Silver on the Road (The Devil's West Book 1) (21 page)

He was about to call out to the house, announce their arrival, when Isobel reined the mare in suddenly, her spine and shoulders rising up on alert. Gabriel had his hand resting on the carbine’s butt even as he caught up with her, glancing at her pale face before following her gaze to the structures a few hundred yards down the path.

“What happened?” Her voice was a scarce whisper, as though she were afraid of startling something, and her gaze darted nervously, as though expecting something to attack.

“I don’t know. Stay here.”

Gabriel swung out of the saddle, feeling his feet hit the ground with a jolt. They’d been sleeping rough since leaving Patch Junction, and he’d been anticipating a real bed all day. But he’d been on edge too since the snake’s visitation, although he hadn’t let himself acknowledge it. The rattler’s words had been for him as much—maybe more—than her, and he didn’t like so much of the medicine world paying attention to him all at once.

But the nights since then had passed unmolested, other than a badger who’d taken offense at their campsite, and nothing of the uncanny had crossed their steps.

Until now.

Widder Creek barely qualified as a dot on his map: three one-story cabins set in a curve of the river that gave it its name, just enough farmland cleared to support a family and not much more. The couple that’d settled there had come with two sons, who’d both married Hutanga girls. There should have been small children playing in the courtyard, movement in the field, someone doing laundry or chores in the shared barn.

Instead, there was stillness and silence.

Next to him, Steady shifted, restless, and Isobel exhaled, a tiny breath that should not have sounded so loud. “Should I . . .”

“Stay here,” he repeated. He unlatched the carbine from his saddle and took a moment to load it. But even as he did so, he knew that it wouldn’t be needed. Not to put down a threat, anyway.

He hadn’t even reached the door of the first cabin before he smelled it: the horrible, too-familiar sweetness of decay and shit. He didn’t want to go any farther but forced his body to keep moving, one sleeve over his mouth in a faint hope of keeping the worst from his lungs.

There were two bodies sprawled on the floor, just past the doorway. Adults, a man and a woman, fully dressed, the visible skin blackened and bursting. His gorge rose, and he gagged it back down again, not wanting to befoul the scene more. A quick glance into the house showed no sign of violence or bloodshed, and no sound coming from deeper inside the house.

He backed out, closing the door behind him, and then bent down to rub his hands in the dirt before dusting them off on his trouser leg. He would not vomit. He would not.

“Gabriel?”

“Stay where you are,” he said, but could hear her walking toward him already. He shook his head and turned to glare at her.

“They’re dead.” She wasn’t asking.

“Yah. Looks like sickness. Something fast.” Not influenza, not the way the bodies had fallen. There hadn’t been plague in the Territory for years that he’d heard of, but he didn’t hear everything. “Stay out here; I need to check the other houses.”

“No.”

“What?” He stopped, staring at her. She lifted her chin defiantly, the brim of her hat not hiding the determination in her eyes or the stubborn set of her chin.

“I don’t know if these people made a Bargain with the boss, but they were part of the Territory, and if a sickness did kill them all, then I need to know. Don’t I?”

He couldn’t fault her logic, only the application of it. “You can know as well waiting here as going inside.”

“You think I haven’t seen the dead before?” Isobel’s expression, if anything, got harder. “I’ve seen death.”

His gut instinct was to tell her, again, to wait here. She was only—

“You’re not supposed to be coddling me,” she said, so matter-of-fact that he had no comeback. “I need to see.”

He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck, then nodded and lifted his other hand, indicating that she should take the house to the left while he went to the right.

They burned the houses and the barn as night fell, not bothering to pull the bodies out first. Flames purified same as deep earth, and faster. Izzy braced herself to watch the roofs fall, the walls collapse in on themselves, the homestead slowly disappear in black smoke and sparks. Gabriel paced back and forth, checking on the horses and coming back, then walking away again, but she stood still, watching. There was an ache inside her that wasn’t sadness—she hadn’t known these people, to sorrow at their passing—but something deeper, the same blood-red heat as the sparks she was watching, the same charred remains left in their wake.

She had not lied to Gabriel; Izzy had seen the dead before. Age, injury, even influenza struck Flood, same as any other place. She’d helped wash bodies before burial, and stood vigil a time or three, once she was old enough. She knew not to linger overlong on what the body became once the spark was gone. But they had been here once. They deserved to be remembered by more than charred earth and smoke.

She turned away from the fire, went to Uvnee, and pulled the notebook she’d found on her dresser the morning she left Flood out of her pack, then turned to Gabriel, who had followed her. “What were their names?”

“What?”

“Their names.”

“I . . .” Her mentor stopped to think, running a hand through shaggy hair, leaving that hand resting on the back of his neck and looking up at the night sky, as though the answer were there. “Karl
was the old man. Karl and Sophia. Oldest son was . . . Simeon; younger was also Karl. I don’t remember their wives or any of the kids.”

She nodded and wrote their names down.
Karl and Sophia of
Widder Creek. Their sons Simeon and Karl younger. Wives and children, names unknown. Dead of unknown causes,
and then the date, near as she could recall. Izzy squinted at the paper, barely able to see it in the firelight. It was likely still May—they hadn’t been gone that long—but the dates slipped away without chores or deliveries to mark the days.

Gabriel didn’t ask what she was doing or why. If he had, she wasn’t sure she could have told him.

As soon as the ashes burned out, they saddled up and left, not wanting to linger overnight in proximity to the dead. The wooden planks of the bridge sounded fragile under their hooves, and Izzy felt a shiver coat her arms as they rode over, but neither of them paused until they reached the point where the turnoff folded back into the main road. Only then, with cleaner air in her nose and the memory of what lay behind them hidden by trees, did Izzy let herself feel sick.

Gabriel reined in beside her, a darker, more familiar shadow in the night, and pulled out the coalstone, clenching it once to create a faint glow in his hand.

Izzy wasn’t sure if the pale red light made things better or worse. She turned her face away so he couldn’t read her expression and asked, “What do you think killed them?”

“Could be anything. Like I said, sickness can come fast, especially them all living on top of each other like that.”

She looked back at him then. “Even the animals?” There had been three horses in the barn, dead in their stalls, and a litter of pigs and chickens in the coop, a mess of feathers predators had not touched.

He shrugged. “It happens sometimes.”

Not often. Not like that. Not so swiftly that they didn’t have time to bury the first victims. She felt chilled, worse than cold rain on a winter’s night. “The snake’s warning. Now this . . .”

He picked up what she wasn’t saying. “Things happen, Isobel.
Sometimes they’re connected, but more often it’s just . . . chance. Random.”

“You think the snake was random?”

It was the first they’d spoken directly of it since that morning, and she couldn’t imagine a time she wanted less to talk about it than now. Saying the words felt like she’d been punched in the stomach.

Gabriel looped Steady’s reins around the pommel horn, then took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair with his free hand. “Creatures like that are . . . like your boss. They’re a law unto themselves, even in the Territory, and if you try to figure out the why or wherefore, you’ll never get out of that hole. I told you already: if there was a deeper meaning to it, we’re not going to know until it bites us on the nose, so there’s no point worrying about it.”

He was harsher-spoken than he’d been before, and Izzy felt a pang of guilt: he’d known these people, known their names, most of them, had maybe shared hospitality before. Whatever she was feeling, it had to be worse for him.

Folk had died there. Folk who should have been protected.

Make this right,
she heard inside her head, a voice like water, like wind, crackling like fire.
Make it safe.

She dismounted, her body moving without conscious direction, and pulled a square package, wrapped in an unbleached cloth, out of her saddlepack. Inside, there was a cylinder of hard-packed salt about the length of her hand and three fingers thick. She had packed it the way she’d packed everything else she’d been given, without question, assuming it would make sense in time.

Now, she went back to where the two paths diverged, knelt carefully, and dragged the cylinder across the dirt where the two trails met, leaving a clear line of salt glittering white against brown, clearly visible even in the darkness away from the coalstone’s glow.

She could hear the horses shifting behind her, leather tack creaking, and the gentle sound of Gabriel exhaling, the way he drew his thoughts together before he spoke. “You think there’s enough left
in the ashes for a haint to linger, you need to lock it down?”

“S’not for them,” she said. “It’s to protect anyone else.” He thought she knew nothing, and maybe she didn’t, not the way he meant, but she knew this. Salt and blood to protect the living. She bit her lip, staring down at the line, then took the knife from her boot and nicked the pad of her left thumb, letting a drop of blood fall down. Just a story she’d heard, maybe a thing the boss mentioned in passing, even if she didn’t remember where or when.

The blood hit the salt and
spread
, one single drop staining the entire line a deep red that glowed like an ember before fading to dark.

When she looked up again, the track they’d followed to the bridge had disappeared, the trees closing together as though no path between had ever been there, and she—even knowing the tiny settlement existed—felt a push to move away, go elsewhere. This was one road that would not be found again any time soon.

“Even folk who knew it was there, they’ll forget,” she said. “And nobody else will think to venture in, or wonder why the trees are there. Give the land time to reclaim the ashes, clean the land.” She knew that the same way she’d known how to do it, the kenning in her like she’d lace her shoes or make a bed. Maybe the boss, or Peggy’s brother the marshal, had spoken of it, told a story of doing the same, and she’d forgotten until it was needed.

Maybe. And maybe it was something else. Izzy let that thought settle in her bones, heavy and cold, as she wrapped the salt stick back in its cloth and replaced it in the pack, then swung back into Uvnee’s saddle. Her hands were still lightly dusted with salt, and her mouth tasted of ashes and smoke.

“That was well done,” Gabriel said quietly, his face showing the same exhaustion, and she nodded, although she didn’t agree. It was what she was supposed to be doing, nothing more.

Make this right. Make it safe.

“We should keep going.”

She knew that he had intended for them to stop a while at Widder
Creek, overnight there. But his suggestion that they put some distance between themselves and the ashes was one she agreed with wholeheartedly. Even the division she’d placed on the ground didn’t banish the uneasy feeling she’d felt on first seeing those too-quiet houses.

Gabriel thought it was illness had killed those people, and she couldn’t say it hadn’t been. Illness came fast and hit hard, and could burn itself out like a match once it had nothing more to live on. And yet. And yet.

Make it right. Make it safe.

She felt the unease tremble on her skin, curl uncomfortably in her stomach, and she pushed Uvnee to go a little faster, put that much more distance behind them before night fell. The mare seemed to agree, matching Steady’s longer stride without further urging.