His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 111

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Chapter 111

Malachi

Nidn’t sleep.

I hadn’t expected to. I sat on the cot with my back against the cold stone and my wrists my lap, and I listened to the lamp hiss at the end of the corridor, and I held my right hand very stills if what had been on it could still be there.

It wasn’t. Salt dries. Skin forgets. By midnight there was nothing on my thumb but my own skin,

and the raw red line where the silver had rubbed it.

The cell still smelled of her. Roses and bergamot, and under it the laundry soap of a house I had grown up in, and the clean, sharp ache of her crying. It would be gone by morning too, I sat in it while

it lasted.

She hadn’t promised me. I had asked her to forget me, and she had looked at me with her face wet and her chin up, and she had said nothing at all.

I should have been angry. I found I wasn’t.

***

They came for me before dawn.

Two guards, the same two as yesterday. One of them was young enough that his hands were unsteady on the key. The other was older, and I thought I knew his face from somewhere. Then I placed it. He had been a boy of sixteen, carrying water to the training ring the day I challenged my brother. He had been standing at the front of the crowd. He had watched me bleed.

He didn’t say anything. Neither did I.

They walked me up the stairs. I had come down them once, at nine years old, on a dare from Adrian Hayes, who had told me a ghost lived down here and then laughed so hard when I came up white that he had to sit down on the floor.

I hadn’t thought of that in thirty years.

At the top, the training hall was gray with the first light, and cold, and empty except for a truck idling outside the open doors. They put me in the back of it, between them, and nobody spoke the whole way out of town.

I watched Moonhaven go by through the rear window.

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I made myself look at the road.

The western border was where it had always been.

The old logging road, three miles out, where the pines gave way to scrub and the ground began to climb. There was nothing there to mark it. There never had been. Only the place where Moonaven’s scent stopped and the wild began, as clear to a wolf as a wall. Nathaniel and I had walked that ne with our father the summer I was eleven, while he showed us where the markings were renewed each spring. Nathaniel had remembered every one of them the first time. I had forgotten half by the next day, and he had walked it again with me, without being asked, and I had hated him for it, and hadn’t

known why.

They were all here. More of them than I had expected.

The elders stood in a group at the edge of the road, with Edmund Marsh in the middle and Garrick Shaw leaning on his cane. Ryan and his patrol. Thirty or forty wolves along the treeline in silence, some in fur, most not. They had come to see it done.

The girl stood in front of them. Abigail. Small, pale, with her hair pulled back so the white in it showed, and her brother at her shoulder.

And a little apart from everyone else, in a dark coat, with her hands in her pockets, stood Cassandra.

I hadn’t seen her in twenty years.

She had been twenty-six the last time, with her son crying somewhere in the house behind her and her face white and furious, telling me through the kitchen window that I had better not come back. There was gray in her hair now. Lines at her mouth. She stood the way she had always stood when she was holding something in, very straight, with her chin up.

She looked at me. I looked at her.

I thought of my brother on the ground in the square, eight years ago, saying my name.

She knew what I had done. At the verdict, the girl had said that the council had been asked to remember who would carry it. I knew who had asked. She had asked for her son. Not for me.

I didn’t look away first. Neither did she. In the end, it was the guard who moved me, his hand on my arm, and I let him.

***

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and waited.

Liam Hayes stepped forward.

had something folded over his arm. He held it out to me without a word.

My coat.

I knew it before I touched it. I knew the weight of it, and the place on the left cuff where the stitching had come loose, and the scorch mark on the hem from a night by the fire. And when took it from him, I knew the smell. Cassandra’s soap. And under it, faint, worked into the wool from days of being worn and slept in, roses and bergamot.

I didn’t ask who had sent it. I didn’t have to.

I looked at Adrian’s son. He looked back at me.

“She asked me to,” he said quietly. Only for me.

I put it on. One arm and then the other. It pulled across the bandage, and I let it.

“Take care of her,” I said.

Something moved in his face, something tireder than anger.

“She’s not yours to worry about,” he said. Then, after a moment, “But somebody is.”

He stepped back to his sister’s side.

The girl lifted her chin.

“Malachi Blackwell,” she said. Her voice carried farther than I had expected in the cold. “You are no longer of Moonhaven. Your name is struck, by your brother’s word and now by your nephew’s. If you cross this line again, your life belongs to anyone who takes it.”

I inclined my head.

“Luna,” I said. And then, more quietly, so that only she and her brother could hear me, “Break the

blade.”

She held my eyes. She didn’t nod. She didn’t have to.

I turned and walked across the line.

***

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I had felt him there the whole way down to the bend. I had wanted him to call me back. I had wanted it so badly that I made myself walk faster, so that he couldn’t, so that I would never have to find out if he would have.

didn’t walk faster now. I couldn’t. My side wouldn’t let me.

Nobody called me back. I hadn’t expected anyone to.

The road curved left a hundred yards past the border, around a shoulder of rock and a stand axold pines, and as soon as I was around it, the border and everyone on it was gone.

The truck was parked on the shoulder, half under the trees, with its engine off.

Teague was leaning against the driver’s door with his arms folded.

There was a fresh cut over one eye and dried mud to his knees, and he had a thermos in one hand. He watched me come around the bend and didn’t move until I was close enough to see that he had

been counting my steps.

Then he pushed off the door and came and took my weight without asking, the way he had on the field and a hundred times before that.

“Boss,” he said.