His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 105

Chapter 105

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Chapter 105

Abby

Nelt the bond break.

Not theirs, exactly. It wasn’t mine to feel. But Sloane was still pack, and the link between

had

been open when she said the words, and something came through it that made Diana stagge A door slamming somewhere very far away. A room going dark.

She did it, Diana said.

I watched Sloane take one step on her bad leg and fold, and Liam caught her before she hit the ground. He lifted her and started back across the frost toward our lines. Her head had fallen against his shoulder, and one hand was still pressed to the side of her neck.

I didn’t know if I had just helped her or broken her.

Maybe both.

Abby. Kade’s voice came through the bond, rough with exhaustion. Are you still with me?

I’m here.

You’re fading.

I was. I could feel it in the way Diana’s legs had started to tremble whenever she stood still too long, and in the way the moonlight no longer filled us the way it had at the start of the night. We had been pouring it into Knox for over an hour. Every time he lunged, every time a rogue’s teeth found him, every time Cressida’s rogues pressed in around him, I had reached for the moon and pushed, and Knox had answered like a fire given air..

Imogen had warned me. Before the fighting started, standing on the packhouse steps with her rings clicking against her coffee mug, she had looked me in the eye and said, “You’ll want to give him everything. Don’t. Give him enough.”

I had tried.

It was hard to know what enough was when someone was trying to kill him.

I’m fine, I told Kade.

Liar.

Across the field, Cressida had stopped chanting.

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I had never seen her face go empty like this.

mogen,” I said aloud, forgetting that Diana couldn’t make words. It came out as a low whine

Imogen couldn’t have heard it from across the field, but her head came up anyway. She was still at the corner of the training hall, one hand braced on the wall, blood running from her nose she looked older than she had at dusk. Holding back Cressida’s magic all night had cost her too. She lifted her free hand from the wall, rings flashing, and pointed at the treeline.

Cressida turned.

Not toward Malachi. Not toward Sloane.

Toward Knox.

Something in me went cold.

“You were supposed to be easy,” she said. She wasn’t shouting. Somehow that was worse. Her voice carried across the field anyway. “One wolf. One blade. Thirteen years of work, and all he had to do was finish you.”

Knox’s lips peeled back from his teeth.

Kade, I said. Don’t.

He took a step toward her.

She wants you to come to her.

I know.

Then don’t-

If she walks into those trees, she comes back. His voice was low and terribly calm. Next month. Next year. She’ll come for you again, Abby. I’m not letting her.

He ran.

I didn’t think. I reached for the moon one more time and threw everything I could find into him.

Silver light raced along Knox’s black coat. He was fast. Faster than anything I had ever seen. The ground blurred under him, and the rogues still standing between him and the trees scattered out of

his way.

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The air between them cracked.

it hit Knox before I saw it. Through the bond, through Diana, through every thread of moonlight I had poured into him, something black and freezing slammed into the place where my light had been and tore it away. Diana yelped and went down on her front legs. Across the e, Imogen cried out, and I heard her hit the wall of the training hall.

Knox didn’t stop.

He was already in the air when the light left him. He hit Cressida full in the chest, and they went down together into the frozen leaves at the edge of the trees. I heard her scream. I saw his jaws close on her shoulder.

Then I saw her arm move.

Once. Short and hard.

Knox jerked.

Kade.

He made a sound I would hear for the rest of my life. Then he let go of her and staggered sideways, and I watched the shift take him without his permission. Fur gone. Bones folding. A man fell into the leaves where a wolf had been.

Cressida rolled away from him. Her shoulder was torn open, blood soaking black down the front of her coat. She got to her knees. The dark blade was in her hand again, and it was wet.

She looked at me across the field.

For a heartbeat, neither of us moved.

Then she smiled. It was thin and shaking, and there was pain all through it, but it was a smile.

“Keep him alive if you can, little moon,” she said.

Then the last of her rogues closed around her, the air at the treeline went dead and scentless the way the trail on the western line had, and she was gone into the trees.

I was already running.

Diana’s legs were barely holding us. She stumbled twice across the frost and kept going. Somewhere behind me, Ryan was shouting orders. Wolves surged past us toward the treeline. I heard bodies

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He was so pale that the tattoos on his forearms looked black against his skin. The wound was under his left ribs, a narrow cut no wider than my palm, and it should have been bleeding more than it was. Instead the edges had already gone gray. Dark threads crawled out from it across his chest, like the ones I had seen spreading across Malachi’s side.

His eyes were open.

“Hey,” he whispered.

Diana pushed her nose against his face. He lifted one hand, slowly, and set it on her neck

“I’m okay.”

He wasn’t. I could feel it through the bond. Pain, so much of it that it made the world tilt. And

under the pain, something worse. Cold. Spreading.

Hold on.

I reached for the moon.

It was right there. Full and enormous and so bright that it turned the frost silver. It had been there all night, and all night it had filled me the moment I asked.

Now I reached, and it slid through me like water through cupped hands.

I tried again. I pulled harder. I found a thread of it, thin as a hair, and pushed it toward Kade. It

reached him. I felt it touch the cold in his chest.

Then it went out.

Diana’s legs folded under us. Her light flickered, and I felt it the way you feel a candle die in a dark room. One moment it was there. The next, there was only the moon above us and nothing inside.

The shift took me the same way it had taken him.

I didn’t choose it. I didn’t fight it. There was nothing left to fight with. Fur and bones and pain, and then I was on my hands and knees in the frozen leaves beside him, naked and shaking so hard my teeth knocked together.

“Abby.” Kade’s voice was faint. “You’re cold.”

“Shut up.” I was crying. I didn’t remember starting. “Don’t talk. Just-stay.’

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A trickle would be better than nothing.

closed my eyes and reached.

Something answered. Small. Deep. The bit of moonlight Imogen had taught me to keep folded away for later, a scrap I hadn’t poured into the stone after all. It was still there. I hadn’t known./

I pulled it out and pushed it into him.

Kade gasped.

For one second, I felt the cold in his chest stop moving.

Then a bright pain split my head open from the inside. Warmth ran over my lip. I tasted copper. The world tilted sideways and the edges of it went white, and still I kept pushing, because the cold had stopped, because if I stopped, it would start again.

Hands closed around my wrists.

“Enough.”

Imogen. Her red hair had come loose, and blood was still drying under her nose. She was on her knees beside me, gripping my wrists hard enough to hurt.

“Let go of me.”