His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 167

Chapter 167

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Chapter 167

Kade

My mother was bleeding to death under my hands, and my mate was holding her together.

That was all I knew, for a while. I knelt on the floor of the Luna’s rooms with my knees in the blood and my hands over Abby’s, and felt both of them through my palms. Under Abby’s fingers, mother’s side, wet and warm and much too still. Under my own, Abby’s hands, shaking, with the claws still curved at the ends of them, and the light going out of them into my mother in a steady stream I could feel the way you feel heat off a stove.

I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t heal. I couldn’t help Abby hold. I could only kneel there and keep my hands where they were and say her name, and my mother’s name, over and over, as if one of them might need to hear it.

My mother’s face was gray. Her eyes were closed. There was blood in her hair, at the back, where she had struck the fender. I could hear her breathing. Very faint. Very slow. Each breath took so long to come that I stopped breathing myself between them, waiting.

And beside me, Abby was going.

I could feel it through the bond. Every second she held on, there was a little less of her. Her hands were getting colder under mine. Her face, in the candlelight, was white to the lips, and the silver in her eyes was so bright it hurt to look at, and she was shaking, all over, the fine hard shaking of someone holding something far too heavy for far too long.

“Abby,” I said. “Abby. How long can you-

“Don’t,” she said. Through her teeth. “Don’t ask me that.”

I didn’t ask again.

***

Daphne came with two of the clinic girls and the stretchers.

I heard them on the stairs. Then they were in the room, all at once, Daphne on her knees on my mother’s other side with her bag open, not looking at anyone, her hands already on the knife, on the wound, on my mother’s throat.

“Don’t take it out,” Abby said.

“I’m not going to take it out.” Daphne didn’t look up. “Keep doing whatever you’re doing. Don’t stop. Not for anything.” She glanced, once, very fast, at Abby’s hands and Abby’s eyes. Her face didn’t

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Ryan and the two night watchmen and a warrior who had come up the stairs behind Daphne, very slowly, as if she were made of glass. Daphne held the knife steady. Abby kept her hands on my

other’s side the whole way, walking bent over beside the stretcher, out of the door and along the corridor and down the long stairs, step by step, barefoot, in her soaked nightgown. I walked on her other side with my hand on her back. I didn’t know which of them I was holding up.

At the turn of the stairs, I looked back.

Owen was coming down behind us with the girl in his arms. He must have come up from theinig stairs at the first shout. He was carrying her the way you carry a sleeping child, very carefull her head against his shoulder and her bare feet hanging, scratched and dirty, with bark still caught

between her toes. She hadn’t woken. His face was white as chalk.

He saw me looking.

“Alpha,” he said. His voice cracked. “I was on the stairs. I never left the stairs. I swear to you, I never

“Not now, Owen.” I couldn’t think about it. I couldn’t think about anything but the stretcher in front of me. “We’ll deal with it in the morning.”

He swallowed.

“Bind her hands,” I said. “In the clinic. Soft cloth. Nothing that hurts her.” I made myself say the rest. “And stay with her. Don’t take your eyes off her. Not for a second.”

“Yes, Alpha.”

At the bottom of the stairs he turned the other way, toward the back ward, with the girl in his arms.

I didn’t see her again that night.

***

They wouldn’t let me near the table.

Daphne put me against the wall with one look and one finger, and I stayed there. I could see everything from there. I made sure I could. I stood with my back against the cold plaster of the clinic and watched them lay my mother on the long table under the lamp, and cut the robe off her, and the nightgown under it, and Daphne bend over the knife with her instruments laid out on a cloth beside her like a row of small bright teeth.

And Abby, on a stool at the side of the table, with her hands still flat on my mother’s ribs. Bent over. Shaking.

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instruments, or the small dreadful noise my mother made once, without waking, when the knife came out. I had seen worse. I had lain on that table myself.

It was standing against the wall with my hands useless at my sides, and the bond pulling me one way and my blood pulling me the other. My mother on the table, who might be dying. My mate beside her, who was pouring herself out into my mother’s body until there was nothing left. I wanted to go to my mother and take her hand and tell her not to leave me. I wanted to go to Abby and pull her hands away and make her stop before she emptied herself out on the floor. I wanted both. I could do either. If I went to my mother, I would be in Daphne’s way. If I took Abby’s hands away, my meher might bleed out on the table in front of me.

So I stood against the wall, and did nothing, and felt it tear.

****

Liam came at some point. I didn’t see him arrive. He was simply there, beside Abby’s stool, with his coat thrown on over a shirt he had buttoned wrong and his hair standing up, and his hands on her shoulders, holding her steady on the stool. He didn’t say anything. He looked at me once, across the room, and I saw his face, and then he looked back down at his sister and held on.

Three of the night watch were in the passage. I could hear them. Daphne had sent one of the girls out to say she needed blood, and they had lined up along the wall in their coats without being asked, the first three who had heard. One of them was the young one. The one who had said Goddess in the

doorway and stepped back.

He gave his blood first. I watched him through the open door, sitting very straight on the chair with his sleeve rolled up, not looking at anyone.

The night went on.

At some point, I felt the light run out of Abby.

Not all at once. The way the last of the water goes out of a basin. There was a little, and then less, and then there was nothing at all, and through the bond I felt her go suddenly, horribly empty, like a room with every window broken. She swayed on the stool. Her hands slid on my mother’s ribs. Liam caught her before she fell.

I was across the room before I knew I had moved.

“I’m all right.” Her voice was barely there. She was looking at my mother, not at me. “Is she- Did it

“It held,” Daphne said, without looking up. “Whatever you did, Abby. It held long enough. I’ve got

her now.” She glanced at me. “Take her away from my table, Alpha. Before she falls on it.”

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her hair back, and in her hair, and down the whole front of her, soaked through, already going dark

and stiff.

She was shaking so hard her teeth knocked.

“Ivy,” I said, without turning round.

Ivy was in the doorway. I don’t know when she had come. She was in her coat over her niggown, with her freckled face blotched red from crying, and she came at once.

“Clean clothes for the Luna,” I said. “Warm ones. Something soft. From my rooms, not her And towels. And hot water, as much as you can carry.” I looked at her. “Quickly, Ivy. Please.”

She went. I heard her running in the passage.

“I’m not leaving,” Abby said.

“You’re not leaving. You’re going into the back room with your brother and taking that off and getting warm, and then you’re coming straight back here and sitting in that chair beside her for as long as you like.” I held her face. “But you can’t sit there like this, Abby. You can’t. You’re frozen. And when she wakes up, she’s not going to want to see you covered in her own blood.”

Something broke in her face.

Then she nodded. Once.

Liam got his arm under her and took her away to the back room. She went without looking back. I watched the door close behind them, and stood there for a moment in the middle of the clinic, empty-handed, between the two of them, and didn’t know where to put myself.

Then I went back to my mother.

***

Daphne finished a little before dawn.

She stood back from the table and pulled her gloves off, slowly, one finger at a time, and dropped them in the basin. She washed her hands. The water went red, and then pink, and then clear. She dried them on a towel. She didn’t look at me until she had finished.

“She’s alive,” she said.

I breathed.

“The knife missed everything I was most afraid of. Just. The bleeding’s stopped. I’ve closed it. If

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Daphne didn’t answer at once.

don’t know,” she said.

“Daphne.”

“I don’t know.” She looked at me, very straight. She had known me since the day I was born he had never once lied to me. “Her wolf’s holding on. I can feel it. Breathing on her own, heart steady That’s good. That’s more than good.” She paused. “But she isn’t there. Not yet. She’s gone a long way down, and I don’t know how long it takes to come back from that. Days. Weeks.” She stopped. “I can’t tell you when. I can’t tell you she will. I’m sorry.”

I stood there and looked at my mother on the table.

They had laid her straight, with a clean sheet over her up to the shoulders and her hands at her sides. Her hair had been washed off her face. Someone had found a pillow. She looked very small. I had never in my life thought of my mother as small.

“Can I sit with her?”

“Yes,” Daphne said. Gently. “Sit with her. Talk to her. I don’t know if she can hear. It doesn’t hurt to

try.”

***

They moved her to the bed by the stove. I pulled a chair up to it and sat down and took her hand. It was warm. That surprised me. I had expected it to be cold.