Which Witch is Which? (The Witches of Port Townsend)

by Kerrigan Byrne

  And she was ready to do it all. With him. Right now.

  Chapter Ten

  With a groan of distress, Julian ripped his lips from hers as though fighting a powerful adhesive and thrust her away from him. “It’s too much,” he gasped, turning from her, his hand gripped at his sides. “I’m taking you home.”

  “What? Why?” Aerin went to him, her knees a little weak, which up until this point she’d thought only happened in sappy romance novels.

  “Because you are the most desirable, fascinating woman I’ve ever come across,” he accused.

  “Okay,” she said evenly. “Not following.”

  Turning back to her, he loomed like a specter of desire, nostrils flaring and blue eyes darkening with thunderclouds of unspent passion. “Because when I’m near you my skin aches to touch yours, my ears search for your voice, and my—body loses every modicum of control over its impulses. I forget that I am immortal. That you are a delicate female. I could very easily hurt you, and that is why you must go. Now.”

  Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t look down…

  Aerin glanced down and then gasped at the barrel of his arousal pressed against the thin trousers he’d tucked into knee-length riding boots. She shouldn’t have done that. Though he was cursed to be Pestilence and Famine, he was certainly blessed in the dick department. More than blessed. That thing was a fucking miracle. The eighth wonder of the world.

  Her whole life, she’d never had to ask for sex, never had to do much more than crook a finger and bring a man running. But what Julian Roarke had in his pants had her contemplating begging, or whatever else she had to do on her knees, to get at it.

  At him.

  “It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” she breathed, reaching down and running her fingertips vertically against the skin that met his belt. “You know, for science.”

  Though his hands were graceful, they felt like iron manacles as he gripped her wrists. “I can’t.”

  “Oh, but you must,” she purred, lifting herself on her tiptoes, pressing hot lips to his flushed collarbone. “I could teach you how.”

  This time, he thrust her away violently, causing her to almost lose her balance. “No,” he grit from between his clenched teeth, the clouds in his eyes adding a flash of anger. “I’m taking you home.”

  “Why are you afraid of me?” she demanded.

  “It is you who should fear me.”

  Planting her fists on her hips, Aerin marched right back up to him, not breaking eye contact, though his warning was clear. “Well I don’t, so get over yourself.”

  He was the one who backed down glancing away and reaching for the reins of his docile horse. “You don’t understand.”

  “On that, at least, we agree,” she spat. “I want you. You obviously want me. So what the hell is your problem?”

  Julian reached his hand out, and surprised her by waving it to encompass their romantic surroundings rather than touch her. “This isn’t reality,” he murmured with a voice full of regret. “When next we meet, it will be as adversaries rather than allies. We Horsemen are determined to put a stop to this, to kill if need be.” Slowly he reached for her, feathering gentle fingers across her lips. “I couldn’t make love to you only to betray you.”

  A chill kissed the heat coursing through her as reality permeated the pall of lust clouding her judgment. She hadn’t chosen to be one of the women prophesied to bring about the Apocalypse. It wasn’t her bloody fault.

  The unfairness of it all choked her, cooling the rest of her ardor.

  “I don’t believe in fate,” she bit out at him. “None of us want to bring about the end of the world. And so we won’t. Why not work together?”

  He caressed her jaw, causing ripples of goose bumps to erupt on her skin, then slowly moved down the column of her neck, and over the thin, sensitive skin of her clavicles. “I truly believe that you mean those words. But the Fates are cruel, and the only way we Horsemen can fight them, is to stop you.” He paused, his eyes swimming with regret. “For good.” With that, he seized her around the waist and tossed her onto his giant black horse.

  Steadying herself on the pommel, Aerin glared down at him. “There is another way, you know. You could kill yourselves, instead.”

  “Don’t you think we’ve tried that?” he asked sadly, capturing her hand in his. “Don’t you think that if there was any other way, we’d take that route instead? I wish we’d met in any other time. That I could have taken you to see the sands of the coliseum. That we could have climbed the pyramids, or swam naked in the Mediterranean. I would have made love to you in fields of Scottish heather. I would have fed you grapes from French vineyards. In a perfect world, we could have explored the fjords of the north on a Viking barge, or ridden the moors of the Druid homelands on the back of Archimedes, my stallion, when the air was fragrant and unpolluted.”

  Aerin let his sadness mingle with hers until she felt like it might be the poison that did her in. “Well, you know what they say,” she sighed gustily. “If wishes were horses…”

  “Then beggars would ride,” he finished, slipping the reins into her hand and shocking her by slapping his big stallion on the rump and sending them speeding into the woods, back in the direction of Tierra’s car.

  ****

  After a bit of ground-kissing once she slid from the horse’s back, Aerin tottered to the car and pointed it in the direction of the Maison de Moray. She evaded her feelings by calling Sandra and getting an update on how the meeting with Masashi went and returning a few business voicemails. Since Port Townsend was a relatively small town, she was in the driveway of the mansion before she was ready to be.

  She stood at the foot of the long stone staircase that led to the porch with ornate, hand-carved porch railings that reminded her of Victorian lace. The windows glowed with golden light, not that glaring white of energy-saver bulbs, but of the specialty kind that went in Tiffany lamps.

  She had family in there. Sisters.

  Do you believe in them? Julian had asked.

  Aerin sighed, running her hands through the hair he’d taken down as she seriously considered the question. The answer was, not really. Not any more than they could believe in her. That needed to change. If they were going to work together, to figure this mess out, they needed to start trusting each other. Or, at least, getting along.

  Baby steps, she told herself as she climbed the stairs and followed the wrap-around porch to the side entry that went to the kitchen rather than go in the front. Suddenly, she was starving.

  A pair of bare, unmanicured feet propped up on the round, antique table that was tucked into the breakfast nook stopped Aerin dead in her tracks. Those feet were attached to long legs, covered only by the customary pair of cutoffs.

  Moira.

  Okay, so idealistically not the first sister she’d hoped to encounter but, as Sandra would always say, Whadayado?

  Closing the door behind her, Aerin hung her purse on an antique coat stand and carefully made her way across the creaky kitchen floor toward Moira. Two old-fashioned gas lamps cast her shimmering auburn hair with a halo of precious metals and caused her porcelain skin to glow with an ethereal beauty. Clinking ice cubes danced at the rim of a tumbler of thick, caramel liquid grasped in her hand. An amber bottle stood at attention on the table in front of her, its label obscured in shadow.

  “Hey,” Aerin began, rather eloquently in her opinion.

  Moira eyed her like one would an approaching honey badger. “Hey,” she echoed.

  Okay, things were going well thus far… kinda. “So, I owe you… an… apology,” Aerin said haltingly. Whew. She’d never said that before. Apologies were tougher than they seemed.

  Moira snorted, then shrugged. “I don’t want to be owed nothing by nobody. Least of all you. So let’s just forget it.”

  “I’d like that.” Aerin breathed in relief. “What are you drinking?”

  Moira turned the bottle around, revealing Celtic lettering. �
��Irish whiskey, old enough to buy isself a drink.”

  Aerin smirked. “I would have pegged you for a bourbon girl.”

  Moira’s half smile eerily mirrored her own. “Which goes to show you know fuck all about me.”

  Carefully, Aerin reached for one of the three remaining chairs tucked into the table. “I’d like to,” she admitted. “Know more about you, I mean.”

  “All right, then.” Moira reached behind her and grabbed another tumbler from the hutch nestled between two bay windows, poured a healthy splash, and slid it across the table where Aerin caught it. “Have yourself a seat.”

  Aerin lowered herself into the chair and took a sip of the whiskey, letting the fire kiss her parched throat and warm its way down to her belly. “Moira, you have excellent taste,” she said with a satisfied sigh.

  “And you’re a filthy liar.”

  “Well… in whiskey, anyway,” Aerin amended, sharing a smile with her sister that did more to warm her insides than the liquor. “Maybe you’re not such a hillbilly.”

  “You bet your britches, I am,” Moira argued with a wink. “And you’re still an uppity, mouthy Yankee bitch who’s too smart for her own good. But that don’t mean we can’t be sisters.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Aerin laughed, and they reached across the table to clink their glasses together.

  “Me too,” Claire said from the doorway. Dressed in form-fitting red tank and short black sleep shorts, she padded into the kitchen and went straight for the fridge. “Pour me something, I’m going to get some soda to mix it with and see what there is to eat. Anyone hungry?”

  “Starving,” Aerin said.

  “I could eat the tits off a warthog,” Moira piped in. “But I don’t take to you mixin’ this precious whiskey with a coke. That’s some kind of sacrilege.”

  “Yeah,” Aerin agreed, pulling the bottle into her body as though to protect it.

  Clare shrugged, taking some interesting cheeses from the fridge and an artisanal loaf of bread from the breadbox. “We’re witches,” she reminded them as she joined them with the fare at the table. “Sacrilege is sort of what we do.”

  “Valid point.” Aerin smiled, pushing the whiskey in her direction, and reaching for the bread. “Can I ask you guys something?” she ventured.

  The other two gave identical nods that almost had her forgetting her question. “Um, do you remember anything about… about when you were little? Like… babies?”

  “You mean like when Uncle Earl got his pecker stuck inside the Shopvac?” Moira offered. “Damn near twenty-five years ago, and I still remember that day. Not that anyone lets him forget it. They used their beer money to buy a new Shopvac that week on account as they didn’t want to use one that’d been sodomized. Weren’t right with the Lord, Uncle Sal said.” Moira chuckled at the memory, taking another drink.

  Aerin closed her eyes, deciding to approach things a different way. “I have these dreams,” she began, staring down into her glass to evade the eyes of others. “I’m falling from the top of a building. The air is cold, and I’m so small, falling so fast it’s hard to breathe. But then—I’m not falling anymore. I’m sort of… floating.” She finally summoned the courage to look up, and no one was looking at her like she was crazy, so she said the word she’d been afraid of all these years. “Flying, maybe. That’s when I wake up and it feels like I fall back into bed.”

  “You do.” Moira nodded. “We all seen it.”

  “Strange thing is… I was taken to a hospital in New York by a homeless man as an infant, and he claimed that it was raining babies and he scooped me off the pavement. But I didn’t have a scratch on me.”

  “I was saved from a fire once,” Claire said after a long drink of her whiskey and soda. “They said I should have died, and I didn’t even smell like smoke.”

  Their eyes met and held as Moira piped in. “I was fished out of the bayou by four of the sweetest drunks you’d ever meet. They said it seemed like I’d been in there a while. Like maybe days.”

  “Air, fire, and water,” Claire whispered. “Interesting.”

  “Sounds like someone was trying to get rid of us early on,” Aerin said, contemplating the shocking circumstances. “But who would try to kill babies, and in such horrific ways?”

  Moira put her feet down and leaned forward intently. “Who’s been threatening us lately? Trying to take business from Tierra? Kidnapping Claire, and making you sicker’n a dog?”

  We Horsemen are determined to put a stop to this, to kill if need be, Julian had said.

  “You’re right. It could have been the Horsemen,” Aerin agreed. Which meant that they weren’t merely adversaries, they were truly enemies.

  A sniff sounded from the doorway, and they all turned to see Tierra holding the Grimoire open, her eyes red-rimmed and watery. “You’re never going to believe what I found,” she said, her voice husky with tears. “It’s a letter from our mother… written right before she was murdered.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “I don’t want to read it,” Aerin said, taking a gulp of her liquor. “I’m not ready.”

  “Me neither.” Moira mirrored her action with a gulp and then refilled both their glasses.

  “We should probably be sober when we do,” Claire agreed. “Paraphrase?”

  Tierra’s skirt swept the floor as she made her way to join them, setting the book gingerly in the middle of the table. “Basically it says she knew someone was after her the moment she realized that she was pregnant with quadruplets. She was afraid that she’d be dead before she had a chance to raise us. Even though she was aware of the prophecy, she couldn’t bring herself to terminate the pregnancy, and she felt that we were supposed to live, but knew that we would be separated. So she hid the Grimoire with magic so that it only appeared when we, four, were together in this house so we could use it to save ourselves.”

  To Aerin’s dismay, she found she didn’t have to be reading the words for them to affect her. Tears burned in her throat and misted her vision and she blinked rapidly to stop their fall. All her life, she assumed she’d been tossed away like someone’s trash. But no, she’d been wanted.

  And that changed everything.

  “It says here that she didn’t believe that we would end the world, at least not with fire and brimstone,” Tierra continued. “Then she tells us that she knows everything we’re going through as witches. The isolation, the pain, the power, the temptations, and the need for… ew.” Tierra made a very girlish face of disgust.

  “Ew, what?” Claire demanded, her voice a little suspiciously thicker than before.

  “The need for… sex,” Tierra whispered that last word as though it was a curse.

  Aerin busted up laughing, joined by Moira and Claire.

  “I guess it makes sense,” Claire postulated thoughtfully. “We all do take power or healing from passion, or emotion, and those are the major things needed for good sex.”

  “Some of us give power and healing that way, too,” Moira reminded them.

  “I’m no saint.” Aerin raised her glass, beginning to really feel the effects of the whiskey. “But no matter how busy, stressed, or angry I am, I still crave the “D,” know what I’m saying?”

  “I sure do!” Claire giggled. “Who do you think out of the four of us has slept with the most men?”

  They all turned to Aerin, who didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.

  “You have the dirtiest mouth,” Tierra accused with a laugh. “And the dirtiest mind.”

  “Don’t look at me.” Aerin held up her hands. “I pick a pony to ride and keep him in the stable for a while. You know how it is, takes too long to train them right. You two are the queens of the one-night stand.” She gestured to Moira and Claire, who looked at each other with mischief in their eyes.

  “We’ll go on three,” Claire suggested. “Just blurt out the number.”

  “M’kay,” Moira agreed with a sloppy smile.

  “There’s a number?”
Tierra asked, her green eyes wide with astonishment. “Like, you keep count?”

  “You don’t?” Moira asked.

  Aerin slapped the table and pointed at Tierra. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed with a loud laugh. “You don’t even have a number? You’re a huge slut bag!”

  “Damn girl.” Claire nudged her. “Respect.”

  Moira stood, wavering a little and speared Tierra with a withering look. “You’re tellin’ me that you’ve been lecturing me all this time about respecting myself while you’ve been humping like a two-peckered jackrabbit?

  “No.” Tierra held her hands up, as though to defend herself, her voice raising a few octaves to a defensive squeak. “You guys! I don’t even… There’s not a number… It’s just…”

  “Oh shit!” Aerin interrupted again. “It’s worse that a slut bag!”

  “How do you get worse than that?” Claire asked.

  “She’s a virgin!”

  “Shut up!” Tierra turned as red as Claire’s tank top and hid her embarrassed laughter in her hands as they all erupted into peals of jibes and hilarity.

  Still laughing, Moira reached for the bread knife, and sliced into the loaf. She squeaked as it flew out of her hand and embedded itself into the floor, sticking straight up, vibrating with an oddly ominous thwang.

  “What happened?” Aerin asked. “Did you cut yourself?”

  Moira shook her head, her eyes wide, and held up both hands for inspection. “No, it just… did that.”

  “Oh man,” Tierra whined. “It never ends, does it?” Sighing, she reached over the table and grabbed the salt, throwing it onto a candle flame and then over her left shoulder.

  “Want to clue us in?” Aerin prompted.

  “Did you know that in medieval Europe it was always considered rude to bring a knife to the table? That’s why they broke bread with their hands, instead of cutting it.”

  “So?” Claire asked.

  “It’s because, if your knife falls from the table and skewers the floor, it is an omen that means your enemies will invade your land.” Tierra jerked the knife from the floor boards and tossed it in the sink.