His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 139

Next Chapter Chapter 139

Q1

Rate Chapter

Send Gift

Comments

22

00

MON

2

<

57 Mon Nov 20

Chapter 139

Sloane

Nfew hours earlier

I couldn’t sleep.

That wasn’t new. I hadn’t slept properly since the field. Some nights it was the leg, aching the cold the way Daphne had promised it would for the rest of my life. Some nights it was Rhea, pacing, lifting her head toward the west every time I closed my eyes. Some nights it was nothing at a. I

would lie on my back in Cassandra’s spare room and listen to the packhouse settle around me and my body would refuse, quite calmly, to go anywhere.

Tonight it was the quiet.

Imogen hadn’t gone out. She had told me at supper, through Owen, that she had everything she needed until the next moon, and that I should rest, and that she would send for me when she wanted me. So there was no basket by the door and no boots by the bed. Just the room, and the dark, and the clock at the end of the corridor counting off the quarter hours.

At one, I gave up.

I got out of bed and pulled the blanket round my shoulders and went to the window. I sat in the chair there, with my bad leg up on the stool, and looked out at the night.

There was no moon. Four days past full, and it hadn’t risen yet. The lawn was a long gray slope going down into darkness, and the lake at the bottom of it was black, and the only light anywhere was the yellow square of a lamp in the kitchens, far down to my left, where someone was setting the bread for the morning.

I sat there for a long time. Long enough for the lamp in the kitchens to go out.

I wasn’t looking for her. I want to be clear about that, because afterward, a great many people would decide that I had been. I wasn’t. I was sitting at a window in the dark because I couldn’t sleep, the way I had sat at that window every night for weeks.

But I saw her.

***

She came round the corner of the clinic.

Small and pale against the dark. Walking. Not hurrying. In the same white nightdress, long-sleeved, down to the ankles, with her hair loose down her back. Her feet were bare. I couldn’t see them from

002

MON

22

|||

She held it in front of her in both hands, close against her chest, the way a child carries something has been told not to drop. It took me a moment to understand what it was. It was so small. A pojnt of light, low and steady and yellow, moving along the bottom of the lawn with her through the dark.

A candle.

I was on my feet before I knew it. The blanket fell off my shoulders. I didn’t pick it up.

I pulled my coat on over my nightdress. I shoved my feet into my boots without socks. I didn’t do up the laces. I went to the door and opened it, and Owen, sitting on his hard chair in the corridor with his book face down on his knee and his head nodding, jerked awake so fast he nearly fell off it.

“Sinclair-”

“Tessa’s outside.”

He blinked at me. “What?”

“Tessa. One of the girls from the mountain. She’s outside, walking in her sleep, she’s got a candle.” I was already past him. “I need to go after her.”

“You can’t-” He was on his feet, catching at my arm. “You can’t leave this room, you know you

can’t. Kade’s orders-”

“Then come with me.”

He stared at me.

“Come with me,” I said again. “Hold my arm the whole way, if you want. Tell Ryan in the morning I tried to escape. I don’t care.” I made myself say it slowly, so he would hear it. “But she’s walking toward the kitchens in her bare feet with a lit candle in her hands, Owen, and she doesn’t know she’s doing it, and we need to go now.”

He hesitated. I watched him do it. A boy of twenty with a direct order from his Alpha on one side and me on the other, and every reason in the world to think I was lying.

“I’ll call the watch,” he said.

“If you call the watch, there’ll be twenty wolves out there in two minutes, shouting, and she’ll wake up screaming in the middle of the lawn with no idea how she got there.” I pulled my arm out of his hand. “And we’ll never know where she was going.”

He looked at me a moment longer.

MON

22

2

O

|||

The back stairs. The third step, on the right. The door at the bottom, into the kitchen garden. The cold hit me like a hand, and I didn’t stop for it.

leg didn’t like the stairs, and it liked the frozen ground less. I went across the garden as fast as I could make it go, which wasn’t fast, with Owen at my elbow, and the cabbages standing in their rows on either side of us under the frost. At the gap in the hedge I stopped and looked.

She was gone.

The lawn was empty. The kitchens were dark. For one terrible second I thought I had lost her.

Then I saw the light again. Small and yellow, moving low along the back wall of the kitchens, past the bins and the woodpile and the bench where the cooks went to smoke. Going round the corner. Toward the long timber building behind the kitchens, where the winter stores were kept. Flour and grain in sacks to the rafters. Oil for the lamps, in barrels along the back wall. Straw for packing,

stacked by the door.

My heart went cold.

“Owen,” I said. “The storehouse.”

He saw it too. I felt him see it. He didn’t say anything. He just let go of my arm and ran.

I followed him as fast as I could.

The storehouse door was open when I got there. It was never locked: Nobody in Moonhaven had ever needed to lock it. Owen was standing in the doorway with his hand on the frame, very still, and I came up behind him and looked past his shoulder.

She was inside.

Standing in the middle of the floor, between the stacked sacks, with the candle in her hands. The

flame was very steady. It lit her face from below, and her face was the face I had seen on the lawn below Abby’s window. Empty. Her eyes open, and looking at nothing, and nothing in them at all.

“Tessa,” I said.

Last time, her name had brought her back. Last time, she had blinked, and come up into her own face like someone coming back into a room.

This time, nothing happened.

“Tessa.” Louder. I pushed past Owen into the storehouse. “Tessa, it’s Sloane. You’re asleep. You’re dreaming. You need to put that down. Put it down for me. Slowly.”

02

MON

22

|||

O

157 Mon, Nov 2

was something there after all. Not Tessa. Something looking out through Tessa’s eyes, very calm, very bright, very interested.

Then she opened her hands.

The candle fell.

It fell slowly. Everything did. I watched it go, turning over once in the air, the flame streaming sideways, down toward the straw stacked against the barrels by the wall.

I threw myself after it.

My leg went out from under me. It folded on the second step, the way Daphne had told me it might if I asked too much of it, and I went down hard on my knees on the boards with my hand out, reaching, and the candle hit the straw a foot from my fingers.

It caught at once.

Not slowly. Not the way a fire catches on a hearth, with a little smoke and coaxing. It went up all at once, as if the straw had been waiting for it, a sheet of yellow flame running up the stack and along the edge of the floor and over the tops of the barrels, and the heat hit my face like an open oven.

66

Owen

He was already there. He grabbed Tessa round the waist and hauled her backward toward the door, and she didn’t struggle. She didn’t do anything. She hung in his arms like a doll, with her bare feet trailing on the boards, and her face turned back toward the fire, watching it.

I got up. I don’t know how. I got my hand on a stack of sacks and pulled myself up on my good leg, and the smoke was already rolling along the ceiling, thick and gray and choking, and somewhere in the back of the storehouse something went whump, low and deep, and a great gout of flame went up

toward the rafters.

The oil.

Į I didn’t remember getting out. I remember the door, and the cold, and falling to my knees in the frost outside, coughing so hard I couldn’t see. I remember Owen’s voice, very loud and very close,

shouting something. He was shouting into the link. I could see it in his face. Calling the watch. Calling everyone.

Behind us, the storehouse roared.

***

They came fast. They always do, in a pack. One minute there was nobody, and the next there were

MON

2

22

T57 Mon, Nov 2

the Gre, and a line was forming from the pump to the storehouse with buckets passing hand to hand, and Ryan’s voice was somewhere in the middle of all of it, shouting orders, steady and loud.

I didn’t see any of it properly. I was on my knees in the frost with Tessa.

Owen had put her down beside me. She was sitting on the frozen ground in her white nightdress with her bare feet out in front of her and the firelight on her face. She hadn’t moved since he put her

down. She hadn’t made a sound. She was watching the fire with her empty eyes.

I took her by the shoulders.

“Tessa. Tessa. Look at me.”

She blinked.

And she was back. All at once. The way she had been on the lawn, coming up into her own face like someone surfacing out of deep water. She looked at me. Then at her hands. Then at the storehouse, burning, the flames coming out of the roof now and the sparks going up in a great red column into

the dark.

She screamed.

It went on and on. I held on to her. I held her by both shoulders while she screamed and tried to pull away from me, from the fire, from all of it, and I didn’t let go.

“It’s all right. You’re all right. You’re outside. You’re safe.” I didn’t know if it was true. “Tessa. Tessa, listen to me. What happened? Why did you do it?”

She stopped screaming. She stared at me with her eyes huge and wet in the firelight.

“I didn’t,” she whispered. “I didn’t, I didn’t, I was asleep, I was in bed-”

“You were carrying a candle. Where did you get it? Who gave it to you?”

“She did.”

The word went through me like cold water.

“Who?”

“The wolf.” Tessa’s whole body had begun to shake. Her teeth were chattering so hard I could barely make out the words. “The silver wolf. She was in my head. She was so bright. Like in the temple, when she-when she put the light in me. She came back. She told me what to do. She told me, and I had to, I couldn’t stop, I tried and I couldn’t-”

11

MON

2

22