Silver on the Road (The Devil's West Book 1) (20 page)

The fire Devorah had started was small but offered a comforting warmth, and the coffeepot sat on its tripod over the flames, the smell making Izzy’s nostrils flare and her mouth water. In all that was still strange and new, the bitter smell was familiar, a connection home, and as the sky brightened to a clear blue, the light filling the air, it was hard to remember the darkness and shadows of the night before, hard to remember the feeling she’d had when the snake slipped up to her face, the words it uttered, and she was half thinking the exhaustion and uncertainty and rabbit for dinner had combined to give her a too-real dream.

Except she was too much a child of Flood to discount any dream that real.

Izzy sat on the flat stone nearest the fire, curled her legs underneath her, and accepted the battered tin mug Devorah handed her. The warmth was nearly enough to burn her fingers, and she put it
down on the ground next to her, to let it cool before she drank it. While she waited, she unbraided her hair, letting the strands fall down her back. Her scalp felt dry and itchy, but when she ran her fingers through her hair, the strands felt unpleasantly oily.

“Men don’t talk about it,” Devorah said, watching her, “but after a few weeks on the dust roads, you’ll be daydreaming of a bath, and after a month or two, you’d trade your companion to the nearest demon for a safe pool to wash in. That’s my advice for you: never turn down the chance to wash your hair.”

Then she reached into her pack and handed Izzy a small brown paper packet. “Soda ash. Rub a little into your scalp, only a little! That will help. Keep it dry or it becomes useless.”

“Thank you.” Izzy took the packet. It fit into her hand, lightweight, with something soft and granular moving inside the paper. She’d never been given a gift before, not from someone she didn’t know, and she wondered if she should give something back in return.

“I don’t know why you’ve taken to the road so young,” Devorah went on, “and I’m not going to ask. But there are damn few of us riding, and every trick needs to be shared.” The older woman gave her a sideways grin and flicked her own braid over her shoulder. “No need to tell the boys.”

“Tell the boys what?” Gabriel’s suspenders hung down at his waist, his hair sleep-tousled, and he needed a shave, the rough bristles covering his cheeks and chin with shadow.

“Girl things,” Devorah said, not cheekily, not saucy the way Molly might, but matter-of-factly, as though that were the end of the discussion.

Gabriel snorted and reached for the coffeepot. “Then I thank you for not sharing.”

He wasn’t sure what sort of conversation he’d stumbled back into, but he caught the long-suffering glance Devorah gave Isobel,
woman-to-woman, and hid a grin behind his coffee. The girl’d spent her entire life in the relatively sheltered environs of the saloon; devil or no, all this—him—had been an abrupt change from what she’d been used to. Not that Dev was what you’d call the mothering sort, but she was female, and he supposed that mattered.

Good influences were for preachermen and stay-at-homes. Isobel was going to be the Devil’s Left Hand, whatever that ended up meaning. She needed a different kind of influence.

“Weather looks to hold another day or two.” He took a seat by the fire, Isobel to his left, Devorah across the low flames. “You were heading north, you said? The trails should all be cleared by now, but be careful. It was a cold winter; the momma bears are going to be taking anything that looks like food up there.”

Devorah made a rude gesture with three fingers. “I’m always careful. You know that.”

“I’ve never seen a bear,” Isobel said.

“Try not to,” Devorah said. “They’re large, smelly, and mean.”

“Only in the spring,” Gabriel said.

“They smell all the time,” Devorah said, wrinkling her nose. “Worse than you.”

“Feel free to make your own campsite next time,” he said without offense, steadfastly ignoring the look the two women gave each other. He was a fine friend to soap when he had it, but when you were on the road, you smelled like the road; that’s all there was to it.

The conversation lapsed after that, a comfortable, lazy silence taking over, until Devorah turned her mug upside down, spilling the dregs of her coffee into the dirt. “Well, it was good to run into friendly faces,” she said, tucking the tin mug into her pack and standing up, “and I appreciate the shared fire.”

“Good to see you still breathing,” he said, raising his own mug in salute. He’d been true to Isobel: the two of them weren’t friends, but they had known each other a long time. It was good to see her well and kicking.

“You take care, Isobel,” Devorah said to her. “Don’t let this one sell you for a wife.”

“Not a soul here who could afford me,” Isobel shot back, and Devorah laughed.

“Yeah, you might just do, Isobel, you might just do.”

Dev picked up her pack and hauled it to where her mule waited, ear to ear with their own mule like a pair of gossips. She saddled the horse and loaded the pack onto the mule, tightening straps and checking the fit, then led the beasts onto the trail, disappearing around a bend, the way they’d come the night before.

Gabriel turned back to the fire and looked at Isobel. “You look like something bit your nose. What?”

The girl’s hair was loose around her shoulders, and it made her look too young. “She didn’t say good-bye.”

“No more than you did when you left Flood,” he pointed out. “And you knew those folk a sight better than she knows you—or me, for that matter.” She still looked upset, and he shook his head. He’d forgotten she was green, for just a moment. “You don’t say good-bye,” he told her. “Not unless it’s the last farewell. The road curves on itself, and you’ll turn around and there she’ll be again, maybe tomorrow, maybe ten years from now.”

That wasn’t entirely true. Once you took to the road, you didn’t expect to see anyone twice again, but why assume the worst? Leave it open, leave the farewells unsaid. That was how he’d sorted it, anyway. He didn’t know how other folk felt.

“Is that why the snake just left?” She said it quietly, as though it weren’t a question, and she didn’t mean for him to hear.

“Snakes are just bastards,” he said anyway. “Wise, but bastards.”

If possible, her eyes got wider. “So . . . it really happened?”

That made him laugh, the sound rough in his throat. “If it didn’t, we both had the same dream, and on the road, that’s the same thing as it really happening.” Towns pulled in tight, people setting up protections as they were able. Outside, especially on the road, you were
more vulnerable; things could get in. She should know this already. They’d sent a child out with him, for all that the law said otherwise. What had the devil been thinking?

He made a face at that thought. The devil kept his thoughts to himself, and an honest man was thankful for that.

“Why did it speak to us? Was it truly a snake, or . . . ?”

At least they’d taught her that much caution, to not even indirectly call the dancers’ attention. Territory had enough trouble in it; no need to give the land itself ideas.

“It’s hard to tell with rattlers.” Rattlesnakes were prone to sticking their noses in, and they’d been unprotected, off the road. And stories claimed rattlers had an affinity with the devil and his kin, making sense it’d called her little sister.

But he’d been drawn to Isobel’s side when he should have been sound asleep, and they’d managed not to wake Devorah, who normally would be alert at the first movement. And it hadn’t made a lick of sense, what the snake had said. All that called for it being a dream. It hadn’t felt like one, though, not the least because he’d been unable to fall asleep again after, staring at the sky overhead until first light chased the last stars away.

He wasn’t sure which would be worse news, if a dream-dancer chose to poke into their dreams, or a snake had something to say to them. But Isobel was waiting on his answer.

“I’m pretty sure it was actually a rattlesnake. I’m too tired for it to have been a dream.”

His reassurance didn’t seem to have reassured her a bit. Fair enough: he’d managed to unreassure himself. If a rattler were paying attention to them, that meant other things might be too. So, there was her next lesson.

“There are things out here, Isobel. Things we understand, and a hell of a lot more we don’t. Not even your boss does entire, I’m thinking. Maybe the tribes, but they’ve each got different stories to tell it, and they don’t share ’em all with us. What I do know is that our visitor
chose to stop by for its own reasons, spoke to us for its own reasons, and it may not be in our best interests to poke too deep into those reasons or worry too much about what it said until we’ve got some idea what it was talking about.”

She looked away, but some of the tension left her face. “Do you think it lied?”

“Snakes don’t lie.” Not in the flesh, anyway. Wasn’t a soul alive could tell what a dream-dancer might do. “They don’t tell the truth, neither, not the way we see it. Didn’t they teach you any of this, Izzy?”

“Not enough,” she said, a sour twist to her mouth. “Obviously.”

“Right. Once we’re on our way, we’ll remedy that. Start with snakes and work our way through.” Odds were, a rider wouldn’t ever encounter one spirit animal, much less more, in their entire life—and at that, they had more chance than most. But as Isobel was the Devil’s Hand, he wasn’t going to assume anything.

It wasn’t until she’d nodded and gone off to pack up her own kit that he realized he’d called her Izzy, the way that girl had, back in Patch Junction, instead of Isobel. He dumped his own coffee and stretched, arms reaching to the sky until he felt something in his back crack. He’d need to watch that. “Izzy” might be fine for a saloon girl, but not the Devil’s Hand. And he could not afford to take liberties or see her as anything other than the woman she’d need to become.

Everyone might be equal in the territory, but only a fool didn’t acknowledge power, be it a gun, a knife, or medicine. And the Devil’s Hand would carry all three.

They broke camp in a silence that was somewhere between comfortable and awkward, and if Gabriel saw her glancing off to the side several times, checking for anything that might slither, he didn’t mention it. Her silence continued once they saddled up, and they rode northwest along the curve of a shallow-cut creek, both of them wrapped in their own thoughts.

By the time they paused to stretch their legs midday, he’d had enough. The creek had widened into something that could honestly claim the name, and he distracted Isobel from her thoughts by showing her how to spot sakli and trout in the shallows, to stand so that the sun didn’t cast a shadow and scare them away. He was already a few days off schedule thanks to taking it slower on Isobel’s behalf; another few hours wouldn’t make a difference to where they were going, and fresh fish was always a welcome change.

And watching her face when she took that first bite of fish, the skin crackled and crisped with a dab of molasses, the flesh practically falling off the knife, was worth it.

“Ree never made fish like this,” she said. He guessed Ree had been the saloon’s cook.

“Soup or fried,” he guessed. “Makes sense. Fish feeds a lot more that way. But there’s nothing like pan-cooked trout, in my experience. Makes fishing worth the bother.”

The delay meant it wasn’t until nearly dusk that the road brought them to a small copse of black cherry, the circle-and-square burned into one of the older trees telling him they’d reached the first of his scheduled stops. A narrow path led off the road, through the trees to a bridge spanning the river, the planks rough-hewn and weathered, and when Isobel turned to look at him, her expression dubious, he nodded.

“Home sweet home for the night,” he said.

“That bridge looks . . . old.”

He snorted. “Older than you and twice as strong. Go on, Isobel.”

Isobel gave the bridge another dubious look but sent Uvnee over it without hesitation, Gabriel following once she was on the other side, the mule, as ever, trailing faithfully behind. He had confidence the bridge was still strong, but there was no point testing it with two horses at once.

On the other bank, the land had been cleared of grasses and replaced by a small garden patch, beyond which were three cabins draped in darkness.