His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 161

Chapter 161

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Malachi

NOV 2

Chapter 161

My brother’s son sat down at the table the way my brother used to.

every

I don’t think he knew he did it. He pulled out the bench with one foot, and sat, and put both hands flat on the wood in front of him, fingers spread, and looked up. Nathaniel had sat like that table I ever saw him at. In our father’s kitchen, when we were boys. At the head of the council, ane year I was sent away. As if he were holding the table down, and the whole room might lift off he

didn’t.

I stood by the hearth with my back to the fire and looked at that, and it went into me somewhere

under the ribs and stayed there.

He had his father’s voice too. Not all of it. Something at the bottom of it. When he had said nobody is arresting anyone today out there in the snow, I had heard Nathaniel in it, as plainly as if he had been standing on the hill.

I didn’t say any of that. It wasn’t mine to say. He was my nephew, and I had given up the right to

call him that a long time ago.

The witch had taken the stool by the fire, a yard from my knee, with her basket on her lap. She wasn’t afraid of me. She looked at me the way a healer looks at a wound, with interest and no sympathy at all. Liam Hayes stood by the door with his arms folded. He hadn’t sat down and he wasn’t going to. He hadn’t looked at me since we came in, except once, when I put a log on the fire, and then

he had looked at my hands.

I knew why. I didn’t blame him.

Outside, through the gap where the door didn’t meet its frame, I could smell her. Roses and bergamot and cold. She was on the wall of the sheepfold with the girl. I could hear their voices, low. I couldn’t hear the words. I didn’t try to.

Once, I heard her laugh. Short, and broken in the middle.

I stood very still by the fire until I was sure it was a good sound.

***

“The blade,” the witch said.

“I told them about the blade. At the hearing.”

“You told them to break it. She keeps it on her, and nobody has seen her since.” She folded her

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“Then tell me what you saw from a distance.”

So I told her.

Two winters, maybe three. The dark half of every month, from the last quarter to the new moon, never in the light half. She had the blade made by a smith two valleys over, plain steel, long and narrow, and then she spent those winters cutting it, in whichever of her places she happened to be. Every symbol by hand, with a graver no longer than my finger. Always with a candle burning beside her. She never worked without one.

“And blood,” I said. “Every new moon. Her own. She’d open her left palm over it and let it run into

the cuts. That was before the hand was burned.”

The witch’s hands stopped on the basket.

“Her own,” she said. “Not an animal’s. Not one of those girls’.”

“Her own. I asked her once, why. She said nothing made with someone else’s blood would ever answer only to her.”

The witch closed her eyes.

“Then it answers to her,” she said, without opening them. “Only to her. Whatever she put in your Alpha’s chest knows her blood and nothing else.” She opened her eyes and looked at Kade. “That’s something. It’s more than I had this morning.”

Kade’s hands were very still on the table.

“Enough to undo it?”

“Not yet,” she said.

****

The door opened, and the girl came in.

I had moved before it opened. Away from the fire, to the far corner of the hut, under the low eaves where the roof came down nearly to my head. As far as the walls let me go. It wasn’t far. The hut was twelve feet across.

She stopped inside the door. Her eyes went round the room and found me, and stayed on me for a moment. I watched her breathing change.

I looked at the floor. But I had seen her, and I went on seeing her.

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She wasn’t small now. Or she was, but it didn’t show at first. She had a long coat on, gray wool, ined with white fur at the throat and wrists, with silver worked down the front of it. A Luna’s coat Her hair was pinned up off her neck, the way older women wore it, and there was more silver in her hair than I remembered. She held herself straight. She had learned that somewhere in the last two months. Somebody had taught her, or she had taught herself.

She looked older. She looked like what she was now.

And underneath it, she was still a girl of eighteen, standing in a doorway with her hands clenched in her sleeves, frightened half to death of the man in the corner. The coat didn’t change that. Nothing

would, while I was in the room.

Kade had stood up. He went to her and took her hand and brought her to the table, and sat her on the bench at the far end, with himself between us. I didn’t blame him for that either.

Sloane came in behind her, and Ryan behind them both. He hadn’t wanted to come in. I could see that on him. He had stayed out in the snow rather than stand in a room with me and with her, and he would have stayed there all morning. But his Luna had walked through that door, and so he came after her and shut it, as far as it would shut, and put his back against the wall beside it, a step from her. He didn’t look at me. He knew exactly where I was without looking.

Sloane didn’t come to the table either. She leaned against the wall on the other side of the door, beside Liam, and looked across the hut at me.

All right?

I didn’t say it. She saw it anyway. She gave me the smallest nod.

*****

The Luna told it to the table, not to me.

A room with a low ceiling, black with old smoke. A shelf, and a candle on it, burning steady with no draught. A voice behind her she couldn’t turn to see. There you are. A river, another time, and a mill wheel, and someone humming. And the last one. Her own thought, given back to her word for word,

the one she had never said aloud.

The mill wheel I knew. Everyone in that hut knew it. Their scouts had found the mill house empty, weeks ago, the shelves cleared and the grate full of ash. They had found the watchtower the same way, when they went back for it. I had told them about both, and both had been cold by the time anyone got there.

“She has more than two places,” I said.

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others. Some she had before I knew her. Some I only heard her talk about. I know four, maybe five./ Not all of them.” I looked at the Luna, and then, because she couldn’t hold it, at the table in front of her. “The ceiling. Was there anything on it? Anything in the beams?”

he was quiet for a moment, remembering. Her face had gone very pale.

“Hooks,” she said. “Iron hooks. In a row. I thought it was a cellar.”

“It isn’t a cellar,” I said. “It’s a trapper’s hut. The hooks were for the pelts.”

The witch’s head came up.

“There’s a trappers’ camp,” I said. “High up, in a valley east of the pass, three days from anywhere Nobody’s trapped there in forty years. A handful of turf huts, dug back into the hillside, so that from the slope you’d take them for nothing but humps of snow. Earth walls. A stone floor. A roof of old black beams with the turf laid over them, so low you can’t stand up straight inside. She was living there when she first came to these mountains, before she found me. She took me there once, the first winter. She kept her oldest things there. Things she didn’t want near anybody else.” I paused. “I don’t know that she’s there now. She doesn’t stay anywhere long. But that’s the room.”

“Then we go,” Liam said, from the door.

It was the first thing he had said to me.

“We take twenty wolves up there and we dig her out.”

“And she smells your twenty wolves a day before they get there,” I said, “and she’s gone, and you’ve found another empty room. Or she doesn’t go. And she’s waiting, and the first one through the door is the Alpha’s Beta.” I didn’t look at him. “Teague knows the road. I know the camp. She doesn’t know yet that I’ve come down. If she’s left, she’ll have left things behind. She always does. She writes everything down.”

“And whatever she did to those girls,” the Luna said quietly, “she wrote that down too?”

“Yes.”

“The one in the clinic,” she said. “We call her Tessa. Do you know what was done to her?”

“No.”

I didn’t say it to make myself look better. I said it because it was true, and the truth was worse.

“I never went into those cells,” I said. “She kept them on the lower level, past the chamber. She said

she needed hands she could borrow. I didn’t ask what that meant. I didn’t want to know.” I made myself look at the girl. “I never knew their names. She didn’t use them. I don’t know a Tessa, and I

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“And we just let him go,” Ryan said.

He hadn’t moved from the wall. He said it to Kade, with his eyes on me. “Up a mountain. To the

witch’s house.”

“Ryan,” Kade said.

“No, Alpha. Somebody has to say it.” He didn’t raise his voice. That was what made it worth listening to. “He walked into Moonhaven eight years ago and left it burning. He fought at her side seven weeks ago. He sat across a table from her for thirteen years, by his own account. And now he says he knows where she keeps her things, and he’ll go and look, and come back and tell us what he found.” He looked at Kade. “How do we know he comes back? How do we know he doesn’t walk up there and tell her everything that was said in this room? How do we know he isn’t walking up there today?”

Nobody said anything.

I didn’t either. He was right. If I had been standing where he stood, I would have said every word of

“We don’t,” I said.

Ryan looked at me.

“You don’t know,” I said. “You can’t. There’s nothing I can say that would make it worth anything.” I held his eyes. “You’re right to ask.”

Something moved in his face. It wasn’t softening. But he looked at me for a moment longer than he had to, and then he turned back to Kade.

“Then keep her,” he said.

He meant Sloane. I felt the room understand it.

“Keep her here. In Moonhaven. Under the same roof she ran from,” Ryan said. “He goes north, and she stays. If he comes back with what he promised, she goes home to him, or wherever she likes. If he doesn’t-” He stopped. “Then at least we have something he wants.”

Everything in me went cold.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t have, and I didn’t dare. I stood in the corner under the eaves with my hands

at my sides and my wolf up so high in my throat I could taste him, and I didn’t say a word. It wasn’t

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looked at Ryan.

“I’m not a hostage,” she said. “Not for him. Not for you. Not for anyone.” Her voice was very steady. This year I’ve been dragged off by Jax, and kept by the man standing in that corner, and taken by Cressida’s men, and locked in a room in Moonhaven with a guard on the door. I’m done, Ryan, Nobody keeps me anywhere again.”

“Sloane-”

“I’m going with him.” She didn’t look at me. She looked at Ryan, and then at Kade. “Back toe cabin. And when he goes north, I’m going north too. All the way.” She took a breath. “If he goes fear her, I’ll be there. If he lies to you, I’ll know. And you’ll know, as soon as I can reach you. Through the link, wherever I’m close enough. I got through to Liam yesterday from ten miles out. I can do it

again.”

“And if he turns on you?” Ryan said. “Up there? With nobody to stop him?”

Sloane held his eyes.

“Then you’ll have been right,” she said quietly. “And I’ll have been wrong. And it won’t be the first time.” Her voice didn’t shake. “But I’m not staying behind a door in Moonhaven waiting to find out.”

Ryan opened his mouth.

“She goes,” Kade said.

Ryan turned.

“She goes where she likes,” Kade said. “She’s not ours to keep. Not anymore. I told the whole pack she was under my protection. That means she decides.” He looked at Sloane. “And she reports. Everything. Every time she can.”

“Every time,” Sloane said.

Ryan stood there for a while with his jaw working. He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t leave either. He stayed where he was, with his back to the wall, a step from his Luna.

I let out the breath I had been holding. Slowly, so nobody would hear it.

Across the hut, Sloane still didn’t look at me. But her hand, at her side, had closed into a fist, and it

was shaking.

***

Kade sat back down. He had held himself through all of it, every word Ryan said, every word Sloane

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under the ribs, and pressed there. His breath went in and didn’t come out.

The witch was off her stool. “Alpha-”

I’m fine.”

He wasn’t. I could smell it. Something under his skin that hadn’t been there a moment ago cold and faintly sweet. I knew that smell. I had stood beside her when she worked too many nights to know

The Luna’s hand went to his arm.

She didn’t decide it. Her hand simply went to him, the way your hand goes out to someone falling, and the moment it touched him, the light came. A faint shine along her fingers, through the cloth of

his sleeve. Kade let his breath out.

And the air in the hut changed.