His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 153

Chapter 153

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Sloane

Chapter 153

He was waiting on the porch when I came out.

It was still dark. Not the black of the middle of the night, but the deep blue that comes an our before the sun, when the snow glows faintly from underneath and the trees stand out against like ink. He was sitting on the top step in his coat with his elbows on his knees, and he got up when the door opened, and looked at me, and didn’t say good morning.

“This way,” he said.

He led. I followed.

Not along the stream, where I had gone yesterday. Up. Behind the cabin, past the woodpile, onto a narrow track I hadn’t seen before that wound up through the pines in long switchbacks. He walked it without a light. He didn’t need one. He went up it the way you walk through your own house in the dark, without looking, his boots finding every step, and I followed in his tracks and tried not to

breathe too hard.

He didn’t look back to see if I was keeping up. But every so often, at the top of a switchback, he stopped. Just for a moment. To look at the trees, or the sky, or something on the ground. And when I came up behind him, he went on.

I knew what he was doing. I let him do it.

After half an hour, the trees opened.

It was a long, flat shelf on the side of the mountain, a meadow in summer, I thought, with the rock rising up behind it on one side and falling away in front into a long white slope down to the trees. The snow lay smooth and even across it, wind-packed, crusted on top. Nobody had walked on it. Nobody could see it from anywhere. Below us, the whole valley was still in shadow, and above us, the sky was going from blue to gray to the faintest wash of gold behind the eastern peaks.

“Here,” he said.

He didn’t say anything else. He nodded toward a stand of pines at the edge of the shelf, where the snow was thinner under the branches. Then he turned his back on them and on me, and stood looking

out at the valley with his hands in his pockets.

I went behind the trees.

***

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cold was gone, and the whole mountain opened up around me in scent and sound, and Rhea shook herself and stepped out from under the trees onto the shelf.

He was gone.

The place where he had been standing was empty. His boot prints went off along the edge of the shelf, toward the rocks on the far side, and stopped behind a boulder. That was all.

Rhea stood still at the edge of the trees with her ears up.

Then she smelled him.

Woodsmoke and leather. The same scent as the man, and not the same at all. Sharper. Wilder. Coming toward us round the far side of the boulder on the wind.

And then he came out.

I had never seen his wolf. Not once. Not in all those weeks in the cabin, not on the field. I had wondered, sometimes, lying awake in that small room listening to him through the wall, what he would be. I had imagined something lean and scarred and ugly. Something that matched the man.

He wasn’t ugly.

He was big. Much bigger than Rhea, taller at the shoulder by a head, broad through the chest and heavy in the neck, the way old fighters are. His coat was the color of smoke. Dark charcoal along the spine, going lighter down the flanks, and lighter still at the throat and belly, almost silver, and silver too around the muzzle where the years had come into it. There were scars. I could see them in the thinner fur along his shoulder and across his face, old pale lines, the record of every fight he had ever been in. They didn’t make him ugly either.

He came out from behind the boulder and stopped, and the first light came up over the eastern peaks behind him and caught him all along his back, and for a moment he seemed to be made of it.

Rhea’s breath went out of her.

Oh, I thought. That was all. Oh.

***

They circled.

Slowly. Rhea on one side of the shelf and him on the other, walking round each other in a wide ring through the untouched snow, with their heads low and their eyes on each other the whole time. Neither of them made a sound. The ring got smaller. The snow crunched under their paws, and their breath went up in the cold, and the light came slowly down the side of the mountain toward them.

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spine was lifting, not in threat, in something else.

He stepped closer.

Slowly. One step. Then another. With his head low and his ears forward, and every line of that big body very careful, the way you approach something you don’t want to frighten away. He put his nose out. He breathed her in. Her face, and her neck, and the place behind her ear, long, slow breaths, as if he were trying to learn her.

Rhea didn’t move.

Then he pressed the side of his muzzle against her neck. Just for a moment. Very lightly. Along slow press, from her jaw to her shoulder, the way a wolf greets someone it has been missing.

Something went through Rhea from her nose to her tail. I felt it. Something warm and enormous and frightening, so strong that for a second I couldn’t tell where she ended and I began.

She leaned into it.

She turned her head and pressed her own muzzle against his, along his jaw, along the old scar, and breathed him in, and the two of them stood in the snow on that high shelf with their heads together and the light coming down on them, and didn’t move at all.

Then Rhea stepped back.

Two steps. Three. Out of reach. She lowered her front end. She flattened her ears. She set her back legs, the good one and the bad one both, and her lip came up off her teeth, very slightly, and she

looked him straight in the eye.

Come on, then, she said. Not in words. In every line of her body. Show me.

He looked back at her.

I saw him understand. I saw something in those gold-flecked eyes that, on a man, I might have called surprise. Then something else. He lowered his head a little. He set his feet.

He waited for her.

He let her come first.

***

She went for his shoulder.

Low and fast, the way I had been taught on the mats at Moonhaven, coming in under the reach of a

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He was faster than he had any right to be, for his size. But she was faster. Not by much. Enough She went low again, and then, at the last moment, high, and her teeth caught in the thick fur of his fuff for half a second before he twisted free. She felt it. I felt her feel it. The surprise in him, the jolt gh, and then something else that came off him in a wave. Not anger.

Delight.

They fought for a long time.

Up and down that shelf, through the snow, until it was trampled flat in a great churned circle and the sun had come all the way up over the peaks and lay gold and white across everything. Rhea was quick. She was clever. She feinted and doubled back and came at him from angles he didn’t expect, and twice more she got her teeth into his ruff, and once into the fur along his flank, and once she got under him and nearly took his legs out from under him, and he went down on one shoulder in the snow and came up shaking himself and snorting.

But he was bigger. He was stronger. He had fought more fights than I had been alive. And she was tiring. I felt it. The leg first, the left hind, starting to drag, starting to land late. Then her breath, coming hard and ragged. Then her timing.

She came in one more time, low, at his shoulder. Too slow.

He met her.

He turned into her instead of away, and caught her with his chest, and she went over in the snow, and before she could get her feet under her he was over her. Not on her. Over. His front paws planted in the snow on either side of her shoulders, his chest above her, his jaws closed very gently on the side of her throat. Not biting. Holding. Just enough.

She went still.

He held her there. One breath. Two. His breath hot on her neck, and her heart going like a drum

against the snow, and the whole mountain silent around them.

It’s over, he said. Not in words. In the gentleness of those jaws. That’s enough for today.

He let go.

He stepped back, off her, and stood for a moment looking down at her in the snow. Then he turned and walked away across the trampled shelf, unhurried, toward the boulder, and went behind it.

Rhea lay in the snow and watched him go.

She didn’t get up for a long time.

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looking out at the valley, with his coat buttoned to the throat.

He turned round when he heard me.

is face was flushed from the cold and the shift. There was a scratch along his jaw, fine and red, where Rhea’s teeth had gone past him on the second pass. He hadn’t wiped the blood away.

He looked at me for a moment.

“You’re good,” he said.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t trust myself to.

“Sloppy,” he said. “On the left. You’re still protecting the leg, and you drop your guard on that side to do it. And you go low too often. Anyone who’s fought you twice will see it coming.” He paused. “But you’re fast. You’re faster than me. And you think. Most wolves don’t think. They just come at you.” Something moved at the corner of his mouth. “You came at me from three directions I didn’t

know I had.”

“I got your ruff.”

“You got my ruff.” He touched the scratch on his jaw. “And my face.”