His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 198

Chapter 198

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Kade

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Chapter 198

Nhad started sleeping in my office.

Not sleeping, most nights. Sitting. In the chair behind the desk with the lamp turned low and Vincent’s map of the Blackridge passes spread out in front of me, weighted at the corners wi whatever came to hand. A mug. A stapler. Ryan’s knife, which he had left there two days ago at not

come back for.

Vincent rang every evening at nine. Every evening he said the same thing. His men had been up the north pass and the west one. They had looked into every shepherd’s hut and every hunting cabin they could find, from a distance, carefully, the way he had promised. They had found tracks of deer and a fox and one old boar. They had found nothing else.

“If she’s up there,” he said on the third evening, “she’s somewhere my men don’t know about. And my men have walked those mountains since they could walk.”

I put a small pencil cross on the map every time he named a place they had looked. There were a great many crosses now. They didn’t help.

That night I didn’t go upstairs at all. I couldn’t face the bed. Her side of it, with her pillow still in its case, and the smell of her going a little fainter every day. I sat at the desk with the crosses in front of me and reached for her, the way I did every hour, and found nothing, the way I always did, and reached again.

It was a little after one when the moon came round the corner of the house and into the window. Past half now, and lopsided, and going thinner every night.

I watched it. I couldn’t stop myself. Somewhere under it, wherever she was, she would be standing in a ring of ash with a band round her leg. If she was still being given her hour. If she was still-

Kade.

***

It wasn’t like the first time.

The first time, she had come pouring down the bond all at once, everything she was, cold and wind and Diana’s wild joy, with no shape to any of it. This time she came small and quick and steady, as if she had been carrying it a long time, waiting for the moment, and knew she would only get one.

Cold. Height. The moon on her back. And under it, fear, held down hard.

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herself away, and went quiet.

Gone.

was standing. The chair had gone over behind me. I had both hands flat on the map, and Iwas staring down at it, at the long thin shape of the lake in the middle of it, with Vincent’s house marked at the southern end in his careful old handwriting, and the north end running up into blank paper and contour lines, where nobody had bothered to draw anything at all.

Blackridge.

I had walked up a white path above that lake in the autumn, with Abby beside me and a pack of flour and coffee on my back, following little piles of stones. I had stood at the door of an old man’s cabin and turned round and looked down at it, lying long and gray between the mountains. I had stood on its shore at night with my coat held up in the cold while my wife undressed behind it, and watched her wolf step out onto the snow.

I had never once looked at the far end. None of us had. Vincent’s men had been watching the passes and the graves, and the road in, and all the time she had been sitting at the top of the lake, looking

down at it.

***

I don’t remember going up the stairs. I remember Liam’s door, and hitting it with the flat of my hand, and Liam opening it in a T-shirt with his hair on end and Kaia sitting up in the bed behind him.

“Blackridge,” I said. “She’s at Blackridge. The lake. The far end. Get Ryan.”

He didn’t ask. He was already pulling on his jeans.

Ten minutes later they were all in my office. Liam. Ryan, dressed, as if he had slept in his clothes, which he probably had. Imogen, in a thick cardigan over her nightdress, gray in the face and blinking. And Malachi, who had heard me on the stairs and come up from the guest rooms at the back of the house, where we had put him, and was standing in the doorway with his boots in his hand.

I told them. Every word of it. The far end, the house, the stones on the ice, full moon.

When I said the stones, Imogen sat down on the arm of the sofa, very suddenly, as if her legs had

gone.

“A ring,” she said.

“Part of one. A big one. They’re still building it.”

“How big?”

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“That’s not for a candle,” she said, very low. “That’s not for a bit of salt and an hour under the moon. You build a ring that size for one thing. To keep everything out.” She opened her eyes and

ooked at me. “Everything, Kade.”

I knew what she meant. I didn’t want to know it. I turned away from her to the map.

“We leave tonight,” I said. “Ryan. Twenty men. The best you’ve got, and the trucks fueled Liam, ring your uncle. Tell him the north end. Tell him nobody goes near it, nobody, not a man, not dog, until we’re there. She’ll feel it. She’ll feel anyone coming.” I looked at Malachi. “You know how her

men move. You’re coming.”

“Yes,” Malachi said.

“Imogen-”

“Kade.”

It wasn’t Imogen.

***

Harlan stood in the open doorway, behind Malachi, in a dark wool robe with the belt tied tight, and his white hair flattened on one side from the pillow.

I hadn’t heard him come. Nobody had.

“I heard you on the stairs,” he said. “Half the house heard you on the stairs.” He looked past me at the map on the desk. “Blackridge?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain?”

“She told me.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he came into the room and shut the door behind him, and

Malachi stepped aside to let him by.

“Then I’m sorry,” Harlan said. “But you can’t go tonight.”

Behind me, Ryan drew in his breath.

“Say that again,” I said.

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tonight, you go as an outlaw. And Moonhaven goes with you.”

“My wife is on that lake.”

know.”

“She’s chained on that lake, and that woman is building a ring on the ice to-” My voice cracked. I couldn’t finish. “And you want me to sit here.”

“I want you to wait,” Harlan said. “For the Council. I’ll call them. Tonight. Now. An emergency session, here, in Moonhaven. They’ll hear your mother. They’ll hear the Greyhollow girl. They’INear what you saw. And then they’ll lift the ruling, or they won’t, and you’ll go to Blackridge with the Council’s leave and every pack in this valley behind you, instead of-”

“How long?”

He didn’t answer at once.

“How long?”

“Some of them are four hundred miles away,” Harlan said quietly. “Some of them won’t come themselves. They’ll send proxies, and the proxies will need to be chosen, and given their authority in writing.” He met my eyes. “Days, Kade. I won’t lie to you. Days.”

***

I don’t know what I said to him.

I know I was shouting. I know Ryan put his hand on my arm, and I threw it off, and the mug went off the corner of the desk and broke on the boards, and nobody moved to pick it up. I know I said days, over and over. That she didn’t have days. That I didn’t care about the Council or the ruling or my seat or my name. That they could strip me of all of it and welcome to it, that they could put Moonhaven out of every agreement in the valley, I didn’t care, I didn’t care, I would go up that road on foot if I had to.

I know the thing in my chest woke up while I was shouting. Pushed up against the knots, hard, and sent a long cold ache up my throat into my jaw, so that my words came out thick at the end. I didn’t

care about that either.

And I know that when I turned round to the others, to Ryan and Liam and Imogen, to have them

back me, none of them did.

Ryan stood by the door with his arms folded and his face set like stone, and didn’t move.

Imogen sat on the arm of the sofa with her hands pressed together in her lap, and looked at me, and

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I stared at him.

He’s right, Kade.” His voice was rough. He looked as if every word cost him. “She stood up in that room. In the blue dress: In front of all of them. She said yes to it so you wouldn’t have to sayo.” He swallowed. “If you throw that away now, you throw away the thing she did. And when we bring her home, she’ll come home to a pack nobody in the valley will speak to. Because of her.” His/voke cracked. “She’d never forgive herself. You know she wouldn’t.”

I couldn’t speak.

I stood there in the middle of my own office with the broken mug at my feet and my chest aching and looked at the four of them. My Beta. My Gamma. The witch who had held my heart in my body with her bare hands. My wife’s brother.

I had never been so angry with anyone in my life.

“Get out,” I said.

Nobody moved.

“All of you. Get out.”

***

They went. Liam last, with one look back at me from the door that I didn’t answer.

Harlan didn’t.

He stood by the window with his hands in the pockets of his robe, and waited, while the others went out and their footsteps went away down the corridor. Then he looked at me.

“I sat in your training hall,” he said. “On the night of the moon. I watched that witch kneel over you with her chalk and her wool for four hours. I watched her nose bleed. I watched that thing come up

your throat as far as your jaw, and stop there, and I watched what it cost her to stop it.” His voice was low and very steady. “She says she can’t do it again. I believe her.”

I said nothing.