His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 195

Chapter 195

My mother was sitting up when I came in.

That was the first thing. Not lying on her back with her face turned to the window, the way she had lain for a month. Sitting. Propped against three pillows, with a blanket round her shoulders and her braid over one of them, and a cup of something in both hands that Daphne was watching her derek as if it might escape.

She looked up when I came through the door.

I stopped. I couldn’t help it. I stood in the doorway of that small room with my coat still on and the chalk from the training hall still on my hands, and looked at her looking at me, and couldn’t make my feet go any further.

She was so thin. Her face had fallen in round the cheekbones, and her skin had the gray, papery look of someone who has been a long way down and only just come back. There were dark shadows under

her eyes. Her hands round the cup were shaking.

But her eyes were her own.

“Kade,” she said.

Her voice was a whisper. Hoarse, cracked, almost nothing. It was the best sound I had heard in my

life.

I crossed the room. I don’t remember doing it. I was on my knees by the bed with my face against her shoulder and her thin hand in my hair, and I was crying the way I hadn’t cried since I was a boy, and she was saying my name, over and over, very quietly, the way she used to when I woke up from a bad dream.

Behind me, I heard Daphne go out and close the door.

*****

She didn’t ask at first.

I think she knew she couldn’t, yet. She held my head against her shoulder and stroked my hair until I could breathe again, and then she let me go, and looked at me. At my face. At my throat. I saw her eyes go to the threads above my collar, black and climbing, all the way up to the hinge of my jaw. I saw her mouth tighten.

“How long?” she said.

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“Daphne told me some of it,” she said. “While you were in the hall. Not much. She said I was to, rest.” Her mouth moved. “As if I’d been doing anything else.”

Naughed. It came out wet and cracked and I didn’t care.

She opened her eyes again and looked at me, and I watched her gather herself. Slowly. The way she did everything now, I would learn, in those first days.

“I remember,” she said. “That night.”

My hand tightened on hers.

“Not all of it. Pieces. The door. Abby, with her back against the wall. That girl, with the candle, and her face-” She stopped. Her hand had closed on the blanket. “It wasn’t her face. I knew that. I knew it

the moment I saw her. And then the knife. And then the floor.”

“Mother-”

“And then Abby’s hands.” She looked at me. “On me. I could feel them. Even when I couldn’t feel anything else. Warm. Holding on.” Her voice cracked. “She kept me here, Kade. Didn’t she. I wasn’t going to stay. I could feel myself going. And she held on.”

I couldn’t answer.

“Where is she?” my mother said.

***

I didn’t tell her that night. I couldn’t. She was so tired that she fell asleep while I was still trying to find the first word, with her hand in mine and her head tipped back on the pillows, and Daphne came in and looked at me and pointed at the door.

I told her the next morning.

I sat in Daphne’s chair by the bed with the gray light coming in through the window and told her all of it. As plainly as I could, because she would have known if I softened it, and she would never have forgiven me. Greyhollow. The hearing. The Council, and the girl’s father on his knees on the floor, and Garrick standing up for me. The ruling. Abby standing up before I could, in the blue dress, and saying

yes.

And then the night five days ago. The fist round my heart. The sleep. And waking up, for her, and finding nothing.

and reaching

My mother listened to all of it without a word. She didn’t cry. She lay against her pillows and looked

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“Yes.”

To keep you from refusing.”

“Yes.”

She looked out of the window for a while.

“Your father would have refused,” she said. “He’d have stood up and refused, and taken us a out of the Council, and gone to war with Greyhollow over it, and he’d have been wrong.” She turned her head and looked at me. “She was right. And she knew she was right, and she knew what it would cost her, and she did it anyway.” Her voice shook, just once. “That’s a Luna, Kade. That’s what one looks like.”

I put my head down on the edge of the bed.

She put her hand on the back of my neck, the way she used to when I was small, and left it there.

“She didn’t run,” my mother said.

“No.”

“Somebody came for her.”

“Yes.”

“The same somebody who came for me.” It wasn’t a question. Her hand tightened on my neck. “Through that girl.”

“Yes.”

My mother was quiet for a long while.

“Then find her,” she said.

***

Harlan came to the clinic that afternoon.

He had been in Moonhaven four days now, in the guest rooms at the end of the east corridor, with his own driver and the two Council guards. He had searched every building in the town. He had sat in the corner of the training hall on the night of the moon and watched Imogen hold the thing in my chest down with her bare hands until her nose bled. He hadn’t said much since. He went about the

packhouse quietly, a big heavy old man in a dark coat, looking at things, and when people spoke to him, he answered them civilly and said nothing at all.

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“She is.”

“And that she remembers the night she was hurt.”

I didn’t answer. Daphne. Or one of the clinic girls. It didn’t matter.

“She’s the only witness,” Harlan said. “The only one in that room who was awake from thetart. The Luna wasn’t. The girl wasn’t, not in any way that counts.” He looked at me steadily. “The Council will want to hear from her, Kade. I want to hear from her. Today, if she can manage it.”

“No.”

His eyebrows went up.

“Not today,” I said. “Not tomorrow either.” I kept my voice level. “She’s been awake for two days. She was a month in that bed. She can barely hold a cup. She still doesn’t know what day it is half the time, and every time she remembers that night, she shakes.” I looked at him. “She’ll talk to you. She wants to. She’s already said so. But not until Daphne says she can, and not until she’s strong enough to sit up for an hour without falling asleep.”

“Kade-”

“You searched my house,” I said. “You searched my town. I let you. I didn’t say a word.” I held his eyes. “But you are not going to sit at my mother’s bedside two days after she came back from the dead and ask her to tell you how it felt to have a knife put in her. Not yet. Not while I’m standing in this

corridor.”

Harlan looked at me for a while.

He looked older than he had at Greyhollow. I noticed it for the first time. Grayer round the mouth. He had been sleeping badly in our guest rooms, Ryan had told me. He had sat up late in the library with the lamp on.

“Your father used to stand in doorways like that,” he said at last.

I didn’t answer.

“A week,” Harlan said. “No more. The Council has given me until the next session to bring them something, and Sebastian Thorne is not sitting still in the meantime.” He put on his hat. “And when she’s ready, I’ll hear her. With her healer in the room. Not you.”

“Agreed.”

He nodded, and turned to go. Then he stopped, with his hand on the door at the end of the corridor,

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He went out.

I sat with her that night.

Daphne had tried to send me to bed. I had refused. In the end she had brought me a blanket and a cup of tea and left me in her chair by the bed with a look that said she would deal with me in the

morning.

My mother slept. Properly now, the way a person sleeps who is going to wake up. Her breathing was slow and even. The lamp on the wall was turned down to almost nothing, and through the window, over the dark garden, the moon was going down toward the trees. Two nights past full. A little lopsided. Still bright.

I didn’t sleep. I hadn’t since the moon. The thing in my chest was awake again, after the binding, and restless. Not climbing. Imogen’s knots were holding it at my jaw. But it shifted all the time, turning, pressing. And under it, every minute, I was reaching for her.

Nothing. The bond going out of me, all that long way, and at the end of it, nothing I could feel.

I sat there in the dark with my hand round my mother’s and reached anyway. I couldn’t stop. I had stopped trying to.

It was a little after one when it happened.

It came out of nowhere. One moment there was nothing at the end of the bond, the way there had been nothing for six days. And the next, all at once, so hard that I jerked upright in the chair and my mother’s hand slid out of mine-

She was there.

Not words, at first. Her. All of her, pouring down the bond at once, after six days of nothing. Cold.

Terrible cold, clean and thin and enormous, the cold of somewhere very high. Wind. Snow under four feet, not two. The moon, huge and white and close, pouring down over her. And joy. Wild, desperate joy, so fierce it hurt. Not hers. Diana’s. Her wolf, out under the open sky, with the moon on her back, for the first time in days.

And under the joy, something else. Something thin and burning, round one leg. And past that, somewhere at the edge of it all, a ring of something dark on the snow. And watching from beyond the ring, something cold.

I couldn’t see where she was. I couldn’t see anything. I could only feel it. Height, and wind, and

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Faint. Cracked. So far away it was barely there. But hers.

ade, I’m alive. I’m alive. Don’t- don’t let them-