Silver on the Road (The Devil's West Book 1) (28 page)

The smile that he flashed them, though, was that of a predator, a coyote upright on two legs. “Well met, well met indeed, on this dusty and not quite so deserted as I’d thought road! Well met, my friends.”

“I’ve no claim to call you friend,” Gabriel said, his chin lifting, “and you none to so name me.”

The stranger blinked, but the smile didn’t waver, and something prickled all over on Izzy’s skin, some sense of things not right. Nobody should be that friendly out there, particularly not when Gabriel had been rude in return, not unless they were up to no good. Even green to the road, she knew that.

The stranger cocked his head, gaze still intent. “You are riders on the dust road, not marshals nor brigands but honest souls. Why should we not be friends?”

The burn on Izzy’s left hand flared as he spoke, almost as though someone’d touched her palm with a hot brand, and her hand clenched into a fist, then released, dropping limply against her thigh. She knew, even the moment Gabriel named the stranger.

“Honest souls have no truck with magicians.”

“If you ever see a magician, run. Do not pause, do not speak, by all that you value, do not catch their attention, just run.”

Izzy stiffened her spine against the shock and watched the magician warily. She was the Left Hand of the Devil and she would not run. But she was no fool, either, to think the creature in front of them harmless—or even benign. She knew what the common folk whispered about magicians, that they’d sold their soul entire to the devil for the power they held, that the things they could do were a twisting of power for evil.

The boss had set them straight on that late one night. Two magicians had been causing a ruckus northward in the Territory, so much decent folk got tired of it and sent a rider for the boss to put things right. Only, the boss said he didn’t have any hold on magicians, any more than he did on demon. “They are what they are,” he’d said, leaning back in his chair, toying with the cigar he’d cut and lit but never drew into his lungs, watching it burn down bit by bit. “Like wind and drought, you live through ’em, you don’t control ’em. Trying’s pure foolishness. Just be polite if they look your way, and eventually they’ll get bored and move on.”

The magician was looking clear at them, and Gabriel had already been rude. Izzy’s thoughts were razor-sharp, rain-clear, aware that she couldn’t trust anything she read, aware that everything hinged on this moment. Polite, perhaps, but she’d learned that polite and the road didn’t always ride together, and the magician hadn’t seemed to take offense at Gabriel’s words. . . .

“What do you want of us?” she asked.

Sandy eyebrows raised, mock surprise. “Why do you assume I want anything?”

The mule snorted, a rude, wet sound, conveying Izzy’s own disbelief perfectly.

“Perhaps,” the magician went on, “I merely seek companionship on the road. Seeing as how darker things have begun traveling it.”

Her eyes narrowed, the razor of her thoughts cutting clean through his words. “And would you know anything of that darkness?”

“No more than you, devil’s daughter,” the magician said. “Oh, yes, I know you, or know the mark you wear, at least. You have the smell of your boss about you.” He lifted his nose and sniffed once, a showy affair, and then tilted his head and smiled at her, though his eyes remained dark and still. Dangerous eyes, she thought again. Not a coyote—a wolf.

As though hearing her thoughts, that smile this time showed too many teeth. “I bear no grudge against the Master of the Territory, little Hand. I am not your foe.”

She could feel Gabriel’s tension, and the way he waited for her to respond. “I believe you,” she said, finally. “But I don’t trust you.”

“You’d be a fool if you did, and I would lose all respect for you. But there are weaker links that have bound allies before.”

“Allies in what?” Gabriel asked, suspicion in his voice. She might halfway believe the magician when he said he meant no harm, but her mentor didn’t.

“In discovering the source of the darkness,” the magician said, as though that ought to have been obvious to a child. Dark eyes narrowed, staring at her. “You know of it. You have seen it?”

There was something hungry in the magician’s voice, and Izzy forced herself not to give way before it. If he was a wolf, then she would be a horse, or better yet a buffalo, and he would beware her hooves.

“What do you know of it?” she asked in return.

“That it chills the wind and trembles the earth, disturbs the bones. But I do not know the what of it nor the why. I would know these things.”

There was a hunger in his voice, naked and unashamed, and some sense of him was clear to her then.

“I am Isobel,” she said abruptly. Gabriel might object, but the magician offered them no obvious threat and spoke of things that she had seen in her vision, that had scratched and worried at her thoughts. For that alone, she wanted to keep him near. “My companion is Gabriel.”

“Farron Easterly.” And he made a sweeping bow, long limbs surprisingly graceful, his hair falling over his shoulder before he flicked it back. “A fortuitous meeting, indeed.”

Magicians took their surnames from the winds, the boss said. Eight winds, each with their own strengths—and weaknesses. But he’d never said what those weaknesses might be, and she had never thought she’d need to know.

“You’ll need to walk if you travel with us,” Gabriel said, accepting her decision but clearly not pleased with it. “The mule already bears a load.”

The magician—Farron—took no visible offense. “I shall endeavor to maintain the pace, to avail myself of your companionship.”

And then he smiled again, a too-wide, too-pleased grin, and Izzy thought she might have made a mistake.

Letting the magician tag along had been a terrible idea.

Gabriel paused while unsaddling his horse, took off his hat, and rested his forehead against Steady’s neck, gathering strength from the solid muscle and calm breathing. He’d called an early halt to the day the moment they’d come to an acceptable place to set up camp, although “acceptable” meant only that they’d gotten far enough away from Clear Rock that he no longer felt overly twitchy.

But at least one cause of his unease had come with them, striding alongside the mule with a pace no human could maintain, cool and talkative as a crow.

Magicians were dangerous. Unpredictable. You avoided them; you
didn’t travel with them. And if one of them asked to travel with you, you took off in the other direction; you didn’t say yes! What had Isobel been thinking?

“Damned if I’ll ever understand women,” he said under his breath, aimed only for Steady’s ears. “And girl-women least of all.”

The magician chuckled softly behind him, and Gabriel jumped, his hand already on the grip of his knife before he gained control of himself again.

“Your mistake is in thinking of her as a woman.”

He turned, leaving his hand on the weapon, and stared at the magician. “Beg pardon?”

“She is female, assuredly. Subject to all the ills and frailties of that flesh. But she is also the Hand, rider. You have no understanding of what that means.” The magician looked up at the sky, not bothering to shield his face from the setting sun. “And neither does she.”

The magician’s tone, half-mocking, half-thoughtful, didn’t help Gabriel’s mood. “And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell us.”

The magician tilted his head and smiled brightly at him. “Now, where would the entertainment be in that?”

Gabriel sighed. This had been a
terrible
idea.

Isobel no longer required guidance when they set up camp, and he left her to it, moving away from the campsite only long enough to find a patch of nopales nearby, gathering enough of the flat, spiky paddles to griddle for dinner. It wouldn’t be particularly satisfying, but he’d survived on less, and worse, before.

He knelt next to the area he had cleared for a fire, placing the coalstone in the center and asking it to burn. It stuttered slightly, then warmed under his touch, warning him to move away before flames emerged. Not that they needed much of a fire: the night promised to be comfortable after the day’s warmth, and they didn’t need a large fire to cook on, only enough to keep the night at bay.

“The coalstone’s dying, isn’t it?” Isobel said, coming up next to him.

“Coalstone don’t last forever,” he said. “I’d meant to trade for a new one when I could. But we seem to be having bad luck with that.”

There was a weighted silence, then she asked, “Do you think that’s all it is? Bad luck?”

He sat back on his heels and looked up at her, thought of how he’d first seen her in the devil’s saloon, hair pinned in a fancy knot, a pretty dress and a sweet, sly look on her face. The figure watching him now was sun-baked despite her hat, the tip of her nose and the stretch of her cheekbones darker than the rest, her eyes shadowed and tired, her hair a long, messy braid flipped over one shoulder, her hands ragged-nailed, holding not a tray or fine glassware but her knife and a whetstone.

She was still weak after whatever it was she’d done back at Clear Rock, and he’d told her to sit and rest while he set up the fire. The magician, of course, was useless, wandering off to stare into the distance, hands clasped behind his back, the moment they made camp, rather than offering to help. He had no gear—he could conjure up a cabin for himself or sleep suspended in air, for all Gabriel knew. Or it was entirely possible that magicians didn’t sleep. Rumor said they’d started human but weren’t any more, giving themselves over to the spirits in exchange for their powers. Rumor said they weren’t to be trusted.

Gabriel was pretty sure rumor was right on all those matters.

“If you were anyone else, I’d say yes,” he told her honestly. “With you?” He shrugged, letting his gaze drop down to where the tiny flames were now curving around the coalstone. “I don’t know. What was that you said about suspicious hands earlier?”

“The boss calls it that,” she said. “When things go one way too consistently. The world is random, he says, like the deal of cards. A good player can manipulate what they get, but they can’t control the
deal, not without cheating. So, if you call the high card every time, it might be luck and it might not.”

“You’re calling all this a high card?” He couldn’t help but be amused.

She let out an exasperated sigh, as though she couldn’t believe she had to explain this to him. “It’s too much. Too consistent. Bad luck, yes. But all this, the illness in Widder Creek, the . . .
thing
in Clear Rock, and a magician who happens to meet us in the road and offers us his aid? And something following us, maybe for days?” Isobel had been checking each item off on a finger, then folded them all against her palm. “The boss taught me how to conjure the odds. Can you say that this doesn’t feel”—she expanded her fingers, like a bird taking flight—“suspicious?”

“Sometimes a run of bad luck’s just a run of bad luck, Isobel.” But once she’d presented the evidence, he couldn’t not see it. Not all of it, but some; if he were gathering evidence, it might be enough to sway a judge and jury.

“Pfffft. Bad luck or manipulation, what does it matter?” The magician stepped out of the dusk, not even pretending not to have been eavesdropping. He had shed his long coat and rolled his sleeves up, looking like any other rider at the end of a long day, if you didn’t look too closely at his face.

Gabriel looked at his face. The eyes were golden brown in the faint flickers of firelight, the sharp planes of his face giving him a feral, worrisome look.

“You think there’s no connection?” Isobel had too little caution of the magician, but Gabriel carried enough for them both. He hoped.

“I say you worry too much of what is and what isn’t, little rider. The winds blow, and the world turns, and things change. You have no control over any of this.”

The magician—Farron—cocked an eye at the coalstone, then shook his head in mock sorrow and bent down, holding out his hands. It looked as though he were trying to warm his fingers, but a faint breeze
rippled around then, and the flames grew twice their size, crackling as they fed on invisible fuel.