His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 169

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12:06 Mon, Nov 20

Chapter 169

Abby

at with Cassandra until the sun went down.

Daphne had moved her to the small room at the back of the clinic, where it was quiet. There was a window onto the garden, and a chair, and the bed, and nothing else. She lay exactly as she h lain all day, on her back, with her hands on the blanket and her face turned a little toward the window. der color was better. Daphne said so, and I made myself believe it. Her breathing was slow and even If you didn’t know, you would have thought she was asleep, and about to wake up at any moment and ask what on earth I was doing, sitting there staring at her.

I held her hand.

I didn’t try to reach her. I had wanted to, all day. I could feel her wolf, very faintly, the way I had felt it on the floor of my rooms, an old gray shape lying very still a long way down in the dark. Every time I felt it, my light stirred, and I had to hold it. Imogen had been very clear. Not today. Not one drop. You’ll need every bit of it tonight.

So I held her hand, and talked to her instead. About nothing. About the snow, and Ivy, and the cook who had sent up a pot of soup for her that nobody could eat. About Kade, who had sat in this chair all night and all morning until Liam had taken him by the arm and walked him out to sleep for three

hours. About the moon.

“It’s tonight,” I told her. “The binding. He’s going to do it.” My voice cracked. “He told me in front of you. Right here. So you’re a witness, Aunt Cassie. You have to hold him to it.”

Her hand lay in mine, warm and still.

At sunset, Daphne came to the door.

“It’s time,” she said gently. “I’ll sit with her. I won’t leave her. You go.”

I bent and kissed Cassandra’s forehead. It was cool and dry, and smelled of lavender soap. Somebody

had washed her hair.

Then I went.

***

The training hall was the same, and it wasn’t.

The high windows open, all of them, and the cold pooling on the floor. No lamps. No candles. The chalk circle, new and white on the mats, and the bowl and the juniper and the mistletoe on its cloth.

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and the dreams, and Ryan had listened without a word and then said I’ll be on the door, and that was

all.

And Imogen had made something new.

She was kneeling inside the circle, at the place where my head would be, with a coil of red thread in her lap. Not the thin red thread she had used to tie the juniper. Thicker. Wool, by the look of it, dyed dark, and long. She was winding it round her own left wrist, round and round, tight, with herteeth

set.

“What is that?” Kade said.

He was sitting on the bench with his shirt off already, gray-faced, with the threads on his throat as dark as I had ever seen them. He had not stood up much that day. Knox had been pacing in him since noon, and the thing under Knox had been awake for two days now, fully awake, turning and turning under his ribs like something in a cage.

“A leash,” Imogen said, without looking up.

“For what?”

“For her.” She jerked her chin at me. “When she goes into the wolf, I’m going to tie the other end round her foreleg. And when that woman pulls tonight, she’ll find she has to pull on me too.” She bit off the end of the thread. “I can’t shut the door. Nobody can, while the blade’s whole. But I can make it heavier to open.”

Liam looked at her from the doorway. “And if she pulls hard?”

“Then it’ll hurt.” Imogen tied the knot with her teeth and one hand. “Me first. That’s the point.”

***

Kade lay down in the circle.

Imogen painted him. The same green-black marks as last time, cold, down his ribs and up his throat, following the threads. He lay with his eyes on the ceiling and his jaw set and didn’t make a sound.

I let the robe fall.

The moonlight lay a foot from my bare feet, creeping in across the mats. I stood at the edge of it, and looked down at him, and thought about all the things I had said to him two nights ago with the door between us, and all the things he had said to me. None of them mattered now. That was the strange thing. I had been so angry. I still was, a little, somewhere at the bottom. But he was lying on the floor in a chalk circle with his chest painted and the threads crawling up toward his jaw, and he

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I stepped into the light and let Diana come.

She came up through the moonlight the way she had last time, and the time before. All at once, silver to the ends of her, and the hall went huge and sharp and full of scent. Juniper. Chalk the cold metal smell of the open windows. Kade, under all of it, the smell of him, and under that, the ber thing. Sour. Cold. Faintly sweet. Awake.

Imogen knelt by my head and took my foreleg in her hand, and wound the other end of the red wool round it, twice, and tied it off. It was warm from her wrist. I could feel her pulse in it.

“Remember the bowl,” she said quietly, into my ear. “Only what he needs. Not one drop more.”

I went and lay down along the length of him.

His skin was cold under my fur. I put my muzzle on his chest, over the wound, and felt the thing under it lift its head and look at me. It knew me. It had been waiting.

The moonlight touched my back.

I drew it in. Slowly, carefully, the way I had learned to with the bowl in this same hall, a little at a time, feeding it down through my chest and into my muzzle and into him. Not a flood. A thread. Imogen began to speak, low and rhythmic, in the language I didn’t know, and her painted marks on Kade’s skin went cold and then tight, the way they had last time, catching the light as it went into him. Holding it. Knotting it.

The thing in his chest fought.

It turned and clawed and tried to climb. I could feel it the way you feel a fish on a line, furious and heavy. I didn’t push. I didn’t pour. I held the thread of light steady, and let Imogen’s knots do the pulling, and gave him only what he needed to hold, and not one drop more.

It was working. I could feel it working. The thing in his chest was going down. Slowly. Sullenly. Fighting every inch. But going.

And then I felt the pull.

***

It came from behind me.

The way it had in the training hall, over the bowl. The way it had in the hut. As if something had

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The red wool on my foreleg went tight.

beard Imogen gasp. Behind me, by my head, I heard her voice catch and stumble and go on, and I smelled blood. Hers. Her nose was bleeding. She didn’t stop.

The pull got stronger.

And in the dark at the back of my head, very close, very warm, a voice I knew.

There you are.

Every hair on Diana’s back went up.

She was there. Right there. At the other end of the thread, close enough to touch, drinking down everything that came through it, every scrap of light I gave Kade, every thought, every fear. I felt her

feel me. I felt her smile.

You’re so careful now, she said. Look at you. A little at a time. Did the witch teach you that?

I didn’t answer. I held the thread.

It won’t work, little moon. It wants to go somewhere. You know it does. I taught you that.

I knew it.

I lay there with my muzzle on Kade’s chest and the moon on my back and the pull dragging at me like a current, and I thought about the floor of a stone chamber. My hand flat on the stone. Her burned hand over mine. It wants to go somewhere. Let it.

She was right. It did want to go somewhere. It had wanted to go somewhere since the day I was

born.

And for weeks, every time I let my light go, it had gone where she was pulling it. Toward her. Along

her thread. Into her hands.

The thread ran both ways. Imogen had said so, in this same hall. Light runs both ways along a

thread.

I didn’t push the light back.

I didn’t try to shut the door. I didn’t pull away from the pull. I did the thing she had taught me

herself, on the floor of that chamber, with her hand over mine.

I let it go where it wanted to.

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I saw.

much. A breath. A heartbeat. But I saw.

A low room, dug into the earth. Walls of packed earth and stone. A roof of black beams, crusted with old soot, so low it almost touched her head, and iron hooks in the beams, in a row, rusted, w bundles of dried herbs hanging from them. A-stone floor. A candle on a shelf cut into the wall burning steady, very close. Her own hand in front of her, the burned one, curled on her knee.

A door, standing half open, with the night outside it. Snow, blue under the full moon. The bumped shapes of two more huts beyond it, dug into the slope, nothing but mounds of snow with a dark doorway in each. And past them, at the bottom of a slope, something long and white and frozen, hanging down a black rock face in great twisted ropes of ice. A waterfall. Frozen solid.

And I felt her know.

She felt me there, behind her eyes. In her room. Looking out through her face. I felt the shock go through her like a bell. For one heartbeat, she didn’t understand. Then she did.

No-

I felt her tear the thread out of my hands.

***

It snapped back on me so hard it was like being struck.

I came back into my own body all at once, on the floor of the training hall, with my muzzle on Kade’s chest and the moon on my back and the red wool on my foreleg suddenly slack. The pull was gone. All of it. As if somebody had cut the rope.

Under my muzzle, the thing in Kade’s chest gave one last heave, and went down.

All the way down. Into the bottom of him, curled and heavy and still, the way it had gone at the first moon. I felt the knots Imogen had made close on it, one after another, pulled tight. The threads on his throat went gray. Then pale. Then stopped.

“Stop,” Imogen said hoarsely. “Abigail. Stop. It’s done.”

I stopped.

The moon slid off my back as it climbed. I let it go. I let Diana go. I felt myself come back up through her, slowly, into my own skin, onto the cold mats, shaking, with Kade’s arms already round

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