His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 114

Chapter 114

Abby

The Luna’s bed was too big.

I had worked in these rooms for two weeks. I had signed letters at the green leather desk and read reports by the tall windows over the lake and once, at four in the afternoon, fallen asleep one window seat with my cheek on a list of patrol rotations. But I had never slept here. Every night had gone down the corridor and climbed into Kade’s bed on the side away from the wound, and lanawake listening to him breathe.

Now I lay on my back in the middle of a bed that had been Cassandra’s for twenty-seven years, and the sheets were cold, and they smelled of nothing at all.

That was the worst part. Not the size of it, or the quiet. The smell. For two weeks I had slept with my face in his pillow, in cedar and woodsmoke and the faint, clean edge of Daphne’s antiseptic, and Diana had settled every night like a dog on a hearth. Here there was only clean cotton and the cold coming off the windows, and Diana paced.

He sent us away, she said.

He sent us to sleep.

He sent us away. Her claws clicked against the inside of my ribs, back and forth. We should be there.

I turned onto my side.

The door was right there. Not the one to the corridor, the other one, in the far wall between the bookshelves. It was painted the same cream as the wall around it, so that you almost didn’t see it, and it had a small brass handle that had gone dull with age. On the other side of it was the back of Kade’s wardrobe, and on the other side of that was Kade.

Eight feet, maybe. Less.

I could feel him through the bond. Not clearly. He wasn’t asleep either. There was something restless and sore on his end, something that kept turning over and settling and turning over again, and under all of it, faint and gray and patient, the curse.

I didn’t reach for him. He didn’t reach for me.

I lay there and looked at the little brass handle until the moon came round to the windows and the

room turned silver, and at some point I must have closed my eyes, because the next thing I knew, I

was somewhere else.

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long yellow ropes to the stone. The light it made was small and close. Beyond it, the dark went on, and the air smelled of damp and smoke and something bitter, like crushed leaves left too long in a jar

I was sitting down. I knew that the way you know things in dreams, without having to look. A hay chair. A table in front of me, rough wood, scarred, with a cloth spread on it. My hands were on the

cloth.

They weren’t my hands.

They were older. The skin was thin and lined over the knuckles, and the right one was wrong it was shiny and tight and pink across the palm and the inside of the fingers, the way skin goes after a bad burn has healed badly. It hurt. Not sharply. It ached the way old burns ache in the cord, a deep, steady complaint that went all the way up the wrist.

My shoulder hurt too. The left one. Something had torn it open not long ago, and it had been stitched, and the stitches pulled every time I breathed.

I didn’t understand any of it. I didn’t try to. I watched the hands.

They were turning something over on the cloth.

A blade. Long and narrow and dark, with no shine to it at all. Carvings ran down the whole length of it, fine and close, and in the candlelight they looked wet. The hands turned it slowly, the way you turn a stone you’ve picked up on a beach to look at both sides. The burned palm ran along the flat of it, very gently.

And the blade was warm.

I felt it through the hands that weren’t mine. Warm, like something living. Warm, and beating.

It took me a long, slow moment to understand what I was feeling.

A heartbeat. Faint and uneven and steady underneath, the way a heartbeat sounds through a pillow in the dark. I knew that heartbeat. I had fallen asleep to it for two weeks. I had counted it on the field, under my hands, in the leaves, when it was the only thing I had.

Kade.

The burned thumb pressed against the carvings, very lightly, and somewhere far away, the heartbeat stumbled.

Someone was humming. Low and tuneless, under their breath. It took me a moment to understand that it was coming from my own throat. From the throat I was in.

There you are, said a voice in the dark. It wasn’t spoken out loud. It was simply there, inside the

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was sitting in that chair, turning slowly, the way a head turns when it hears something behind it in an empty house.

Turning toward me.

I woke up on the floor.

I didn’t remember falling. I was on my knees on the rug beside the bed with the sheet twisted around one leg, and the moon had sunk low and white in the windows, and my right hand was

burning.

I held it up in front of my face.

Nothing. No mark. Just my own palm, pale and whole and shaking. But it burned, deep in the flesh, the way an old scar burns in the cold, and the smell of candle smoke was in my nose and my hair and

the back of my throat.

Diana.

She was on her feet inside me, every hair raised along her spine. She didn’t answer. She was staring at something I couldn’t see.

Then I heard it through the wall.

A sound. Low, and cut off quickly, the sound a man makes in his sleep when the pain finds him

there.

I was at the little cream door before I had decided to move. My hand was on the brass handle. It was cold and stiff, and for a second I didn’t think it would turn at all after eight years.

It turned.

The door opened about a foot before it hit the back of the wardrobe. I squeezed through the gap between the wardrobe and the wall in my nightgown and came out into Kade’s room in the moonlight.

He was asleep, but not peacefully. He lay on his back with one hand pressed flat over the bandage on his side, and his face was turned toward the window, and his forehead was wet. His breathing came short and fast through his teeth. Every few breaths his whole body tightened, and his fingers dug into his side as if he could hold something in by force.

Through the bond, the curse had gone from gray to something darker, like a bruise coming up under the skin. It was moving. Not spreading, not yet, but stirring, the way a thing stirs when someone has reached in and touched it.

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He didn’t wake. I didn’t want him to. I knew exactly what he would say if he opened his eyes and

found me there with my hands out, and I knew he would mean every word of it.

aid my right hand on the back of his, over the bandage. It was still burning, the ghost of that old scar under my skin. His hand was hot and damp and clenched tight.

I reached for the moon.

It was thin tonight, past half and fading, and it came to me slowly through the window, a com trickle instead of a flood. Diana gathered it the way Imogen had taught us, a little at a time, cupped and careful. I didn’t take much. I didn’t dare. I only let it run down my arm and out through my palm, a thread of it, so faint I could barely feel it leave me.

It touched the dark place in him.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the darkness flinched, the way a hand flinches from a stove and drew back. Not far. Just back to where it had been, gray and patient and waiting. Kade let out a long breath. His fingers loosened under mine. The lines between his brows smoothed out one at a time, and his breathing slowed, and slowed, and evened out into sleep.

I stayed on my knees beside him until I was sure.

It hadn’t cost much. A little dizziness when I stood up. A dull ache behind my eyes. I had felt worse after a long shift at the clinic. But my hands were shaking, and I couldn’t tell any more whether that was the light or the dream.

I looked at him for a long time. At the shadows under his eyes and the sweat drying at his temples and the hand that had finally gone slack on the blanket.

He had told me no. He had looked at me last night and told me no, and meant it.

I didn’t feel sorry. I tried to, and I couldn’t.

I went back through the gap behind the wardrobe and closed the little cream door very quietly behind me.

***

I didn’t go back to bed.

I couldn’t. Every time I looked at it, I saw the candle. The burned hand on the blade. The slow turn of that attention through the dark, toward me. There you are.

I didn’t know if it had been real. I didn’t know if it had been Cressida, or my own exhausted mind

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For two weeks, when I woke up frightened in the dark, he had been there. Half asleep, he would each for me without opening his eyes and pull me in against his good side, and his hand would find the back of my neck, and he would say something that wasn’t quite words into my hair until stopped shaking. I hadn’t even known how much I relied on that until tonight.

Now there was a wall and a wardrobe between us, and a door he had asked me to keep closed.