His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 181

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Chapter 181

Malachi

Nknew whose fire it was before I was out of the bed.

Not from the smoke. Smoke is smoke. From what wasn’t in it. I had my nose full of it, wood and pitch and burning wool, so thick I could taste it, and under it, where there should have been the scent of whoever had walked up to my door in the dark with a can and a match, there was nothing al Nobody. The same nothing that had stood under Sloane’s window in the autumn and left no mark in

the frost.

I had seen her make that nothing. Once. In the mill house, over a bowl of something black, with three of Brask’s men standing in front of her with their shirts off while she painted it on their chests. So the dogs can’t follow, she had said, and smiled at me, because she knew what I was.

She had always liked fire.

“Up,” I said. I had Sloane’s arm. She was up. She was coughing so hard she was bent double, and she had my shirt balled in one fist, and I didn’t know why, and there wasn’t time. I found her boots by the bed with my feet and shoved them at her, and pulled my trousers on, and got the door open.

The main room was burning.

The whole front wall, from the floor to the beams. The front door, the coat hooks, the shelf where my map had been, my cot under the window. All of it one sheet of moving light, and the heat came through the doorway at us like a shove in the chest. The beams overhead were alight. The table. The

chair.

I didn’t look at any of it for longer than it took to see it.

Teague came out of his room on the far side, bent low, with his bad hand over his mouth and his pack over his good shoulder. He looked across at me through the smoke, and pointed. The back. The

kitchen window.

I went back into Sloane’s room. Two strides. Her coat on the hook behind the door. The pack under it, where it had always hung, where I had hung it myself the first week she was here and told her it was for in case. She had laughed at me. In case of what? I hadn’t answered her. I have lived most of my life in places I might have to leave in the night. You learn to keep a pack by the door, and you learn not to explain why.

I threw her coat round her. I put the pack on my own back, over my bare shoulders, and took her arm, and got her low and moving, under the smoke, toward the kitchen.

Teague had the window out. Frame and all. He had put his elbow through it, and the glass had gone,

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water.

crawled. There was no other way to do it. Away from the cabin through the snow on our hands and knees, coughing, until the heat stopped beating on our backs and the air was cold enough to hurt. Then we stopped, and turned round, and knelt there and watched.

low

The roof went first. It had been going since before we woke. Now it went all at once, with a fuse low groan of timber and a rush of sparks up into the black, and the whole cabin stood in the middle of the clearing like a lantern, every window full of fire. The porch was gone. The steps were gone. Through the empty frame of the back window, I could see into Sloane’s room. The narrow bed. The chair by the window. The blankets we had been lying under an hour ago, curling up black.

She was looking at it too. I didn’t look at her face. I didn’t have the right.

And at the edge of the clearing, by the track, the truck.

It was too close. It had always been too close. I had told Teague so, a hundred times, and he had grunted and gone on parking it where it was, because it was the only flat ground. The fire had found it already. The canvas over the back was burning in long tatters. The tires were burning, with a thick black stink. As I watched, the flames ran up under the cab, and then there was a deep soft whump that I felt in my teeth, and the tank went, and the whole truck jumped on its wheels and lit the clearing yellow for a hundred yards.

Sloane flinched against me. I put my arm round her. I hadn’t known I was going to.

Teague was on his feet.

He was looking past the truck, into the trees on the slope above the track. All of him had gone taut, from his heels to the back of his neck, like a dog on a point,

I looked where he was looking.

Three shapes. Dark, against darker trees, on the slope above the track. Walking. Not running. Not even hurrying. Walking away up the slope with their backs to us, the way men walk away from a job they’ve finished and been paid for. The fire lit the snow round them, and the snow was all the light there was, and I couldn’t see their faces, and I couldn’t smell them at all.

Teague went after them.

“Teague.” I was up. “Teague, no—”

He didn’t hear me. Or he heard me and didn’t care. He went across the clearing in his undershirt and his bare feet, with his arm running blood and his pack still over his shoulder, round the burning truck

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nothing to see.

Teague went in after them.

stood in the snow with my fists shut and every muscle in my body pulling me after him. Ash was up in me, all the way, hackles raised, teeth bared, screaming at me to go. Run them down. Find them. They have no scent but they have feet. Find the tracks.

I looked down.

Sloane was still on her knees in the snow. In her coat over nothing, with her bare legs going white in the cold and her boots unlaced and my shirt still balled up in her fist. Her face was black with smoke. She was shaking. She was looking up at me.

I stayed.

***

Teague came back a long time later.

The cabin had burned down to the walls by then, and the walls were burning down to the sills. The truck was a black shell, still ticking. We had moved back to the edge of the trees, out of the light, and I had opened the pack.

There wasn’t much in it. There never is. A knife. Matches in a tin. A coil of cord. A little dried meat and a bag of oats. A pan. A blanket rolled tight. A first-aid kit no bigger than my hand. And at the bottom, in an oilskin, a change of clothes for each of us. One shirt, one pair of trousers, one pair of socks. I had packed it for two, the week she came. I had never told her that either.

I gave her the trousers and the socks, and turned my back while she put them on. Her fingers were too cold to work the buttons. After a minute, she said my name, very quietly, and I turned back round and did them for her, kneeling in the snow, and laced her boots, and neither of us said anything at all.

I put on the shirt. It was hers, the one she had been holding. My own had burned on its hook. It was too tight across the shoulders and smelled of her, and I didn’t care.

Then Teague came out of the trees.

He was walking slowly. His feet were raw and red from the snow, and his arm had stopped bleeding and set black with dried blood from wrist to elbow, and his face was gray. He came and stood in front of us, and looked at me, and shook his head once.

Nothing.

“Tracks?” I said.

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there on the ridge, there had been something waiting for them. A truck, on the logging road. He had heard the engine.

They had come, and done it, and gone, and they hadn’t touched us.

I looked at the black shell of the cabin, with the last of the flames running along its sills, and understood that too.

She wasn’t trying to kill us. If she had wanted us dead, she would have nailed the doors shut first. She had wanted us to wake up. She had wanted us to stand in the snow and watch it go, the cabin and the truck and everything in them, and know that she could have done it any night she liked. That she had known where we were all along.

You took my box, she was saying. You took it down to them. You sat at their table. So.

So.

“We can’

e was looking at the cabin.

There was a place two miles up the stream, under a ledge of black rock, where the bank had been cut back by some old flood into a long shallow hollow, dry at the back, out of the wind. I had found it the first winter. I had never used it. I had only marked it in my head, the way I marked everything, in case.

We got there a little before dawn.

time. Sloane’s leg had stiffened in the cold, and the snow along the stream was deep and Teague’s feet were bad. Nobody spoke. I went in front and broke the trail. Sloane ehind me, with her hand on the back of my pack when the going was worst, and Teague came as he always did, watching behind us.

Twice I stopped and stood in the dark with my head up and breathed, and smelled nothing but snow and pine and the long thin smoke of the cabin following us up the valley on the wind.

The hollow was the way I remembered it. Low, and dry at the back, and floored with old leaves and sand. I cleared a space. I found deadwood under the ledge where the snow hadn’t reached, and broke it, and built a fire small and close against the rock, where the ledge would break up the smoke, and lit it with the second match.

It caught.

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12:14 Mon, Nov 2

“Yes.”

And she let us stay there. All this time. Until you went to that camp, and brought them the box.’ She was looking at the fire. “She’s not going to let us stop anywhere now. Is she? Anywhere she can find.”

“No.”