His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 158

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Sloane

Chapter 158

The truck was older than I was.

It had been ted once. Now it was the color of rust and mud, with one door that didn’t match and a crack across the windscreen that someone had stopped with clear tape. The heater worked wo settings, off and furnace. Teague drove it one-handed, with the bad hand resting in his lap and the wheel held steady in the good one, and he took the switchbacks down from the cabin slowly, low gear, with the chains on the back tires clanking against the wheel arches on every bend.

I sat in the middle of the bench seat between the two of them, with Teague’s mittens on my hands and my knees jammed up against the dashboard.

Nobody talked for the first hour.

The road came down out of the trees and along a ledge above a river, iced over, black in the middle where the current ran fast. Then down again, through a long stand of pines so close together it was almost dark under them. Then out, all at once, into the sun, with the whole range spread out below us white and blue and endless, and the crossroads at the bottom of it, a tiny scatter of roofs in a cleft between the hills.

Teague didn’t stop at the trading post. He didn’t even slow down. He turned south at the fork and drove past it with his eyes on the road, and I saw a face at the window behind the gas pump, and then it was gone behind us.

After that the road was wider, and the snow on it packed hard, and the truck stopped clanking quite so much. The heater roared. Malachi sat against the far door with his arm along the window and his eyes on the mountains, and didn’t say anything.

I watched his reflection in the glass.

He was afraid. I could see it. Not in his face, which was the face he always wore, closed and still. In his hand. His right hand, on his knee, which kept closing into a loose fist and opening again, over and over, as if it didn’t know he was doing it.

“Do you still care about it?” he said.

I looked round. He hadn’t moved. He was still looking out of the window.

“Moonhaven,” he said. “It’s your home. Your family’s there.” He paused. “You must still care what happens to it.”

I didn’t answer at once.

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He turned his head.

When I woke up in Cassandra’s spare room,” I said, “after the field. With my leg in a splint and your mark still on my neck. She’d sent for them. The first morning.” I kept my eyes on the road ahead. “My mother asked if I was going to live. Cassandra told her yes. That was all she asked. My father said he had no daughter to come and see.”

Malachi didn’t say anything.

“They didn’t come,” I said. “Not once. Not in all those weeks. Not to the hearing. Not to the cell” I swallowed. “They live a ten-minute walk from the packhouse, Malachi. I could see their roof from my

window.”

Teague’s good hand had tightened slightly on the wheel.

“What did he want?” Malachi said. “Your father.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

“Not much,” I said. “That was the trouble.” I pulled the mittens off and turned them over in my lap. “He wanted a daughter he could hand to some decent man from a decent family, and never think about again. A proper lady. A mate. A wife. A mother.” I folded the mittens together. “Small, and quiet, and obedient. Speak when spoken to. Sit with your knees together. Smile at the elders. Don’t argue. Don’t raise your voice. Don’t ever, ever let a man think you know more than he does.”

“And?”

“And I was none of it.” I almost smiled. “I wanted to fight. I wanted to train in the ring with the boys, and run with the warriors, and come home with blood on my knuckles. Kade and Liam let me. They were the only ones who did. We were inseparable, the three of us, from the time I could walk. And my father hated it. He hated them. The Alpha’s son and the Beta’s son, teaching his daughter to throw a punch.” I looked down at my hands. “No man will claim a girl who knocks him down in the training ring, Sloane. He said that to me when I was twelve. I knocked Liam down the next day just to spite him.”

Malachi’s mouth moved. Not quite a smile.

“I remember your father,” he said.

I looked at him.

“Not well. I was young, and he was on the council, and the council never looked at me twice.” He was still watching the mountains. “But I remember him. He used to come into a room as if he’d built

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“I don’t doubt it.” He was quiet a moment. “You, I barely remember. I’ve tried. Since the hearing. eft when you would have been, what, five? Six? There were always children underfoot at the parkhouse. I think there was a fair-haired girl who used to follow the boys round the training ring with a stick, hitting things.” He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know if that was you. I don’t now if I’m making it up because I want to have known you then.”

Something in my chest went tight.

“It was probably me,” I said. “I hit a lot of things with sticks.”

*******

We stopped at the fork a little after noon.

The truck couldn’t go any farther. The logging road ran down from here to the line, four miles, steep and narrow and buried under three feet of new snow that no plough had touched. Teague pulled into a gap in the trees at the side of the road and turned the engine off, and in the sudden silence I could hear the tick of the cooling metal and the wind in the pines and nothing else at all.

He got out. He handed us the snowshoes from the bed of the truck, one pair and then the other. He handed Malachi the rifle in its canvas sleeve, and the smaller pack.

Then he looked at me.

“I’ll be here,” he said.

It was the most I had heard him say in one breath that wasn’t pretty. I nodded.

He got back into the truck and shut the door, and we left him there.

***

The logging road went down through the trees in long, steep turns. The snow was deep and soft, and even with the snowshoes we sank to the ankle with every step. Malachi went first, breaking the trail, and I came behind in his tracks.

It was easier to talk like that. With him in front of me. With his back to me, and the trees going by, and nothing to look at but the snow.

“Kade and Liam were my family,” I said.

He didn’t stop. But I saw his head turn slightly, listening.

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borrowing my things without asking. She drove me mad. I used to tell her to go home.” I swallowed. “And the first time one of the older girls made her cry at school, I found that girl after training and put her in the lake. Fully dressed. In October.”

Malachi made a small sound. It might have been a laugh.

“That’s what she was,” I said. “A little sister. The annoying kind. The kind you can’t stand, and would tear apart anyone else for even looking at wrong.”

“And I ruined it,” I said. “All of it. Because I was jealous.”

The trail turned. He went round it. I followed.

“Do you want to know why?” I said. “Really why. Not what I told the council.”

“Tell me.”

I took a breath. The cold went all the way down.

“Because I wanted someone of my own,” I said. “That’s all. That’s all it ever was. I turned eighteen, and nineteen, and twenty, and no mate came. Every other girl I grew up with found hers, one after another, and I stood at the weddings and smiled. And I thought, all right. Fine. I’ll make my own. I had Kade. I had been beside him for years. I knew him better than anyone. I had spent years becoming exactly what a Luna is supposed to be. Not what my father wanted. Not small, not quiet. Strong enough to stand beside an Alpha and clever enough to sit at his table. I made myself into that, with my own two hands, and I was good at it, Malachi. I was so good at it.” My voice cracked. “I had a place. I had a role. I had a home, and a man, and a future I had built myself.”

He had slowed down. He didn’t turn round.

“And then the bond woke up between him and my little sister,” I said. “And it was gone. All of it. In one night. Just taken out of my hands. And everyone looked at me and expected me to smile, and step aside, and say how wonderful, and let it go.” I stopped walking. “It wasn’t fair. That’s all I could think. It wasn’t fair. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and it was taken anyway, and I was supposed to just accept it.”

He had stopped too. He stood in the snow ahead of me with his back to me, very still.

“So I did the worst thing I could think of,” I said quietly. “To a girl who had never done anything to

me except be chosen.”

The wind moved in the pines.

Then Malachi turned round.

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Just that. Very quietly.

Astared at him.

“I know what that is,” he said. “Watching someone else stand in the place you thought was yours. Being told to be glad for them.” He looked down at the snow. “Adrian Hayes stood at my bromer’s right hand for twenty years. The place I thought I was born for. And every time Nathaniel turned to him instead of me, I was supposed to smile.” He was quiet a moment. “I didn’t smile either.”

He turned round and went on down the trail.

After a while, I followed.

****

“Eight years ago,” I said.

We had come down past the steepest part of the road. The trees were thinning. Somewhere ahead, still miles away, the land opened out toward the valley, and I could feel it, faintly, the way you feel the warmth of a fire from the next room. Home. The pack. All of it, getting closer.

“The night of the attack,” I said. “You came for Nathaniel. And the girls.”

“Yes.”

“I was seventeen.” I watched his back. “A few months from my first shift. Fair-haired. Exactly what Cressida told you to look for.” I paused. “Why didn’t you take me?”

He walked on for a while without answering.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t know that we ever came near you. You’d have been in the packhouse, by then. Cassandra’s rooms, or near them. We never got through those doors. The warriors held them all night.” He shook his head. “And I didn’t care, Sloane. I want to be honest with you about that. Cressida cared. She was the one who wanted the girls. I gave the order because she asked for it, and because it was easier than arguing with her, and because I didn’t believe in any of it.”

“You didn’t believe her?”

“About the Moonsilver? Not then.” His voice was flat. “It was a story she told by the fire. A girl touched by the moon who could make the wolf beside her unbeatable. I thought it was a way to keep men like me in line. Something to hope for.” He pushed a low branch aside, heavy with snow, and held it until I was past. “She didn’t know who it would be. She didn’t know how it passed down, or where it came from, or what to look for except young and pale and she-wolf. We were guessing. All of us. For

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Error, mostly.

didn’t say anything.

“And Nathaniel,” I said.

He stopped walking.

He didn’t turn round. He stood in the middle of the logging road with the snow up to his ankles and the rifle on his back, and the trees very still around him, and I saw his shoulders go up, very slightly,

and stay there.

“They said you killed him,” I said. “In the square. At the hearing, Abby asked you to your face, and you said yes.”

“I know what I said.”

“Did you?”

The silence went on for a long time. Long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Long enough that I thought about saying never mind, and going on down the trail, and leaving it.

“No,” he said.

I stood very still.

“I don’t know who did,” he said. He was still facing away from me. His voice was very low. “I found him at the edge of the square. There was fire everywhere. Smoke. I had a knife in my hand. I went for him. I had been going for him for twelve years, every night in my head, and there he was.” He stopped. “And he didn’t fight me.

The wind came down off the slope and stirred the snow.

“He saw me,” Malachi said. “He knew me, through all of it. He said my name. And he put his hands down. Just put them down, at his sides, and stood there and looked at me.” His voice had gone rough. “And I couldn’t. I stood there with the knife in my hand and I couldn’t do it.”

“Then who-”

“I don’t know. Somebody came out of the smoke. Behind him. One of mine, or one of hers, or one of anyone’s. I didn’t see a face. I saw a blade go in, and him go down, and then I was on my knees in the square with my brother’s blood on my hands and my own knife still clean, and half of Moonhaven coming round the corner of the packhouse to see me there.” He let out a breath that shook. “That’s

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“It was messy,” he said. “That’s all I can tell you. It was dark and it was burning and I don’t know. I’ve gone back over it every night for eight years and I still don’t know whose hand it was.” He was quiet a moment. “But it doesn’t matter.”

“It matters-”

“It doesn’t.” He turned round then, and looked at me, and his gray eyes were very steady and very tired. “I brought them there. Every man in that square came because I led them. I knew the parkol routes. I knew where the doors were. I gave the orders. If I hadn’t come back, Nathaniel would be alive. And Adrian. And Naomi Hayes. And a ten-year-old girl wouldn’t have hidden in her father’s house while my men walked past her.” He held my eyes. “Whoever held the knife, I put it there. That’s the truth. The rest is just whose hand.”

“And you never told anyone.”

“Who would I tell?” He almost smiled. “Kade? Cassandra? I didn’t kill him, I only brought the men who did?” He shook his head. “They wouldn’t believe me. They’d have no reason to. And I can’t prove it. There’s nobody left who saw. And it would only sound like what it is. A man trying to make himself less guilty.” He looked down at the snow. “Let them believe what they believe. They’re not wrong. Not in the way that matters.”

I stood there in the snow and looked at him.

I thought about the hearing. You killed Nathaniel Blackwell in the square. And Malachi, standing at the foot of the long table in chains, saying yes. Without hesitating. Without looking at anyone.

The same way he had said yes about my leg.