Unless whatever blocked them from touching the Road blocked the devil as well.
The idea that something could stop the Master of the Territory within his own borders was not one Gabriel wanted to consider. The devil had sent Isobel to be his eye and his ear as well as his hand. If something were able to circumscribe his reach . . .
. . . what else was happening that the devil might not know about?
Gabriel thought of the letter in his pack, of the forces pressing against the Territory, and remembered the half-dream and Old Woman’s words. Be wary. Be wary, and step lightly.
It might have meant nothing, might be nothing. He should have told her of the letter. It was too late now.
“Ici.”
Isobel recognized that word when the old man finally spoke, so she reined her mare in and looked around.
It didn’t seem all that different from any other valley they’d ridden through. The sunlight was beginning to fade, but there was enough light to see that the grass appeared undisturbed, the rocks unshattered, none of the devastation that the boss had said would happen where the earth shook so violently. She looked at Gabriel for a lead, but he was swinging out of his saddle, briefly out of view on the other side of the gelding.
She made a face and followed suit, letting her boots land lightly on the dirt, not aware that she was braced for something to happen until nothing did. Her feet pressed against the ground, and nothing pressed back. It was as still and silent as it had ever been before she took Contract with the devil. No, even more silent. In Flood, she had felt the town itself, the protective boundary-wards that encircled it, the constant flow of power through the very floorboards of the saloon, though she’d not realized then what it was. She had grown up in proximity to the devil; power had been as present in the air she breathed as the sulphured smoke from the blacksmith’s forge.
Here, there was only the sharp, bitter smell of the trees covering the slopes around them, a perfume of flowers she couldn’t identify, and under it all, the faint acrid bite that had met them when they entered the hills that they’d ascribed to the ghost cat.
Then, it had been unpleasant, the smell of illness. Here, it reminded her somehow of home, of the morning stink of Gregor’s smithy, and the smell of dough rising—except unpleasant, unnerving.
She hadn’t realized she was walking toward something until she felt the others gather behind her, Gabriel at her shoulder, the old man a few paces behind. She paused, the toes of her boots neatly lined up as though a ward lay in front of her, telling her to stop. The grass and flowers past her toes looked the same as every other part of the meadow, nothing jarring or out of place.
“Careful”—and Gabriel’s hand was on her elbow, fingers curling around the fabric of her jacket, digging through the cloth. “There’s something . . .”
“I feel it,” she agreed. She turned, her face lifted to the sky, pushing her hat back, watching a single bird winging across the broad blue expanse. It was massive, the sun glinting off dark feathers, and she knew she should feel fear: that was a Reaper close overhead.
Instead of fear, awe overwhelmed her, awe and trepidation; the sense that every beat of its wings was echoed in the thud of her heart, the catch of her breath. Reapers, like buffalo, were creatures of the Territory; they carried some of its medicine within them. Watching it, her head tilting back, the sun glinting at the corner of her vision, Isobel was able to forget, briefly, that she had been cut off, was able to forget anything existed beyond that beat pressing through her flesh, down deep into the bones of the Territory itself.
Then awareness returned. Reaper hawks were hunters, not scavengers: Gabriel had warned her to be careful, that it would not hesitate to attack a slightly built human if it were hungry enough.
“What is it looking for?” she asked. If it lingered here when there was no hunting to be found, there was a reason. Might it also be ill? She remembered the ghost cat, remembered the feel of the plague-ridden settlement of Widder Creek, the stink of the camp burning in their wake, then sniffed the air again, as though something that far away, that high above, could be scented. The air smelled as it had before: tainted, but not ill.