His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 133

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Kade

Chapter 133

ogen wanted the training hall, and nobody in it but the four of us.

Ryan cleared it at sundown. He moved the evening drills to the north field, and posted two of his own at the main doors and one at the side, and then stood in the doorway for a long time looking at me sitting on the bench against the wall, as if he were trying to decide whether to say something

“Go,” I told him.

“If anything-”

“You’ll know before anyone else does. I know.” I looked at him. “Go, Ryan.”

He went. The door shut behind him, and the bar came down on the outside, and then it was only the

hall, and the cold, and the four of us in it.

****

Somebody had opened the high windows again. All of them, every one along both walls, so that the night air came down into the hall and pooled on the floor like water, and my breath went up in front of me when I breathed out. The lamps were out. There was only the moon.

It came in through the windows on the east side, very low still, and laid itself across the mats in long pale bars. As it climbed, the bars would shorten and swing toward the middle of the hall. Imogen had measured where. She had spent most of the afternoon in here, on her knees, with a ball of string and a stick of chalk and her lips moving, and when she was finished there was a circle on the mats in the very center of the room, wide enough for two to lie down in, and nothing else.

No stones. No candles. She had been very clear about the candles.

Inside the circle, she had laid out what she had been gathering all month. A wooden bowl of water. A bundle of dry juniper, tied with red thread. Three clumps of mistletoe, pale berries and all, laid on a clean cloth so they wouldn’t touch the floor. A small pot of something dark and green that smelled of

crushed moss and river mud. A knife.

I didn’t look at the knife for long.

Daphne sat on the bench beside me with her bag open at her feet and her hand on my wrist, counting. She had been counting since we came in. She had counted on the stairs, too, where I had stopped twice, and on the long walk across the hall to this bench, which had taken longer than I wanted anyone to see.

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table at the council meeting, and walked with me in the corridor afterward, and all day long, under everything, I had felt her doing what she did before a hard thing. Gathering herself. Folding

everything away very small and very neat so that there would be room.

Aknew because I did it too.

“Alpha,” Imogen said. “Shirt.”

Daphne helped me with the buttons. My hands were shaking too badly by then to manage the myself, and I was past caring who saw that. The cold hit my bare chest and went straight through to the bone, and I set my teeth so they wouldn’t chatter.

The bandage came off. Daphne did it slowly, peeling it back from the edges, and I watched Abby not look away.

I knew what she was seeing. I saw it every morning when Daphné changed it. The wound below my ribs that had never closed, a hand’s width across, still raw at the center, with the edges gone gray. And spreading out from it, under the skin, the threads. Fine and dark and branching, like the roots of something, or the cracks in ice. They had been halfway to my collarbone at the reception. They were past it now. Three of them had reached the side of my throat.

Inside me, under the threads, the thing that had put them there turned over in its sleep, and felt the moonlight on my skin, and didn’t like it.

Knox growled. Very low. He had been growling at it for six weeks.

“Lie down in the circle,” Imogen said. “On your back. Head to the north.” She looked at Daphne. “He’ll need help.”

He did.

***

The mats were cold. The moonlight wasn’t on me yet. It lay a foot from my right hand, a long pale bar across the floor, creeping slowly closer the way the tide comes in.

Imogen knelt at my head. She put her fingers on my temples, dry and cold and smelling of juniper, and started to talk. Not to me. Not in any language I knew. Low and steady and rhythmic, the way you talk to a horse that’s about to bolt, and as she talked she dipped her fingers in the dark green paste and drew on my skin. A line down my breastbone. A line round the edge of the wound. Small marks, like knots, at the end of every one of the dark threads.

Wherever she touched me, it went cold, and then numb, and then very quiet.

The thing inside me noticed. I felt it notice. It went from sleep to waking in the space of a breath,

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I had known it would. Imogen had told me. She had sat on the end of my bed three nights ago and told me exactly what it would feel like, in detail, so I would know. It didn’t help. The wound opened

ike a mouth. The threads went from cold to burning in an instant, every one of them at once, out along my ribs and up into my throat, as if someone had poured fire down every crack in the ice, and my back came up off the mats and Daphne’s hands pressed my shoulders down.

“Hold him,” Imogen said, and went on talking.

I heard a sound, very close. A long, low, rising whine. It wasn’t mine.

I turned my head.

Abby had let the robe fall. She was standing at the edge of the circle in the moonlight with her arms at her sides and her face turned up toward the windows, and as I watched, she shifted.

I had seen her shift before. Under trees, in the dark, at the edge of my land. Never like this. Never inside. Never in the full moon with nothing between her and it. The light took hold of her before she was halfway through, and when Diana came down onto four feet on the mats, she wasn’t pearl gray at

all.

She was silver. Silver-white from her ears to her tail, so bright in the moonlight that she seemed to give it off rather than take it in. The light lay on her coat the way it lies on snow. Her eyes were full of

Knox stopped growling.

He stopped all at once, mid-breath, and went completely silent inside me. Then he lay down. Flat, with his head on his paws, the way a wolf lies down in front of something he has decided not to fight.

Diana came into the circle.

She came to my side and lay down along the length of me, on my right, her warm silver flank against my ribs, and put her muzzle down on my chest just above the wound, and breathed out. Her breath was warm. Her fur was warm. Everything else in the hall was cold.

And then the moon reached us.

***

I don’t know how to say what happened next. I have tried, since. To Liam. To my mother. To myself,

at night. There aren’t words for it that don’t sound like nonsense.

The bar of light crept across the last foot of floor and touched Diana’s back, and she took it in.

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Then she gave it to me.

It came into me through the place where her muzzle lay on my chest. Into the wound. Into the threads. Into the thing curled up in the center of me with its claws in my ribs. Light, steady,

unending, pouring down every one of those burning cracks the way the fire had a moment before, and where it went, the fire went out.

Imogen’s voice rose.

She was saying something new. Short, hard words, over and over, and I felt the marks she had drawn on me tighten, every one of them at once, like knots pulled closed. I felt the light Diana was pouring into me catch in them. Catch, and hold. And all at once, all along the threads, out to the tips of them at my throat and my ribs and my shoulder, something drew tight, the way a net draws tight round a

fish.

The thing in my chest thrashed.

It was the worst moment. It was worse than the field. It came up inside me, all claws and weight and fury, and threw itself against the net, and for one second I thought it would tear through. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. Somewhere, very far away, Daphne was saying my name.

Diana pressed her whole weight against me and poured.

I felt her draw deeper. Past what she had taken in from the moon, into something else, something that was hers. I felt it come out of her and into me, warm and bright and alive. It wasn’t moonlight. It

was her.

Abby, I said. Enough.

She didn’t stop.

Imogen said one word, very loud, very sharp, and slapped her hand flat on the mat beside my head,

The net closed.

The thing in my chest gave one last heave. Then it went slack. I felt it go. Not out of me. Not gone. Down. Down and down, folding in on itself, curling small and heavy in the bottom of my chest like a stone sinking through dark water, until it touched the bottom and lay there, still, with the light closed over it.

Asleep.

The burning stopped.

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jana lifted her head from my chest.

She looked at me. Her eyes were still full of light, but it was going out of them as I watched the way it goes out of the sky at dusk, and she swayed where she lay

Then she was shifting back.

It happened too fast. Not the slow, careful change I had watched at the start, but all at once, as if something had let go of her, and Diana was gone and Abby was on her hands and knees beside me on the mats, naked and shaking, with her head hanging and her hair over her face. She tried to push herself up. Her arms folded under her.

I was moving before I knew I could.

I sat up. I rolled onto my knees. Two months ago, it would have been nothing. An hour ago, it would have been impossible. I didn’t think about it at all. I got my arm under her before her face hit the floor, and pulled her in against me, and she came, limp and cold as the mats, all her weight against my chest.

“I’ve got you,” I said. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

Her skin was like ice. She was shaking so hard I could hear her teeth. I gathered her up, all of her, knees and shoulders, and held her against me, and knelt there in the middle of Imogen’s chalk circle with the moon on both of us and didn’t let go.

Something soft hit my shoulder. A blanket. Imogen was standing over us, holding out the other end

of it.

“Wrap her,” she said. “She’ll be cold for a while.”

I wrapped her. I got the blanket round her back and over her shoulders and tucked it in at her throat, one-handed, holding her with the other, and pulled her in tighter. She turned her face against my bare chest. Right over the place where the wound was. It didn’t hurt.

“Kade,” she said. It came out as a breath.

“I’m here.”

“Did it work?”

I laughed. I didn’t mean to. It came out of me rough and broken, and my eyes were stinging.

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flat against my chest, over my heart, as if to make sure.

I put my face down in her hair.

nd I saw it.

At her temple, on the left side, where the hair fell back from her face. The white strand. The one she had come out of the temple with, that I had held between my fingers in the clinic for three days while she slept and checked her breathing every hour…

There was another beside it now.

Fine and new and silver-white, lying close against the first, as if it had always been there. It hadn’t been there this morning. I knew every strand of her hair this morning.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I touched it, very lightly, with the tips of my fingers.

I thought of a portrait in a dark corridor at Blackridge. A young woman with silver hair.

***

“Alpha.”

old Imogen had knelt down at the edge of the circle, slowly, with one hand on the floor, the way women kneel. Daphne was beside her with her bag. Neither of them came any closer.

“Listen to me now,” Imogen said. “While you’ve both got your wits. I want you both to hear this.”

I held Abby closer. “Tell me.”

“It held.” She said it plainly, without any pleasure in it. “It’s asleep. You felt it go down. It’ll stay down. For a while.” She held up one finger. “But it’s not gone, and I didn’t say it would be. I tied it. That’s all. Tied it and put it to sleep. The wound will close some, now it’s not being fed. Not all the way. You’ll be able to stand. Walk. Climb your own stairs. Sit in that chair of yours all day without your shirt sticking to your back.” Her eyes held mine. “That’s what you get.”

“And what don’t I get?”

“You don’t shift.”

I had known that was coming. It still went through me like cold water.

“Not this month,” Imogen said. “Maybe not next month either. When your wolf comes up, it comes up through that place in your chest, and it’ll wake the thing as surely as a kick. You keep him down. However much he wants it.” She held up a second finger. “You don’t fight. Not in your skin, not out of

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“It won’t always go back down,” I said. “You told me.”

told you.” She nodded slowly. “And now it’s tied, it’ll go back down easier. But it frays. Every time you push at it, it frays a little more. By the end of the month, it’ll be thin. You’ll feel it. The last few days before the full moon, it’ll start to wake.” She looked at Abby in my arms. “And then we do this