His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 180

Chapter 180

Sloane

For three days, it was almost easy.

We came back up the mountain the evening after the hut, and Teague had the stove going and a pot of something on it, and the cabin smelled of woodsmoke and unions and wet wool. Nobody taked about the list. Nobody talked about the box. Malachi had given it to Liam, and it was gone, and the space where it had been in his pack was just space.

In the mornings, he split wood. I heard the axe through the wall of my room before it was light, the same slow, steady rhythm, the way I had heard it every morning since the storm. Teague went down to the wire and walked it, and came back with snow in his beard, and grunted, and made coffee. I sat at the table with my leg on the other chair and mended the elbow of Malachi’s good shirt, badly, because there was nobody else to do it and Teague couldn’t hold a needle. In the afternoons, if the sun came out, I let Rhea out and ran her down along the stream and back, and Malachi pretended not to watch from the porch.

At night he slept on the old cot by the stove, under a heap of blankets, with his boots lined up underneath it. When I first came up here, half-dead from the storm, he had slept sitting up in the chair beside it, so he would hear if I called. When I got better, he went back to the cot. Neither of us ever mentioned it.

It was almost easy. That was the trouble.

Because every morning I woke up and lay there in the dark, listening to the axe, and counted. The hearing was in four days. Then three. Then two. I knew the dates. Liam had told me, on the ridge. They leave in five days. And somewhere down there, on the other side of the mountains, Cassandra was lying in a clinic bed with her face turned to the window and a hole in her where a knife had gone, and I had found out about it a week too late, from Liam, in a shepherd’s hut, and I didn’t know if she

was better or worse or dead.

I didn’t know anything. That was the worst of it. I had been gone from Moonhaven for six weeks, and for most of that time I hadn’t wanted to know anything. Now I couldn’t stand not knowing for an

hour.

*******

On the third day, I went up to the ridge at noon.

Teague drove me down as far as the turn, the way he always did, and I climbed the last half mile through the trees on my own and stood on the flat gray rock with the phone held up, and waited.

Two bars.

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They would be on the road by now. Or already there. In Sebastian Thorne’s house, at Sebastian Thorne’s table, with Abby beside Kade in whatever Ivy had packed for her, and every Alpha in the valley watching her eyes. And Bash smiling. I knew exactly how he would be smiling.

I stood on the rock for an hour, until the cold came up through my boots and my leg began to ache in long slow pulls. Therr Fcalled one more time, and got his voice again, cheerful and ordman, and

climbed down.

Teague didn’t ask. He looked at my face when I got into the truck, and put it in gear, and drove

***

Malachi was on the porch when we came back up the track. He watched me get out of the truck, and he watched me come up the steps, and he saw.

“Nothing?” he said.

“Nothing.”

He nodded. He didn’t say anything else for a moment. He was sitting on the top step with a knife and a piece of wood, the way he did when he had nothing to do with his hands, and he turned the wood over and looked at it.

“You went yesterday,” he said. “And the day before.”

“I know when I went.”

“It’s a long climb on that leg.” He shaved a curl off the wood. “And it’s half a tank, every time, there and back. We don’t have that much left till Teague goes down to the post.” He didn’t look up. “They’ll call when there’s something to say. Going up there every day won’t make it come any faster.”

I stood on the porch with my coat still on and looked down at the top of his head.

It wasn’t what he said. It was the way he said it. Reasonably. Quietly. As if I were a child asking to be taken to see the ponies again.

“That’s fuel, is it?” I said.

He looked up.

“That’s what you’re worried about. The fuel.” My voice was rising. I let it. “Cassandra Blackwell has been lying in a bed for two weeks with a hole in her, and I didn’t even know. Abby is sitting in a room right now with a man who wants to take her apart, and I don’t know if she’s all right, I don’t know if

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“They’re my family.” It came out of me hoarse and raw. “Do you understand that? They’re mine/

Abby’s the closest thing I’ve got to a sister. Liam’s the only one who ever stood up for me when didn’t deserve it. They’re mine, and I have every right to worry about them, and you don’t get to sit there and tell me it’s a waste of fuel.”

He had gone very quiet.

He put the knife down on the step beside him, and the piece of wood beside it, carefully

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

I didn’t want that. I wanted him to argue. I wanted something to push against. I stood there on the porch with my hands shaking, and he only sat on the step and looked up at me, and didn’t say anything else, and I couldn’t stand it.

I went past him into the cabin and shut the door of my room, hard enough to rattle the window.

***

I lasted an hour.

Then I couldn’t stand the room either. It was too small and too quiet, and I could hear Teague moving about in the main room, putting things away, very carefully, the way people move when they know there’s been a fight and are trying not to be part of it.

I went out the back. Round the side of the cabin, past the woodpile, to the steps at the front, which were in the last of the sun. I sat down on the top one with my coat round me and my knees drawn up and looked out at the clearing, at the long blue shadows of the trees on the snow, and didn’t think about anything.

That isn’t true. I thought about everything.

I heard the door open behind me. I didn’t turn round.

He came out and sat down on the step below me. Not beside me. A step down, the way he had sat that first morning after the storm, when I told him I was staying. He had two mugs. He held one up to me without looking round, and after a moment, I took it.

Tea. Too strong, with too much sugar in it. The way Teague made it.

We sat there for a while.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last. To the clearing. “About the fuel.”

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“I don’t know how to do this,” he said. “Wait for news. About people. I never had anyone to wait

for.” He turned the mug slowly in his hands. “When you go up there and come back with nothing, your face-” He stopped. “I wanted it to stop. That’s all. I wanted to make it stop, and I couldn’t, so I said something stupid about gas.’

I couldn’t answer that.

“They’ll be all right,” he said.

“You don’t know that.”

“No.” He didn’t pretend. “I don’t. But I sat across a table from your Alpha in that hut, and I watched him. He’s his father’s son. Nathaniel could stand in front of a whole room that wanted him gone, and not give an inch, and walk out with what he came for.” He was quiet for a moment. “And the girl. Your Abby. She held that air in the hut so tight I couldn’t breathe for it. She won’t let them see anything

she doesn’t want them to see.”

My eyes stung. I looked down into my tea.

“And Cassandra,” I said. It came out very small.

He didn’t answer that one. He didn’t lie to me. He only put his mug down on the step, and turned round on it, and looked up at me.

I don’t know what he saw. I don’t know what my face was doing. But he reached up, slowly, the way you reach toward something that might bolt, and took the mug out of my hands and set it beside his own. And then he just waited. A step below me, with his hands open on his knees.

I leaned forward and put my forehead down on his shoulder.

That was all. I didn’t cry. I wanted to, and it wouldn’t come. I just stayed there, bent over, with my face against the rough wool of his coat and my hands balled in my lap, and breathed, and he didn’t move. He didn’t put his arms round me. He held very still and let me lean, and after a while, his hand came up and rested on the back of my neck. Warm. Heavy. Just resting there.

“I don’t know what I am anymore,” I said into his shoulder. “I was going to be Luna. I had it all worked out. And then I was a traitor, and then I was your-” I stopped. “And now I don’t know. I can’t go home. I don’t know if I’d want to, if I could. And I sit up here and wait for a phone to ring, and I don’t even know what I’m hoping it’ll say.”

His thumb moved, once, on the back of my neck.

Then he got up off his step, and sat down on mine, beside me, close, so that his hip was against

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“You don’t have to know,” he said, into my hair. “Not tonight.”

We sat there like that until the sun went down behind the trees and the cold came up off the show. Then he stood, and put his hand down to me, and I took it, and he took my weight and brought me up

off the step, carefully, until the leg held. And let go.

***

Teague made supper and didn’t say anything about anything. He looked at us both when we me in, and grunted, and put a plate in front of each of us. Afterward he washed up one-handed, and banked the stove, and went to bed early again, and shut his door very firmly behind him.

Malachi sat down on the edge of his cot by the stove and began to unlace his boots.

I stood in the doorway of my room and looked at him. At his face in the firelight, tired and hard and older than his years. At his hands on the laces. The narrow cot, out here in the main room, so that the bed in the back room could be mine and the door between us could stay shut.

I thought about the temple.

I didn’t want to. It came anyway. His rooms at the temple, and me, going to him every night of my own accord because the alternative was the lower level, and the chains, and her. Making myself want it. Making him believe I wanted it. Getting very, very good at that, because my life depended on it, and hating him, and hating myself more, and never once letting it show.

It wasn’t like that now. Nothing was holding me here. Nobody was going to put me in chains if I shut my door and went to sleep alone.

I was so tired of being alone.

“Malachi,” I said.

He looked up.

I didn’t know what else to say. I stood there in the doorway with my hand on the frame, and looked at him, and after a moment he understood. I watched him understand. Something went across his face, very fast, and then he got up off the cot, slowly, and stood there by the stove, and didn’t come any closer.

“You don’t owe me anything,” he said. His voice was low and rough. “You know that. Whatever you think—”

“I know.”

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He looked at me, standing there by the stove with the firelight on one side of his face.

hen he came.

***

It wasn’t like the temple. That was the first thing, and the last thing, and the thing in between

He let me lead. He stood in the middle of that tiny room with the door shut behind him and his hands at his sides, and let me come to him, and let me put my hands on his chest. I started on the buttons of his shirt. My fingers wouldn’t quite work.

“Sloane,” he said.

“Don’t.” I didn’t look up. “If you ask me whether I’m sure, I’ll lose my nerve.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Then what?”

“Your hands,” he said. “They’re like ice.”

I laughed. It came out of me shaky and surprised, and some of the tightness went with it. I got the last button undone and put my cold hands flat on his chest, on purpose, and he drew in his breath through his teeth and didn’t move away.

“Better?” I said.

“No.”

He didn’t help. He didn’t hurry me. He only stood there and breathed, and watched my face, and I felt how hard his heart was going under my palms.

At the temple, he had never once watched my face. And I had never once looked at his.

I made myself look now. It was harder than anything else. Harder than the buttons, harder than standing in that doorway and saying his name. His face in the dark, so close. The gray eyes, the lines round them. He let me look, the way he had let me look at everything else, and didn’t look away.