His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 96

Chapter 96

Abby

Again,” Imogen said.

I opened my eyes. “I’ve done it nine times.”

“And you’ve lost it nine times. Again.”

We were sitting on the floor of her room in the east wing of the packhouse, the one with the window she had asked for. She had moved the bed against the wall on her first night and rolled up the rug, and now the bare boards were covered in chalk marks I wasn’t allowed to step on. Her bags sat in the corner. Nobody had touched them. Cassandra had made sure of that personally, after a conversation in the hallway that I had heard only half of and that had ended, somehow, with the two of them drinking tea together in the kitchen until midnight.

I still didn’t know whether they liked each other. I wasn’t sure they knew either.

Through the window, the morning sky was pale and clear. Last night the moon had been a little over half full. It had gone down before dawn, but I could still feel it, the way you can feel the warmth of a stove after the fire is out.

I closed my eyes again and reached.

In my own body, it was always harder. With Diana, the moonlight came in like breathing. As myself, it came like trying to fill a cup from a dripping tap. Slowly. A little warmth in my chest, then a little

more.

jor

“Good,” Imogen murmured. “Now close the lid.”

That was the part I couldn’t do.

Everything in me wanted to use it. To let it spread into my arms and legs and make them stronger, or to push it outward toward someone, anyone. Keeping it still felt like holding my breath underwater.

I held it.

Ten seconds. Twenty.

“Don’t clench,” Imogen said. “You’re not holding in a sneeze. You’re putting something on a shelf.”

I almost laughed, and the warmth slipped. I caught it, barely.

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frustrated sound.

Imogen looked at the small brass watch she wore on a chain around her neck. “Forty-three.”

Out of what?”

“Out of nothing. Yesterday it was eleven.” She snapped the watch shut. “Go eat breakfast You’re no use to me hungry.”

The afternoon was for using it.

Daphne sent over a patrol wolf named Owen who had sprained his wrist on the eastern border. It was swollen and dark with bruising, the kind of injury that would heal on its own in a day or two with a wolf’s healing.

“Perfect,” Imogen said, when Daphne looked doubtful. “Nothing that matters if she gets it wrong.”

Owen looked even more doubtful than Daphne.

I sat across from him in the clinic and took his hand as gently as I could. He tried not to flinch.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“The Luna asks, the Luna gets.” He gave me a nervous grin. “Just don’t make it fall off.”

I hadn’t gotten used to that yet. The Luna. People said it to me in the corridors and at the clinic, and every time I had to stop myself from looking over my shoulder for Cassandra.

I reached for the moon.

What I had managed to hold that morning was long gone. What I could pull in now, in daylight, under a roof, was a thread. I gathered it in my chest, then let it run down my arm into my fingertips. and pictured it moving into the swollen joint under my hand.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then Owen inhaled sharply. “That’s warm.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No. It’s-” He stared at his wrist. “It’s easing.”

It was. Not much. The swelling went down a little. The darkest edge of the bruise faded to yellow.

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“Stop,” Imogen said.

didn’t, quite. I wanted to finish it. It was so close-

“Abigail. Stop.”

I let go.

The room tilted. Daphne’s hand was on my shoulder before I could fall sideways, and Ower was saying Luna? in an alarmed voice, and somewhere far away, across the packhouse, Kade’s attention snapped toward me through the bond like a hand closing around my wrist.

Abby.

I’m fine.

You’re not.

I’m sitting down. I’m fine.

Imogen crouched in front of me and looked into my eyes, then touched two fingers to the white strand and frowned.

“No new ones,” she said. “Lucky.”

“It wasn’t even very much.”

“No. It wasn’t.” She stood. “That’s the lesson. In your own skin, a sprained wrist costs you a headache and cold hands. Your wolf could have healed that and gone for a run afterward.” She looked at me hard. “Diana is the door. You are a window. You can pass something through a window, but don’t ever try to climb through one in a hurry.”

Owen flexed his wrist carefully. “For the record,” he said, “it feels a lot better.”

That helped more than anything Imogen said.

***

Kade found me on the back steps of the clinic twenty minutes later.

He didn’t say anything at first. He sat down beside me and took my hands between his and held them until the cold went out of my fingers.

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He knew what I meant. Imogen had told us both at breakfast.

No.”

“Kade.”

“You just nearly passed out in the clinic over a sprained wrist.”

“Because I was in human form. Tonight I’ll be Diana. Under the moon. That’s different, you heard

her.”

“I heard her say she can’t make it safe.”

“She also said she can make it less stupid.” I turned my hands over in his so I was holding him back. “Kade, it already goes to you. If something happens and you’re hurt and I’m scared, it’s going to go to you again, all of it, and I won’t know how to stop.”

He looked away, toward the trees.

“I would rather learn what that feels like here,” I said quietly. “With Imogen counting and Liam pretending he isn’t worried. Not for the first time in the middle of something real.”

It didn’t open. But I felt something change around the edges of it.

“You don’t want me to do this at all,” I said. “Do you? Not tonight. Not ever.”

He was quiet for a long time.

“I don’t want to be the reason,” he said at last. His voice was rough, and his hand tightened on mine. “I don’t ever want to feel it pouring into me and not know what it’s costing you.”

“Then don’t let me hide it from you.” I leaned my shoulder into his. “That’s what the bond is for. You’ll feel it. If I go too far, you’ll know before Imogen does.”

He breathed out slowly.

“And if I tell you to stop?”

“Then I’ll stop.”

He looked at me then, really looked, the way he did when he was trying to decide whether to believe

something because he wanted to or because it was true.

“Tonight,” he said finally. “Once. And when I say stop-”

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“I promise.”

The moon was already high when we gathered in the field behind the training hall.

one

in the

Imogen had chosen it because it was open to the sky and far enough from the houses that would come wandering past. Ryan had put two of his people at the tree line anyway. Lian sto frost with his arms folded, waiting to go behind the hall with Kade and undress. Near the fence half in shadow, Kaia watched with her hands shoved into her jacket pockets. Imogen had wanted as few eyes on this as possible; Kaia was there because Liam had asked her to be, which was its own kind of announcement. Liam kept not looking at her very carefully.

“The rules,” Imogen said. “The Alpha and the Beta wrestle. Nobody bites anybody hard enough to need stitches. Abigail gives the Alpha a little. I count. When I say stop, she stops. When the Alpha says stop, she stops. If I see one new white hair on that girl’s head, I will turn every one of you into something with fewer legs.”

Liam glanced at Kade. “Can she do that?”

“I wouldn’t ask,” Kade said.

We undressed and shifted behind the hall, and I came out as Diana.

The moon hit us like warm water. More than half full now and climbing, it poured into her coat and lit the silver through the pearl-gray until the frost around her paws seemed to glow. She lifted her

head and drank it in.

Slowly, I told her.

I know.

Knox and Jasper circled each other in the center of the field. Kade’s wolf was enormous and black, and he moved with that heavy, rolling ease that made other wolves step back without knowing why. Jasper was smaller, quicker, darker brown, and he had been wrestling Knox since they were pups. They knew each other’s every trick.

They clashed. Rolled. Broke apart. Jasper got under Knox’s guard and shouldered him sideways, and Knox caught himself and came back, and it was even, the way it had always been even between them.

“Now,” Imogen said. “Count of five. One.”

I reached.

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“Two.”

Knox’s head came up. I felt it hit him through the bond. Not just strength. Clarity. His senses sharpened. His muscles loosened and filled. The tiredness of the day fell away from him like a coat he’d shrugged off.

“Three.”

–

Jasper lunged. Knox met him-and simply wasn’t there anymore he was faster than had ever seen him, a black shape that turned inside Jasper’s attack and put him on his back in the frøst before Liam’s wolf knew what had happened.

“Four.”

Kade’s surprise poured through the bond. Then something else, something hot and fierce and wild He felt invincible. I could feel him feeling it.

And I could feel how much I wanted to give him more.