His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 142

Chapter 142

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Chapter 142

Liam

Kaia made the call the morning after the fire.

She had been going to make it four days ago. She had said so, sitting on the floor of her doway with her hand in mine and her face wrecked from crying. Tomorrow. I’ll tell him tomorrow. And the next morning she had come down to the kitchen with my phone in her hand and sat at the table and looked at Tiernan’s number on the screen for twenty minutes, and then put it face down on the wood and pushed it away from her, and said, very quietly, Not today.

I hadn’t said anything. I had made her toast.

The day after, the same. And the day after that. Every morning she picked up the phone and looked at it, and every morning she put it down, and every morning I said okay and meant it. I could do not yet. I had told her I could.

Then the storehouse burned, and I came home at nine in the morning smelling of smoke, with soot in my hair and a burn across the back of one hand where a beam had come down too close, and she was waiting in the kitchen.

She took one look at me.

“Sit down,” she said.

I sat. She got the kit out from under the sink and cleaned the burn and wrapped it, without asking what had happened, with her mouth pressed into a thin line. When she had finished, she tied off the bandage and sat back and looked at my hand on the table between us.

Then she picked up my phone..

“I’m doing it now,” she said. “Before I think about it.” She looked up. “Stay.”

“I’m staying.”

She dialed.

***

I only heard her side. I didn’t need the rest.

She told him plainly. She didn’t cry, at first. She sat very straight at the kitchen table with the phone pressed to her ear and her free hand flat on the wood, and she told her brother what had happened at Greyhollow five summers ago, in the same flat, careful voice she had used through the

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When she had finished, she stopped talking.

he silence on the line went on for a long time. Long enough that she took the phone away from her ear and looked at the screen to see if he was still there. He was. She put it back.

“Tiernan?”

I heard him then. Not the words. Just the sound of him. A long, low, broken noise, the kind man

makes when he has been hit somewhere he didn’t know he could be hit.

Kaia’s hand tightened on mine until the bones ground together.

“Don’t,” she said. “Tiernan. Don’t. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know. I didn’t tell you, I didn’t tell anybody, you couldn’t have-”

He said something. I heard my own name.

“He’s here,” she said. “He’s been here. He sat outside my door. Like you did.” Her voice cracked for the first time. “Tiernan, listen to me. Listen. Promise me you won’t go to Greyhollow.”

His voice rose. I could hear it from across the table now. Not the words. The shape of them.

“I know. I know you want to. That’s why I never told you.” Her eyes had filled. “He’s an Alpha, Tiernan. He’s got twice our wolves. If you go over that border, they’ll kill you, and then there’s nobody. There’s just Mother, and the pack, and me, and him on the other side of those trees.” She was crying now. Quietly, steadily, without letting go of my hand. “Promise me.”

A long pause.

Then something low, and short.

She closed her eyes. “Thank you.”

She listened for a while after that. Sometimes she said yes, and sometimes I know, and once, very small, I’m sorry I threw the phone. Then she looked at me across the table.

“He wants to talk to you,” she said.

I took it.

“Liam.” Tiernan’s voice was hoarse. It sounded as if it had been scraped raw on the inside. “Is it

true? What she said. That you sat outside her door.”

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nobody can say it was lost. I won’t give him a reason. I won’t put her name in his mouth again for any reason in the world.” He stopped. “But he’ll take it badly. He’s new in that chair and he came to my house in front of his own council. He’ll want to make somebody pay for the insult.”

Then let him try.” I kept my voice level. “I spoke to Kade this morning, before I came home. didn’t tell him what she’s told you. That’s hers. I told him Thorne asked for her and she said, and that he’d take it badly.” I paused. “Kade said, if Greyhollow so much as leans on your border, Moonhaven stands with Ravenwood. You have his word. And mine.”

There was a long silence.

“Thank you,” Tiernan said. Very quietly.

“Don’t thank me. Come and see her.”

“I’m coming next Saturday.” His voice broke a little. “As soon as I’ve got that letter sealed and sent and Thorne’s answer back. Tell her- Tell her I’m coming Saturday. And that I’m-” He stopped. “I’ll tell her myself.”

He hung up.

Kaia was watching me across the table. Her face was blotched and wet and very tired, and she was still holding my hand.

“He’s coming next Saturday,” I said.

www

She nodded. She didn’t say anything. She put her forehead down on the back of my hand on the table, and stayed like that for a long time, breathing, while the clock over the stove ticked and the kitchen slowly filled with winter light.

***

Kade found me at noon.

He told me in the corridor outside his office, with his voice low and his eyes on the far end of it, making sure nobody was coming. All of it. Abby and the dreams. Sloane and the girl. The council in three days, and the pardon, and the sums.

Then what he wanted me to do.

I didn’t argue with him. I wanted to. I stood in that corridor and thought of all the things I could say. That it would look like guilt. That they would say it forever. That if the council ever found out, it would be the end of him in that chair.

He knew all of it. I could see it in his face.

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“And with a message,” I said.

“And with a message.”

I looked at him for a moment.

“She’ll need a map,” I said..

I relieved Owen at a quarter to midnight.

He didn’t want to go. He had been on that door, on and off, for nearly two weeks, and he had told the truth about it that morning in a room full of elders who hadn’t wanted to hear it, and I think something in him had settled into the job. He looked at me, and at the closed door, and then back at

“Beta,” he said. “Is she going to be all right?”

I looked at him. Twenty years old, red-eyed, with soot still in the creases of his knuckles.

“Go to bed, Owen,” I said.

He went.

At half past twelve, Cassandra came down the corridor in her dressing gown and slippers with a pack over one shoulder. I had never seen her carry anything heavier than a folder. She handed it to me

without a word.

It was heavy. A good pack, an old one, oiled canvas with leather straps gone dark with age. It had

been Nathaniel’s. I didn’t need to ask.

“Warm things,” Cassandra said quietly. “Food. Matches. A knife.”

“Thank you.”

She didn’t answer. She stood looking at the closed door for a moment. Then she knocked, very softly, and went in, and closed it behind her.

I stood in the corridor and didn’t listen.

When she came out again, ten minutes later, her eyes were red and her face was perfectly composed. She touched my arm as she passed. She didn’t say anything else. She went back down the corridor to her own rooms, and her door closed, and I didn’t hear it open again.

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The back stairs. The third step, on the right side. Sloane went down them in the dark ahead of me, slowly, with one hand on the wall, in a thick wool coat that wasn’t hers and boots that were. The pack was on my shoulder. Neither of us said a word.

The truck was where I had left it, behind the kitchens, a hundred yards from the black ribs the storehouse. The smoke had stopped. The smell hadn’t. We went past it without looking.

I drove without lights until the trees closed over the road.

She sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and looked straight ahead through e windscreen, at the pines going by in the gray glow of the snow. She didn’t look back at the packhouse

Not once. I watched her not do it.

Three miles out, I pulled onto the shoulder at the bottom of the old logging road and turned the engine off.

The western line was a hundred yards ahead. There was nothing to see. There never was. Only the road running on up into the dark, between the trees, and the place where Moonhaven’s scent stopped

and the mountains began.

I reached across her and opened the glove box and took out the map.

It was the one from the autumn. The big survey map of the western ranges that Ryan had pinned to the wall of the command room the week Abby was taken, and then the week after the temple, when we had gone out every day for a month looking for the Rogue King and the girl he had carried down the mountain. It was soft at the folds, and torn at one corner, and covered in pencil. Red for the roads we had searched. Black crosses for every cabin, every hunting lodge, every shepherd’s hut we had kicked open and found empty.

I unfolded it on my knee and turned on the little light over the mirror.

“Here,” I said. I put my finger on it. “Moonhaven. Here’s the line. This road we’re on.” I traced it up and to the left, into the mountains. “It climbs for about four miles and then forks. Teague’s truck went up it the day we put him out. Which way at the fork, I don’t know.” I moved my finger. “Here’s the temple. North and west. Two days on foot, maybe less in fur. You’ll know it when you see it. Half the mountain came down.”

She was leaning over the map. Her face had gone very still.

“We searched every road west of the temple,” I said. “Every one. For weeks. Here, and here, and all of this.” The red lines, crossing and recrossing. “We never found him. Which means he’s somewhere

we didn’t look.”

I moved my finger off the red. Up, into a long blank space at the top of the map, high in the ranges,

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clearing from the east and stopped. And Teague drove down to a trading post at a crossroads for supplies. There’s only one crossroads with a trading post on this side of the range.” I tapped it. “Here.”

he looked at the map for a long time.

Then she put her finger on the blank space. Very lightly. Just above the place where the forran out.

“There,” she said. “Somewhere there.”

“Somewhere there.” I folded the map and put it in her hands. “It’s a lot of somewhere, Slome.

“I know.”

“You could die up there.”

“I know that too.” She put the map inside her coat. “I could die in that council room in three days. At least up there it would be my own choice.”