His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 183

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Chapter 183

Malachi

Nheard the truck long before I saw it.

It came grinding up the track from the eastern road with no lights, slowly, in low gear, the way you drive when you don’t want to be seen and know you will be anyway. I was at the door of the t before it was halfway up the hill, with the knife in my hand and Ash up in me, all the way, every hair

Behind me, Sloane said, “It’s them. Liam said. It’s all right.”

I didn’t put the knife away.

end

The truck stopped at the bottom of the slope, by the wall of the sheepfold. The engine died. In the silence afterward, I heard the doors open, and two people get out, and their boots in the snow. One of them I knew. Juniper, and wormwood, and old smoke. The witch.

The other was a stranger. A man. Not Moonhaven. A wolf I had never smelled, cool and green and

far off, like rain on pine.

He came up the slope ahead of her, slowly, with his hands out from his sides where I could see them. Tall. Dark-haired. Not yet thirty. He stopped ten feet from the door, in the snow, and looked at me, and at the knife, and didn’t seem to mind either of them very much.

“Tiernan Finnegan,” he said. “Ravenwood.” He tilted his head toward the truck behind him. “I was

passing.”

I looked at him for a while.

Then I put the knife away, and stood back from the door.

***

The witch went past me without a word, straight to Teague.

He was sitting against the wall by the hearth with his arm across his chest, where he had been since we came in at dusk. The cloth round it had soaked through twice. His feet were wrapped in the strips of the blanket I had cut for them, and he hadn’t been able to stand on them since noon. He looked up at her as she knelt down in front of him, and something went across his face that I had never seen there. Wariness. The old fear, the one every wolf has of what witches do with their hands.

She saw it. She didn’t say anything about it. She only held out her own hands to him, empty, palms up, and waited.

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Tiernan brought it. And everything else. He went up and down the slope from the truck four times with his arms full, and set it all down along the wall inside the door, and didn’t say anything abouy where it had come from.

Sloane got up off the floor by the fire. She had been sitting there since dark with the one planket round her shoulders, feeding the damp wood to the flames a stick at a time, and her face ne firelight was gray with tiredness. She went to the pile along the wall and stood there, looking i

At the top of the pile, folded, was a coat I knew. An old brown wool coat with leather patches at the elbows. It had hung in the warriors’ hall at Moonhaven for as long as anyone could remember on the peg nearest the door, and anyone who came in wet and cold and without a coat of their own was

welcome to it.

She put out her hand and touched the sleeve.

Then she picked it up and put it on. It came down to her knees. She stood there in it, by the wall, with her back to the room, and didn’t turn round for a while.

I built up the fire. I didn’t look at her. I gave her that.

***

The witch stitched Teague’s arm by lamplight, at the table.

She did it the way she did everything, as far as I could tell. Quickly, without fuss, talking to him the whole time in a low, flat voice about nothing much. The weather. The road. A goat her mother had kept, when she was a girl, which had eaten a whole hymnbook. Teague sat with his arm on the table in front of her and a cup of Ryan’s whiskey in his good hand, and drank it, and watched the fire, and didn’t make a sound. Once, when the needle went in somewhere deep, his jaw went tight and the cup shook in his fingers, and the witch stopped talking for a moment and laid her other hand flat on his shoulder, and left it there until the cup stopped shaking.

Then she went on.

When she was done, she bound it in clean linen and sat back.

“Flex your fingers,” she said.

He did. One at a time. They all moved.

“Make a fist.”

He made a fist. Slowly. It wasn’t a good one. But it was a fist.

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way a healer touches something to see if it’s still alive. Teague looked at her. She looked back.

“Later,” she said. “When there’s time.”

did his feet next. Then she made Sloane sit down and looked at her leg, and her throat, and her hands. She made me sit down and looked at mine. The backs of my hands were burned, where had pushed through the smoke. I hadn’t noticed. She put something on them that stung like nettles and smelled of pine pitch, and wrapped them, and slapped my wrist when I tried to flex them

“Leave it,” she said.

I left it.

***

Tiernan cooked.

That surprised me, for some reason. The Alpha of Ravenwood, on his knees at the little hearth of a shepherd’s hut with his sleeves rolled up, frying bacon in Teague’s blackened pan and slicing potatoes into the fat. He did it well. He had done it before. The smell of it filled the hut until I could hardly think, and Ash came up in me with his nose working, whining like a pup.

We ate at the table, the five of us, off two plates and a pan and the lid of a tin, passing them round. There wasn’t anything to say that was more important than the food.

******

It was Tiernan who said it, when the plates were empty and the fire had been built up high and the lamp turned down.

“You can’t stay here,” he said. Not unkindly. “You know that.”

“I know,” I said.

“A mile from Moonhaven’s line.” He was sitting on the bench with his back to the wall and his long legs stretched out toward the hearth. “Half the valley knows this hut. And Thorne knows exactly

where you were. He made sure the whole Council knew it too. If anyone sees smoke from this chimney for more than a night or two, and puts it together with where Kade Blackwell’s traitor was last seen—” He spread his hands. “It won’t matter who brought the food. They’ll say Moonhaven did. And Kade’s Luna will stay where she is.”

I felt Sloane flinch beside me.

“Then where,” I said.

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out, and the company went, and the people went after them. There are a few houses left down by the stream, what’s left of them. Stone, most of them, with the roofs falling in. The old mine sheds up the slope. Good water. Woods all round.” He paused. “Nobody goes there. My grandfather said it was bad ground. Something in the soil, from the mine. The wolves don’t like the smell of it.”

“Do you?” Sloane said.

Tiernan smiled a little. “I’ve walked through it. It smells of old stone and wet nettles. Nothing worse.” He looked at me. “It isn’t Ravenwood’s. Lcan’t give it to you. Nobody can give it to you But nobody can take it away from you either, because nobody wants it. And it’s six miles from my stem border.” He let that sit. “A neighbor, passing through, might find he had a truck full of things he didn’t need, now and then. On the way somewhere else.”

I didn’t say anything for a while.

A handful of dead houses. Roofs falling in. Bad ground that the wolves didn’t like the smell of. I thought about walking into it in the middle of the winter with a woman with a bad leg and a man with

stitches in his arm.

I thought about the cabin, burning.

“Why?” I said.

Tiernan looked at me.

“You don’t know me,” I said. “You know what I am. You know what I did. Every Alpha in this valley would put me in the ground and dance on it. Why would Ravenwood do anything for me?”

Tiernan was quiet for a moment.

“I don’t know you,” he said at last. “That’s true. But I know my sister’s alive, and safe, and in love with a decent man, in a pack that took her in when I couldn’t protect her. Because of Abby Blackwell. Who’s sitting in Sebastian Thorne’s house tonight because she wouldn’t let Moonhaven go to war for

her.”

He turned back to me.

“I’m not doing anything for you, Blackwell,” he said. “I’m doing it for her. You just happen to be

standing near the people she cares about.”

Beside me, Sloane put her hand over her eyes, and held it there.

*****

Later, when Sloane had fallen asleep on the floor by the fire in the brown coat with her head on a

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wall a little, without a word, to make room.

I didn’t sit. I stood beside the wall with my hands in the pockets of a stranger’s coat, and looked at the hut, and the faint red line of light under its crooked door.

“You’re leaving in the morning,” I said.

“At first light. Tiernan will take me down to the river road.” She drew on the cigarette. Foy

coven.”

“Will they listen?”

“No.” She blew out smoke. “Not the first time. Not the second, probably. But I can be very tiresome, when I put my mind to it.”

I didn’t say anything.

She waited. She was good at waiting.

“Ask it,” she said.

I looked at her.

“You didn’t come out here for the air,” she said. “You’ve been chewing on something since Tiernan said the word valley. Ask it. I’m cold, and I’d like to go to bed.”

So I asked.

It came out badly. I had never said it aloud before, not even to myself. I told her about the link. How I had none. How I had never had one, not since the day I was sent out of Moonhaven, and Teague had none, and Sloane had only the one she was born to, which reached as far as Moonhaven’s border and no further. How tonight, at the hut, she had found Liam in it, and I had watched her face while she did it, and felt nothing. How in the cabin, when the fire came, I had had to drag her out of bed by the arm and shout, because there was no other way to reach her.

“If something happens,” I said. “If she comes again. If we’re split up, in the dark, or in the snow, or one of us is hurt and can’t get back. I can’t find them. I can’t hear them. I can’t tell them where I am.” I looked at the hut. “I want to be able to hear them. That’s all. Is there a way? To bind the three of us.