Silver on the Road (The Devil's West Book 1) (24 page)

It
was
her responsibility. That was what being a Hand meant: it was the strength of the Territory, the boss had said. The cold eye and the final word, he’d said, the one who could do what others couldn’t.

She had known how to close the sickness off from the rest of the Territory before. The whisper had told her. But it was silent now, and her sense of
knowing
slithered away, leaving her fretful and restless.

Izzy waited until they’d left the sod house and the farmstead behind, the sound of hooves on the packed dirt of the road echoing below them, and the mule’s occasional grumbles a familiar lullaby, thinking he’d be more open to speak when they were alone.

“Something happened back there. Something that worries you.”

Gabriel settled into his saddle, glanced sideways at her. “It’s likely nothing.”

“But possibly is?”

They were riding alongside each other, the road there wide enough for a wagon to pass without risking the grass, and she tilted her head to look back at him. “Possibly is?” she repeated, as though he might not have heard her, or misunderstood her.

“Possibly,” he agreed, and his eyes were shadowed. There was something he was hiding, something he wasn’t telling her. “You open your ears and your eyes, and tell me.”

Izzy opened her mouth to ask what, exactly, she was meant to be looking and listening for, then clamped her mouth shut so hard, her teeth hurt. Something worried him, even more than what they’d found at Widder Creek. This wasn’t another test. This was real.

PART THREE

DUST AND BONES

G
ABRIEL TURNED THEM WEST AGAIN
after leaving the Carons’ farmstead, taking a rougher trail through dry plains, where the sky seemed impossibly far away and small brown birds hopped through the scrub brush, away from the sound of their hooves. Despite the uncertainty of that first morning, Izzy found herself near falling asleep in the saddle several times over the next few days, waking abruptly once when she thought she heard the hot rattle of a snake, but when nothing appeared, she wrote it off reluctantly to nerves. There were far fewer trees there, even the wide-spreading cottonwoods looking parched and broken, and the creeks they passed by were all dry and dusty. They made cold campsites and used their water sparingly and mainly for the horses.

After three days, the dust seemed embedded in their sweat, crusting on their skin during the colder nights. Devorah’s words about how badly she’d desire a bath came back to Izzy, and her dreams each night were filled with water deep enough to sink into. The soda ash had been keeping her scalp clean at least, but she was running out, and the sliver of soap Miz Margaret had given them was near-useless in a handful of water, leaving more behind than it cleaned off.

They saw no one else as they rode, the land around them empty of everything save brush and the occasional rabbit or deer gazing at them thoughtfully. Rabbit could be trouble, Izzy knew, but neither it nor the fox she spotted early one dawn gave any indication they were anything but what they appeared.

The third day, Izzy looked up to see a smudge of grey in the near distance, swirling like a child’s top, but although she noted that Gabriel’s shoulders tensed up again each time and he reached for his knife like it gave him comfort, the dancer never came close enough to be of concern.

Izzy watched them more out of boredom than real interest. Everyone knew dust-dancers were harmless, mostly. They might confuse a traveler or obscure a trail, but that was it.

Yet something about them spooked Gabriel, and that preyed on Izzy’s thoughts, churning with what had happened back at the farmstead, and what had happened with the rattler, and the growing prickle at the back of her neck.

But he didn’t speak of it, any of it, and she didn’t ask. They both only waited and rode on.

A day later, with the landscape changing only in the type of birds they saw and the prickling growing more intense, impossible to ignore, Izzy finally spoke up.

“Someone’s watching us?”

“I think so.” No praise for figuring it out, which irked Izzy, but he hadn’t scolded her for not realizing sooner, either. “Someone or something. For a while now. Since just after Widder Creek, I think.”

Well, that wasn’t disturbing at all. She huddled deeper into her bedroll and looked up at the sky, the half-moon bright enough to blot out some of the stars, casting odd shadows on the land. But there was nowhere anything could hide, not unless it was knee-high to a grasshopper. They hadn’t even heard a fox or coyote hunting in the
past few nights. In fact, the only thing they’d seen was . . . ah. But dust-dancers weren’t anything to be feared of, certainly not someone as road-savvy as her mentor, and he’d been worried days before they saw the first one.

Since Widder Creek.

She swallowed her uncertainty and spoke into the chilled darkness.

“You think whatever it was, it was what spooked the hens, too? Back at—”

“Maybe.” She couldn’t read him in the darkness with that single terse word.

“Might not be a threat.”

“Might not.”

He didn’t think so, though. She could see it now, in the way he moved during the day, the way he looked over the area even as the horses picked their way along the trail, the way he’d drawn the mule in closer instead of letting it amble at its own pace, keeping it within reach. As though he thought something might attack, going for the unridden animal first.

She considered the terrain again, trying to see it the way Gabriel might. A ghost cat might blend into the brush, and they’d never see it coming, but the horses would smell it before it got close, surely. What could be silent, near-invisible, scentless, or . . . oh.

Izzy swallowed hard and touched the silver ring on her finger, rubbing it until the smooth metal warmed under her touch. She wished she had something larger, more than the handful of coin Gabriel had given her, tucked into the pocket of her jacket folded just out of reach with her dress and stockings. Like natives, demon acknowledged the boss’s power but didn’t fear or need it. She’d never thought that she might need to fear
them.

What had the rattlesnake said, again? The memory had turned to haze, but it had been something about enemies and friends and not being who they thought. Demon weren’t friends. And the snake had been speaking to Gabriel, not her, hadn’t it?

Her palm itched, and she scratched it absently, then inspected the skin for sign of bite or rash. But there was nothing there other than an ordinary bruise on the heel of her hand and a line of dirt under her nails.

Just nerves.

Izzy went to sleep that night trying to remember the familiar, comforting feel of her old coverlet under her hands, the sounds of the saloon at night, the smell of brimstone and smoke in the morning air, but her dreams were filled again with the sound of running water and the dry, whistling sound of the something crackling underfoot.

The next day, they both woke tense and watchful, the small fire put out as soon as Gabriel had poured the last coffee grinds into the dirt. Izzy reloaded the mule’s packs and saddled Uvnee with only half her attention, the rest torn between the sense, still, that something was following them.

They saw no more dust-swirls in the distance, and eventually, the feeling of being watched faded. She caught Gabriel’s eye at one point, and he nodded slightly: he’d felt their watcher leave too.

Izzy let the reins drop to her lap, trusting Uvnee, and stretched her arms to the sky. Her menses were gone for another moon, her muscles felt loose and limber, the sky overhead was blue, and the air, while still too dry, now smelled of fresh growing things, and the watcher was gone.

“Things come and go out here,” Gabriel said. “Best never to assume anything. And pick up the reins. Uvnee’s a good horse but even good horses can spook.”

Chastened, she picked up the reins again and paid attention to her surroundings.

The change in mood seemed to make her mentor more talkative, and he picked up her lessons again. “What was that?” he asked, lifting his chin to the left of the trail, at the form disappearing into the grass.

“Grouse,” she said. “Young one?”

“Do you know, or are you guessing?”

“Guessing,” she admitted, bracing herself for the lesson on how to identify a bird by the flick of its tail feathers.

Midmorning on the fourth day since leaving the farmstead, they came to a split in the dirt track. Gabriel led them onto the left fork, slightly wider but otherwise unremarkable from the trail they had been on, and Izzy reined the mare in a few paces after that, feeling an odd shock run through her body. It was like what she’d felt when she crossed that first stream but different, somehow. She turned in her saddle and looked back, the mule looking at her quizzically, as though to ask what she thought she was doing.

The trail behind them looked the same as it had before: dry, packed dirt surrounded by brush and rock.

She looked ahead. The trail they were on looked almost the same. But almost wasn’t the same. If she were trying to read it the way she’d read a person . . .

It was half again wider. The ground underneath was smoother. And it . . . felt different.

“This is a road,” she said out loud. “That wasn’t; this is.” The difference between a road and not-road, that she’d asked Gabriel about when they passed the burned-out homestead weeks ago: this was it. Not a thing to be seen but to be
felt.

The realization, the knowledge that she could tell the difference, made her dizzy, enough to catch at the pommel so that she didn’t fall. She looked back again, letting her gaze linger on the ground, then rise up into the sky, the pale colors around her whiting out around the edges, her eyes watering until she blinked, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyelids.

When she opened her eyes again, the world had gone back to normal, the sensation of difference gone. But she had felt it. She
knew.

The knowledge—the ability to
see
—tucked into her hands like a
precious thing, she urged Uvnee on to catch up with Gabriel, who had not paused while she figured it out.

Her lessons continued as they rode. Snakes, despite their reputation, had been simple: be respectful when you crossed paths, listen when they speak, and if you have an extra egg to leave out for them, do so, but don’t feel obligated; they disliked being obligated in turn. Mostly, though, they left people alone. Rabbits were tricky, buffalo were powerful, so were ghost cats, and best left alone unless you had a powerful need. Bears could be approached but never twice, and Gabriel told her stories from several different tribes of what happened to foolish hunters who failed to heed that.

And that brought them to the creatures of air.

“If an owl calls three times, what does it mean?”

“That there’s medicine being worked,” she responded. “If it calls a seventh time, someone will die.”

“And five or six times?”

“It’s a noisy bird?” She grinned at him, almost impish.

Gabriel kept his expression stern. “Why three and why seven, but not four, five, or six?”

“Because . . . I don’t know.” She pushed the question back to him. “Why?”

He shrugged one-shouldered. “Nobody knows. It just is.”

She flicked the underbrim of her hat with one finger, clearly liking the sharp thunking sound that made. “I bet the boss knows.”

“I bet he does.” Unspoken in his response: but the boss wouldn’t tell her, even if she asked. Although Gabriel had no idea what the Hand would be privy to once she returned to Flood.

The thought was also a reminder that this, her company, was not a thing he should be becoming accustomed to. When he felt she was blooded enough, that she understood the road enough to travel it herself, the mentorship would be over.

And, having completed his half of the bargain, the devil would pay in full.

All he had to do was keep her safe until then.

They both fell silent. Gabriel drank water from his canteen, then passed it over to her, a silent reminder to stay hydrated, while he scouted the road ahead. Just because their shadow had disappeared for a while, there was no reason to assume all was peaceable up ahead.