His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 126

152 Mon Nov 2

Chapter 126

Malachi

The north wall of the cabin had been letting the wind in for six years.

I had always meant to fix it. Every autumn I had looked at the gaps between the logs where the old moss had dried and crumbled, and felt the draft on the back of my-neck at night, and told melf would do it next week. Then something had always come up. Cressida. A raid. A plan. There ha always been something more important than a wall.

There wasn’t anymore.

So I fixed it.

I went up into the trees behind the stream with a sack and a short knife and gathered fresh moss off the north faces of the boulders, the thick green kind that holds water. I mixed it with clay from the bank and packed it into every gap along the north wall, one handful at a time, working it in with my thumbs until the logs sat tight against each other and the light stopped coming through. It took four days. My hands cracked and bled at the knuckles and healed again overnight, the way they should

have.

That was how I knew I was healed.

Not the side. The side had been closing for a while, the dark threads under the skin fading to nothing, the muscle knitting back so that I could swing an axe again without seeing white. But the hands. The ordinary cuts and scrapes of ordinary work, gone by morning, the way they had always gone. My body had stopped putting everything it had into staying alive and gone back to doing what a wolf’s body does.

My wolf noticed it before I did. He started pacing again in the evenings. Testing the edges of me. Wanting to run.

I didn’t let him. Not yet.

***

Teague had decided we were staying for the winter.

He hadn’t said so. He hadn’t needed to. On the second day after the tracks, he had driven down the mountain to the trading post at the crossroads and come back with the truck bed full. Flour, salt, lamp oil, coffee. Two sacks of potatoes and one of onions. A crate of tinned meat. A spool of heavy wire and a box of nails and a new axe head, because the old one had a crack in it I hadn’t noticed and

he had.

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He had also set wire along the north edge of the clearing, low in the snow, strung between the trees where the tracks had come out. Tin cans hung on it, half full of stones. If anyone came through there

gain, we would hear them.

Nobody had come through. Not in a week.

That should have made me feel better. It didn’t.

“Wood,” Teague said, on the eighth morning, when I came in from the stream with water.

I looked at him.

He was at the table with his whetstone and a skinning knife, and he tilted his head toward the woodpile through the window. It was already as high as the eaves on one side.

“There’s enough there for two winters,” I said.

He kept sharpening.

“It’s a long winter,” he said.

That was three words more than he usually spent on the weather, so I went out and split wood.

***

She came on the ninth day, at dusk.

I was at the woodpile with the axe in my hands and my back to the trees, and I didn’t hear the cans. That was the first thing I would think about afterward. Teague had strung that wire across every gap on the north side, and she didn’t come from the north.

She came up the road.

Walking. Not hurrying. Up the last stretch of track from the bend, where the trees thinned and the clearing opened out, in a long dark coat with the hood down and the last of the light behind her. I knew her before I saw her face. I knew the way she walked. I had watched her walk toward me across a dozen camps and a hundred fires, always unhurried, always as if the ground had been laid out for her that morning.

I put the axe down. Slowly.

My wolf came up so fast my vision went red at the edges.

“Malachi,” Cressida said warmly, from the edge of the clearing. “You look well.”

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where Knox’s jaws had closed on her shoulder. The burned hand was bare. She had stopped bandaging it. The skin had healed shiny and tight and pink across the palm, and she held it a little away from her body, the way you hold something that hurts in the cold.

But her eyes were the same. Bright and dark and amused. Measuring.

“Don’t,” she said gently, when my weight shifted. “Look behind you first.”

I didn’t look behind me. I didn’t need to.

I could smell them now that I was paying attention. Three of them, in the trees on the far side of the stream. Rogues. Sweat and old smoke and gun oil, and under it, a scent I knew. Brask. Gray-bearded Brask, with his patient eyes, who had told me his men were out hunting in the show

before dawn, the morning Sloane was taken.

“They’re very good shots,” Cressida said. “I made sure. Silver, of course.” She tilted her head toward the cabin. “And they’re not aiming at you.”

Teague was on the porch.

He had come out at the sound of her voice, with the skinning knife still in his hand. He stood very still at the top of the steps. A red point of light had settled on the center of his chest, just over his heart, steady and small and patient.

I didn’t move.

“Good,” Cressida said. “Now we can talk.”

***

She didn’t come any closer. She stood at the edge of the clearing with the dusk going blue around her and looked at the cabin. At the patched north wall, the woodpile, the smoke coming from the

lean-to.

“You fixed the wall,” she said. “I always told you to fix that wall.”

“What do you want?”

“To see you. Is that so strange?” She smiled. “Thirteen years, Malachi. I found you in a hunting shack not ten miles from here, drunk and starving and talking to yourself about your brother. I gave you everything you ever had. And then I lost you on a field to a girl who couldn’t even walk.” She shook her head slowly. “I wanted to see what you looked like now. Whether it was worth it.”

I said nothing.

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remarkable?”

“She rejected me.”

She did. On the field, with my curse in her heart, because she thought it was the only way to save you.” She tilted her head. “It wasn’t, by the way. It was only the only way to save herself.”

My hands had closed into fists. I made them open.

“I could give her back to you,” Cressida said.

The clearing was very quiet.

“A rejection is only words, Malachi. Words said in pain, in fear, with a curse running through her. The bond doesn’t die when it’s cut. It bleeds. You can feel it bleeding, can’t you? Right there.” She touched her own chest, just below the collarbone, with her burned hand. “So can she. Every night. I’ve felt her feeling it.” Her voice softened. “I could close it again. Tie the ends back together. She’d wake up one morning in that cold little room in Moonhaven and she’d know where you were, and she’d come. On her own. Gladly. She’d think it was her idea.”

My wolf had gone completely still.

For one long second, I let myself see it. Her on the road. Her coming up the last stretch of track in the dusk with her hair down and her stick in her hand, looking for the cabin. Her voice through the

door.

She’d think it was her idea.

“No,” I said.

Cressida’s smile didn’t move.

“You haven’t heard what I want for it.”

“I don’t need to.” My voice came out low and rough. “I took enough from her. I took her name and her pack and her choices, and I locked her in a room, and I called it keeping her safe. I won’t take her mind as well. I won’t let you do it either.” I held her eyes. “She said the words. She meant them. That’s hers. You don’t get to touch it.”

For a long moment, Cressida just looked at me.

Then she sighed. Gently. The way she used to sigh when I had failed at something small, and she was going to forgive me for it, this time.

“You really have changed,” she said. “How disappointing.”

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wind and made every hair on my body stand on end.

On the porch, Teague screamed.

had known him eleven years. I had seen him cut and burned and bitten through the arm. Khad never heard him make a sound like that.

He went down on his knees at the top of the steps with his left hand clutched against his chest, and the skinning knife fell out of it and clattered down the steps into the snow. His face had gone ay. Between his fingers, the skin of his hand was turning dark, the way a bruise comes up, spreading from the palm out along the fingers and up toward the wrist, the way frost creeps across a window

The red light on his chest hadn’t moved.

I was halfway to him before I knew I had moved. Something hit the snow a foot from my boot with a hiss and a small, ugly puff of steam. Silver. Steaming. From the trees across the stream.

I stopped.

“The next one won’t miss,” Cressida said pleasantly. “And it won’t be aimed at you.”

I stood in the snow with my hands open at my sides and my wolf screaming inside me, and I didn’t

move.

On the porch, Teague had stopped screaming. He was breathing in short, hard gasps, bent double over his hand, with his forehead almost on the boards. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at her. He looked at his own hand, at the dark creeping up toward his wrist, as if he were watching something happen to someone else.

“It’ll stop at the wrist,” Cressida said. “If I let it. He’ll keep the hand, more or less.” She lowered her arm. “Consider it a reminder that I can still reach you. Both of you. Wherever you go.”

“Why?” My voice was barely a voice. “If you don’t want me. If I’m no use to you. Why come all this

way?”

Something moved in her face. It was so quick I almost missed it. Satisfaction, maybe. Or contempt.

“Oh, Malachi,” she said. “I didn’t come for you. I came to make sure you understood.” She drew her coat closer around her with her good hand. “I spent thirteen years building you into something I could use. A Blackwell. A claim. A man with a right to that chair and a grudge big enough to take it. And you threw it away on your knees in the frost for a girl who didn’t even know your name.” She smiled. “I don’t need a Blackwell anymore.”