Read Online Soul Catcher by Michael C. White - Free Book Online Page B

sleep soundly that night, because he'd only done his job. But cruelty for cruelty's sake was another thing altogether and he could not abide it. Some men relished it. Like this Preacher fellow. Still, this wasn't his concern. Let Strofe keep Preacher in line. That wasn't what Cain was being paid to do. His job was to bring back the girl.
    The bloody hell with it, he thought. He stood up on his creaky leg and went over to his horse, untied him from the tree, and led him down to the stream. He reached into his coat pocket and gave Hermes a piece of sugar. The horse sucked it off his palm with his clever lips and set about masticating it with a wonderful intensity of pleasure, one dark eye locking conspiratorially on Cain, as if to say, We are not a part of all that, you and I. He gave him another piece and then stroked the thick, muscular neck, running his hand down the silky blaze. The horse's agile lips pulled at his pockets in search of more. "Last one, boy," Cain said, handing him another piece. He reflected on how much he cared for the animal, more perhaps than was naturally right, and how he was here, in some measure, precisely on account of his attachment to the horse. Another man might have let the thing go, gotten another mount. There were, he supposed, other horses to be had, even ones as fine as Hermes, though he had not laid eyes on one. Then again, another man would not have wagered him to begin with. You can't blame him for your own drunken foolishness, Cain told himself.
    From the pommel he got the canteen. At the water's edge, he squatted with difficulty, his bad leg creaking with the effort. He filled his canteen, then took a long drink of the water. It was cold and sweet, tasting of autumn leaves and rotting wood and the deep stony secrets of the earth. The stream had slowed here to form a small pool perhaps twenty feet across. The fine rain barely wrinkled the water's skin. Looking down into it, he saw reflected the thick forms of trees, the tangle of naked branches overhead not yet budding out with the liberality of spring, and beyond, the gray vault of sky like a vast coffin lid. Angling his head a bit over the water, he caught sight of his own muted reflection. He had taken to avoiding looking into mirrors, as a man might who had long since stopped appreciating what he saw there. Beneath the broad-brimmed leather hat, he noted the wind- and-sun-scarred features, the angular jaw, which in others would have suggested strength of character but in Cain merely denoted a certain mulishness, the jagged scar over the brow where he'd been struck by a whiskey bottle during a fight, the full mouth turned sullenly downward at the corners. A still good-looking face taken all in all, but one which now had been aged well beyond its thirty-six years, with deep fault lines around the eyes that gave a certain tentativeness to his otherwise self-assured expression. And though he couldn't make them out in the dark mirror of water, the eyes were, he knew, the wistful, gray ones of his mother.
    As he was musing on these things, Cain found himself staring down into the water at something that lay on the bottom a few feet away. A stick, dark along one side, with colorful markings along the other. One end was flattened and broad, a handle of sorts. It almost looked like a fancy walking stick that a person had fashioned from a piece of ironwood and then painted. He thought how he hadn't used a cane to get around, not since the old mestiza woman had made him that one from a piece of pinon. So he rolled back his coat sleeve and began reaching his hand into the frigid water to take hold of it. That's when the stick moved. He jerked his hand away just as the thing came suddenly to life and went slithering rapidly toward the far bank. He felt a silken movement in his chest and then a sudden emptiness, as if his soul had been yanked out of him by the snake and carried off.
    * * *
    When Cain returned to the camp, Preacher was still at it.