His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 130

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Chapter 130

Liam

Nourned the garlic bread.

I want it on record that I didn’t burn anything else. The pasta was fine. The sauce was out of a jar, but I had put things in it, onions and the end of a sausage and a handful of something green from the pot on the windowsill that Kaia said was basil and I had been calling “the plant.” It tasted like teed. It tasted, if you didn’t look too closely, like the kind of food a person might cook on purpose.

The garlic bread I had put under the grill and then gone to find the good plates, which were in the cupboard over the fridge where nobody could reach them, because Abby had put them there when she was fourteen and said they were for special occasions. By the time I got them down, the kitchen was full of smoke and Kaia was standing in the doorway with her arms folded.

“Rule nine,” she said.

“I know.”

“You said you’d burn it.”

“I know what I said.”

She came in and opened the window over the sink without being asked, and stood there with the cold air coming in around her, looking at the black slab on the tray. Then she broke off a corner, the least black corner, and ate it.

“It’s fine,” she said.

“It’s charcoal.”

“It’s fine on the inside.” She broke off another piece. “The list says that’s fine. It’s written down.”

I put the good plates on the table.

She looked at them. White, with a thin blue band round the edge and a chip out of one rim. Kaia didn’t say anything about them. She just sat down in front of the one without the chip, and moved her fork a little straighter beside it, and waited for me to bring the pasta.

***

She ate two helpings. I didn’t say anything about that either.

We had found a way of eating together over the last few nights that mostly worked. It involved not

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Tonight Kaia put her fork down halfway through the second plate and looked at me across the table,

“What do you do?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“When you’re not working. When you’re not at the packhouse, or on patrol, or standing in ade’s office looking worried.” She tilted her head. “You must do something. Everybody does something

I thought about it. It was a harder question than it should have been.

“I used to run,” I said. “Early, before work. I haven’t much, lately.” I turned my glass on the table. “I fix things. Badly. There’s a chair in the shed I’ve been fixing for about three years.”

“That’s not a hobby. That’s a chair.”

“It’s a very important chair.”

Her mouth moved. She was trying not to smile, which was most of what I knew about Kaia so far. She spent a great deal of energy not doing things.

“Movies,” I said, before I had decided to. “Abby and I used to watch movies. Every Friday, when she was little, and then every Friday when she wasn’t. Terrible ones, mostly. Old action films where everything explodes. She liked the ones where somebody says a line and then walks away from an explosion without looking at it.” I could hear how it sounded. “We had a whole system. She picked one week, I picked the next, and whoever picked had to defend it.”

Kaia was watching me.

“When did you last watch one?” she said.

I opened my mouth, and then I shut it again.

I didn’t know. Before the mountain. Before the mate bond, before Kade, before Abby moved up to

the packhouse and I came home to a house where her door was always shut. Some Friday in the

summer. I couldn’t remember which film.

Kaia stood up and took her plate to the sink.

“Well,” she said, with her back to me. “It’s Friday.”

***

I let her pick, because I was a guest in this conversation and I knew it.

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“This one,” she said.

It was the worst one. A man in a vest, a skyscraper, a great deal of shouting. Abby had made me watch it more times than I could count.

“You have to defend it,” I said.

Kaia looked at me as if I were simple. “He walks away from an explosion,” she said. “Doesn’t e

He did. Several times.

She sat on the far end of Abby’s couch with her feet tucked under her and a cushion in her lap, and I sat on the other end, and there was a whole cushion of empty space between us. Jasper looked at the empty cushion with great interest and then, because I asked him to, looked at the television instead.

She didn’t laugh at the jokes. She laughed at the wrong places, which was worse and better. When the man in the vest pulled the glass out of his feet, she said “Oh, no,” out loud, very quietly, with real feeling, and I had to look at the ceiling for a while.

Somewhere around the middle, when the shouting had died down and two men were talking on a radio, she said, without taking her eyes off the screen, “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask.”

“Sloane.”

I waited.

“She came and got me, at the reception. In the corridor. She took me to her room and made me drink tea and told me things.” Kaia turned the corner of the cushion between her fingers. “She told me what she did. To your sister. And she told me about the man who marked her. She was very honest. I didn’t expect that.” She paused. “But I don’t know what she is to you. You stood in that corridor and she stood next to you, and you looked like you’d known each other forever.”

“We have.”

I watched the man on the screen for a moment. He was crawling through an air vent with a lighter

in his teeth.

“There were three of us,” I said. “Kade and Sloane and me. From before I can remember. Our families were always in and out of the packhouse, and the three of us were always underfoot, so somebody put us together to keep us out of the way. We trained together. We got in trouble together. She was the best of us at everything and she never let us forget it.” I could hear my own voice going flat, the way it did when I didn’t want it to do anything else. “She wanted Kade. For years. Everybody

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“Then you know.” I shrugged one shoulder. “And then she went into that mountain after my sister, and came out with her leg in pieces, and lied to a council room for a man I would have killed with my hands if Kade hadn’t told me not to, and she was right to lie. I was there. I stood there and let her

Kaia didn’t say anything.

“So I don’t know what she is to me,” I said. “Not anymore. She was my friend for twenty years. She hurt the person I love most in the world. And she’s still-“I stopped. “She’s still Sloane. I can make

her not be.”

The men on the screen went on talking. Kaia turned the cushion over in her lap.

“That’s honest,” she said finally.

“I’ve been told it’s my worst quality.”

“By whom?”

“Abby. Mostly. Sloane, once.”

She almost smiled again. Then she didn’t, and looked at the screen, and I knew it was my turn.

I had been carrying the question around for a week. Since the corridor. Since little wren, and her face going white under the lanterns, and the way she had walked home beside me at midnight with her arms wrapped around herself and not said a word. I had promised her I could do not yet. I had

meant it.

I asked anyway. Carefully. As if I were picking up something that might be hot.

“Sebastian Thorne,” I said.

The cushion stopped moving.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “I only- I’d rather know a little than nothing. In case he comes back.”

For a while, she watched the television. The man in the vest was on a roof now, with a fire hose around his waist. She watched him jump off the roof, and swing in through a window, and land in a heap of glass, and she didn’t say oh no this time.

“Greyhollow and Ravenwood share a border,” she said at last. “Twelve miles of it, through the pines. Everybody goes back and forth. Weddings, funerals, the midsummer games.” Her voice was very even. “So I’ve known him since I was fourteen. Fifteen. Something like that. He was always around.”

I waited.

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agar until your reception. That’s all.”

That wasn’t all. I knew that the way I knew the edges of my own house in the dark. A girl doesn’t white like that for a moron. A girl doesn’t come home and take her pins out one by one at one in the morning, and lie in the dark until noon, for a boy she stopped talking to.

“Did he bully you?” I said.

She considered it.

“Kind of,” she said. Then she shrugged, very lightly, the way you shrug off a hand. “But we were kids, Liam. Literally kids. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

I looked at her, at the side of her face in the blue light from the screen, at the scar through her eyebrow and her mouth pressed flat.

It mattered. It mattered enough that she still couldn’t say his name.

“Okay,” I said.

She glanced at me sideways, quickly, as if checking whether I meant it. I let her see that I did. Not the part where I believed her. The part where I wasn’t going to push.

She looked back at the screen. After a while, the cushion started moving again.

***

She fell asleep before the end.

I didn’t notice it happen. One moment she was sitting with her feet tucked up and her chin on her fist, frowning at a helicopter, and the next her fist had slid down to the arm of the couch and her eyes were closed and her breathing had changed. I turned the volume down. Then down again. On the screen, the building was on fire, very quietly.

Then she shifted in her sleep, the way people do when they’re looking for somewhere to put their head, and she leaned sideways across the empty cushion, and her head came down on my shoulder.

I didn’t move.

I don’t think I breathed for the first minute. Her hair was against my neck, smelling of rain on stone and juniper and very faintly of my kitchen. Her weight was almost nothing. She had one hand curled loose against my arm, and she made a small sound, low in her throat, the kind of sound you make when you’ve finally found the right place in the bed.

Jasper lay down inside me, all at once, with a long, shuddering sigh, as if he had been running for

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screen went to the menu and played the same eight bars over and over, and I didn’t reach for the remote, because the remote was on her side. The clock in the kitchen ticked. A car went past outside, and then nothing. The house settled around us the way it did at night, all its small sounds, the pipes and the boards and the wind at the back door, and for the first time in a very long time, it didn’t sound

empty.

I don’t know how long I sat there. A long time. Long enough for my arm to go numb from the shoulder down. I didn’t care.

Liam.

Ryan’s voice, through the link. Low and clipped and wide awake.

Liam. You up?

I closed my eyes.

I’m up.

The wolf’s back. West line, same place. Noah’s got eyes on him now. A pause. I want you out here. I think I know what he’s waiting for.

I had heard about the wolf. Everybody on the night watch had, for four nights now. A rogue at the western border, alone, at the edge of the scent line where the old logging road came down out of the hills. He came every night a little after midnight. He didn’t cross. He didn’t call. He didn’t do anything at all, except sit at the line in the dark and watch the trees on our side, and wait, and then, a little before dawn, get up and go away again, limping.

Give me ten minutes, I said.

I lifted her head off my shoulder as carefully as I have ever done anything. I slid out from under her and lowered her down onto the cushion, slowly, an inch at a time, and she frowned in her sleep and turned her face into the cushion and was still. The blanket was over the back of the couch, the old blue one, with one corner unraveling where Abby used to pick at it when the films got scary. I shook it out and put it over her, up to her shoulders, and tucked it in at her feet.

She didn’t wake.

154

I stood there a second longer than I needed to. Then I turned off the television, and left the lamp on in the hall in case she woke and didn’t know where she was, and let myself out the back door into the

cold.

****

The western line was a forty-minute run, and I ran it.

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across the snow.

Ryan met us at the bottom of the logging road, where the trees opened out and the scent line ran cross the old track like a rope laid on the ground. He was in his skin, in a heavy coat, with Noal beside him and two others back in the trees. He didn’t say anything when I came up. He just tipped his head toward the far side of the line.

I shifted back. Somebody handed me clothes. I pulled them on with my eyes on the dark.