His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 166

Chapter 166

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Abby

Chapter 166

couldn’t get warm, and then I couldn’t get cool.

I had turned the key in the Luna’s door and stood with my back against it until my legs stopped shaking, and then I had gone and sat on the window seat in the dark with my arms round mynees and cried, very quietly, so that nobody across the corridor would hear. Not Kade. He was downstrs. could feel him through the bond, far off, in his office, wide awake and miserable, and I closed myself

against it as hard as I could.

Let me.

I sat there and turned it over and over until it didn’t mean anything anymore.

Somewhere after midnight, I got into the big bed. It was cold. The sheets hadn’t been slept in since the week I moved across the corridor into his rooms, and they smelled of cedar from the chest and nothing else. I lay under three blankets and shivered. Then, an hour later, I was burning, the way I sometimes was now after I had been very cold, a dry, prickling heat all over my skin, as if something

inside me were still running too fast.

I got up and opened the window. Only a few inches. The way I used to, in the first weeks, to let the smell of candle smoke out before Ivy came.

The cold came in off the lake, clean and sharp. I stood in it for a while with my eyes closed. Then I went back to bed and lay on my side facing the window, with the air on my face, and at last, without meaning to, I slept.

***

I woke to light.

A small, warm, wavering light on the ceiling over the bed, where there should have been nothing but the dark.

For a moment I didn’t understand. I lay there and looked at it. Then I turned my head on the pillow.

There was a candle on the nightstand.

A plain white candle in a tin holder, the kind the kitchens kept in the drawers for when the power went. It was lit. It was burning very steadily, with the flame standing straight up, a few inches from my face.

I hadn’t lit it. There had been no candle in that room when I went to sleep. Daphne had made sure

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eyes go past the candle, slowly, to the foot of the bed.

Tessa was standing there.

She was in her white nightdress. Her feet were bare on the rug. Her hands were scratched and bleeding, both of them, long raw scrapes across the palms and the insides of her wrists, and there were bits of bark caught in her hair, and dead brown leaves. Behind her, the window stood all the way open now, and the curtain moved in the wind. The old wisteria. It went all the way up there of the wing, thick as a man’s arm, past the window, to the gutters. I had climbed it once myself, at forceen on a dare, and been shouted at for a week.

She had climbed it barefoot, in the snow, in her sleep.

Her face was empty. Completely. The way it had been in the storehouse, on the night of the fire, with the candle in her hands. Her eyes were open, and they were looking at me, and there was nobody behind them at all.

In her right hand, held down at her side, she had a knife.

An ordinary kitchen knife. A long one, with a black handle. The kind they used in the long room off the kitchens for cutting bread. She had been helping there, in the mornings, Daphne had told me. It was good for the girls to have something to do with their hands.

“Tessa,” I said.

My voice came out a whisper. She didn’t move.

“Tessa. It’s Abby. You’re asleep. You’re dreaming. You need to-

“She can’t hear you,” Tessa said.

It was her voice. Her mouth moved, and her voice came out of it. But it wasn’t her. The words came

too slowly, too evenly, each one set down like a stone, in a rhythm that wasn’t hers. Older. Patient. Faintly amused. I knew that rhythm. I had heard it in the dark, through stone, every night of the dreams.

There you are.

“Hello, little moon,” Cressida said, with Tessa’s mouth.

***

I sat up.

I did it slowly. I don’t know how. Everything in me wanted to scramble back across the bed to the far

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“She’s quite comfortable.” Tessa’s head tilted, very slightly, the way a bird’s does. “She doesn’t Know she’s here. She won’t remember. She never does.” The empty eyes moved round the room. The desk The window seat. The cold side of the bed. “You’re alone tonight. That’s new.”

I didn’t answer.

“He said something cruel to you,” Cressida said softly. “Didn’t he. I heard it. You’re turning into something that frightens my own people.” Tessa’s mouth smiled, slowly, as if it didn’t know how “He’s right, you know. They are frightened. They should be.”

I went cold all over again.

She had heard it. Kade’s words, in his room, hours ago. I hadn’t used my light. I hadn’t touched him. And she had heard every word.

She didn’t need my light to reach me anymore. Imogen had said it, in the office. It’s lying with its

eyes open.

“What do you want?” I said.

“You.” Simply. “I always have. You know that.” Tessa took a step along the side of the bed, unhurried, with the knife hanging loose at her side. “But not tonight. Tonight I only want them to see you. Properly. The way I see you.” Another step. “You did so well in the hall, little moon. On your knees, with your eyes like that, and your nails. They all saw that. They’re still talking about it. And they’re right to. You’re wasted on them. You always were.”

“Stay where you are.”

“I taught you, you know.” She stopped, at the corner of the bed. Close now. Close enough that I could smell the snow and the bark on her, and under it, very faint, the smoke of a snuffed candle. “In the chamber. The first night, when you wouldn’t stop crying. I took the chain off your wrist and put your hand flat on the stone, and I told you, it wants to go somewhere. Let it. Do you remember?”

I did.

I had never told anyone that. Not Kade. Not Imogen. I had pushed it down so far I had forgotten it was there, and it came up now all at once, whole. The cold stone under my palm. Her burned hand over mine, holding it there. Her voice, very gentle in the dark. It wants to go somewhere. Let it.

The words I had said to Imogen, in the training hall, over the bowl. Like it wants to get out.

Hers. They had been hers all along.

“Somebody has to bleed tonight,” Cressida said, with Tessa’s soft, empty mouth. “I’m sorry it has to

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I moved.

came out of the bed sideways, tangled in the blankets, and hit the floor on my hands and knees as the knife came down into the pillow where my head had been. Feathers burst up into the candlelight. Tessa pulled it out and turned, without a sound, without any hurry, and came round the end of the

bed.

I got to my feet. My back hit the desk. There was nowhere else to go.

“Tessa,” I said. “Tessa. Wake up. Please. Wake up-”

She came at me.

She was so small. That was what I couldn’t make sense of, afterward. She was smaller than me, and thinner, and barefoot, and she held the knife the wrong way, the way a child holds it. But she didn’t stop. She didn’t feel anything. When I caught her wrist, she didn’t pull away. She simply pushed, steadily, with all her weight, as if my hands weren’t there at all, and the point of the knife came closer to my throat an inch at a time, and her empty eyes looked into mine from a hand’s width away.

And Diana came up.

I didn’t call her. She came up through me so fast and so hard that I felt my own body change shape around her, my gums aching, my nails darkening and curving against the skin of Tessa’s wrist. The air in the room went tight. The lamp on the desk behind me buzzed faintly in the dark, and its bulb glowed and flickered, though it was switched off. I felt my eyes go. Silver. I saw it, reflected small and bright in Tessa’s empty eyes.

I could have thrown her across the room. I could feel it. All that strength, all at once, in my hands.

She was eighteen. She was asleep. She had been chained to a floor for months.

I held on. I didn’t throw her. I held her wrist, and pushed back, and the knife hung between us, shaking.

“Good,” Cressida said, very softly, with Tessa’s face. “There you are.”

Behind us, the door handle rattled.

Hard. Twice. Then a fist on the wood.

“Abby?” Cassandra’s voice, sharp with sleep and fear. “Abby, what’s happening? Open the door!”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t take my eyes off the knife. Tessa’s face didn’t change at all.

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Her footsteps went away down the corridor, Running,

held on.

I don’t know how long it was, Seconds. A minute. I held Tessa’s wrist with my claws in het in, and the knife shook between us, and Cressida watched me out of that girl’s empty eyes, and smiled with that girl’s mouth, and waited.”

Then the key turned in the lock.

The door swung in, and Cassandra was in the doorway in her robe, out of breath, with the ring of house keys from her rooms still in her hand. Her hair was down. Her face, in the candlelight, was white as paper.

She saw it all at once. I watched her see it. The candle. The open window. The girl in the white nightdress. The knife. Me, against the desk, with my eyes shining and my nails gone to claws.

She didn’t hesitate. Not for a second.

“Tessa,” she said. The voice she used on Kade when he was small. The voice that stopped a room.

“Put it down.”

Tessa’s head turned.

It turned slowly, the way an owl’s does, all the way to the door. For a moment the knife stopped pushing between us. And then I felt the pressure on it change. Shift. Turn, under my hand, away from

“No,” I said. “No-Aunt Cassie, no-”

Tessa tore her wrist out of my grip. I don’t know how. My hands were stronger than they had ever been. She simply wasn’t there anymore. She turned and crossed the room in three quick, light, barefoot steps.

Cassandra didn’t run. She didn’t step back.

She stepped forward. Between the girl and me. She put herself there, in the middle of the floor, with her arms out, the way you would put yourself between a child and a dog, and she said, “Tessa,” again, very gently.

The knife went in.

Low, under her ribs, on the left side. All the way. I heard it. Cassandra made a small, surprised noise,

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back into it. Her eyes moved. They went to the knife, standing out of Cassandra’s side, and to the blood coming out round it, dark on the robe. Then up, to Cassandra’s face.

Tessa opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

Then her eyes rolled up white, and she folded straight down onto the rug like a dropped coat and didn’t move.

Cassandra’s knees went.

I caught her. I don’t remember crossing the room. I had her, under the arms, and her weight came down on me, and I couldn’t hold it, and we went down together. Her head struck the edge of the hearth fender on the way, with a dull hard sound, and then she was lying across my lap on the floor of the Luna’s rooms, with her eyes half open and her hair spread over my knees and the knife still in her

side.