Alone with Nick again in a room that seemed to have shrunk by half, Moira found herself rambling. “I would have thought the de Moray mansion is the last place Reaper would be willing to come. What with our accidentally loosing all those ghosts upon the world.”
“It is.” Nick loosened his tie with one expert hand and it slid from his collar in a whisper of silk. He carefully laid it across her robe, adjusting it so it hung plumb with the towel rack.
“And Reaper. I hadn’t figured him for the type to carry a phone. What with the buckskins, the duster…”
“He doesn’t.” Off came the shoes. The shirt.
“But you said—”
“I lied.” By this time the pants were long gone, and Nick wore only a sardonic expression.
It was a perfect fit.
“Remind me why you’re here again?” Moira asked, fully aware he hadn’t answered her question the first time.
“I have the whole evening free to fuck you witless,” Nick announced. “Julian’s off perfecting his melancholy on some moonlit cliff or other. Dru’s jerking off to a bag of Red Hots, and Killian made like a mosquito and buzzed off with Tierra to gods know where—”
Moira sat up in the bath, forgetting for an all-important second that she was, in fact, bare-ass naked. “What did you just say?”
“I said Julian is wringing tears from his violin and—”
“No, you arrogant asswaffle. About Killian. Isn’t he supposed to be suffering eternal torment at the hands of Lucy in the Sky with Demons?”
“You really shouldn’t say her name,” Nick admonished. “Somewhere, an orphan just lost his adoption paperwork.”
“Is Death out of Hell or what?” Moira hadn’t realized was standing until the scar over her breast began glowing like the coals at a goat roast.
And he was staring at it.
The scar.
His eyes coloring with it, pinwheels of fire dancing within them.
Searing pain shot through her, a ghost of the arrow her body had known. Her hand clutched at her chest, finding nothing but the same, strange smoothness of her healing wound. No outward manifestation of the inner agony ripping through her.
Silvery blue light pulsed from the wand in time with her heart, which itself had synchronized with the waves of pain surging along her nerves like an electrical current.
The wand wanted her to do something. To say something.
But now, as they had then, words failed her. Strength failed her.
Moira fell.
Chapter Three
Nicholas Kingswood tasted blood.
Sweeter than any wine. Heady. Drugging his senses with the throb of life and sense of purpose.
Her life. His purpose.
The scar on Moira de Moray’s breast testified in flesh of their intersection. On the cliff at Siren’s Cry, the sumptuous night breathing cool upon their skin, he had nocked his arrow and sent it whistling through her heart.
He remembered the sound the arrow had made when it struck her. The pure pleasure it had brought him. A sensation matched only by the peace he had known when he buried himself within her for the first time.
The memory dragged a savage thrill straight to his cock.
Killing and fucking had always been the two things he was best at. The two things he most enjoyed.
Her scar reminded him of both.
He reached across the distance separating them, fingers seeking the source of the unearthly glow, wanting to feel its heat and smoothness. It retreated from his touch. Downward. Away. Sinking in slow motion as Moira’s body crumpled into the bath.
Time took on the odd, stretched quality it sometimes did when Nick’s unnaturally long life violently collided with a present shock.
He was hurting her.
And part of him wanted to go on hurting her. To see just how much damage he could cause. Just how much she could take.
He was humanity’s bottomless need. Their insatiable desire. The ceaseless search for power, for pleasure.
For pain.
Moira had a bigger appetite than most.
Time with her sisters had tempered her, shoring her up against the darkest of his desires. Drawing her away from the places where their shared shadows had once bled so easily into each other.
Far from regretting the loss, he had relished the chance for an ugly, sweaty brawl with an opponent now more worthy of him than ever.
It was this thought that held him in its thrall, the world around him narrowing until all that existed was Moira, Nick, and the delicious silken thread of fire worming through the air from her scar to his eyes.
An all-together different kind of fire bloomed in his peripheral vision, erasing the room and everything in it for a brief, blinding flash. Nick lifted a protective arm against the intense heat suddenly baking the side of his face.
Whatever hypnotic power had arrested his motion abruptly ceased in that moment, and he was deposited in the present.
In this time. In this place.
In front of the bathtub where Moira’s crumpled body slumped limp and pale.
“Fuck!” Nick went to his knees, only tangentially registering the water soaking his William Westmancott Ultimate Bespoke slacks.
He registered the sharp pain in his leg with a startled grunt and healthy stream of invectives.
He looked over his shoulder and discovered not a cramp, but a pig. A very small pig with its very small mouth locked onto Nick’s not so small calf.
Only then did he understand what he had seen.
The fiery flash had been not some otherworldly warning, but a belch of flame from the infernal regions of the miniature pig’s unnatural intestines.
The little fucker was trying to light him up. And not for the first time.
The first time, they were at 30,000 feet, and Nick had been trying to drag the walking bacon from the bag where Moira had him secreted.
His eyebrows and a good measure of Nick’s pride had been sacrificed to his unwillingness to listen to Moira’s warning not to touch the creature then. Now, he didn’t relish the thought of smelling his own nuts cook while attempting to save its mistress.
If save her he could.
Nick was a breaker of shit. A taker of shit.
He could detail several thousands of ways to dismantle a human being. When it came to fixing one, he was drawing a big, fat blank.
His usual method of approaching a crisis (i.e., kill everything and leave) felt somehow incongruous with his desired outcome.
For perhaps the first time in his incomprehensibly long life, Nick asked himself a noisome but prescient question.
WWJD—or, what would Julian do? Julian fucking Roarke would know how to handle this shit. He and his giant encyclopedia brain and tea-soaked diplomatic tongue would have the cloven-footed creature eating out of his hand.
Provided his hand was gloved.
Otherwise there would be some hideous swine dysentery and the pig’s liquefied intestines falling out its mud chute.
He briefly considered dialing Julian’s number but then realized he would have to heed whatever counsel he provided, which more often than not contained a laundry list of things Nick was not to do.
Pass.
Nick took a deep breath, channeling the calm of his more cultured brother if not his specific advice. An ascot might have helped.
“Look, Frito…Dorito, whatever your name is. We both know you’re not so much a pig as a billion-year-old benevolent spirit driving a pig’s body. Which is cool. I’m not here to judge your choice of meat suit. But, I’m going to need you to let the fuck go of my leg so I can...do the things that will make Moira better. Understand?”
The little pig’s narrowed eyes glittered spitefully in the candlelight. If anything, his grip on Nick’s leg tightened.
“For fuck’s sake! How are you biting that hard?” Nick said, gripping the edge of the bathtub. “You don’t even have teeth!”
The pig growled. Fucking growled at him.
“Look, I
didn’t want to have to do this, but you leave me no choice.” Nick made a grab for the stand next to the bathtub, nabbed the bowl of pork rinds and shoved them into the pig’s face. “Let go, or so help me gods I will gut you and make you into a magical bar snack.” For effect, Nick popped a couple rinds into his mouth and chewed slowly, never breaking eye contact.
It didn’t escape Nick that he—Conquest—defeater of nations, slaughterer of entire armies had been reduced to eating at a miniature barnyard animal.
Even so, the tactic proved effective.
Pink snout quivering, the pig turned loose Nick’s pants and scurried beneath the towel rack.
Thus freed, Nick turned his attention to Moira, whose erratic breaths caused his heart—a mythical entity in its own right—to respond in kind.
Gathering her naked body out of the bath, Nick lifted her whole, wet weight against his chest and sat with her in his lap on the bathroom floor. He pushed wine-dark locks out of her eyes and placed his palm over the scar, still hot against his hand.
Beneath it, her heart fluttered, uncertain and slow.
He had caused this hurt, whatever it was. And if he caused it, might he also be able to take it back?
Chapter Four
Nick was no more of a scholar than he was a healer.
But sacrifice he understood. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. An idea much older than the Bible, and one he was intimately acquainted with. He had tasted her blood, felt her pain.
His own was owed in recompense.
Also, Nick was pretty certain his blood came with an added bonus as he’d been maimed, crushed, stabbed, shot, and beaten thousands upon thousands of times, and he bore not so much as a mark.
So there was that.
Taking up the empty whiskey tumbler, Nick crushed it in his hand. Dark blood welled between the network of shards, a crimson mockery of a cathedral’s stained glass. He let the shards fall away.
His bloody palm met Moira’s chest with an audible hiss of steam.
Spells and rituals were not within his wheelhouse. The words he spoke were magic to no one but himself.
So he told their story, his hand over her heart.
“Do you remember the day we met?” he asked, watching Moira’s face. Beneath the diaphanous skin of her eyelids, the roundness of her eyes moved.
“I climbed aboard that plane, ready to slam a martini or seven and maybe a few stewardesses, and there you were. Sitting in my seat. You know the first thing I thought when I saw you?”
The corner of Moira’s mouth twitched.
“Okay, the second thing.” Nick bent down until his lips were even with the curves of her ear. “I thought I’d never seen anything as beautiful as you in ten thousand years, and even if I lived another hundred thousand, I never would.”
Moira heaved within his arms, her whole body seizing in a spasm that brought to mind a much more pleasant naked memory. He felt her first indrawn breath rattle through her ribs and drive her upright.
If Nick had mortal reflexes, she would have head-butted him.
And judging by what she said next, that might have indeed been what she’d intended all along.
“If that ain’t the soggiest pile of pig shit I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“Something did,” she said, fingers inspecting her chest. “What the—where did my scar go?”
He held up his wounded hand to show her, but the lacerations had already knit tidily closed. “You’re welcome.”
“For what?” Her eyes narrowed at him in a manner not altogether dissimilar from her porcine protector. “What did you do?”
He should have known better than to hope for tearful thanks and a couple rounds of hearty gratitude fucking. “I undid the damage I had caused. With my blood.”
“You gave me your blood?” Moira shoved herself up from his lap and clutched a towel to her chest. “Your blood is inside me?”
“It doesn’t have to be the only thing.” Nick gained his feet and tugged his damp trousers away from the painful tightness in his crotch.
“How could you do that?”
“It’s real easy. You bend over the sink, and I’ll—”
Moira’s shot to his chest knocked him backward a full three feet. Her eyes widened in surprise and—dare he say it—delight in her newfound strength. His strength. “Holy shit. Did you see that?”
Why the everlasting fuck hadn’t he called Julian?
“I didn’t need to see it,” he said, stepping hard on the urge to massage the throbbing spot on his sternum. “I felt it.”
“Damned if I don’t have the urge to run out and overthrow a small country. Or find an old lady to exploit.” Moira wrapped the towel around her and tucked the edge under her arm.
“Do you have the urge to fuck me senseless?” he asked, not completely successful at abandoning all traces of hope from his voice. “Stands to reason if you inherited some of my strength, you might also have inherited some of my libido.”
“Not so much fuck you senseless as split your skull with a tire iron. But truth to tell, that ain’t new. Cheeto!” The pig wriggled his way out from under the linens and trotted happily around Moira’s ankles. She scooped up the creature and nuzzled the disgustingly moist, pink snout. “Did you save momma from that nasty old Horseman? Did you?”
“This nasty old Horseman just saved your life,” Nick pointed out.
“After trying to suck my soul out of the scar you caused in the first place. Forgive me if I don’t fall to my knees and gush my gratitude.”
“Falling to your knees would be a good start. Of course, I could think of far more productive things for you to do while you’re there.”
“The more you talk, the less I like you.”
“Well, that at least we have in common. How about we just skip the talking and go straight to life-affirming gorilla sex?”
“How about you go tongue-punch a badger’s butt?” Moira placed the pig back on the floor and snapped on the lights, considering herself in the mirror. Looking, Nick supposed, for physical changes beyond the disappearance of her scar.
They were both relieved when she couldn’t seem to find any.
“Right before I—you, before whatever the hell that was, I asked you a question.”
“Yes,” Nick confirmed. “Death is out of Hell. It seems your intrepid sister found her way into…that demonic super-slut’s domain and hauled Killian’s ass back to the land of the living.”
“How do you know?”
“Same way I know Lucy’s been using Aerin as her own personal puppet. Death sent a raven.”
Moira whirled on him, grabbing a thousand dollars worth of custom-fitted Italian shirt and driving him a foot up the wall.
He could have reversed the hold and had her pinned to the opposite wall in the time it took her to blink.
Could have, but didn’t.
Mostly because Nick had never been so turned on in all his life.
“What the hell did you just say?” Her eyes had darkened to the color of the ocean’s deepest trenches. Water that had never seen the sun’s light or felt its warmth.
“I said Lucy is wearing Aerin like a Givenchy suit. She has been for a while now.”
Nick’s Bruno Magli loafers found their rightful place on the tile as Moira’s grip on him loosened. “How come you didn’t say nothing about this when you first got here?”
“You were naked.” Nick shrugged. “And when I got done fucking your brains out, Tierra would still be gone, and Aerin would still be possessed.”
Moira paced the short path between the bathtub and the door, gnawing the cuticle of her thumb as she walked.
Nick watched her teeth work with perhaps more attention than the action warranted. She halted mid-step, the corner of her mouth working upward in a grin that made his insides feel greasy and hot.
“How quick can you get Battle Boy and Doctor Disease here?” Moira asked. “We need to have
us a little talk.”
Chapter Five
“Possessed?” Claire repeated the word that had saturated the parlor in Maison de Moray ever since Moira had spoken it. Now it passed along the faces of all who gathered there, leaving shadows in its wake.
And a strange gathering it was.
War, Conquest, Pestilence, and the two de Moray witches who yet remained un-kidnapped by Death or soul-fucked by Satan. Moira had intentionally chosen a time when Aunt Justine was off doing whatever it was she liked to do when she wasn’t quietly scowling in corners or looking constipated. The fewer people and/or immortals who knew what they would be discussing, the better.
“Damn skippy,” Moira confirmed. “At least, if we can believe Killian baby-daddy Bane. He may be no better than a winged horny toad, but I don’t figure it’s something he’d lie about.”
“And seriously, what the fuck is up with Death taking off with Tierra, anyway?” High color blazed in Claire’s cheeks, assisted by the constant fire living just below the surface of her skin. “Where are they? When will they be coming back?”
“Fucked if I know.” Nick shrugged, looking about as concerned as he would be if someone had asked him when the post office opened. He’d been in a hell of a snit ever since Moira had evicted him from the bathroom to get her clothes on and insisted he call War and Pestilence over for an impromptu strategy session.
Moira found herself losing patience in the face of his sullen lack of cooperation. “Look, we need Tierra back, and Death needs to get his feathered ass back here and do something about these ghosts. I’m just about sick and tired of spirits popping up in the kitchen, in the bathtub—”
“In my underwear drawer,” Claire added. “I wish I was kidding.”
“Bane will come back when he’s damn good and ready.” Drustan Geddes thumbed the edge of a bowie knife that had materialized from the arsenal of weapons Moira suspected he kept strapped to every available inch of his formidable body. “And not a second before. Anyway, you’ve got nothing to worry about. No harm will come to her as long as she’s with him. She carries his spawn.”
Flashes of the strange little life bobbing and playing among the ultrasound waves returned to Moira in a soul-rending rush, bringing with it a surge of fierce, protective energy.
Which Witch is Wild? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 3) Page 18
