His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 164

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Mon, Nov

Chapter 164

Abby

Nwoke late, and alone.

The light through the curtains was already high and white. Kade’s side of the bed was cold. There was a note on his pillow, in his square, impatient handwriting. Let you sleep. Office till noom Eat something.

I lay there for a while with the note in my hand.

I hadn’t slept properly since the hut. Every time I closed my eyes, I felt the air in the hut go tight again, and that cold breath at the back of my neck, as if somebody had opened a door behind me and stood there. I had told myself a hundred times that Imogen was right, that it had only been a few seconds, that she might have seen nothing at all. I didn’t believe it. I lay in Kade’s bed and listened for her in every creak of the old house.

Somewhere toward dawn I must have fallen asleep. Now it was nearly eleven.

Ivy came in without knocking, the way she did, with a pitcher of hot water and an armful of linen, and stopped when she saw me.

“You’re awake. Good.” She put the pitcher down. “The Alpha said not to wake you. I’ve been in

twice. You were snoring.”

“I don’t snore.”

“You do a bit, Luna.” She went to the wardrobe. “The gray, I think. It’s cold out.”

I let her. I stood in front of the mirror while she did up the long row of buttons down my back, and sat in the chair while she brushed my hair and pinned it, and watched my face in the glass. Pale. Tired. Older than it had been in the autumn, though I couldn’t have said where exactly. Something around the eyes. The silver at my temple caught the light from the window.

“There,” Ivy said, and stood back. “You’ll do.”

“Thank you.”

She picked up the linen. At the door, she hesitated.

“There were cars in the lane,” she said. “When I came up. Two of them. Big black ones.” She frowned. “Not ours.”

***

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down the walls that somebody had wired for electricity before I was born. It was always full of people at this time of day. Somebody going out to the yard. Somebody coming in from the town with a basket. The kitchen boys, cutting through to the back stairs when they thought nobody was looking

was full now. But nobody was moving.

They were standing round the edges of the hall, along the walls, by the doors, on the bottom steps. Kitchen boys and warriors and two of the council wives with their coats still on. All of them ent. All of them looking at the middle of the floor.

Sebastian Thorne was standing in front of the fireplace.

He looked exactly as he had at the reception. Tall and fair, in a dark coat cut so well it made everyone else in the room look shabby, with snow melting on his shoulders. He had six warriors with him, spread out behind him in a loose half-circle, big quiet men with Greyhollow’s gray in their collars. He was smiling.

Kade stood in front of him, ten feet away.

He was standing. I saw that first. He had come down from his office and he was standing in the middle of his own hall, very straight, with his hands at his sides. Ryan was a step behind his left shoulder. I could feel through the bond what it was costing him to stand there. Not much yet.

Enough.

“-only what any suitor is owed,” Sebastian was saying, pleasantly, as I came down the stairs. “Under the old law. I don’t ask for anything more than that. The lady was refused to me without a reason, through her brother. I’ve come to hear it from her own mouth. Then I’ll go.” He spread his hands. “I can’t imagine Moonhaven would deny a neighbor something so small.”

“The lady is under Moonhaven’s protection,” Kade said. “She doesn’t owe you anything. Small or

otherwise.”

“So I heard.” Sebastian’s smile didn’t move. “Very generous of you. Moonhaven seems to be taking a great many people under its protection lately.”

He let that sit in the hall. I watched it go round the walls. A glance. A shift of feet.

Then he saw me on the stairs.

“Luna.” He bowed. Exactly the right depth. “Forgive me for arriving unannounced. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

I came down the last steps and crossed the hall to Kade’s side. I didn’t look at Sebastian. I put my hand on Kade’s arm, lightly, the way a Luna does in front of guests.

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Liam?

On his way. Ryan called him.

And Kaia?

Kade didn’t answer. I could already hear it, out in the lane. Running feet in the snow.

Liam came through the door first, and stopped dead.

Kaia was right behind him. She was in her coat with no scarf and her hair half pinned up, as if she had walked out of the house in the middle of doing it, and her face was absolutely white.

The hall went even quieter.

Sebastian turned to look at her. Slowly, all the way round, with his hands in his coat pockets. And smiled. Not the smile he had been using on Kade. A different one. Softer. Fond.

I felt Liam go rigid in the doorway. I felt his wolf come up so hard it hit the pack bond like a shove. He took a step forward.

Kaia caught his arm.

She didn’t look at him. She was looking at Sebastian. She held on to Liam’s sleeve with one hand, and with the other she reached up and took the last pin out of her hair, and let it fall, and put the pin in her pocket. Then she let go of Liam, and walked out into the middle of the hall.

She stopped six feet from Sebastian Thorne. Not one step closer.

“You wanted to hear it from my own mouth,” she said.

Her voice carried to every corner of that hall. It didn’t shake at all.

“No,” Kaia said.

Sebastian waited, smiling, as if she might go on.

“That’s all,” she said. “That’s my answer. It was my answer five years ago, and it’s my answer now, and it’ll be my answer every time you ask, until you’re dead or I am.” She held his eyes. “You don’t need a reason. You know the reason. So do I.”

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Something moved in his face. Very fast. There and gone. If I hadn’t been watching for it, I would ever have seen it. Then the smile came back, wider than before, and he took his hands out of his pockets and turned away from her as if she were finished. As if she had never been the point.

He turned back to Kade.

*****

“Well,” he said, to the whole hall. “You all heard it.”

He walked a few steps along the hearth. Unhurried. Taking his time.

“Refused,” he said. “Twice. Once by letter, without a reason. And now to my face, in front of a hal full of strangers, without a reason. In Greyhollow, that would be called an insult to my house.” He stopped, and looked at Kade. “But she’s not in Greyhollow, is she. She’s in Moonhaven. Under Moonhaven’s protection, as the Alpha says. Which means the insult is Moonhaven’s now.”

“Nobody here has insulted you,” Kade said evenly. “A woman told you no. That’s all.”

“In your valley, perhaps.” Sebastian smiled. “In mine, when a house is insulted, the old law gives it a remedy. Alpha to Alpha. In the yard, in the open, until one of them yields.” He tilted his head. “It doesn’t have to be to the death, Kade. I’m not a barbarian. First to yield. A small thing. To settle it

between neighbors.”

The hall was so quiet I could hear the snow ticking against the high windows.

Kade didn’t move.

He couldn’t. I knew it, and Ryan knew it, and Liam in the doorway knew it, and Imogen, wherever she was, knew it. You don’t fight. Not in your skin, not out of it. If Knox came up through that place in his chest, the thing under him would come up with him. In the yard, in front of Greyhollow’s

warriors, in front of half his pack.

“Moonhaven doesn’t fight over a woman’s answer,” Kade said.

“No.” Sebastian studied him. Then he smiled. “No, I don’t suppose it can.”

The words went round the hall like a slap.

“You told me once,” Sebastian said, more quietly, coming closer, one step and then another, “that two months in a chair wasn’t very long to start making enemies. Before I’d had a chance to find out whether I could fight them.” He stopped three feet from Kade. Close enough to touch. “I’ve found out, as it happens. I can.” His voice dropped further, so that only the three of us could hear. “Can you?”

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“I meant what I said to you in your office,” he said to Kade, very softly, never taking his eyes off me. Agirl like that doesn’t stay a widow. Somebody always steps forward.” He smiled. “I just want you to know, when the time comes, there won’t be any shortage of volunteers.”

Knox came up.

I felt it in my hand on Kade’s arm before I felt it in the bond. All at once, the way it had come up in his office the morning after the reception, every hair on end, a growl so deep I felt it in my own teeth. And this time, under it, the other thing came too.

It didn’t stir. It didn’t turn over in its sleep. It woke.

Kade made a sound. Very small. His hand went to his side. He bent forward, slightly, the way a man bends when he has been hit low and hard and doesn’t want anyone to see. And above the collar of his shirt, on the side of his throat, I saw them. Dark gray. Climbing. Three of them, four, spreading up toward his jaw like ink in water, while I watched.

Sebastian saw them too.

I watched him see them. I watched his eyes go to Kade’s throat, and stay there, and widen very slightly. Then I watched the smile come back, slowly, satisfied. The smile of someone who has been told a thing and has finally seen it for himself.

Behind him, his warriors had seen it too.

Kade’s knees went.

He didn’t fall. Ryan caught him under one arm, and I had the other, and between us we held him. But he was on one knee on the stone floor of his own hall, in front of everyone, with his hand pressed to his side and his face gray and his breath coming in short hard pulls through his teeth, and the dark lines crawling up his throat.

Somebody along the wall cried out.

I didn’t think.

I knew what it would cost. I had known since the training hall. Every time you put your light into him, you let her in. I knew there was a woman somewhere in the mountains, in a room with iron hooks in the ceiling, who might be sitting by a candle at this very moment waiting for me to do exactly this.

I didn’t care.

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It wasn’t like the bowl. It wasn’t like the clinic.

came up out of me all at once, from the bottom of everything I was. No moon behind it. It was the middle of the morning, in the middle of winter, and there was no moon anywhere I could reach. There was only me. I reached past Diana, past the light she kept, into the place under it, the place that was simply mine, and I took it all and poured it into him through my hands.

I didn’t see what happened in the hall. I felt it.

The air changed. It went tight and strange, the way it does in the minute before a summerston breaks, when every hair on your arms lifts on its own. I felt it go out from me across the stone floor in a wave. Along the walls, the old iron lamps flickered. All of them at once. Dimmed, and flared, and dimmed again, buzzing, as if something were pulling at the current.

I heard every person in that hall draw in their breath together. I heard someone drop something, metal, ringing on the stone. I heard one of Greyhollow’s warriors swear, low and shocked, and scuffle

backward.

I didn’t stop.

Under my hands, the thing in Kade’s chest fought me. It clawed. It turned and tried to climb. I could feel it the way you feel a fish on a line, heavy and furious and alive. I pushed it down. I didn’t have Imogen’s words or her chalk or her water. I had only my hands and my light, and I pushed it down with everything I had, until I felt it go. Down. Down and down into the bottom of his chest. Still. Sullen. Waiting.

The dark lines on his throat went gray. Then pale. Then stopped.