His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 152

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Abby

Chapter 152

Imogen wanted the training hall at ten, with nobody in it.

“Nobody,” she said, when I came in and found her alone in the middle of the mats with her basket at her feet. “Not your Alpha. Not your brother. Not the healer. If you-fall down, I’ll pick you up ve done it before.”

She had swept the floor herself. The chalk circle from the full moon was gone, and the boards were bare and pale in the winter light from the high windows. Outside, across the yard, I could hear Ryan’s morning drills, the thud of bodies on the frozen ground and his voice calling the count.

“Sit,” Imogen said.

I sat on the mat, cross-legged, facing her. She sat down opposite with her knees creaking, and set a bowl between us. A plain white kitchen bowl, full to the brim with water.

“I want to see what you can do with a little,” she said. “Not a lot. A little. Fill that with light. Don’t spill a drop.”

I looked at the bowl.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” She folded her hands. “You’ve been pouring yourself out like a bucket since the day I met you. Into him. Into that boy in the clinic. Into a wrist, into a field, into a moon. You know how to empty yourself. I want to know if you can do anything else.”

I reached for the moon.

In daylight, under a roof, there wasn’t much of it. There never was. A thread, far away, pale and thin. I drew it in slowly and held it under my breastbone, where Diana was, and felt her lift her head

and take an interest.

.it.

Then I let a little of it go. Down my arms. Into my hands, cupped round the bowl without touching

The water began to glow.

Very faintly, at first. A pale silver haze, deep down, like moonlight seen through ice. I held it there. I fed it, a little at a time, the way you feed a fire you don’t want to get away from you. The glow came up through the water slowly until it reached the surface and lay there, trembling, a skin of light right up to the rim.

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It was harder than it looked. The light wanted to go. That was the thing nobody had ever told me, and I had never had words for. It always wanted to go somewhere. Out, and on, and into something. delding it still was like holding a breath under water, and Diana was pressing against the inside of my ribs with her ears pricked, waiting for me to let her.

Not yet, I told her.

“How does it feel?” Imogen asked.

“Like it wants to get out.”

“It does. It always will. That’s what it’s for.” She watched the bowl. “The question is whether it gets out where you send it, or wherever it likes.”

The light trembled on the water. I held it.

“Now,” Imogen said quietly, “keep holding it. And tell me about the night of the fire.”

I looked up at her.

“Don’t look at me. Look at the bowl.” Her voice didn’t change. “The girl in the white nightdress. The candle. The fifty people in the garden. Tell me what they shouted.”

I looked back at the bowl.

“Traitor,” I said. “At Sloane.”

“And at you?”

I didn’t answer. The light shivered.

“Nobody shouted at you,” Imogen said. “They looked. Didn’t they? They looked at the silver in your hair. I saw them. You felt every one.”

“Yes.”

“Still holding?”

“Yes.”

It was. Just. The skin of light on the water had gone ragged at one edge, and I pulled it back. My hands were starting to ache.

“Good,” she said. “That’s the first lesson. You can be frightened, and angry, and ashamed, and still

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It was an ordinary candle. A plain white stub, the kind they kept in the kitchen drawers for when the poyer went. She set it on the mat beside the bowl and struck a match.

Every part of me went cold.

“Imogen-”

“Look at the bowl.”

“You said no candles. You said, at the binding-”

“I said no candles near him.” She touched the match to the wick. It caught. A small, steady yellow flame, standing straight up in the still air of the hall. “Look at the bowl, Abigail.”

I couldn’t.

I was looking at the candle. At the flame. And I wasn’t in the training hall anymore. I was in a stone room with a low black ceiling, and there was a candle on a shelf in front of me, burning very steadily with no wind to move it, and a voice behind me saying only you, and me.

The light in the bowl jumped.

“Hold it,” Imogen said sharply.

I tried. I felt it go out from under me like a step in the dark. All the light I had been holding still, all of it at once, and Diana with it, rearing up, and the thread from the moon behind them, pulling, pulling more-

The water in the bowl went white.

Then it went out of me. All of it, all at once. I couldn’t see it. I felt it. It came up out of me from somewhere under my ribs and went out through my hands and my chest and my skin, in every

direction at once, the way water goes out of a broken dam.

The air in the training hall changed. It went tight and strange, the way it does in the minute before a summer storm breaks. Every hair on my arms stood up. Imogen’s shawl lifted off her shoulders as if a wind had caught it, in a room with no wind. Overhead, the long electric lights along the rafters flickered, and buzzed, and flared too bright, and one of the bulbs burst with a flat little pop and rained glass down onto the mats.

Somewhere outside, across the yard, a wolf began to howl. Then another.

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“Abigail.”

mogen’s hands closed on my wrists. Cold, and dry, and very hard. Something sharp and green filled my nose. Juniper, crushed. She had it in her palm.

“When I say stop,” she said, very close to my face, “you stop.”.

I stopped.

I don’t know how. I think it was the cold. It went into my wrists from her hands like a key into a lock, and something in me turned over, and it came back. Not all at once. Raggedly, the way the tide goes out, in long uneven pulls. The air loosened. The lights that were left steadied, buzzing faintly The bowl was sitting on the mat in front of me, ordinary and white, with an inch of water left in the bottom of it. The rest was gone. I didn’t know where.

Imogen reached over without a word and pinched out the candle.

I sat on the mat with my hands in Imogen’s, and shook, and couldn’t stop shaking.

***

It was a long time before either of us said anything.

She let go of my wrists at last and wrapped her own shawl round my shoulders, and then her coat over that, and sat back on her heels and looked at me. She looked older than I had ever seen her. Her hand, when she pushed her hair off her face, wasn’t quite steady.

“Well,” she said. “That was more than a little.’

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. I lit the thing.” She looked down at the candle. Her mouth thinned. “I wanted to see what you’d do. I didn’t think you’d do that.”

Outside, across the yard, it had gone very quiet.

I hadn’t noticed when the drills stopped. I noticed now. No count. No thud of bodies on frozen ground. Only silence, and then, after a moment, a low murmur of voices, a lot of them, just outside

the walls.

I knew what they had felt. Every wolf in that yard. The air going tight across the frozen ground, their hackles going up all at once, the lamps on the corner of the hall flickering in broad daylight, and the howl. All of it coming out through the walls of the training hall like a wave, and nothing to see.

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I looked at her.

When the candle was lit,” she said. “Before it went. What did you see?”

“The dream.” My voice came out hoarse. “The room. The candle on the shelf. Her.”

“Tell me about the last one. All of it.”

So I told her. The night after the clinic. The stone room and the black ceiling and the candle with no wind to move it. The voice behind me, saying he’s so tired. My own thought, word for word, the one I had never said aloud to anyone. Only you. And me.

Imogen didn’t say anything for a while.

“When it went,” she said at last. “Just before. Did you feel anything else?”

“Like what?”

“A pull.” She was watching my face very carefully. “Not you pushing. Something pulling. From outside you. The way a draught pulls at a door that’s been left open.”

I went cold all over again.

Because I had. I hadn’t had a word for it. In the second before it all went out of me, under the candle and the dream and the fear, something had tugged. Somewhere behind me. As if a door had opened at my back and the air of the whole room had rushed toward it.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“So did I.” Imogen’s mouth was a thin line. “I’ve felt that pull once before. On your Alpha, the night I tied the thing in his chest down. I thought it was the curse fighting me.” She shook her head slowly. “It wasn’t fighting. It was drawing breath.”

I stared at her.

***

“Tell me every time,” she said. “Every dream. When it came, and what you’d done that day. Everything.”

I told her.

The first one, a month ago. The night after I first sat by Kade’s bed and put my hand on his chest

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hands, and a little light, and he’s so tired.

Imogen listened to all of it without moving. When I had finished, she closed her eyes.

Of course,” she said. Very quietly. Not to me: “Of course. Stupid woman. It’s been in front of me since the first night.”

“What has?”

She opened her eyes.