Which Witch is Wicked? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 2)

by Kerrigan Byrne

  Also, Tierra said he smelled weird. And at the moment, scent was her superpower. Not because she was a witch, but because she was knocked-up.

  Aerin shuddered with revulsion again.

  Tommy’s blue eyes sparkled like the open sea. He had that kind of wide-shouldered, dimpled, all-American charm that belonged to sparkly-eyed men like Chris Pine and Channing Tatum. It was disarming and very, very different than Drustan’s dark, exotic, dangerous, and otherworldly sex appeal. Claire’s spectrum of men was quite varied. Aerin had to give her sister that.

  “I like my meat rare,” Tommy said with a good-natured shrug.

  There was rare, and then there was the fact that the stove hadn’t been used, and neither had the grill as far as Aerin could tell. She supposed Claire could have roasted it with her uber fire powers, but she thought Claire was in the entertainment room with the others—

  The high-pitched, terrified screams of her sisters was instantly drowned out by the pounding of adrenaline in her ears. Snatching the broom from the ground, Aerin raced down the hall, almost tripping on the Celtic-braided rug before skidding to a stop at the entry to the entertainment room.

  “His boot still has brains on it!” Moira bounced up and down on the overstuffed sectional couch, crunching on another pork rind and pointing at the big screen TV. “Did ya’ll see that? Zombie’s eye popped like a grape!”

  “My eyes are still popping because the one with a crossbow took his shirt off.” Claire wriggled her shapely eyebrows.

  “Gross,” Tierra moaned from where her face was buried in one of the couches’ many throw pillows. “Tell me when I can look, you guys.” Even in the ambient glow of the TV, she looked a pale, maybe a little green, too.

  Aerin lowered the broom she brandished, her breathing returning to normal. They’d all been on high-alert lately, and it must be getting to her more than she realized.

  An impending Apocalypse will do that to a girl.

  She knew how religious her sisters were about their Sunday night cable and that for the next hour, they would be glued to the tube, getting off on gore-porn and zombie killers.

  “Why does the sweaty one in leather have a crossbow? Seems like an antiquated weapon with a high risk of running out of ammunition. Don’t guns kill zombies in this show?” Aerin asked. “Everyone else is using a gun.”

  Three pairs of mutinous, incredulous eyes turned toward her in perfect synchronization. It was unsettling because each face was identical but for the color of their eyes, and it gave a distinct Children of the Corn vibe.

  “The sweaty one?” Moira asked slowly, her aquamarine eyes narrowing.

  “You mean the hot one,” Claire corrected. “As in sexy. Also, that woman is using a katana, so not everyone has a gun.”

  “I prefer the leader,” Tierra said, slightly off topic. “I like a rugged guy with a beard who’s in charge and carries a big gun.”

  “But he’s carrying a revolver,” Aerin pointed out. “It only holds six bullets. What about the good-looking Asian with the AK47, doesn’t it seem like he should be in charge? At the very least, he wins bullets.”

  “That so-called sweaty one is the melancholy backwoods badass loner with a tragic past and a heart of gold.” Moira snorted her displeasure. “Almost every woman in this country would do him sideways from hell to breakfast.”

  “As long as they use protection,” Aerin snarked. “It looks like his family tree doesn’t have enough branches.”

  She gasped as a pork rind bounced off her face. “Hey!”

  “Are you doing chores?” Tierra asked hopefully motioning to the broom Aerin still clutched with both hands.

  Aerin looked down, feeling sheepish and at the same time wondering where the dustpan went. Chores? Ha. Fat chance. “I heard you guys scream, and I thought…”

  “That we were being attacked and you were going to sweep them to death?” Moira chortled.

  “If this was the zombiepocalypse, you’d totally die first,” Tierra said.

  “You know what? Never mind.” Aerin brought the broom in closer to her chest, as though to shield it from their taunts. See if she came running to their rescue next time.

  On the screen another zombie head exploded, and a horde of gray, hissing, grotesque undead began ripping the limbs off a screaming victim.

  “That’s it!” Tierra held the back of her hand to her mouth, the silver backs of her rings catching the light from the TV as she squeezed her eyes shut. “Change the channel you guys, or I’m going to barf.”

  Moira grabbed the remote. “Okay, what else we got on Sunday night?”

  “Hmmm.” Claire pursed her lips. “There’s Masterpiece Theatre presents historical soap operas, Sexy Highlanders on Starz, or boobs and dragons on HBO.”

  “I don’t care.” Teirra swallowed a few times. “Just switch it before you’re wearing my dinner.”

  Moira hit a button on the remote and two newscasters, a man and a woman with impossibly white teeth and strikingly similar blowout hair styles, sat behind a gray desk.

  “Whew, thank you.” Tierra visibly relaxed.

  “… Officials are saying that they don’t have any conclusive data as of yet to explain the cause of the recent rise in disturbingly violent crime in Seattle, but they did voice their growing concerns that it’s spreading to other cities along the West Coast,” the male newscaster explained in a solemn voice. “Officials also refused to comment on the claims several victims have made that the perpetrators of assaults, violence, and even murder have been someone who was previously reported deceased.”

  They all wore identical looks of wide-eyed astonishment as they glanced at each other.

  “Is this another zombie movie?” Aerin asked.

  A horrified Tierra shook her head. “This is the channel five evening news. That’s Kip Kipley and Sharon Trout, long-time local news anchors.”

  Cue Sharon with her red suit and chunky gold jewelry. “We obtained some footage of the violence shot earlier today, and we have to warn you, this might be disturbing to some viewers. A local Tacoma man was brutally attacked at a coffee shop by someone he’d claimed was a childhood friend who’d drowned ten years ago when they were swimming together.”

  A shaky video, obviously taken from a bystander phone, showed a bloated teenager with soggy clothes grab a man in a suit and chop the screaming guy’s hand off with a cleaver.

  Coffee mingled with blood as chaos erupted, and the cup, hand still attached, exploded all over the floor.

  “Holy shit on a shingle,” Moira breathed. She barely noticed as Tierra ripped the bag of pork rinds from her and heaved the contents of her stomach into it.

  Chapter Two

  “So zombies, is that a thing?” The words rushed from Aerin’s mouth into her Bluetooth the moment the click sounded indicating someone had picked up the other line. Sitting on the white trunk at the foot of her bed, she worried one of her silk cuffs and studied the black and white arabesque wallpaper.

  “Aerin de Moray.” Julian Roarke’s British inflection wrapped her name in blood-red velvet, even through the phone. His cultured voice evoked luxurious Jaguar commercials and indulgent, delectable sins that would be illegal where Moira came from. “How did you get this number?”

  “Not important.” She tried to sound all clipped and business-like and shit. She’d swoon over the provocative surprise in his voice later. “Does this Apocalypse happen to be the zombiepocalypse?”

  “You see,” he continued, undeterred, “we bought this phone at a ubiquitous marketplace that seems to be off of every freeway exit these days. There was an astounding number of people in elastic-waist trousers or sporting what Nicholas called a “muffin top.” He paused, and Aerin could almost hear him shudder. “Are you familiar with the term?”

  “Yes, but I saw on the news—.”

  “Please, don’t misunderstand me, I do so appreciate a voluptuous woman, but if ladies insist on wearing trousers in this century, then they should at least buy t
hem in the correct size to avoid said phenomenon.”

  She couldn’t agree with him more, truth-be-told, but she didn’t have time to commiserate at the moment. Julian wasn’t the sort of man who would be caught dead in sweat pants. He dressed exclusively in anachronistic suits that evoked Dracula movies and Brontë novels, complete with watch chains and cufflinks and buttoned vests.

  Except for that once. When they’d enjoyed an evening ride through the forest on a black steed older than her last name. Where they’d kissed in the moonlight. He’d worn an open poet’s shirt and loose trousers. More Highlander than Hawthorne. He’d taken her breath and left her wanting way more than just one kiss.

  She intended to remedy that. Eventually. If they didn’t all die first.

  “What does this have to do with zombies?” she demanded in that voice that always got her what she wanted.

  He denied her. Again. “The point I was getting at is that I procured the phone from a gentleman, and I use that term very loosely, who assured me that it was untraceable, that no one could get the number.”

  Oh, now it made sense. “One thing you have to learn about the digital age, Julian, is that you can hide nothing. Especially from me. I own the clouds. All of them. Which means there is no information I can’t find if I look hard enough.”

  “Indeed.” He sounded sufficiently impressed, and Aerin had to swallow satisfaction. “May I ask why you expended so much of your expertise to seek me out, Aerin de Moray?”

  “Because you know stuff.” That was why. The only reason why. Pretty much half of the only couple of reasons why.

  His voice became dry enough to blow away in a sandstorm. “Duly noted. You inquired about zombies?”

  “Yes, what do you know about them?”

  He was silent a moment before answering. “Well, the genesis of the word itself is contested. It either comes from the Haitian or Creole French term Zonbi, which belongs to the Voodoo religion. They’re historically human corpses reanimated by magic. Specifically Necromancy. Though in popular culture of these modern days the consensus seems to be that the undead are corpses infected with a virus, which I find rather ridiculous as there is and never will be a virus that brings the dead back to life.”

  He should know. He was Pestilence, after all.

  “Do zombies have anything to do with the prophecy?” she pressed. “If the dead start to come back to life, what does that mean?”

  “Aerin…” A pregnant pause yawned in the chasm between them. “We shouldn’t be talking about this. We’re on other sides of this battle and—.”

  “Listen, bub, every last one of us is going to be on the ‘other side’ if we don’t figure out how to stop this shit,” Aerin interrupted. “I don’t understand why we have to be in opposition. It’s not like any of us want the end of the world to come about.”

  “That isn’t entirely true.”

  This time it was Aerin’s turn to pause. “Come the fuck again?”

  “My brothers and I are divided on this issue,” he confessed.

  “Really?” This was news to her. “Where do you land?”

  “I am…conflicted. I haven’t landed on a side as of yet. It is all, up in the air, as it were.” His soft chuckle washed over her like silk gliding over nude flesh.

  Puns. Ugh.

  “Har. Har,” Aerin said acerbically. “Yuck it up, chuckles. But if there are those of you who want us to end the world, why are you still trying to kill us in order to stop it?”

  “You know I can’t answer that,” he replied. “There are powers at play that you can’t possibly—” He caught himself just in time and silence stretched between them once more.

  She could see him in her mind as though she’d conjured him with a spell. His dark, gothic elegance underscored by a hint of archaic brutality. Beautiful features, artistically rendered with such flawless precision that even the staunchest atheist would have to admit only a god could sculpt such perfection. Pale as a vampire, strong as a mountain, and lethal as the plague. Literally.

  That was Julian Roarke.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have fucking called him.

  “I must admit,” something warmed Pestilence’s voice. Scotch, maybe, or laughter. Hard to tell. “After spending an infuriating half hour at said marketplace today, I lost what little faith I had left in humanity. I’m leaning toward complete planetary annihilation.”

  “A man like you shouldn’t joke about that,” Aerin said through a burst of laughter. “But I can’t say I haven’t experienced the same thing.”

  “You have a lovely laugh, Aerin de Moray.” The sincerity in his tone sobered her immediately.

  “Thanks.” She brought a hand to her burning cheek. “Will you at least tell me why you’re conflicted? I want to understand you.”

  “Have you ever looked up what the word Apocalypse means?”

  “Don’t try to change the subject on me, Julian,” she warned.

  “I can assure you, I’m not,” he redressed. “Just indulge me for a moment whilst I explain.”

  “Okay,” Aerin said carefully.

  “If this prophecy is allowed to come to fruition, Aerin, it won’t culminate in complete obliteration of the planet, or of humanity. As I was saying before, the word Apocalypse, when translated from Greek, its original language, literally means a revelation. A lifting of the veil, as it were. What we, the Horsemen bring about, would be mass devastation, there’s no doubt of that. But it would be more of a cataclysm really, than true annihilation. It’ll mean the gods of creation have forsaken mortals. That the planet would be on the open market, so to speak, for anyone with sufficient power to take hold of. To put it simply, no one wants to rule nothing. But scorched earth can easily be reseeded, and the outcome of that battle could be worse than anything our feeble minds could devise. On the other side of that argument, there is a chance for humanity to redeem itself. To start over. The strongest would survive the conquests, the wars, and finally the plagues. They would be ripe for the picking, ready to follow someone with enough power and—”

  An idea straightened Aerin’s spine. “Someone like us?” she posited. “Like you?”

  He made a wry sound. “Perish the thought… but yes.”

  Interesting…

  “Though the likelihood would be more of the deity variety,” he rushed on. “And none of them good. Listen, Aerin, there are those whose interests are directly tied to this prophecy. Who’ve waited literally millennia to swoop in and take over. To subjugate any who are left and to claim all errant power in this world for their own. Do you understand me? Some of them are closer than you think.”

  The hidden meaning in his voice could have choked a whale.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “I can’t say,” he repeated his earlier words. “But, who knows where we’ll stand when the smoke clears?”

  Who, indeed? Aerin thought. Something to consider. Might well-meaning, benevolent elemental witches make for some excellent overlords? Hells yeah. A damn sight better than the current fuckwads in power. If the de Moray Druids ruled the planet, would little kids starve? No. Would religious war devastate nations? Not on her watch. Everyone would be all happy and fed and shit. Plus, Druid magic made for one hell of a health plan.

  Was that a terrible idea?

  She was getting ahead of herself. First things first.

  “So zombies are wreaking havoc and I don’t think the problem is going to get any better.” She shifted gears back to the problem at hand. “What do you think we should do? Do you know how to kill a zombie?”

  That thoughtful, unhurried silence would be considered rude in this day and age, but Aerin understood that he had the patience of an immortal, not to mention the memory of one. That was a lot of files to flip through in the ol’ noggin.

  “I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done. Permit me to consult some texts. There exist many many myths about the dead coming back to life. The problem is, these are stories of those who conquer
ed death himself and thereby become deities, or at least immortals. We’ve had this conversation before, you and I… Pantheons of your people. Demi-gods and luminaries who may or may not be deities but are supposed to have risen from the dead. For example, the Egyptian’s Ra and Osiris. The Nordic God Baldr. The Greeks had Adonis. The Babylonians had Ishtar. And a myriad of others, Ba’al, Bacchus, Hermes, Dionysus, Mithras, Orpheus, et cetera. Even the son of the Christian God rose from the dead and the argument could be made that he’s a zom—”

  “Dat! – stop right there.” Aerin held up a hand, forgetting that he couldn’t see her through the phone line. “I might not be religious, but being raised in a Judeo-Christian society I still expect to get hit by lightning every time you wax so blasphemous.”

  That chuckle washed over her again, and the warm vibration made its way through her until it landed in her panties. “Lightning.” Amusement made his voice a little deeper. Even sexier, if that was possible. “That’s so charming coming from you.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll find out, soon, I expect.” A deep breath expelled too close to his side of the mouthpiece, and it made that unpleasant noise that wind did over the phone. “I’ll look into this, Aerin de Moray. But this means I’ll have to see you again.”

  Implications she dare not identify dripped from his cultured voice like expensive wine.

  “You could call me,” she ventured.

  “You could meet me,” he countered.

  “So you can kill me? Please.”

  “What if I gave you my word that I wouldn’t, this time?”

  “Pff. Real romantic there, Casanova. But you have three brothers who’d love nothing more than to see my head on a spike.”

  “I won’t tell them we’re meeting. And I won’t allow them to harm you. I—”

  Aerin waited while he waged a silent battle with himself.