Silver on the Road (The Devil's West Book 1) (52 page)

Then a friar screamed, and Isobel’s gaze cut to the spring itself.

The beast that rose to his challenge looked nothing like the multi-armed creature in the crossroads, nor the half-formed thing that chased her from Clear Rock. Sleek from the water, whiskers quivering, it flipped twice sideways in a sinuous roll, then rose erect, twice as tall as a grown man but slender, its pelt a shimmering brown, four visible paws folded neatly across its chest. It turned its head to face Farron, but tiny rounded ears twitched restlessly, clearly aware they were not alone.

“I was not expecting that,” she heard Gabriel say softly, almost amused, but could not spare a glance at him, her attention focused on the Spaniards, who had finally reached the water’s edge. She shook her head, aware that something was wrong despite everything going to plan. What had she missed when she touched it, deep in the water? What hadn’t she understood?

“Give me your name,” Farron said, his voice carrying to all of them. “I am stronger than you, and I will have your name.”

The creature’s mouth opened, and a long tongue escaped, flickering
and forked like a snake’s, but it did not speak. Nor did its gaze leave Farron, as though it had dismissed the others as no threat. Isobel’s palm itched with prickly heat, a thousand sewing needles jabbed into her skin all at once, and she shifted, finding Gabriel at her back, his hands on her shoulders.

“I will have your name,” Farron repeated, no louder but more fiercely, and raised his hands, fingers spread wide. “I will have all of you, and you will have none of me.”

She could not have said how she knew when the battle in truth began: neither moved, neither spoke, and the wind did not rise nor settle further, wrapped close around the magician’s form, but Isobel
knew
, and some part of her trembled under the knowledge, instinct telling her to flee, to run, to grab all that she cared for and make herself be somewhere far away.

She held.

“Vade et relinqo. Vade et relinqo. In nomine Dei et Domini nostri uos sub praeconem nos explicare vobis misimus ad vos ex nihilo per quem venisti.”

Bernardo’s voice was not as clear as Farron’s, not as strong, and yet it echoed across the water, the air shuddering with the sounds of his spell. Isobel felt her skin shudder as though touched by something cold, although her palm still burned hot, and she leaned back against Gabriel instinctively.

In the spring, the creature spat its tongue into the air again, twisting gracefully so that its body now faced the monks, now deemed the greater threat.

Farron flicked his hands, and the clear shimmer darkened, tinged now with red, but otherwise he neither spoke nor moved, even as the creature shuddered under the joint attack, one seeking to dismiss it, the other to consume it.

“Vade et relinqo!” Bernardo said again, and reached into his pocket, pulling something out and casting it overhand at the creature.

The flask broke against the creature’s chest, and it ducked its head
to look down, then the two paws on its right side slashed out in unison even as the creature leaned forward, claws raking through the air and tossing men aside as though they weighed nothing. The top half of one man fell forward, the lower half falling back, and two others went down intact but did not move again. Another swipe and Bernardo was on his knees, bleeding from the face, while the last standing friar lifted an arm as though pleading for aid.

Before Isobel could react, Gabriel had stepped around her, raised the carbine, and fired, the sound ringing in her ears. The creature screamed, a mixture of pain and anger, and twisted again, searching for the source of that new attack. Something inside Isobel ached, sympathetic to that pain and anger, and she tried to shove it aside, intent on the fight below her.

Hunger.
Such hunger that it nearly swamped her, shaken with pain and confusion, it thrummed up through the bones beneath her feet, weakened her knees, made her shudder under the sheer longing and need.

What had she missed? What had she not understood?

Gabriel placed the carbine down and drew the smaller gun, moving as gracefully over the rocks as the friars had been clumsy, dodging and weaving as he went. The creature let out another wavering scream when the silver shot hit it, followed by a loud, sharp bark, before it launched across the spring, water splashing around it, to meet this new attack.

On the other side of the spring, Farron now snarled and clenched his fists together, yanking them backward sharply as though he were hauling on the reins of a runaway cart horse. The creature jerked backward, twisting in midair, and growled over its sloped shoulder at the magician, even as one clawed paw reached out to grab at Gabriel, who danced back just out of reach.

The magician shouted something, but his words were lost in the winds that rose now, dust swirling around him from his ankles, moving until it reached his chest, then circling around his arms, weaving like snakes, lifting like wings, snarling in hunger and madness. Part of
Isobel knew that there was nothing to see, there was no actual dust, no sound, only the magician calling on the power he had bartered everything for, always reaching for more.

This was the madness that lived in his eyes, the hunger that drove his laughter. Isobel felt it brush past her, sensing her but deeming her both too large and too small to be worth the effort, then slide past, engulfing the creature, twining around it, engulfing it, claiming it.

Fear. Need. Hunger. Defend.

“No,” Isobel breathed, unsure if she were protesting that need or her inability to soothe it.

The creature screamed again and lunged for Gabriel, wrapping all four webbed paws around him and pulling him backward into the spring, the splash of water rising higher than the creature before coming down again, soaking the friars and magician, even as the creature and Gabriel disappeared below the surface.

“No!”

She didn’t remember crying the word, didn’t remember standing or moving, but she was at the edge of the spring, her long knife slack in her grip, helpless. Her words rang out into the air, sank into the stones. “Let him go!”

Farron, his face ashen and blood trickling from his nose, raised his arms again, but before he could ready himself, the water roiled, then the surface exploded again, the beast rising to snarl at the magician, flinging something at him before sinking below the surface again, the water around it turning a murky dark red with blood.

Crumpled on the muddy stones, Gabriel groaned.

There was an impossible silence, deep and loud enough for Isobel to feel all the way through her body, as though the quiet filled the entire Territory from Mother’s Knife to the Mudwater River, loud enough for the viceroy to hear it in his capital, for all the tribes to lift their heads and listen, for the boss to pause in dealing his cards.

Then: “That went about as well as I expected,” Farron said, his voice as wearied and rough as she felt, and the silence shattered, and the world began again. He reached down to touch Gabriel’s shoulder, but the man pulled away, struggling to do so, and the magician sat back on his heels, hands raised to show he meant no harm.

Isobel hurried to join them, skirting around the edge of the spring, offering her hand to her mentor so he could pull himself to his feet. Gabriel hesitated, then grimaced and took the aid, his hand warm and callused against her own.

“Not . . . part of the bargain,” he said, and coughed up more water. He was sodden and shivering despite the water’s warmth, and the drops that ran down his face were tinged with red, paler versions of the stains on his torso and arms. She could see no wounds on him but blood everywhere, and she wondered if it were any of his own.

“Little rider, you need to—” Farron started to say, but she interrupted him.

“We need to move away from here,” she said. The surface of the spring was still, but it was not the stillness of something dead and gone, not entirely. An intense sorrow rose in her, but she couldn’t indulge it, not now, and guilt clogged her throat, but she couldn’t indulge it, not yet. A thing injured but not dead was twice as deadly as it had been unharmed.

She looked at Gabriel. “Can you . . . ?”

“Yeah,” he managed, standing mostly upright, his free hand pressed against his side. His face was tight with pain, but he was able to shuffle forward under his own power, so she merely followed close enough to catch him if he stumbled, and said nothing more. Farron, wordless for once, followed them as they staggered away from the edge of the spring, back behind the boulders, where Gabriel faltered and nearly fell. The magician shook his head once when she glanced at him: Gabriel could not move much farther, not without worsening his injuries.

“Go, quickly,” she told him. “Bring our supplies here.”

“I will help.” She looked up to see one of the friars standing over
her, the younger one, who had been staring at them the night before, the one who had begged for mercy from the beast. “Zacarías,” he prompted. His mouth was bleeding, his clothing muddy, and there was a bruise purple and green over the entire side of his face, but he seemed otherwise unharmed. She refused to look back at where the bodies lay, forcing all thoughts of Manuel’s gentle smile or Esteban’s stern faith from her mind, and nodded at him, unable to form the words to say thank you just then.

None of them should have died. And yet she wished they all had, that she didn’t have to worry about them now. That guilt, too, weighed on her like exhaustion.

The magician looked as though he would argue, then nodded once and gestured for the friar to follow him. Isobel turned her attention back to Gabriel. “We need to clean those wounds,” she said, her hand hovering over one of the bloody stains. “That thing’s claws, it might have been infected . . .”

He started to laugh, batting her away from his injury even as he winced. “It was an otter, Isobel. Monstrous-sized, but an otter. I refuse to die from injuries caused by an otter. Do you think we could get its pelt? That’d be a story to tell, not that anyone would believe it. Not even with the pelt.”

He was delirious. She pressed her fingers to his forehead, then on instinct pressed her palm instead. He sighed, the laughter running out of him the way a clock might run down, but his skin was too ruddy, his eyes too bright. Had infection already set in? She needed their kit; Rosa had taught her how to draw out a fever, and there was a slippery elm powder she could use. . . . She cast a worried glance at the spring, still quiescent. Dare she use water from there?

“Don’t,” he said. She glanced at him, and he shook his head, a weak back-and-forth movement. “Too dangerous. Even I could feel it; you must . . .”

“Shhhh.” His eyes closed and she sighed, brushing the hair away from his sweat-glossed face and wishing Farron would get back already,
even though she knew that it would take longer, coaxing the horses up the steep trail.

Her palm itched and she shook her hand once, briskly. “I know,” she told it. “I know, but not now.” She would worry about the spell-beast once the others were back to take care of Gabriel.

There was a noise, and she felt her body snap to alert, because it was coming from the wrong direction, from the direction of the spring. Gabriel stirred, opening his eyes and trying to get up as well before she pushed him back down, her hand on her knife, wondering what fresh danger was coming.

Rocks slid down the path and a figure appeared at the rise. It was Bernardo, making his way to join them. His robes were torn and his hands and face filthy with mud and blood, but there was a triumphant glow about him, his eyes too bright for comfort.

“We gave it a terrible blow!” he cried, seemingly oblivious to the bodies of his brothers left on the ground behind him. “The foul beast could not withstand the might of—”

“It took three men dying merely to wound it,” Isobel said sharply. “And your magic did nothing save enrage it.”

“We knew our lives might be the cost,” Bernardo said, brushing off her words. “But we have wounded it, and my prayers—”

“It’s wounded, not dead,” Gabriel said, pushing himself up on his elbows to glare at the friar from under heavy lids. “And your prayers and spells did nothing. Your men have died for nothing.” He winced and pressed harder on the bloody, sodden rags of his shirt. “Iz . . .”

She met his gaze, seeing the worry there, the same as her own. Whatever Bernardo had been told, whatever the spell had been, the creature had not been cowed by it.

Farron had been right; they had both felt it. Isobel remembered what she had seen again, the storm passing over the mountains, shredded into many ribbons by the peaks of the Mother’s Knife, falling to ground. . . .

Falling to ground, into the ground. Her breath caught, something
flickering at the edge of her thoughts, something
important.

It was waiting for us.
The words echoed in Isobel’s thoughts, pushing away any others, keeping her from focusing on the plan she’d come up with, making it harder to breathe. It had known they were coming, the way they had known they were being watched, the way . . .