His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 171

Chapter 171

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Kade

Chapter 171

Abby slept for most of two days after the binding.

Daphne said it was the best thing for her, and I believed her, because I could feel it through the bond. Not the cold, frightening emptiness of the night in the clinic, when the light ran out other all at once. Something slower. A deep, heavy stillness, like ground under snow, with something alive and patient underneath it, waiting for spring.

She woke sometimes. Long enough to drink what Ivy held to her mouth, and look at the window and ask about my mother, and fall asleep again before I had finished answering. Once she woke and looked at me sitting on the edge of the bed, and frowned, and said, “You should be working,” and was asleep before I could tell her I was.

I was. I had to be. A storehouse to rebuild before the worst of the winter came down. A council that watched me every time I stood up, to see if my knees would go. A pack that had seen its Alpha’s mother carried out of the Luna’s rooms on a stretcher, and the Luna kneeling in the blood. I went to my office every morning and did what had to be done, and I was very good at it, and every hour of the day some part of me was upstairs in that dim room, listening to her breathe.

And every night, I went to her.

I never stopped to think about it. The moment the last door in the packhouse closed, I was on the stairs. I would take my boots off at the threshold so I wouldn’t wake her, and get in beside her, and lie there in the dark with her against me, and feel the bond settle between us like a held breath let go.

It helped her. I hadn’t known that it would, the first night. I had only wanted to be near her. But I felt it happen. Lying there with her head on my chest and my arm round her, I felt something go from me into her, slowly, steadily, the way warmth goes from one body to another under a blanket. Not light. Nothing like the light. Only me. Whatever I had, the bond took a little of it and gave it to her, and in the morning she was warmer, and slept less heavily, and on the second morning she opened her

eyes before I left and smiled at me.

“There you are,” I said.

Something went across her face. Very quick. I didn’t understand it until later, when I remembered whose words those were.

“Here I am,” she said, after a moment. And put her hand on my face.

*****

On the third morning, she got up.

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12:06 Mon, Nov 2

“Daphne said one more day,” I said.

Daphne says a lot of things.” She didn’t look away from the window. “I’ve been to see your mother.”

I stopped in the doorway.

“Ivy helped me down.” She turned her head. “I only sat with her. I didn’t do anything I promised Imogen.” Her mouth moved. “Her color’s better too. Daphne says she moved her hand in the night. Just once. Toward the window.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

I came across the room and knelt down by the chair and put my head in her lap, the way I hadn’t done since I was a boy with my own mother, and she put her hand in my hair, and we stayed like that for a while without saying anything at all.

***

The letter came on the fourth day, a little after ten, by courier from the Council’s clerk.

I knew what it was before I saw it. Ryan came up the stairs to my office himself instead of sending someone, and stood in the door with a long cream envelope in his hand, held a little away from him, the way you hold something that might be wet.

“From the Council,” he said.

The seal was gray wax. A ring of small stars, unbroken. I had seen it twice in my life. Once on the letter that confirmed me in my father’s chair, eight years ago, a week after his funeral. And once on a letter to my father, when I was a boy, that he had read standing up at this same window and then burned in the grate without a word.

I broke it.

It wasn’t long. The Council never wrote long letters.

To Kade Blackwell, Alpha of Moonhaven.

The Council of Alphas of the valley has received grave representations concerning the pack of Moonhaven, its Alpha, and its Luna. These touch upon the fitness of the Alpha to hold and defend his house; upon a traitor to the pack, pardoned and since concealed by its leadership; upon a power held by the Luna which is said to be beyond her control and the control of her pack; and upon an attack in the Luna’s private rooms in which the Alpha’s mother was grievously wounded.

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Greyhollow.

read it twice. Then I put it down on the desk and turned it face down, and put my hand flat on it.

Ryan was still in the doorway. He hadn’t moved.

“Greyhollow,” he said.

“Greyhollow.”

“That’s-” He stopped. His voice was very flat. “You’ll have to stay there. My Alpha and my Luna Under Sebastian Thorne’s roof, with his men on your doors, for as long as the session sits.”

“Yes.”

“With the Luna.”

I didn’t answer.

“Kade,” Ryan said. It was the first time in a month he had used my name. “You can’t take her there.”

“The Council has asked for her by name.” I didn’t lift my hand from the letter. “If I go without her, I’m hiding her. That’s what they’ll say, and they’ll be right. And then there’s no hearing. There’s only a judgment.”

Ryan stood there a moment longer.

Then he came in, and shut the door behind him, and sat down in the chair across from my desk without being asked. He put his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor.

“Then I’m coming,” he said. “And I’m choosing who else comes. And none of them are going to sleep

while we’re under that roof.”

“I know.”

He looked up. He searched my face for a moment.

“You were going to ask me,” he said.

“I was going to ask you.”

He nodded slowly, once. He didn’t smile. But something in his shoulders let go that had been held there since the morning in my mother’s corridor, when I had stood in front of him and lied.

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I had called the council. Not all of them; there wasn’t time for all of them, and I didn’t want the whole town knowing before I knew what I thought. Garrick, and Hester, and Edmund. They sat round

he Jong table and I read them the letter, all of it, in an even voice, and then I put it down.

Edmund had gone pale. Hester wrote something in her notebook and underlined it twice.

Garrick said nothing.

I had braced myself for it. I had sat at my desk for four hours with the letter face down under my hand and listened in my head to every word he was going to say. I warned you. In this room. When you pardoned her. When you hid her. When you let the Luna’s light go round this house like lamp left burning. I warned you.

He didn’t say any of it.

He sat at the far end of the table with both hands on the head of his cane, and looked at the letter on the table in front of me, and then he looked at me. For a long time. His old face was gray.

“Greyhollow,” he said at last.

“Yes.”

He was quiet again.

“Your father went before the Council once,” Garrick said slowly. “Before you were born. A border dispute with Stonecrest. He took me with him. I was younger than you are.” He turned the cane slowly under his hands. “The host that year was a man who wanted your father’s eastern woods. He put us in rooms above the kitchens, where the smoke came up through the floor. He served us last at every meal. He had his own wolves stand behind our chairs.” His mouth thinned. “And he very nearly got the

eastern woods.”

Nobody said anything.

“I don’t like your Luna’s light,” Garrick said. “I never have. I don’t understand it, and I don’t like what I don’t understand. And I don’t like that girl in the clinic, and I liked the Sinclair girl a great deal less, and I don’t like any of the things you’ve done in the last month without asking this table.” He looked down the length of the table at me. “But I like Sebastian Thorne even less than all of that put together. And I will not see a pup like that sit in judgment on Nathaniel Blackwell’s son in his own

hall without someone at his back who remembers how it’s done.”

He set the cane against the table.

“I’m coming,” he said. “If you’ll have me.”

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12:07 Mon, Nov 20

told Abby that night.

She was sitting up in bed when I came in, with the lamp on and a book face down on the blanket, and she knew. Of course she did. She had felt it through the bond the moment I broke the sea at ten that morning, and she had waited all day for me to come and tell her, and I hadn’t. I had sat with Garrick and Ryan and the map of the Greyhollow road until the lamps were lit.

“Show me,” she said.

I gave it to her.

She read it the way I had. Twice. Her face didn’t change. When she reached the last line, I saw her eyes stop on it, and stay there.

“Greyhollow,” she said.