His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 168

Chapter 168

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Chapter 168

Bash

There was a candle burning on my desk when I came back into the study, and I hadn’t lit it.

I stopped in the doorway with the glass in my hand.

It was past two. The house was asleep. I had gone down to the kitchens for ice, because I had ent the boy to bed hours ago and I didn’t like my whisky warm, and I had been gone perhaps five minutes. When I left, the study had been dark except for the lamp on the desk. Now the lamp was off. On the blotter, beside the letter I had been failing to write all evening, a plain white candle stood in tin holder, burning very steadily with no draught to move it.

And in my chair, behind my desk, there was a woman.

She had her feet up on the corner of the desk. Muddy boots, on my father’s mahogany. A long dark coat, open, over something gray and plain. Her hair was dark and shot all through with silver, pinned up carelessly. One arm lay along the arm of the chair, stiff, as if it didn’t bend the way it used to. The other hand rested in her lap, and in the candlelight I could see that it was burned. The skin shiny and puckered, the fingers curled in on themselves like a dead bird’s claws.

She was smiling at me.

I knew who she was. Anyone who had heard about the night of the Moonhaven field would have known. The witch who had walked out of the trees beside the Rogue King, and put a blade in the Alpha of Moonhaven, and walked away again into the dark.

I should have been frightened. My father would have called the guard.

I came in and shut the door behind me.

“You’re in my chair,” I said.

“I am.” Her voice was low and warm, with a faint rasp in it, like a cat’s tongue. “It’s a very good chair. Your father had excellent taste in furniture.” She looked me up and down. “And in very little

else.”

I went to the sideboard and poured a second glass, and brought it to the desk and set it down in front of her. Then I sat in the chair on the other side. The one people sat in when they came to ask me for things.

She looked at the glass. Then at me. Something in her face approved.

“You were at Moonhaven,” she said. “In the entry hall. You saw her.”

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old her. Not all of it. She didn’t need all of it. She needed the end: the Luna on her knees on the stone with her hands on her Alpha’s chest, and the air in the hall going strange, and every lamp along the walls flickering. And then the girl standing up, with her eyes gone silver as coins and her nails curved into claws, telling me in a voice I wouldn’t have believed came out of something that size to get out of her house.

The witch had taken her feet off the desk while I talked. She was leaning forward now with her good elbow on the blotter and her chin on her hand, and she was looking at me the way a starving mak looks through a window at someone else’s dinner.

“Yes,” she said, very quietly. Not to me. “That’s her.”

“You know her.”

“I made her.” She sat back. “Or I started to. Somebody interrupted.”

I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to look as if I needed to know.

“And him,” I said. “Kade Blackwell. Can’t stand for more than half an hour without his knees going. Can’t fight. He’s a joke. A boy in his father’s chair with a hole in his chest. He can’t hold his own council, he can’t hold his own house. He pardoned the traitor who sold his Luna over the border, and from what I hear she’s walking round his packhouse free as a bird.” I laughed. “He’s finished. He just

hasn’t noticed yet.”

“He doesn’t matter,” the witch said.

I stopped.

“Kade Blackwell is a dead man. He has been since the night I put my blade in him.” She shrugged, one shoulder, the good one. “He’s only walking about because that girl keeps pouring herself into him like water into a cracked jug. She can’t keep it up forever. Nobody needs to waste a moment on him.”

She said it the way you would say it was going to rain.

“Watch the traitor, though,” she said.

“The Sinclair girl?”

“She used to warm the Rogue King’s bed.” Her mouth twisted. “Thirteen years I spent on that man. Building him into something worth having. And one girl with a pretty face crawls into his bed, and he rolls over like a dog.” She looked down at her burned hand. “Whipped. That’s the word for it. Watch her, Sebastian. A girl who can do that to him can do it to anyone.”

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I set my glass down.

Since last night. They found her on the floor of the Luna’s rooms. With the Luna kneeling over her, soaked in her blood to the elbows, with her eyes silver and her nails gone to claws.” She turned the glass I had poured her round and round on the blotter without drinking. “She isn’t dead. Not wet. She isn’t awake, either. She may never be.”

“Did the Luna-”

She looked up at me, and didn’t say anything at all. She only smiled.

“Does it matter?” she said.

It didn’t. I understood that at once. It didn’t matter in the least. The Alpha’s men had seen what they had seen. By now all of Moonhaven would be talking of nothing else. By the end of the week, so would the valley.

“How do you know?”

“I was there.” She drained the glass at last, in one swallow. “In a manner of speaking.”

The candle burned very steadily between us. I found I didn’t want to look at it.

***

“So,” I said. “What do you want?”

“What you want.” She got up, and came round the desk, slowly, favoring the stiff arm, and stood by the window with her back to the dark glass. “Moonhaven broken. That Alpha dead, and that pack scattered, and that valley open for whoever’s quick enough to walk into it. Greyhollow is very close to that valley.”

“It is.”

“And Ravenwood is closer still. Smaller. Weaker. With an Alpha who’s just promised Moonhaven he’ll stand with them.” She smiled. “When Moonhaven falls, he’ll have nobody to stand with. And nothing left to bargain with but his sister.”

I took a drink.

“You can have her,” the witch said. “The little wren. She’s nothing to me. She’ll come to you in the end, with no mate and no friends left in that valley, because she’ll have nowhere else to go.” Her voice was very soft. “And you’ll have the passes, and the timber, and the river, and the eastern slope. And

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After. A girl like that shouldn’t go to waste. And she’d be a widow.”

The witch didn’t move.

*

She only looked at me. And the candle on the desk between us, which had been burning straight up all this time, guttered once. Shrank down very small, and blue, and stood there trembling.

The room got cold.

All at once, the way a room gets cold when someone opens a door onto a winter night. My breath went up in a cloud. Frost came up on the inside of the window behind her, spreading out from her shoulders across the black glass in long white feathers.

“The girl,” she said pleasantly, “is mine.”

I didn’t say anything.