His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 102

Chapter 102

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118 Mon, Nov 2 M

Chapter 102

Abby

Nad been filling myself with moonlight since sunset.

Imogen had taught me to think of it like water poured into a cup. In human form, I couldn’t hold much. A cupful. Maybe two, on a night like this. But for three hours I had sat at the window the training hall with the full moon on my face and my hands open in my lap, drawing it in slowly, the way she had made me practice every night for a week. By the time the howling started, I was so full of it that my fingertips tingled.

Chloe and Noah were at the doors in wolf form, Skye tawny and Kai black, both of them restless. Imogen stood beside me at the window with her arms folded and her rings catching the light.

From up here I could see the whole north field.

I could see Kade.

Not well. Knox was one black shape among dozens in the gray grass. But I didn’t need my eyes. Since the cabin, I had always been able to find him, the way you know where your own hand is in the dark. Through the bond I felt every impact as a dull jolt, every turn of his body, the cold steady anger he wore in a fight like armor.

I felt the moment he saw the man in black at the treeline, too.

It went through me like a dropped stone. Recognition. Then something under it that I didn’t have a

name for.

“He’s seen Malachi,” I said.

Imogen didn’t ask how I knew. “Where?”

“There. By the stones.”

She squinted at the top of the field, where a ring of pale rocks stood on the rise in the moonlight, and a thin figure moved inside it. Something crossed Imogen’s face that I had never seen there before.

“Oh, you clever, wicked woman,” she said quietly.

Then the moon went out.

That was how it felt. I could still see it through the glass, round and white over the trees, but when I reached for it there was nothing to take hold of, and Diana threw herself against something she couldn’t see.

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I gripped the windowsill so hard that my knuckles turned white.

Breathe.” Imogen’s hand closed over my wrist. Her ring, the heavy one that had turned black the night before, was hot against my skin. “Breathe, Abigail. You’re not cut off. You’re full. Feeli

She was right. Everything I had stored was still there, a warm weight behind my ribs. She dn’t

taken that.

“What is she doing?”

“Stealing your sky.” Imogen was already moving toward the door. “Come with me.”

Skye and Kai fell in on either side of us as we went out into the cold. Imogen walked straight to the corner of the training hall, where the building met the edge of the field, and dropped to her knees in the frozen grass.

“Here,” she said. “I felt it the second she lit them up. Dig.”

We dug with our hands. The earth had been turned recently and packed down again, yet it smelled of nothing at all, not soil, not the hands that had dug it. Six inches under, my fingers struck stone.

It was smooth and pale and the size of a loaf of bread. Symbols had been carved into its face, and I knew them. I had lain chained on top of them for a night and a day.

“The temple,” I whispered.

“The same markings. She learned more than she should have in that chamber.” Imogen wiped her hands on her coat. “And the same veil that swallowed your trail on the western line. Her people walked in under it these last few nights and buried these where no nose in Moonhaven would ever find them. I walked past this corner twice.” “The ring at the top of the field is where she pulls the moonlight to. But she’s buried these all along the edges, and they’re carrying it to her like pipes.

Every stone drains its part of the field and passes it on.”

“Then we dig them all up.”

“We don’t have time. There could be twenty of them.” She looked at me. “But you’ve done this before.”

I stared at her.

“You overloaded a temple,” Imogen said. “This is a rock. Put more through it than it can carry and it’ll break. If I’m right, the break will run the whole way back to her.”

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him was on fire, and he was fighting it, and he couldn’t shift, and men were coming toward him with knives.

I made a sound I didn’t recognize.

“Abby.” Imogen’s voice snapped me back. “Hands on the stone. Now.”

I put my hands on it.

Imogen laid hers over mine. Her rings were burning hot. She began to speak, low and fast, in language that was nothing like Cressida’s chant. Where Cressida’s words had sounded like something being dragged across stone, Imogen’s sounded like a key turning.

The stone grew cold under my palms. Cold enough to hurt.

Then Kade’s order came through the link, the full weight of the Alpha voice with the fear and the love tangled up behind it. Diana didn’t even have to fight it. It hit her and simply came apart, and I told him I was coming anyway.

I took the lid off everything Imogen had taught me to keep on a shelf, and I pushed.

Everything I had stored since sunset went into the stone at once.

For a second, the stone held. I felt it straining like a dam, the old carved lines trying to swallow the light and pass it on. Then they filled. Then they overfilled. A thin silver line split across the face of the rock under my hands.

The crack ran.

I felt it go. Through the ground, from stone to stone, faster than thought, up the length of the field toward the ring at the top.

At the treeline, something broke with a sound like a lake freezing all the way to the bottom.

The moon came back.

It rushed into me so hard I nearly fell over. Diana surged up to meet it, howling inside my head, and

I didn’t wait for anyone’s permission. I tore my sweater over my head and let her take me.

The shift was the fastest of my life.

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Diana ran.

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I didn’t wait until I reached him.

took the moonlight pouring down on us and I gave it to Kade.

Not the careful trickle I had practiced in the training hall with Imogen counting under her breath. A river. It went out of me and into him, and I felt it land in his chest like a second heart starting

Knox exploded out of the net.

I felt the silver burn him as he tore through it, and I felt him not care. He came up off the ground twice his size, or that was how it seemed, every hair on his body standing out silver-tipped in the moonlight. The man holding the net’s edge went flying. The two with knives didn’t get the chance to

run.

Then I was beside him, and for one second we just stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the

field, breathing.

You disobeyed a direct order, he said through the link. He sounded like he couldn’t decide whether to shout or laugh.

Diana doesn’t take orders.

I’m aware.

His side was bleeding badly. His shoulder too. I could feel how much it hurt, and I could feel the light I’d given him pushing against the pain, holding him upright.

Not too much, he said. Abby. Aldric-

I know.

I did know. I could feel it already. The faint sting behind my eyes. The heat building at the base of my skull. Imogen had told me what it would feel like before it became dangerous, and I was not there

yet.

The rogues came at us again, and this time Moonhaven came with us.

It was different now. The weight was gone from my pack, and the moon was back in their legs, and every time Knox moved, I fed him more. The river had narrowed to a steady stream, enough to keep him faster than anything they sent. Rogues broke against us and fell back. Some of them started running for the trees.

I was so focused on Kade that I didn’t see it coming.

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T18 Mon, Nov 2▷ MD neck and stopped.

Diana choked.

collar. Cressida had made a collar out of nothing.

At the top of the field, inside her broken ring, she stood with one scarred hand stretched toward me and her lips moving fast.