His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 179

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Chapter 179

Kade

The bond didn’t break. I kept waiting for it to.

I sat in the back of the truck with Garrick asleep in the front seat and Ivy’s grandmother’s n closed in my fist, and felt it stretch. Mile after mile. Out past the lime trees and the river road, pascald Thorne’s high straight walls, over the bridge at Millford and up into the long valley toward home. It went thinner with every mile. A rope, and then a cord, and then a single thread, and then something so fine I had to close my eyes and hold my breath to find it at all.

But it was there. Every time I looked for it, it was there. Very faint, very far, like a single note held a long way off.

She was sitting down. I could tell that much. Somewhere warm, and quiet. She was very tired, and very sad, and holding herself together the way she had held herself together in that hall, with both

hands.

And under all of it, small and stubborn and steady, she was thinking of me.

I opened my hand and looked at the pin. The small pale stone. I closed my hand again.

Ryan drove. He didn’t speak the whole six hours. Once, on the long climb out of the river valley, he took one hand off the wheel and reached back between the seats without looking, and put it on my knee, and left it there for a mile. Then he took it back.

***

It was dark when we came down the last hill into Moonhaven.

Ryan had called ahead from Millford. I had heard him do it, low and short, on the phone to Edmund Marsh, and I hadn’t stopped him. Somebody had to tell them. I couldn’t have.

So they knew.

They were waiting. Not a crowd. Nobody had called them out. But there were lights on all along the lane, in every window, and people in the doorways, and on the steps of the bakery, and along the low wall by the lake, standing in the cold in their coats with their breath going up white under the lamps. Watching the trucks come in. They didn’t wave. They didn’t call out. They only stood and watched us go by, one truck after another, and I saw them looking. Through the windshields. Into the back seats.

Looking for her.

At the packhouse, there were more. Along the drive, on the steps, at the door. The kitchen girls in

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I got out. I made myself do it in one movement, the way I had at Greyhollow. The cold hit me. The thing under my ribs turned over, slowly, at the sight of all those faces, and I let it.

walked up the steps alone. They stood back to let me pass. I felt them watching me, and then watching the truck behind me, and the empty seat in it, and then watching me again.

Halfway up, an old woman. I knew by sight, one of the lake-shore widows, who had spat e snow once when Imogen walked by, put out her hand and caught my sleeve.

“Alpha,” she said. Her voice was thin and cracked. “Where’s our Luna?”

Our.

I looked down at her old hand on my sleeve. I couldn’t answer. She let go.

I went on up the steps, and in at the door, and didn’t stop until I had shut myself in my office and stood in the dark with my back against the wood.

***

Ivy found me there an hour later.

She knocked, and didn’t wait, and came in with a tray, the way she always did. She put it down on the desk. Then she turned on the lamp and looked at me, sitting in my father’s chair with my coat still

Her eyes were red. She had been crying, and stopped, and she was holding her face very firmly in

place.

“You haven’t eaten,” she said.

“No.”

“Eat that.”

I didn’t move. She didn’t go.

“Is she all right?” Ivy said at last. Her voice wobbled. “Is she- are they treating her properly? Has she got everything? I packed for a week. I only packed for a week, Alpha, I didn’t know–”

I opened my hand on the desk.

She looked at the pin lying in my palm. I watched her know it. Her face crumpled for a second, and then she pulled it straight again, by force.

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with her eyes squeezed shut.

“I’ll keep it for you,” I said. “Until she’s home. I told her I’d bring it back, and I will. Into her hand Net yours.” I didn’t know why it mattered. It did. “Is that all right?”

Ivy nodded, fiercely, without opening her eyes.

Then she turned round and went out, very fast, and I heard her crying in the corridor all the way to

the stairs.

I ate what was on the tray. All of it. I didn’t taste any of it.

***

I went to see my mother.

The clinic was dark except for the lamp in the back room. Daphne was there, in the chair by the bed, with a book open on her knee that she hadn’t been reading. She stood up when I came in. She looked at me, and then past me, at the empty doorway, and her mouth thinned.

“I heard,” she said.

“How is she?”

“Better. Every day.” Daphne put her hand on my arm, briefly. That was a great deal, from her. “She squeezed my fingers this afternoon. I asked her to, and she did. Not much. But she did.” She looked at me over her glasses. “I’ll be in the ward.”

She went out and left me there.

My mother lay as she had lain for three weeks, with her face turned toward the window and her braid over her shoulder. Somebody had put a sprig of winter jasmine in a glass on the sill. Her color was almost right. She looked as if she were only asleep, and would wake at any moment and frown at me

for coming in with my coat on.

I sat down in Daphne’s chair. I took her hand.

“They’ve kept her,” I said.

I had meant to say it gently. It didn’t come out gently. It came out of me flat and hard, like something dropped on stone.

“They’ve kept her, Mother. At Greyhollow. In his house. Until the spring, or until they decide they understand what they’ve done, and they never will.” My voice went. I let it. There was nobody to hear. “And I let them. I sat there and let them. She stood up before I could, and said yes, and I let her,

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“Garrick stood up for me,” I said, after a while. “In front of all of them. You’d have liked that. You’d have hated how much you liked it.”

Nothing.

I sat there a long time. I told her about the list, and Corran’s daughters. I told her about the girl, and the man on his knees on the floor of Thorne’s hall. I told her about the line of warriors at the foot of the steps, with their hands held out. I didn’t tell her about Sebastian’s face, or the thin southern woman’s question, or what Abby had said in our room with her arms round me. Some things you don’t

say, even to someone who can’t hear you.

“Wake up,” I said at the end. Very low. “Please. I can’t do this on my own.’

Her fingers moved in mine.

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It was very small. Daphne had said it would be. A pressure, no more, and gone. But I felt it. I sat there with my head bent over her hand, and felt it, and couldn’t say anything else at all.

***

1

I didn’t go to the Luna’s rooms. I couldn’t. I went to my own.

She had been sleeping there since before the winter. Her brush was on the dresser. Her robe hung on the back of the door, where she had left it the morning we drove away, and her book lay face down on her side of the bed, open at the page where she had stopped. It still smelled of her.

I put the pin down on the nightstand, on her side. Then I took off my boots, and my coat, and my shirt, and lay down on my side of the bed, on top of the covers, in the dark.

I didn’t reach for her. There was nobody there to reach for.

I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling, and found the bond, and followed it. Out of the room, out of the house, away across the dark and the snow and the long valley and the river, all that long way. Thinner and thinner. Until it was so faint I could barely hold it.

She was lying down too. In a strange bed, in the dark. I could feel her there, at the very end of it, very far away. She wasn’t asleep either.

I’m here, I told her.