His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 103

Chapter 103

Malachi

My brother’s son came toward me through the moonlight, and he was burning.

That was the only word for it. Knox was black, as black as Nathaniel’s wolf had been, but every hair along his back and shoulders was tipped with silver light, and it moved on him like wind through grass. It was pouring into him from somewhere behind him. I didn’t have to look to know where

The silver wolf stood thirty yards back with her legs braced and her head low. She was the source of it. I could see the light leaving her and going into him in one steady stream.

Cressida had told me this was the point. Kill the boy, and the light had nowhere to go.

She had told me a great many things over the years.

***

Cressida’s men had walked Sloane out of the dark at dusk, limping, in my coat from the hook by the door and a collar too tight, her lip split where she must have fought them. She looked at me once across the stones they were setting in the ground and asked if this was what I chose, and with Cressida at my side and twenty of her rogues watching, I said nothing at all. I had already told my eight to hold the edge of the trees, fight only what came at them, and leave the boy to me. Sloane had not looked at me again until now, and I could feel it on the back of my neck like a hand.

***

Knox hit me like a falling tree.

He was faster than he should have been, and stronger. The first blow took me off my feet and rolled us both through the frozen grass. I came up first, because I had been doing this since before he lost his milk teeth, and I opened the wound in his side again with one hard rake of my claws.

He didn’t flinch. The light in him seemed to swallow the pain.

We circled.

He had his father’s way of moving. I hadn’t expected that. The same low head, the same habit of leading with the left shoulder. Nathaniel had fought like that the day I challenged him, and I had

been young enough to think it was a weakness.

It hadn’t been then either.

Knox came in again. I gave him my shoulder and went for his throat and he twisted away. We broke

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Kill him, my wolf said. It wasn’t eagerness. It was habit. Twenty years of wanting.

The boy was good. He was very good. But I had spent my life in fights with no rules, against wolves who would bite off a leg to win, and he had spent his learning to protect people. Every time he lunged, I could see him make sure none of his own wolves were behind me first.

Every time he fought, he was thinking about someone else.

And the light that held him up was getting thinner.

I saw it before he did. The silver along his back flickered once, then again, like a lamp on a bad wire. Thirty yards away, the silver wolf’s legs were shaking. Her head had dropped lower. Even from here I could see her sides heaying.

She was burning herself out to keep him standing.

Cressida had told me that too, years ago, reading from some crumbling book by candlelight. The old Moonsilver wolves didn’t die of age. They died of love, or of war, or of both at once.

I hadn’t cared then.

The next time Knox came in, the light stuttered, and I was ready.

I took him down by the throat.

We hit the ground together with my weight on top of him and my jaws locked just under his jaw, where a wolf’s life runs close to the skin. He stopped fighting at once. He knew what I had. Everyone watching knew.

Now, my wolf said.

All I had to do was close.

I looked down into his eyes.

They were dark. Nathaniel’s eyes. The same eyes that had looked at me across a burning square eight years ago, when my brother said my name-only my name, quietly, as if it surprised him—a moment before the night closed over us both.

They were also the eyes of a five-year-old boy who used to drum his heels on my chest and shout higher, higher while I galloped him down to the lake and back. The boy who cried when I was sent away, because no one had told him why.

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didn’t beg. He lay there under me and looked at me, and the waiting in his eyes was worse than any/ fight.

Everything I had done since my exile had been to bring me here, and I couldn’t do it.

I opened my jaws and stepped back.

Knox rolled to his feet, bleeding, and didn’t attack. He stood with his head low and his side heaving and stared at me as if he were trying to understand a language he had once known.

Up on the hill, someone was shouting. I didn’t turn around.

I let my wolf go.

The shift back was slow and ugly. I came up on my knees in the frozen grass with blood running into my eye and the cold biting at every wound. Teague was there before I had finished, the way he always was, with the pack he had carried on his back all night. He dropped trousers and a shirt beside me without a word and went back to stand between me and the trees.

I dressed in front of both packs. I took my time about it.

Behind me, Cressida’s voice cut across the field.

“Finish it!”

I pulled the shirt over my head.

“Malachi. Finish it. Now.”

Knox hadn’t moved. He stood a few yards away with his head low and blood dripping from his shoulder into the frost, watching every move I made and not making one of his own. Beyond him, the silver wolf had dragged herself to his side. The light in her had dimmed to a glimmer. She was shaking, but she was standing.

I turned to face the treeline. I wanted Cressida to see me when I said it.

“No.”

The word carried farther than I had expected. The whole field heard it.

Nobody moved. Cressida’s rogues looked at one another. My own men, scattered along the edge of the trees, had stopped where they stood. Teague turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder, and for once in his life there was an expression on his face that I could read. It wasn’t surprise.

Above them all, a little behind Cressida, Sloane stood with a rogue’s hand clamped around her arm

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Cressida stood inside her broken ring with her bandaged hand against her chest. For a moment she ooked at me the way she had looked at me the first night she found me, a half-starved exile with nothing but a grudge. Measuring. Deciding what I was worth.

“It’s done,” I said. “I’m done.”

Then her face changed.

“You’re done when I say you’re done,” she said. “But let’s see what you’re still willing to bleed for.”

She didn’t turn to Sloane. She didn’t have to.

The rogue holding Sloane’s arm had been watching me, like everyone else on that hill. Sloane felt his grip go slack. I saw her feel it. She tore free, and she ran.

She ran down the slope toward me on a leg that couldn’t carry her, in a coat that wasn’t hers, with a collar on her throat and her hair flying. She fell once and got up. Two of Cressida’s rogues started

after her.