His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 151

Chapter 151

waited five days.

Five days of sleeping, and eating whatever Teague put in front of me, and sitting by the stove with my leg up on a stool while the cracked skin on my hands healed and the ache went slowly out of my bones. Five days of the cabin, and the two of them moving round me in it. Malachi out at the woodpile, or on the roof, or gone into the trees for hours with an axe over his shoulder. Teague at the table with his whetstone. The three of us at supper, saying very little.

On the sixth morning, I woke before light, and the leg didn’t hurt.

It ached. It always would. But it was the old, deep, patient ache that Daphne had promised me, not the sharp one, and when I stood up and put my full weight on it in the cold dark of my room, it held

I dressed. I went out through the main room as quietly as I could. Malachi was asleep in the chair by the stove, the way he had slept every night since the storm, with his head tipped back and his arms folded and the firelight on his face. He didn’t stir. Teague’s door was shut.

I let myself out into the blue light before dawn.

*****

I went round the back of the cabin, past my own window, down toward the stream. There was a flat place there, under the trees, where the snow had been beaten down by the wind and lay thin and hard over the ground. I stood in it and looked back at the cabin. Nobody at the windows. No smoke yet from the chimney.

I took off my coat. Then the rest, quickly, folding everything onto a rock under the pines where it would stay dry. The cold was so sharp it felt like being burned. My skin went to gooseflesh all over and my breath went up in a cloud and I stood there for a second, naked in the snow, shaking, and thought you are a fool, Sloane Sinclair.

Then I let her come.

It hurt. It always does, a little, after a long time. It hurt more in the leg, where the bone had knitted, a deep grinding pull as it changed shape around the old breaks. I set my teeth and let it hurt. And then the cold was gone, all at once, and I was standing on four feet in the snow with the whole morning open around me, every tree and stone and frozen blade of grass sharp with scent, and Rhea shook herself from her ears to her tail and sneezed.

I hadn’t been in fur since before the field. Weeks and weeks. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be this big, and this warm, and this sure of the ground.

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Down along the stream first, in long easy strides, with the water running dark and quick under the ice beside us. Then up, into the trees, where the snow lay deeper and every step sent it spraying. favored the left hind at first. I felt her do it, the old habit, taking the weight off it a little early. Then, after the first mile, she stopped favoring it. She stretched out. She ran the way she used to run on the training fields at Moonhaven, flat out, with her ears back and her tail streaming, until my heart was pounding and the trees were going by in a blur and I could have laughed out loud if wolves could laugh.

We ran until the sun came up. We ran up a long ridge above the cabin and stood at the top fit in the first light, panting, with the whole range spread out below us white and gold and endless Weran down again. We drank from a place where the stream had broken through the ice, and the water was so cold it made my teeth ache.

By the time we came back down through the trees toward the cabin, the sun was well up, and there was smoke going up from the chimney, and the leg was aching again. But it was a good ache. The ache of something that has been used, and has held.

Rhea came out of the trees at the back of the clearing at a trot, with her tongue out and her breath

steaming, and stopped.

Malachi was standing at the corner of the cabin.

***

He had an armful of wood. He must have come round from the woodpile on his way to the door, and seen her come out of the trees, and stopped. He was standing very still in the snow by the corner of the cabin with the split logs held against his chest, and he was looking at her.

Rhea stopped dead.

Everything in her went still. Her ears, her tail, her breath. She stood at the edge of the trees with one forefoot still lifted and looked at him, and he looked at her, across thirty yards of trampled snow in the morning light, and neither of them moved at all.

I felt something in her I didn’t understand. Something that wasn’t fear, and wasn’t the old pull of the bond, though the bond was there, aching, faint. Something careful. As if she were waiting to see what he would do.

I knew what he would do. I had seen it once before.

The first night. The stone chamber. The silver coming off my wrists and Rhea forced up through me onto the cold floor in front of all of them, stumbling, in the moonlight. Cressida’s face falling. She’s not her. And him, the Rogue King, already turning away, because whatever they had been looking for, Rhea wasn’t it.

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She’s useless.

And then his hand round my throat.

Malachi moved.

He shifted the logs in his arms. He looked at her a moment longer, at all of her, the way he had looked that first night. Then he said, quite quietly, “Come inside. It’s cold.”

And he turned, and went round the corner of the cabin toward the door, and was gone.

Rhea stood in the snow with her foot still lifted.

Then she put it down.

****

I shifted back by the stream, behind the pines, where I had left my clothes on the rock.

It hurt more going back. It always does, when you’re tired. I knelt in the snow, shaking, and pulled my clothes on as fast as my hands would let me. My sweater stuck on my damp skin. I couldn’t get my boot on over my wet foot and sat there on the rock trying, with my hair falling in my face, and suddenly my eyes were stinging and I didn’t know why.

I did know why.

Come inside. It’s cold.

That was all. That was all he had to say. He had stood there and looked at her, at all of her, my wolf, the only part of me that had ever been completely honest, and he had looked her over, and turned away. Again. The same as the first time, only without the claws.

Of course he had.

What had I thought would happen? That he would see her, now, after everything, and― What? Stop dead in the snow? Drop his armful of wood? I had seen what he dropped everything for. I had stood on a field and watched the Moonsilver light up the whole valley like a second moon. That was what he had been looking for, that first night. That was what Cressida had promised him. And instead they had dragged in a Moonhaven she-wolf with a bruised face and silver burns on her wrists, and she had come up through me onto the stone floor, cream and gold and ordinary, and he had looked at her and called her useless, and then lifted me off the floor by the throat until the room went black at the edges, because she was nothing.

She was still nothing. To him. A useless she-wolf with a bad leg, who had come up his mountain in a

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Teague was on the porch.

He was sitting on the top step in the sun with a bowl of something in his lap, eating with his good hand. He looked up when I came round the corner. He watched me come all the way up to the foot of the steps, and I braced myself for whatever he was going to say, and for a while he didn’t say anything

at all.

Then he said, “Pretty.”

I stopped.

He was looking at me. Not at my face. Past me. At the edge of the trees, where Rhea had come out.

“Your wolf,” he said, in case I hadn’t understood. And went back to his bowl.

I stood at the bottom of the steps, and something in my throat closed up.

“Thank you, Teague,” I said.

He grunted. He didn’t look up.

I went inside.

***

Malachi was at the stove.

He had put the wood down by the hearth and was standing with his back to me, doing something with the kettle. He didn’t turn round when I came in. He nodded at the chair by the fire, the one I had sat in for five days, and said, “Sit down.”

I sat.

He poured tea. Two cups. He put one into my hands, and I wrapped my fingers round it, and it was so hot it hurt, and I held on to it anyway. He took the other to the chair on the other side of the stove and sat down in it, facing me, with the fire between us. The chair he slept in.

He didn’t say anything for a while. He drank his tea and looked at the fire.

Then he said, “You shouldn’t go wandering off like that.”

I looked at him.

“Not on your own,” he said. “Not without telling anyone. Not in fur, in the middle of the trees,

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“You should have told me first.”

You told me I was free to come and go.” I kept my voice level. “To go anywhere I liked. Do whatever I liked. Nobody locks anything. You said that, on the porch.”

He didn’t answer.

I looked down at my tea. And I don’t know why I said it. I hadn’t meant to. It came up out othe place where it had been sitting since the stream, since the rock, since the stone chamber all hose weeks ago, and it came out before I could stop it.

“I know what you think,” I said.

He looked up.

“About her. About me.” I made myself keep my voice steady. “I know. You don’t have to pretend. I remember the first night. I remember what you said about her. Useless. That was the word.” My hand had gone, without my meaning it to, to my throat. I made it come down again. “I remember what you

did after.”

He had gone very still in his chair.

“I’m not stupid, Malachi,” I said. “I know I’m nothing special. Not to you. I never was.”

The fire cracked in the stove.

He didn’t answer at once. He was looking at my throat. At the place my hand had gone. Something moved across his face that I had never seen there before, and it took me a moment to understand that

it was shame.

“I know what I did,” he said. Very low. “I’m not going to pretend I don’t. I’m not going to tell you there was a reason that makes it anything other than what it was.” He held my eyes. “But that word

isn’t true. It wasn’t true then.”

“It was true,” I said. “It still is.”

“It isn’t.” His voice had gone rough. “You weren’t what I thought I needed. Then. That’s all. That isn’t the same thing.” He was looking at me across the stove, and his eyes were very dark. “She’s beautiful. Your wolf. I stood out there this morning and—” He stopped. “She’s beautiful, Sloane.”

I looked at him.

Then I laughed. It came out short and tired and not very much like a laugh.

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