His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 189

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Abby

Chapter 189

Sebastian didn’t come back.

I waited for him. Every afternoon in the garden, every time I heard footsteps in the corridor that weren’t the guards’ or the maid’s, I felt my whole body go tight, and Diana come up off her ws. But the days went by, and he didn’t come. I saw him once, from my window, crossing the gravel at the front of the house to a car with two men behind him, in a dark coat, talking on his phone. He idn’t look up.

That was worse, somehow. I knew what he was doing. He was letting me wait.

The moon was growing.

I could feel it before I could see it. Every night it rose a little later and a little fuller over the trees on the far side of the river, and every night Diana felt it a little more. She stopped lying down. She stopped pacing, too. She sat inside me, upright, very still, with her nose lifted toward the window, the way a dog sits by a door when it knows someone is coming home. The light in me rose with it. I could feel it filling up, slowly, like water rising in a well. By the ninth night it was so full that it hummed under my skin when I lay down, and I couldn’t sleep for it.

And at the other end of the thread, Kade was getting worse.

I could feel that too. Every night, when I sat on the floor by the window and followed the bond out across the dark, he was further down. The thing in his chest wasn’t lying still anymore. It was moving. Slowly, all the time, the way a tide comes in. Climbing. On the eighth night, I felt it reach somewhere it hadn’t been before, high up, near his throat, and I felt him wake in the dark and put his hand there and lie very still.

The moon would be full in four days. Imogen had told me once, sitting on the mat with the bowl between us, that the curse was always strongest at the full.

I sat on the floor with my hands in my lap and the light humming in me like a hive, and didn’t pour, and didn’t pour, and didn’t pour.

***

On the tenth morning, the maid spoke to me.

She had brought the breakfast tray, the way she always did, and set it down on the table by the window, and gone to the fire. The two guards were in the doorway. One of them was new, a young man from Highmoor with a cold, who turned his head away to sneeze into his sleeve just as she knelt at the hearth beside my chair.

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It was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it.

didn’t move. I looked at the window.

“At night,” the maid said, to the fire. “My girl. She walks in her sleep. They lock her door, and in the morning it’s open, and she doesn’t remember.” Her hands had stopped moving. “Three times this

week.”

The guard in the doorway finished sneezing. He straightened up.

The maid went back to the fire. She laid the kindling, and the logs, and struck the match, and stood up, and smoothed her apron. And she went out past them with her eyes on the floor, the way she always did, and never once looked back at me.

I sat at the table and looked at the breakfast tray, and couldn’t eat any of it.

She walks.

I knew what that meant. I knew exactly what it meant. I had seen that girl standing on the frozen grass under my window in her nightdress, with a candle in her hand. I had seen her climb my wisteria with her hands torn open. I had held Cassandra’s blood in my hands.

And she was in this house. Somewhere above me, in the far wing, behind a locked door that

wouldn’t stay locked.

I couldn’t tell anyone. Not the guards. Not the captain, who would tell Sebastian, who already knew, I was sure of it. I had no phone, and no pen that would reach anyone, and no one in the world I was allowed to speak to.

I sat by the window all that day and watched the far wing, the long row of windows on the second floor, and didn’t see anything at all.

***

That night, I dreamed.

It had been weeks. Not since the binding. Not since I had followed the thread down into the dark and seen the hut and the frozen waterfall and felt her tear it out of my hands. I had almost started to believe they had stopped.

I was standing on ice.

It was the lake. Our lake, at home, under the packhouse, frozen from shore to shore the way it froze in the deepest part of winter. White, and flat, and endless, under a sky with no stars. There was no

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Kade was under the ice.

He was right below me. A foot down. Less. Lying on his back in the black water with his eyes open, looking up at me through the ice, and his face was gray, and his lips were blue, and the dark threads on his throat had climbed all the way up over his jaw and across his cheek and into his hair. His hand was pressed flat against the underside of the ice. Right under my feet. As if he had been reaching for me, and the water had closed over him, and he was still reaching.

I went down on my knees. I put my hands on the ice over his.

It was so cold it burned.

I poured. I didn’t think. I didn’t stop to think. I let it go, all of it, the way I had in the hall at home, everything I had, down through my hands into the ice. I felt it go. I felt it light the ice from underneath, white and silver, so bright that the whole lake lit up round me like a lamp, all the way to the shores. I could see him clearly now, every line of his face, his eyes, open, looking up at me.

The ice didn’t melt.

It drank. I felt it. Every drop of light I poured into it went down, and down, and the ice took it, and grew thicker. Clearer. Colder. And under it, Kade went on looking up at me, and didn’t move, and the threads on his face went on climbing.

I couldn’t stop.

I tried. I tried to take my hands off the ice, and they wouldn’t come. They were frozen to it. Stuck fast, palms flat, the way your tongue sticks to iron in the winter. And the light kept pouring out of me, through them, into the ice, and I couldn’t stop it, and I couldn’t take it back.

My hair fell forward over my shoulder.

It was white.

I stared at it. A long fall of it, over my shoulder, against the silver ice. White, every strand of it. Not

silver. White, like snow, like bone, like an old woman’s.

I tried to scream. Nothing came out.

And then, behind me, a long way off across the ice, I saw a light.

A small one. Yellow. Steady. Coming toward me.

I couldn’t turn round. I never could, in these dreams. I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, coming closer, across the white, very slowly. A candle. A girl in a white nightdress carrying it, with

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