His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 94

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Chapter 94

snowed in Blackridge the night after we came down from Aldric’s cabin.

Not much. Just enough to dust the dark stone of Vincent’s house and turn the edge of the lake white, so that by morning the whole valley looked like someone had drawn it in pencil and forgotten to finish.

I watched it from the kitchen window with both hands around a mug of tea I wasn’t drinking.

I had slept, but badly. All night, in my dreams, I heard Aldric’s voice again, rough from years of not using it. The way he had said Seraphina’s name, as if it still cost him something. The way he had looked at my necklace and then at me, and then at Kade standing behind me.

I took her for granted.

Diana stirred at the memory. She had been quiet since the mountain, turning something over

without showing it to me.

Maren set a plate of toast beside me without a word and stood there until I took a bite. Vincent’s mate moved through her kitchen as if everyone in it was a guest she had been expecting for years.

Kade came in a few minutes later with his hair still damp from the shower. He looked at me first. He always looked at me first now.

Through the bond, I felt him the way I had been learning to feel him since the night at the cabin. Warmth. Steadiness. The low, familiar hum of Knox underneath.

And something else.

EL

It had been there since yesterday, since we left Aldric standing alone in his doorway. Something closed and hard, like a fist he kept carefully in his pocket.

I didn’t know what it was. I only knew he didn’t want me to look at it.

“Morning,” he said, and kissed my temple, right beside the white strand.

“Morning.”

He took the chair beside me. Under the table, his knee settled against mine.

Whatever it was, he kept it shut.

Shave

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The woman who climbed down from the cab was not what I had pictured when Vincent said witch. had expected someone like Cressida.

Imogen was short and solid, in a long waxed coat with mud on the hem, her brown hair twisted into a knot that had clearly been done without a mirror. There were rings on almost every finger. Heavy, plain silver ones.

Kade noticed them at the same time I did. I felt him go alert.

Imogen noticed him noticing.

“Relax, Alpha.” She pulled a canvas bag from the passenger seat. “If I wanted to burn you, I wouldn’t announce it with jewelry.”

Vincent’s mouth twitched. “Imogen. Thank you for coming.”

“You said it was urgent and you said please. You’ve never said please to me in your life. I assumed someone was dying.” Her gaze moved past him and landed on me. “Ah.”

She came up the steps, stopped in front of me and looked at my face for a long moment. Then she reached up, without asking, and lifted the white strand of hair away from my temple between two

fingers.

Kade shifted. I touched his arm before he could say anything.

“When did this appear?”

“At the temple. The night of the full moon.”

“Just the one?”

“Yes.”

She let it fall. “Good.”

“Good?”

“It means you only spent too much once. That isn’t damage, girl. That’s a receipt. Now, is there coffee in this house, or did I drive up a mountain for nothing?”

***

She drank two cups at Maren’s table before she let anyone tell her anything. Then she listened.

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My voice went strange on that part. Kade’s hand found my back.

mogen didn’t interrupt once. When I finished, she was quiet long enough that Maren got up to refill everyone’s coffee just to have something to do.

“So,” Imogen said at last. “Your great-grandmother poured herself into her mate in the midle of a battle until there was nothing left of her, and nobody had ever taught her where the floor was

I swallowed. “Aldric thinks it was his fault.”

“Aldric is a ninety-something Alpha who has had decades alone on a mountain to decide what he thinks.” She set the mug down. “I’m more interested in what you think.”

“I think I don’t want to die young.”

It came out sharper than I meant. Beside me, the closed thing in Kade’s chest tightened.

“Then let’s find out where your floor is.” She began pulling the rings from her fingers one by one and lining them up on the table. “Give me your hands.”

“You’re taking those off?”

“I said I wouldn’t burn you. I didn’t say I was careless.”

Her hands were warm and rough at the knuckles, a gardener’s hands. She turned my palms upward and held them loosely.

“Reach for it.”

“For what?”

“The moon.”

I glanced at the window. Pale daylight. Snow. “It’s the middle of the day.”

“The moon doesn’t stop existing because you can’t see it. Reach.”

I closed my eyes and tried.

It was like trying to hear a song through a wall. I could feel the place inside me where it usually gathered when Diana stood beneath the light, but in my own body, under a roof, in daylight, there was almost nothing. A faint warmth in my chest. A prickle in my fingertips.

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hands and sat back. “Do you have any idea how many witches I know who would sell their own sister

for that’s it?”

Kade found his voice before I did. “Is it dangerous for her?”

“Everything is dangerous for her. She’s a girl with a tap in her chest and no handle on it.” nogen looked at him. “The question is whether she learns to turn it, or whether she keeps opening all the way because someone she loves is bleeding.”

Through the bond, something in Kade clenched so hard I almost flinched.

***

She showed us her own magic in the afternoon, I think because she had watched me tense every time she said the word spell.

Vincent cleared the long table in his study. Imogen took a wide copper bowl from her bag, filled it with water from the lake, and set it in the center. Then she dipped one finger into a small tin of ash and drew a mark on the rim. A curve, a line through it, two dots.

She sat me in front of it. Kade stood behind my chair. Vincent and Maren watched from the doorway.

Imogen picked up one of the silver rings, held it over the bowl, and began to speak.

The words were low and old and slid together without pauses.

My whole body went cold.

I was back in the circular chamber, chains around Diana’s legs, Cressida’s voice rising while the floor began to glow. I had shoved my chair back before I knew I was moving, and Kade’s hands were on my

shoulders.

Imogen stopped immediately.

“Not her words,” she said quietly. “Not her kind of words. I promise. Listen this time.”

I was breathing too fast. Through the bond, Kade was a wall of steadiness, pressing it toward me on purpose. I leaned into it.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Keep going.”

She studied me a moment longer, then began again, softer.

This time I listened. Cressida’s chant had dragged, like something heavy pulled over stone. This

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into the bowl. Where it touched, the surface went still and pale. When she finished, the copper bowl

held a small, perfect moon, glowing faintly in the middle of the afternoon.

Diana sat up inside me.

That’s ours, she said. That’s moonlight.

“It’s moonlight,” I said out loud.

“Caught at the last full moon, over my vegetable patch.” Imogen slid the ring back onto herger. “Witches don’t make power, Abigail. We borrow it. We store it in things that can hold it -siver, stone, water if we’re quick. And then we spend it very, very carefully, because we know exactly how much we have.” She tapped the rim of the bowl. “You draw it straight from the source. You don’t need the ring. But you’ve never once in your life counted.”

I stared at the little moon in the water.

“Can I learn to do that?”

“Store it? Some. Not much, at first.” She shrugged. “Your body isn’t a ring. But a cistern holds rain long after the storm passes. We’ll see how deep yours goes.”

Behind me, Kade’s hands stayed on my shoulders. I felt him ease, very slightly.

***

The real test came after dark.

Imogen wanted Diana, and she wanted her outside

So we walked down to the shore of the long lake with Vincent carrying a lantern, snow creaking under our boots and our breath hanging white in the

air.

The moon was a thin new sliver low over the mountains, already sinking. Barely anything.

“Good,” Imogen said when I pointed that out. “I don’t want to see what you can do when the moon is doing all the work. I want to see what you are when it isn’t.”

I undressed behind Kade’s coat, shivering, and let Diana take my place.

The cold vanished. The night opened. The lake smelled of ice and stone.

Diana shook out her coat. Even under that small moon, faint silver ran through the pearl-gray.

Imogen didn’t step back the way most people did the first time. She walked a slow circle around us. “Beautiful,” she said, almost to herself. Then, briskly, “Right. Give me some.”

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She’s not hurt, Diana said doubtfully. The girl was hurt.

I don’t think it matters, I told her. Try.

We drew in what moonlight there was. Thin and cool. Diana held it the way we had learned the temple, let it gather, and then I pictured Imogen standing in the snow and pushed.

A trickle went out of us.

Imogen inhaled sharply. Her shoulders straightened. “There. Stop.”

We stopped. It was easy. There hadn’t been much to stop.

“Again. Same amount.”

We did it again. And again. Each time she told us to stop, and each time we did, and I began to feel something I hadn’t felt once in the temple.

Control. Not much of it. But some.