"Why not?"
"They are not my concern. You are. You and our child." Briefly he laid a hand on her stomach, and then his eyes fell on Aerin and Claire. "Everything and everyone else can go to hell."
"They concern me!" Tierra stressed.
"I hope Nick and Dru end this." His narrowed eyes looked at Aerin. "Succeed where I failed."
"I dare you to try and end me again, you douche weasel," Aerin sneered.
"If they kill Moira, the Apocalypse is over," Killian said flatly, facing Tierra again.
She slapped at his chest and tried to push him away, but he didn't budge. "You bastard. She's my sister."
"And they are my brothers. Nothing has changed in that regard."
"But..."
He'd fought the Devil for her. No, that wasn't right, she reminded herself. He'd fought the Devil for their child. He hadn't professed any great love for her, regardless of his talk of destiny when they'd made love in the Standing Stones. He'd only talked of desire.
But then did she love him?
How could she? She didn't even know him.
Tierra took a step back. The events of the Standing Stones sharpened in her memory. "Explain what you said to Lucy, that we are bound. What does that mean?"
"Bound?" Claire asked. "As in married?"
Married? Good goddess, no.
Killian ignored Claire and reached for Tierra. She retreated another step and entered the safety of the wards placed around the manor. His grasp brought him into contact with the wards, and he jerked back his hand like he'd been shocked with an electrical current. "Tierra—"
"I said explain."
"You accepted me, all of me, gave yourself to me as I gave myself to you. You are mine, Tierra, whether you like it or not. And I am yours."
The words they had spoken to each other came rushing back.
"Say you take me."
"Yes, take me."
"No, say that you take me," he growled. "All of me."
"I take you. Oh goddess, please, yes, I take you, Killian Bane. Now."
"And I take you, Tierra de Moray."
"You tricked me." She swallowed. Desire to feel him inside her again warred with the need to bury him in the ground. How could she still want him after all he'd done?
His lips quirked as if knowing her thoughts. "Regardless of the method, promises were made on sacred earth. They are binding and unbreakable."
"You married her without her permission?' Aerin said.
"He'd impregnated her the same way," Claire added fuel to the fire.
"I will find a way to break them," Tierra vowed.
"You can waste your time trying, but a promise made within the Standing Stones can't be broken by time or death. Just ask your mother when you next converse."
"What the hell does that mean?" Tierra asked.
"Her secrets are not mine to reveal."
Anger and frustration driven by fear had Tierra lashing out. Suddenly her wand appeared in her hand. Last she'd seen the wand it had been carried away in a river of water rushing in the street during her showdown with Satan. She had to learn more about how the wand worked. For now, she shook the earth.
Killian laughed. "I hope our child receives your fighting spirit." His wings unfurled in a quick snap. Before he could take to the sky, Tierra had him seized with the vines of the forest and opened the ground below him.
"Go to Hell, Killian." Tierra flicked the wand, and the branches threw him into the opened maw and the earth swallowed him whole.
"Well, that's one way to get rid of an unwanted spouse," Claire said, when the dust cleared.
"It's going to be hard to get alimony with him being in Hell and all," Aerin commented and then shrugged at Tierra's crazed look. "Just saying."
"I didn't really send him to Hell, did I?" Tierra studied the end of the wand, horrified. She couldn’t have, could she? Had she just delivered Killian into Lucy's vindictive clutches?
"Sure seemed like it to me," Claire said.
"We're a Horseman down," Aerin said with glee. "This is good."
"Do you think, if we kill a Horseman, will that stop the Apocalypse?" Claire's amber eyes narrowed in plotting. "Why haven't we thought of that before?"
"They can't be killed." Tierra's throat went dry. "They're immortal." But the statement came out in a whisper.
What have I done?
"They were immortal," Aerin said. "But what if we are strong enough to take that away from them? We're prophesied to end the world. If we have that kind of power, who's to say what we can't do?"
"Oooh, I like that," Claire said, the glint in her eye turning into a flame and sending fear chasing up Tierra's spine.
"No, I don't like it. I don't want that kind of power." Or the responsibility that came with it. She just wanted to grow her herbs and make her teas.
Ambrosia's Charms and Brews, which she'd lovingly started years ago, was gone. Moira and Aunt Justine were in the clutches of Conquest and War. Aerin and Claire had embraced the dark side, while Tierra was at the top of Satan's wish list.
And, good goddess, she'd just sent the father of her child to Hell.
Moira
by
Cynthia St. Aubin
Chapter One
Goddess of power, I’m stuck real hard
Turn these shackles into lard
If it’s your will, so let it be
By earth, air, fire and sea...
Moira de Moray looked at her reflection in the crazed antique mirror on the ceiling overhead, seeing herself as she might be reflected on the surface of a brackish pond in Stump Bayou, the place she had once called home. Her lips moved only a little as she whispered the spell.
She closed her eyes and waited, attempting what she hoped was a reverent silence. When after a moment of unbearable stillness she opened one eye to peek at the mirror, she found she was still bound hand and foot by iron shackles to the bed of Nicholas Kingswood, better known as Conquest to whomever had scratched out the Bible.
“Damnation!” A deep metallic clanking was the only reply to her bitter oath.
Okay, so maybe spells weren’t her thing. Lord knew she’d tried enough of them this morning to choke a deep-throated goat.
Please dear Goddess, I know I’m whiny, but could you make my hands really tiny? She had thought—hoped?—that if she could slip her tiny hands of their cuffs, she could work her feet free, and once she escaped, one of her sisters might be able to reverse the spell. Even if they couldn’t, for the chance at escaping the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—in whose compound she was now held captive—she was willing to consider a life with hands no bigger than a buffalo nickel. She’d just have to make more trips to carry in the groceries was all.
Please dear Goddess, I ain’t fakin’, turn these shackles into bacon. Now, that had been the real heartbreaker. Her stomach growled something fierce and she would have been more than willing to gnaw herself free. Technically, she knew the use of fakin’ was a cheat on the rhyme, as much of her bayou patois had begun to fade these months with her sisters in Port Townsend.
Fading like her memories of a loon’s mournful call just when the sunset sewed gold sequins on the bayou’s surface. Or the whisper of a summer breeze threading through the Spanish moss outside her window in the shack she shared with Uncle Sal. Truth was, she’d been shedding herself like a snake shed its skin. Letting her sisters sand away her rough spots—and Lord knew there were enough of those.
Tierra patiently trimmed Moira’s borders like she were a patch of overgrown herbs.
Aerin’s breezy uptown parlance had filtered her own backwater blabber into something clearer, cleaner.
Claire burned off Moira’s untended dead edges like autumn leaves, helping her find her own shape beneath beliefs that no longer served.
She could see the good in all of it, but wasn’t sure she’d see her sister’s faces again.
Moira huffed out a frustrated breath and gazed down the length of her tanned legs pa
st her customary cut-off jean skirt to the metal cuffs at her ankles. She tried to draw her knees in, but judging by the chain’s weight, the cuffs had to be made of lead or something.
Silver lining: if she did a few more leg lifts, that oughta count as her work out for the day, at least.
Her own irritated visage stared back at her when she flopped back on the pillow, which she was pretty damn sure was made of the finest goose down and covered in a pillowcase with a thread count in the quintuple digits. Nicholas Kingswood would have nothing less. The comforter beneath her bare thighs was no less silky and seductive in its buttery caress. These luxuries did little to allay the chilling affect of the rest of the room however, particularly the creepy-ass masks staring at her from their cases with blank shadow eyes. Helmets long since emptied of their heads. Swords and spears, still rusty with blood of the conquered. Newspaper clippings sandwiched in frames worthy of Baroque masterpieces. The word surrender featured prominently in just about every headline.
Trophies.
Trophies belonging to the man Moira sensed but didn’t see. She smelled him on the sheets beneath her, that particular mix of expensive cologne, aftershave, and lust for domination. It was this last that eased her fear for her life.
Nicholas Kingswood could not help but come and lord his position of superiority over her before he allowed her to meet her end. And he would end her. Of this she had no doubt. In this way, he differed from his brothers.
Dru, War’s own iteration, the blade and the bullet made in flesh, could not hide the lust for Claire rolling from him in heady waves.
Bane, Death on wings, as necessary and unstoppable as the sun’s rising, collector of souls, broadcast to Moira a deep wound within his own immortal fabric: he couldn’t bear the death of his own child, or Tierra who carried it.
Julian, embodied Pestilence in the dark, languishing form of the fiercely romantic vampires in books she’d swooned over on their back porch in the Louisiana summer heat, rocking herself with a broom handle in a hammock fashioned from old fishing nets. His longing for Aerin could pull the world off its axis.
But not Nick.
Oh, he wanted to bone Moira, sure enough. But the only reason he’d kept Julian’s or Dru’s sword from providing her a hasty introduction with her maker was because it was his right. He had been sent to kill her, and no other would bear her blood as their victory banner. Nick needed to own her, body to soul, bones to blood. Needed the knowledge that she belonged to him. And when he was through with her, a braid of her black-red hair might end up in the case right next to old Creepy Eyes.
“Well fuck that,” she said aloud, readying herself to try another spell. Scarcely had she opened her mouth to begin an invocation involving motor oil and a llama when a sound snapped her lips shut.
Water. In pipes.
Someone, and Moira had a pretty decent guess who, had just turned on a shower. Close enough for her to feel the presence of moisture through the solid wood door to her left. Her chest went still, her eyes open in lidless concentration. The only movement in the entire stretched ‘X’ of her bound form were her lips, curving into a slow smile.
She’d been working on a little something. Something she’d been dying to try out. Delicious tingling stole over her, through her as each water molecule of moisture responded to her. Her cells, their cells, one in purpose. Only when she felt the wholeness of them heeding her call did she pull their heat into her body, leaving the water spraying from several shower heads at the body of Nick Kingswood at exactly two degrees above freezing. She thought the extra degrees especially magnanimous in light of all the general fuckery he’d dragged into her life.
“Fuck!” The hollered curse in that smooth, smoky baritone widened Moira’s smile.
And for my next trick...a magician’s voice announced in her head.
Moira beckoned the droplets to increase their pace. Just a titch. Say, about the velocity of a firehose?
They seemed all too eager to comply.
“Jesus fucking Christ! Holy fuck!”
And would the moisture collected around the glass shower door care to freeze, perhaps? she wordlessly requested. Just enough to prevent someone from opening it without a few solid body blocks, of course.
Not a problem.
Moira heard the squeaking of taps attempting to be turned off, then glass violently rattling. At this point, Nick’s curses devolved into a language she didn’t speak but could still take the general meaning of.
When it finally flung open, the wooden door followed almost at once, and Moira was confronted with the towering, naked, dripping frame of Conquest, with naught but a towel held to his admittedly impressive crotch.
“Good morning, Sunshine.” Moira greeted Nick with her most beatific smile. “Well, don’t you look like a drowned possum? Didn’t your momma ever teach you to dry off while you’re on the shower mat?”
Droplets hung jewel-like from the tips of Nick’s disheveled hair, the exact color of a roux allowed to sizzle past brick brown. His eyes, usually the exact shade of sunlight through a good Tennessee whisky, had darkened considerably. Water droplets under her control only moments earlier willfully disobeyed her just for the chance to glide down the channels provided by his pectoral muscles, abdominals, and the dangerous ledge where his abdomen cut a deep “V” into his lean hips.
And the rest of him…Lord, but Moira couldn’t let herself look for fear of what he’d see reflected in her liquid aquamarine eyes. She already knew what hid under that slate-gray towel, and he’d drop it in a second if the distraction would give him an advantage.
Seeing Nicholas Kingswood bare-ass naked would be enough to drive any woman straight past distraction and right over the cliff beyond it. Maybe she hadn’t thought out this part of her plan so well.
“Problems with your plumbing?” she asked, sweet as sugared honey.
His chest rose and fell, his breath practically steaming from flared nostrils. He advanced to the bed with startling speed, drops of water falling from his body onto Moira’s cheeks like rain as he seized her shackled wrists with hands equally unyielding.
His mouth hovered over hers. Close enough for her to feel his heated words against her lips when he spoke at last.
“While you are under my roof, I would advise you against provoking me.”
“On account of you don’t like what cold water does to your tally whacker?” This shot? A total bluff. Simple math told Moira that if he had both hands on her wrists, he had no hands on his towel. What she saw out of the corner of her eye hadn’t been affected by the icy spray one lick.
Lick. Now there was an interesting idea.
“From this moment forward, every breath you take is given by my grace. As you are mine to destroy, your life is over the second I decide it’s so. And understand this, Moira Jo—” An involuntary shudder worked its way up her spine with her name on his lips and her water on his body “—I am the only one in this house who has any interest in prolonging it.”
“You want I should scare up a blue ribbon for you? Cheeto won one at the county fair once for Most Charming Animal. Can’t say that it applies to you much, but I don’t guess he’d mind sharing. Come to think if it, Nick Kingswood sharing a ribbon with a pig makes an awful lot of sense.”
Nick’s eyes darkened further at the mention of her familiar, a teacup pig that just happen to belch fire when stirred up.
Nick had made the mistake of shaking him up like a little tank of nitroglycerine and was relieved of his eyebrows for the privilege.
“You don’t have any idea the danger you’re in, do you?”
“What? You mean with the zombies, five seals out of seven more busted than a poker player on Sunday morning, two of my sisters seduced by the dark arts, the third knocked up with Death’s spawn, Satan herself clamoring to turn me into some strappy sandals, and waking up chained to the bed of an apocalyptic horseman sent to destroy me personally?” Moira paused, allowing herself an unbroken gaze straight into th
ose amber eyes as water drops now warmed by his body continued to rain down. “You’re right. I don’t have me the first god-damn clue.”
Surprise softened the hard angles of Conquest’s face. He hadn’t expected her to understand. Most folks didn’t when it came right down to it. For Moira, gifted with a large rack and about the worst backwater drawl a body could have, she’d encountered the same reaction all her life.
No one expected much from her, and she was happy to give them about what they expected.
From men, a bless your heart, and a pat a little left or right of her arm, grazing her boob. From women, the stony-eyed stare of outright dislike.
“Then why do you insist on contradicting me at every turn?” Nick asked, his grip on her wrists tightening.
“Because I know you, Nicholas Kingswood.” Moira leaned to the side of his face, his yet unshaven jaw brushing against her cheek as she whispered close to his ear. “I’ve tasted you. Remember?”
She certainly did. The heat of their mouths fused in the pouring rain, the ocean’s tides coming in waves like their pleasure, her hand slick on his cock, convulsing around his fingers to the scent of salt air and sex. Her first—and to date—only orgasm. A fact that had surprised Nick almost as much as the tsunami-sized wall of water she had coaxed to launch him to the far side of the Puget Sound seconds after.
“Yes.” His voice had lowered by several registers. The jugular vein on his throat rose and fell in time with the erratic throbbing of his heart.
Moira kept her lips at his ear.
“You’re a man who’s used to getting whatever he wants. But you ain’t gonna get it from me, Nick. No sir. I’m fixin’ to give you what you need.”
Chapter Two
Nick Kingswood’s blood burned hot beneath his chilled skin. At least he’d managed to rinse off the reek of smoke and brimstone still clinging to him after Satan’s latest soirée before his shower had gone polar. He hadn’t been particularly enthused to see Ambrosia’s Brews and Charms go up in flames, as it belonged to him despite the protracted legal battle waged by Aerin de Moray, Moira’s bun-wearing bitch of a sister.
Which Witch is Wicked? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 2) Page 26
