Nick tasted ash as he writhed on the ground, hands pressed to his crotch and knees drawn up to his chest.
Moira squatted down next to him. Close enough so he could hear her but not quite so close that he could reach her. “Lord, Cheeto. I ain’t seen a face that purple since Pervis Coy tried that auto-erotic asphyxiation stuff with an alternator belt and some engine lube. And just look at his eyes. You ever seen eyes bulge out of a head like that?”
The pig squeaked, a sound redolent with approval and good humor.
Nick prepared a scathing rejoinder, but when he opened his mouth to deliver it, all that came out was a strange, high-pitched, “Guhhh.”
“I’m sorry,” Moira said. “Say again? I’m afraid I didn’t quite understand.”
Nick dragged in a shaky breath and tried again. This time, he managed a very clear and emphatic, “huuuurrrf.”
“Right,” she said, turning to the pig. “I think what he’s trying to say is that he’s awfully sorry for insulting Stump Bayou.”
“Duurrgh,” Nick gurgled.
“And he also wants to apologize for indicating that there was something to be desired in the way I talk.”
Cheeto oinked his agreement with her assessment.
“Mmmmeerbb.” A white curd of spittle flew from Nick’s lips in the pig’s direction.
“Furthermore, he wouldn’t mind one bit if I went out and found another immortal to father my baby on account of he realizes that he’s a self-centered donkey taint with a soul uglier than a lard bucket full of armpits!”
This time, Nick didn’t bother trying to reply.
Moira stood, spanking ash from her jeans. “Well, I’m sure glad that’s settled. I’ll just let you rest there a spell since you’re looking so comfy.” Even in a strop, Moira’s hips traced swayed side to side in that effortless figure eight that so hypnotized him. Or would, if he could feel anything but the sickening ache in his offended testicles. The angry thwap thwap twap of her sandals kicked up little clouds as she made her way across the lawn to the back porch.
The pig, who had stayed behind, turned the pink pucker of its ass to him and hoofed dust into his face before trotting off after his mistress.
As he lay there, Nick’s own words returned to his mind like a mocking echo.
It is better to be feared than loved.
Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.
It is better to live one year as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.
He was used to not getting credit for his finer thoughts. After all, it had been engineered that way. He dropped gems in the ears of those in power and went on his way unseen. Unmarked in history’s dizzying sweep.
Millenia of quotable shit, all attributable to him.
How was it, then, that the first time he attempted to express his feelings, he ended up with a knee in his crotch and ash in his mouth?
“Do I correctly surmise that your efforts didn’t proceed especially well?”
So mired had he been in his own misery that Nick hadn’t even heard Julian come. But then, Julian Roarke had always been one slick motherfucker. Like the virulent lifeforms that were his birthright, you didn’t see him until it was already too late and you were bleeding out the ass.
With one dexterous sweep, Julian cleared his long coat tails from the backs of his thighs so he could lower himself without catching them.
Nick took his proffered hand, gloved in the finest, buttery leather and was once again surprised at the wiry strength in his brother’s grip when Julian hauled him upright. Nick remained seated, still unsure of trying his legs.
Unfailingly polite, Julian did not stand, his knees bent and his weight on the heels of his hand-tooled leather boots so they could converse at a level as egalitarian as possible.
“May I ask what you said that vexed her so?”
Some of the seizing pain having passed, Nick tried a breath. “I just told her that out of all the women I had known in my millennia on the planet, she’s the one I wanted.”
Julian narrowed eyes the color of a scrap of sky. “Were those the exact words you employed?”
“Well, not the exact words,” Nick admitted. “I might have mentioned how ironic it was that I would fall for a woman with her disadvantages.”
Chagrin dug a delicate crease at the center of Julian’s forehead as he sighed. “Have you?” he asked. “Fallen for her, that is.”
Something turned in Nick’s gut, thankfully several inches north of the still-throbbing heat.
At first he thought it might be indigestion from one of the earth witch’s meatless lunches or perhaps his testicles descending back into place from his diaphragm.
But no.
As much as he disliked those particular sensations, they weren’t unfamiliar to him. They didn’t come with the strange spreading warmth he felt now. Like someone had tipped a jar of heated honey inside his chest.
“It’s possible,” he said to Julian. “That I might have a kind of attachment to her that exceeds a general feeling of not-hate.”
“Nicholas,” Julian said, pinning him with the icy edge of his unfettered regard. “Slice the excrement. We know each other of old.”
“I fucking love her, Julian.” Nick paused, something like wonder dipping him into a beat of silence. “Holy shit. I really do.”
The corners of Julian’s lips tipped up in a knowing smile. “Then you must tell her. Preferably in a way that doesn’t involve insulting everything she holds dear.”
“How the fuck am I supposed to do that?” Slowly, carefully, and with infinite deference to his aching scrotal region, Nick rolled over to all fours and pushed himself to his feet. “You saw how this turned out.”
Julian followed suit, lithe in his black suit as he stood. “Are you familiar with Pride and Prejudice?”
“You mean that one book by that one mopey chick who wrote lots of books about lots of other mopey chicks?”
“I’ll take that as a no,” Julian said, procuring an antiquated volume from the pocket of his suitcoat and handing it to Nick. Like the trunk he kept in his room, it seemed Julian’s bottomless pockets could produce any much-needed tome upon demand.
Like Mary Poppins, if Mary Poppins caused explosive diarrhea and imminent death.
“It might be helpful for you to study the case of one Mr. Darcy as you seem to share a similar penchant for inserting your loafers in your mouth,” Julian said.
“And what did this Darcy fucker do to fix it?”
“In Mr. Darcy’s case, it was to arrange for payment of an annual income so the heroine’s sister can be legally wed to the man she’d eloped with, thereby warming the heart of the heroine and securing her affections.”
“Jules, you beautiful fucking brain!” Nick clapped his brother on the back, seized by a sudden onslaught of inspiration. “A grand gesture. Bitches love grand gestures!”
“Yes, well, perhaps you ought not state your intentions in just such a way.” Julian dusted Nick’s dirty handprint from his velvet smoking jacket, cordial as a cat.
“Freak not, brother,” Nick said, already jogging toward the Maserati parked on the street in front of the De Moray manse. “I got this.”
18
I got this.
I got this.
I don’t got this.
“Fuck!” Enraged, Lucy threw down the arm she’d been attempting to pop back into the gaping shoulder socket of the body she was wearing. The gleaming white ball of bone protruding from the wet red stump glowed in the moonlight.
Time to change.
She picked up the long, black leather duster from the hedge, shrugging one arm into the coat and draping the other over her shoulder to hide the damage while she limped toward downtown.
With any luck, people would think she was just a kinky amputee.
Luck, she sneered inwardly.
Luck was a rank twat who she hadn’t been on speaking terms with for quite a while.
Not since the devastating c
yanide spell that drove her from her own crumbling carcass into more pleasing—and also intact—vessels.
Trouble was, they never stayed intact.
Her powers had been compromised right along with her face, and even a simple possession spell turned into a total fuckola.
Take this most recent body, for instance.
The taut, lithe, little boho yoga teacher she’d spotted browsing among the crystals at Phoenix Rising.
She’d chosen her.
She stalked her.
She’d deftly helped herself to the body the minute the hippie had ever so compassionately turned her back on Lucy’s veiled and putrefying face.
And less than hour later, boom.
A finger popped off.
Followed by three toes on the left foot. Still, to Lucy’s knowledge, scattered under the table where she’d been sitting at Siren’s pub. She didn’t envy whichever member of the t-shirted waitstaff found them. Just as she didn’t pity the snooty tea-shop proprietress who had driven her out the second she noticed the scattering of teeth that flew from Lucy’s mouth as she tried to order a chai latte. A dizzying act of hypocrisy, Lucy thought, from someone who sported horsey, ill-fitting dentures.
Judgy bitch.
Still, the body had lasted long enough to serve its purpose.
Which was pretty much the only purpose Lucy had these days—eavesdrop on the sisters de Moray.
From the fight she’d witnessed while lurking just beyond the de Moray house’s wards, things were getting juicy.
Remembering the sound Conquest made when the backwater swamp witch had hiked his junk up to his sternum made Lucy forget herself for a moment and she grinned.
An action she immediately realized to be a mistake when with a pop her jaw came unhinged and dangled from the top half of her skull.
“Hun of uh itch,” she growled, attempting to snap her face back together with her remaining hand. Her jaw flopped back down the second she released it. “Huck it,” she said, deciding to let it hang.
Just then, a car pulled up alongside her, the passenger side window sinking down with an automated buzz. The driver—a polite and pony-tailed man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles—ducked down to lean across the arm rest.
“Excuse me, miss. I noticed you were limping. Could you maybe use a ride somewhere?”
Lucy turned to him, forgetting herself until his eyes widened. “Dear God,” he gasped. “What’s the matter with you?”
She tried raising her eyebrows to make it seem like maybe her mouth was only gaping from perpetual surprise, but the effort stretched her eyelids just a hair too far.
One of her eyes fell out of its socket and dangled against her cheek with the nerve still attached, dangling like a disco ball.
From the back seat, a toddler with hair a similar shade of chocolate brown shrieked. The tires squealed as the driver romped on the gas and sped off, leaving Lucy coughing in a cloud of oily exhaust.
“Hum ack!” she shouted, casting off a few fingers as she attempted to wave him down. “Other hucker!”
What the everlasting fuck was going on?
Staring at the gutter where two her fingers had landed in a somewhat appropriate peace configuration, Lucy began to wonder.
It couldn’t be happening already…could it?
She knew they had stumbled upon the prophesy from what she’d overheard Nick say to the water witch in the garden. Which meant they knew one of them would have to conceive a second child.
But none of them knew what Lucy knew.
What Lucy had known from the second the earth witch’s womb-rat had kept her from entering their mother’s sanctuary.
The earth witch carried the Tugadh Solas. The Bringer of Light.
And while it nudged her closer to her demise, the earth witch’s spawn did not spell certain disaster for Lucy because, after all, it was her darkness that balanced the light.
No.
From the way she had understood it, she wouldn’t be relieved of her powers completely until after the Ceann Dorcha, The Dark One, was conceived.
Surely they hadn’t had time to do that already.
From what she could gather, the water witch had volunteered herself as the vessel but had come to no consensus with Conquest as to his filling it.
Moira de Moiray had left Nick writhing in the dirt, and not even a being with Conquest’s stamina could recover from a shot to the junk so quickly. Nor could they have successfully conceived already, immortal swimmers or no.
But they would try.
Soon, they would try, and if Lucy didn’t stop them, they might actually succeed.
One thing was for sure and certain. She’d never be able to stop them if she kept shedding parts like a broken Barbie. She needed a new body, and she needed it now.
When she saw the headlights reflected in the eyes of the deer lazily strolling up the middle of the street, she knew she had her answer.
19
Moira had always thought of this as her place.
Just a simple pier crawling into the water on long, stilted legs. Gray, sun bleached wood complaining of its age under every stiff wind.
But it held so many of her memories.
Here, she had almost tried to drown herself.
Here, she had first kissed Nicholas Kingswood.
Here, she had crawled out of the bay with crown and wand in hand.
Here, she sat and spent long hours contemplating the end of all things as the waves crashed below her feet.
They crashed like that now. Angry curds of foam flying up as the water gnawed at the barnacled ankles of the pier pilings.
It wasn’t just the end of the world that stirred the water so.
It was her. Her proximity.
Because she hurt. Because what Nick said had hurt her. Because what Nick said could hurt her. He had that power over her now, and she’d be damned if that didn’t just chap her ass good and proper.
Two days ago she had jacked him in the junk, and he’d been missing ever since.
No word.
No call.
Big fat nothing.
“Can you believe the nerve of that shit weasel?” It was a hypothetical question in that all the questions she asked to Cheeto were hypothetical. It wasn’t like he could answer, though he looked like he’d dearly like to. His curly little nub of a tail wagged happily the way it did whenever she was insulting Nick.
“I mean, saying those things about where we come from. There ain’t a nicer place to live in the whole entire world.”
Here, Cheeto’s tail stopped wagging all together as his small, dark eyes slid to the side.
“All right, okay. So there were mosquitos big enough to rape a turkey and some cousins did a lot more than kiss, but that don’t mean they weren’t good people.”
Cheeto sat down on his plump hindquarters, his velvety ears rotating backward.
“And yes, I do remember how I rescued you from Jo Buck Jones, who was using you to clear his acreage like a flame thrower, but I still think most the people there were essentially good.”
Cheeto grunted.
“Everyone but Charlie Ray. But mostly people have forgotten about what happened with him and the goat.”
“My point is, there are a lot of good memories there.” Moira drew Cheeto to her lap, stroking the spot behind his ears that made his body go slack and loose in her hands. “Like, remember how Uncle Sal used to wake up first thing in the morning, pee out the window and say—”
“Hey, baby. What time do y’all eat around here?”
For a moment, Moira thought she might have heard a ghost. Some scrap of her Uncle the wind had carried all the way from Stump to torment her.
Then, she saw it.
A smallish yacht, sleek and powerful as it knifed through the waves toward her pier. A tall, dark-haired man stood at the prow, gripping the railing and waving his arms in opposing circles like airplane propellers.
Moira scrambled to her feet, upending Cheeto, who
squealed in alarm. She had to catch him by the tail to keep him from going in the drink. “Uncle Sal?” she shouted into the wind. “Is that really you?”
The man on the deck stripped off his trucker hat and saluted her with it.
“It’s really me, Moira Jo!”
Moira Jo.
The name opened up a familiar ache in her chest.
She’d been Moira Jo once. A simple southern girl who waited tables at the HooDoo shack. A girl who’d driven an old Barracuda she’d nicknamed the Badger down back roads paved with ground oyster shells. A girl who’d fallen asleep to cricket orchestras and woken up to rooster choirs.
A girl who had laughed easy and often.
Where had that girl gone?
She waited for minutes that felt like eternities as the boat pulled up alongside the pier at a rate far faster than seemed safe.
She saw the alarm darkening Sal’s eyes as he motioned her away from the dock. “Watch y’self, Moira Jo! We’s comin’ in hot!”
Moira reached down the scooped neck of her shirt and drew out her wand from its appointed place in the bra she now wore to hold it snug between her breasts.
Aiming the pearlescent and sapphire jeweled tip at the water directly ahead of the yacht’s bow, she whispered a quick incantation. The yacht stopped abruptly as the water molecules fused together, a solid somewhere between concrete and ice.
Uncle Sal nearly toppled over the side at the sudden stop, catching himself on the railing with a sheepish smile. “Stay where you are,” he shouted down to her. “I’ll be there directly.”
“How are you going to get down?” she asked, eyeing the gap between the boat and the dock.
“Just you wait and see!” With no small measure of mischief and glee smoothing the wrinkles on his sun-weathered face, Sal raced to the bridge on the yacht’s main deck.
Moira watched in wonder as a gangplank emerged from the side of the boat and extended out and down toward the dock.
As soon as it was within distance, she leaped onto it, running, running and not stopping until she’d barreled into Uncle Sal’s embrace.
His wiry arms folded her into his chest, his chin coming down to the top of her head as it had so often when she was a girl. He held her this way while she gave into a gail of tears, stroking her hair and making the same reassuring noises she remembered so well.
Which Witch is Willing? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 4) Page 10
