weary but firm. “They’ve done no injury by the Law that I could hold them, and I’ve no authority to bind such as they for anything less. The magicians go free.”

“They attempted?—” She clamped her jaw shut when he swung around, raising one finger to her, warning her to cease interrupting.

“Whatever they attempted, it’s no business of ours. Magicians are creatures outside the Law, outside the devil’s claim, and unless they’ve wish to involve themselves”—and his expression showed he thought little of the odds on that—“then they are to be on their way as soon as they are able.”

And not a moment too soon, his tone conveyed.

Open the door, unlock the wards, and allow them to saunter away. . . . Isobel could understand his reluctance to keep them within the confines of the town, but to simply wash his hands of what that meant?

“The Law is the Law,” he said. “Magicians are neither mine nor yours to control. You will release them, and they will go. And we will all hope that they do not decide to take offense at your treatment of them.”