And Aerin. Lord, how they picked at one another. But Moira had long suspected it had more to do with similarities than the petty jabs about clothing and diction. A common wound they didn’t have to acknowledge if they didn’t get close enough to share. Stubborn pride keeping Moira from letting Aerin know just how much she’d wanted her approval. And Aerin’s smooth-as-glass exterior, against which all things emotional and maudlin left unwelcome smudges. Fragile, glass was, beautiful and ethereal as the air that gave the molten particles their shape.
What she wouldn’t have given to hug each one of her sisters one last time.
Last. This one word stuck in her mind and attached itself to everything she now smelled, thought, felt, and did. The last time she would watch the moon glow over the bay. The last time she would smile, laugh, feel the hot water of a shower slide over her skin.
“Here we are.” Nick stalked into a copse of trees. A sleek, white car lurked within the shadows, its exotic headlights shaped like nostrils flaring in the darkness.
“Hol-ee shit,” Moira gasped as they drew closer. “Is that a Ferrari Italia 458?”
Nick halted abruptly. “You know cars?”
“Are you kiddin’ me? I worked in Uncle Red’s shop since I was big enough to hold a socket wrench. Back home, I drove a ’69 Plymouth Barracuda.”
“Keep it up, and I’ll spread your legs on the hood of this car,” Nick warned.
“Hey, it ain’t my fault you’ve got the libido of a two-peter jack rabbit. I just miss tearing up the back roads, hearing the Badger growl…”
“You’ll get to hear Magnus growl. I don’t think he’ll disappoint.”
“Wait a minute,” Moira said. “This is Magnus? I thought when you said mount, you meant he’d be an actual horse.”
“Why have only one horse when I can have 600?” Nick asked.
“Can’t argue with that logic,” Moira admitted.
Nick walked around to the passenger’s side, and with a flash of headlights and the requisite beep, the door opened, and he deposited Moira in the buttery black leather seat.
When Nick slipped into the driver’s side and turned the engine over, the low, throaty growl sent a reckless rush of adrenaline down Moira’s spine.
The very air between them felt electric with possibility, thick with the new intimacy between them, saturated with the sensual scent of leather, Nick’s aftershave, and the man himself. The immortal sent to destroy her.
“Fast.” Moira ran her fingers along the leather dash, marveling at a display that seemed more appropriate to a space ship.
Nick caught her hand and slid it downward, but surprised her by guiding it to the jutting leather stick shift instead of his crotch.
“Wanna shift?” he invited her.
“Does a woodpecker shit splinters?” she replied.
“For our purposes, I’m going to assume that’s a yes. Shall we?”
As it turned out, they worked the powerful machine much like they had worked each other’s bodies—with a precision that seemed born more than learned.
Nick had opened the moon roof, allowing the wind to whip her drying hair into a frenzy as they navigated the frontage road circumscribing the bay at speeds neither would have dared in the day time. Only when they neared the turn off that would send them up the winding road to Siren’s Cry did Moira downshift, hesitating as her heart decided to rent a condo in her throat.
From this spot, she traced the treacherous lines of Siren’s Cry as it jutted out above the ocean, calmer tonight than most in her recollection. The shadows of monoliths were barely visible beyond the thick gathering of trees. The Standing Stones.
Where they had seen their mother.
Where Tierra had discovered her crown and wand.
Where she would die so her sisters could live.
She damn near hit her head on the Ferrari’s roof when Nick Kingswood wrapped his hand around hers on the stick shift. The same current that had shocked them both so on their first meeting still leapt between their twined fingers.
“You take over,” Moira insisted. “I don’t think I can.”
Nick nodded, understanding.
He guided Magnus expertly up the winding road, braking and downshifting in perfect time with every curve, much as he had reverenced her own body with a skilled and masterful hand.
Magnus slowed to a halt a ways down the road from the stand of trees beyond which the Standing Stones kept their silent vigil.
They sat together in the car, staring out at them in silence.
Moira searched inside herself for the stillness she had felt earlier that afternoon, looking into Justine’s tear-stained face and knowing the answer. The same blessed peace found her again, warmed her chilly heart and expanded in her chest, filling her with light, and lightness.
Nick did not urge her out of the car, didn’t so much as speak a word until she turned to him.
“Okey dokey,” she said, wrapping her fingers around the car door handle. “Let’s go.”
He reached across to block her exit. “Keep your ass in that seat.”
Her heart fluttered within her chest. After all this, was he truly going to try and stop her?
Did she want him to?
“The least I can do is open the car door like a motherfucking gentleman before I shoot you through the chest,” he said.
“Oh,” Moira replied, unable to summon any other cogent response.
She remained seated until Nick walked around to her side of the car and opened it, offering her his hand, which she accepted.
He didn’t drop it as together they made their way the final steps over the dew-dampened grass, through the trees and out into the clearing where the stones stood tall beneath a sky full of stars.
Stars. Praise the Lord for a night without clouds so she could die beneath a moonlit sky with stars wheeling overhead.
She resisted the urge to count every blade of grass beneath her bare feet, capture a handful of leaves and smell them. To roll and glory in every last sensual detail she could greedily drink from these last few moments.
Moira allowed herself to reach out and place her palm flat against the nearest stone, feeling beneath its cooling surface the sunlight it had absorbed. She rested her cheek against the gritty warmth, looking at the lights of Port Townsend across the bay. Moira had no spells memorized for this moment. Instead, she resorted to an old-fashioned prayer of the kind Uncle Sal had always insisted on muttering over their steaming plates of dinner.
Please, watch over them, dear Goddess. Please, keep my sisters safe. Let this be the end. And let the end be good.
She turned to Nick and nodded, beginning her final trek toward the edge of the cliff.
Scarcely had she taken two steps when she was hauled backward by a hand grasping the back of her cutoffs, dragged into violent collision with the body of Nick Kingswood, hard and unyielding as the Standing Stones.
His mouth crushed hers, his lips a brand that would send her to her death marked.
Claimed.
Chapter Ten
Moira opened to him like a flower drinking the rain, drawing what nourishment it could of the last of its little season. Nick moaned into her mouth, his tongue sliding over hers not with conquering force, but with urgent need, unguarded passion, painful longing.
She answered him in kind. Tasting him as she had their first time on the dock. Their first kiss and their last pressed together in a memory more voluminous than the ocean backdrop to both. Moira took all he was willing to give in the velvety exchange, hands twined around his neck, binding her to him now because there was no forever. No next time. No tomorrow.
He deepened the kiss, one hand plunging into her hair, fingers curling into a fist in the sensitive strands at the nape of her neck. Moira relished the miniscule darts of pleasure firing from her scalp down her neck, tugged by the hand of Conquest, fully alive in her body and devouring every sensation as it came, desperate for each second she could steal.
He
r breasts flattened against his chest as he palmed the round swell of her ass before sliding down her thigh, lifting it over his hip. His desire pressed against her, the very throb of life itself.
Somehow, Moira knew Nick did this not for his own pleasure, but so she could feel, this one last time, just how much she was wanted. Just how much she was needed.
And she did.
Not just wanted, but wanted by a force as old as the world itself. Wise as he was impulsive, arrogant as he was tender, brutal as he was gentle. Ruthless as he was considerate. Nicholas Kingswood was as beautiful a death as Moira could imagine, and at last she ended their kiss, knowing the time had come for another deadlier part of this immortal to be buried inside her.
They both came away panting, but Nick did not release her, opting instead to hold her face in his cupped palms so she couldn’t look away even as she struggled to hold the tears at bay. Her hands remained planted on his chest and she shut her eyes tight to memorize the sensation of his wild heart leaping beneath her fingertips.
“Brave Moira,” he whispered, running the rough pad of a thumb over her swollen lower lip. “Are you ready?”
“I am.” She looked up into his eyes, darkened to burnt umber by night’s veil. “Question is, are you? Or are you going to pull me back for another bout of tongue twister?”
“Don’t.” Nick spoke through a tightened jaw, his forehead creased in concentration. “Don’t tempt me, Moira. I could take you again. Right here, right now, this second and every second after it. I could fuck you while the world burned around us, and the only thing stopping me is knowing that you’re strong enough to walk toward that cliff.”
She realized the time for her wise-ass rejoinders had truly passed.
Her time had truly passed.
She was almost over.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She felt her eyes filling with tears again, the faces of all those she loved swimming on the backs of her eyelids when she pressed them shut.
Nick kissed her forehead, his hands splayed over her temples, letting his lips linger there until she closed her hands over his wrists and squeezed.
He thumbed the tears from her cheeks and dropped his hands to her shoulders, making sure she looked directly into his eyes before giving his instructions. Moira could not decipher what emotion lived in the amber depths of Nick’s gaze at that moment, nor read the thoughts spooling through his immortal mind, but knew on some instinctive level this night would take something from them both.
“Walk toward the edge of the cliff. Don’t turn until I tell you to.” The urgency in Nick’s voice dismantled what little defense Moira had left, and she could no longer stem the tide of her own fear in these final moments.
She drew a shaky breath and nodded before turning away from Nick, mechanically taking the first step, then the second, unable to keep herself from counting each as she moved toward the last step she would ever take.
Behind her, Nick spoke an incantation and the Earth beneath her feet shifted and trembled. Clouds appeared over her head where there had been none, circling above them like water around an unplugged drain. The bow and arrow. Nick was calling his weapons to him now.
“Now, Moira!” he ordered in a voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. She halted in place, close enough to the cliff’s edge to see the ocean spit and spray against the jagged rocks below.
When she did, she understood why Nick had asked her not to look until he bade her to.
The Nicholas Kingswood she knew was gone.
What remained was no longer a mere mortal, an arrogant business mogul destroying and overtaking paltry sections of the earth at will. He was Conquest, Horseman who would bring an end to the Apocalypse. Here, and now.
Light swirled and leapt around him like lightning in a glass jar. Smoke billowed and swirled as the clouds overtook the sky completely. Through the miasma, Moira could make out three points of light: the fire-orange glow of Conquest’s two eyes, and the sharp silver tip of his arrow.
Moira stared at it, waiting.
Conquest hesitated, the inner struggle evident in the outer manifestation of energy crackling and leaping, the fire in his eyes dimming like dying coals.
Please, Moira silently begged. End this.
Conquest’s eyes closed, dousing the coals to the twang of the bowstring and an arrow’s brief, whistling scream.
Pain exploded into Moira’s chest as the razor tip pierced her clean through. She felt intense pressure. Shock. Sorrow.
Relief.
Moira staggered backward, driven by the arrow’s speed and force. One bare foot found the earth’s crust. The next, only air.
How absurd, the last thought her mind supplied before she plummeted toward the ocean and the rocks below.
I never did get to finish those grits.
Chapter Eleven
“Earth is our body.
Fire, our soul.
Air, our breath.
Water, our blood.
Flesh, knit to flesh.
Vein to vein.
The Goddess blesses you.
Be whole again.”
Moira nodded with appreciation, eyes still closed against the chilly water. Now that sounded like a real-ass, honest to goodness spell. She ought to write that one down. She could have saved an awful lot of critters with a spell like that.
Now wait just a gods-damned minute, she thought.
How in the hell was she thinking anything? She was dead. Like, Apocalyptic arrow through the heart, fall from a hundred-foot cliff, land on the ocean floor-dead. Real dead. Super dead. Deader than a corpse’s pecker dead.
Her back still stung from the reverse belly-flop she’d done when hitting the water’s churning surface. Ethereal blue light pried her eyelids open, and Moira found herself surrounded.
Cod, steelhead herring, spiny dogfish, sea otters, starfish, and even an orca whale had drifted by to examine her intrusion into their realm.
She felt scorn in their judgy, goggled eyes.
What the hell are y’all lookin’ at? Half of y’all aren’t even vertebrates. She reached out to their pure and simple minds as she had with Old Methuselah, elder statesman of the catfish colony back home. Nothing to see here.
But perhaps she was wrong about that.
Moira glanced down at her middle, where Nick’s arrow still skewered her like a cocktail wienie on sample day down at the A&P. She’d never had much of a mind for math, but by her rough estimate, she had at least twelve inches of the arrow’s feathered butt end sticking out of the second “O” in Hoodoo Shack on the front of her tank top and another twelve jutting out of her back, ending in the arrow’s pointed tip. Which left at least eight inches of the arrow still inside her body, puncturing all kinds of organs she’d planned on using ripe into her dotage, when her love of beignets and Irish butter gave her the ‘Beetus and a four-alarm heart-attack sent her toppling off a barstool.
She took a gander at her surroundings, all illuminated by the same otherworldly glow whose source she couldn’t find. Kelp forests moved in the water’s caress with balletic grace. Fish swam idly by, seeking food or mates. She spotted an ancient, barnacle-crusted lobster and gently picked it up by its tail only to have it squirt a foul jetstream of curmudgeon crustacean invectives into her mind about other things she could dip in butter and shove into her mouth aside from him.
Fish back home had been a lot friendlier—that had been for damn sure, not banging on about sustainable this and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife that.
Moira’s hair, black against the glowing blue, floated around her in an amorphous cloud. She touched it, then her face, to test the solidity of her body before examining her hands and finding them raisiny beyond recognition. Sea creatures were insulting her left and right for invading an area protected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and judging by that weird-ass blue light, she was shot through, sure as shit, underwater, but somehow alive.
And
speaking of that weird-ass blue light, just exactly where was that coming from—
Moira’s scream released the remaining oxygen in her lungs through a cluster of iridescent bubbles when someone gently tapped her on the shoulder.
She whirled around in the slow motion movement the water would allow.
There was a woman in the water.
A beautiful woman emitting an eerie blue glow. A woman whose gossamer garments floated about her like something Moira had seen in ads for washing machines or tampons.
Eyes the exact shade of aquamarine as hers looked upon her kindly from a porcelain-pale face surrounded by a veil of hair a shade darker than hers.
Not Mirelle, her mother, but the resemblance was keen enough to smart.
An angel? Come to welcome her sorry, sodden behind to heaven?
If this was heaven, Reverend Dupuis was more full of shit than a manure truck.
The woman’s smile widened. “This isna heaven, I’m afraid. And I’ve been accused of being many things, but an angel was never one of them.” She winked at Moira, her full lips curving in a mischievous smirk that only enhanced the lyrical lilt of her Scots accent.
“How come you can talk underwater?” Moira asked, realizing her own words were not distorted as she had expected them to be.
“Because lass, like you, I am a water druid. My name is Morgana de Moray, sister of Malcom de Moray.”
Moira recognized the name instantly. Malcolm, who had written to them in the Grimoire. Malcolm the Earth Druid king whose crown and wand Tierra had found.
“I’m guessing you don’t just hang out down here all the time, so would I be correct in postulatin’ that your presence here might have a little something to do with my being turned into a human shish-kabob by Conquest?”
“Yer postulating would be correct, Moira de Moray. I’ve come to pass along to you certain relics in my possession that are now yers to command.”
Which Witch is Wicked? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 2) Page 34
