Which Witch is Wild? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 3)

by Kerrigan Byrne

  “That spawn saved Tierra’s life,” Moira pointed out. “No thanks to the thing that’s treating Aerin’s body like a timeshare condo. The way she’s been acting lately, I should have known.”

  “Can’t say I’ve noticed much of a difference.” Dru drilled at the thick rubber sole of his combat boot with the tip of the bowie knife, looking like he desperately wanted a neck or chest to plant it in instead. But then, War pretty much always looked like that.

  Running into Tommy, Claire’s meat-slurping, undead ex-boyfriend earlier certainly hadn’t eased matters anyhow.

  Claire had forgiven Tommy for stabbing her in the shoulder while he was possessed of a manbun-sporting witch hunter, even if Dru had not.

  Moira had lingered near the kitchen door, watching as Dru clotheslined Tommy’s feet out from under him when Claire’s back was turned.

  Planting a boot on the zombie’s sternum, Dru had leaned down until his coal-black eyes were only inches from Tommy’s. They could breathe the same air…if Tommy breathed.

  Not that Moira would have had an easy time breathing if she’d been the one on the floor, blinking up at the hulking vengeance that was Drustan Geddes.

  If Nick was the razor-wheeled minds of men who make war, Dru was the weapon they wielded—strength for strength’s sake. Spine-shattering, soul-crushing, shocking violence in a black t-shirt and fatigue pants. Being in the same room with him always felt to Moira a little like falling into the tiger’s cage at the zoo. Mostly you just hunkered down in a trench and prayed he didn’t eat your face.

  “If you don’t want me to rip your undead spleen out your asshole, I suggest you stay the fuck out of this room,” Dru had growled when Tommy had attempted to follow them into the parlor.

  Tommy’s wide blue eyes had managed to look surprisingly innocent for a reanimated corpse. Moira thought she saw something else flash in them for the briefest of moments. Anger? Fear?

  Where in seven swampy hells was Aerin’s emotional barometer when you needed it?

  “Okay,” Tommy had said. “Okay. I’ll go. We wouldn’t want to upset Claire. Would we?”

  Something about the way he’d said this needled Moira. Made her wonder exactly how he meant it.

  Dru had looked like he would have preferred to hork a wad of spit at Tommy rather than reply, but he’d left it. Tommy had slapped the side of Dru’s boot as he lifted it from his chest and pushed his angular frame back to his feet.

  For once, that easy smile Tommy always wore didn’t look easy at all. It had looked…smug? He’d winked at Moira as he shuffled into the kitchen, most likely in search of floppy strips of raw bacon.

  Moira made a mental note to have a come to Jesus with Cheeto about trotting clear of Tommy, seeing as her familiar was pretty much raw pork on four legs.

  “Aerin’s linguistic patterns do tend toward the abrasive, which makes variations in her mood and mental state difficult to detect.” Julian Roarke’s crisp declaration dragged Moira back into the present, ears first. He was the only one in the room with an accent as pronounced as hers, and yet its effect couldn’t be more different. “I’ll allow Drustan that much. But, what Moira has reported is consistent with my own theories on the matter.”

  Pestilence was something of an anomaly to her. With his fine, pale skin and features so perfect, he looked stricken under the weight of bearing up such beauty.

  Beauty Moira found hard to reckon, having grown up in a place where faces were dealt in measures of over and under abundance. Buck teeth, weak chins, ears like jug handles. A place where men brayed their laughter and slurred their speech. Slumped over barstools, guts and ass cracks aplenty falling out of work-worn jeans, the contrast they formed to the lithe, waist-coat wearing, by-goddess gentleman before her now made Moira’s eyes water.

  “Theories?” Nick detached himself from the fireplace mantel he’d been leaning against and stalked closer to his brother, who looked perfectly at home on the velvet settee. “Theories means you’ve been brooding about this for a while, haven’t you, Jules?”

  A gentle incline of Julian’s head passed for acknowledgement. “For a time, yes.”

  “And what is it that has you so convinced?” Dru asked. He had moved on from shanking his boot and was now using his knife to pare the edges of his already-short fingernails.

  If Tierra were here, she would be shoving a hand-thrown bowl into his lap to catch the clippings.

  If Tierra were here.

  The thought pierced Moira with a dart of worry.

  “Well,” Julian began, looking for all the world like a professor stepping up to a lectern as he rose from the couch. “Through repeated empirical observations on my part, I have documented certain physical reactions to Aerin which are antithetical to attraction.”

  “How’s that?” Claire asked.

  “He means he can’t get it up for Aerin,” Nick offered by way of translation. The speed with which he did so had the ease of a well-worn pattern between them. One that they’d probably been enacting since before King Tut was a horny twitch in his daddy’s ballsack.

  “Since when?” Dru had abandoned his knife, leaning forward with a sudden interest in the conversation. “You sure as hell didn’t have any problems sticking it to her in the alley.”

  Moira studied the grimace etching Julian’s face, appreciating for the first time that being around someone for a few thousand years wasn’t necessarily a guarantee that you’d like them any better. Maybe exactly the opposite.

  “The reactions I am referring to occurred sometime after that. At first, I thought it might be the product of over-satiation, as Aerin and I…well, we…”

  “Hit it harder than Caligula at a Saturnalia festival?” In Nick’s case, Moira guessed this probably wasn’t a metaphorical comparison. In fact, she wouldn’t put it past him to have kept a scorecard on a clay tablet to make sure he’d been keeping up.

  “I wouldn’t have described it in those terms, necessarily. But, in a manner of speaking, yes. I suppose you could say we made up for lost time. Until…” Julian’s smooth brow creased. Moira sensed the depth of feeling behind this expression, the great volume of his knowledge crashing against his inability to make sense of something as simple and as complex as the want of one body for another.

  “Until you all the sudden felt like someone up and pissed out the fire in your heart, and you were left scratchin’ your ass and wondering where it had gone,” Moira said. “The fire. Not your ass. Anyone can see that’s still there, of course.”

  By the look on Julian’s face, he had been surprised by the accuracy of her statement. By the look on Nick’s, he was altogether displeased that Moira even knew Julian had an ass.

  A girl could look. A girl just about had to look when she was about to suggest something in which Julian’s ass might play more than a backstage role, so to speak.

  “All but the gluteal abrasion,” Julian agreed. “At first, I couldn’t account for the reaction. It wasn’t until the next time we had the displeasure of a visit from she of whom I am not fond of speaking that I recognized my body’s response. The revulsion, the irritation—”

  “The desire to drag your balls through broken glass,” Dru supplied helpfully.

  Moira felt a blast of heat on the side of her body where Claire was seated. Apparently, this comment had pleased her sister.

  She rode the wave of warmth out of her place on the overstuffed sofa, conscious of Nick’s eyes on the exposed length of her legs beneath the frayed edge of her denim skirt.

  “All right, y’all. I think we all know what it feels like to be around Lu—the great blond she-whore,” she substituted in a rare moment of deference to the Horsemen. “What else do we know about her?”

  “If she were a candle, her scent would be Blood of the Innocents and Slut?” Nick offered.

  Dru’s stony façade cracked ever so slightly at this. “Her shoe size is peasant neck?”

  “What she can’t have is what she wants most.” Claire’s eyes d
arkened to the color of red clay as they sometimes did when her fires were banked and the coals burned deep below the surface. Lucy had befriended her first, after all, and had helped her to bring Tommy back. Moira suspected her sister still suffered a tangled net of emotions as a result.

  “Right. And what does she want more than anything?” Moira crossed her arms over her chest, all too aware of the insistent amber gaze making a study of her breasts.

  “Aside from a purse made from the skin of a thousand virgins, I’d have to say Jules,” Nick said. “But I’ll be goat-fucked if I can figure out why.”

  “Couldn’t have anything to do with you following the water witch’s tits instead of this conversation,” Dru accused.

  Heat crawled up the back of Moira’s neck and into her cheeks. Funny that the first time she wished she listened to Tierra’s gentle bullying about a bra, her sister should be nowhere in the room.

  Nick took two long strides into Dru’s space, and just like that, the parlor shrank to the size of a saltine cracker, every available molecule of oxygen consumed by the sudden onrush of violent, masculine energy.

  Moira planted a hand on Nick’s sternum, feeling his heart pound beneath her palm. She tried not to think of the other times she felt it leap like this. Times when she not only felt his pulse, but heard it. Tasted it.

  “Y’all knock this off before I turn the hose on you. And believe me, ain’t no one can do it like I can. Isn’t that right, Nick?”

  A muscle tightened in Nick’s jaw. On the smoked honey screen of his eyes, Moira read the memories of tidal waves, cloud bursts, and icy showers—all of which she’d gone to the trouble to arrange for him personally.

  He stepped back. In his searing look lived a promise that whatever ground he ceded here, he would reclaim on other fields of battle between them.

  And soon.

  “Like I was saying,” Moira continued. “Lucy wants Julian, but Julian wants Aerin. So Lucy hops into Aerin, and before you know it, she’s got a one-way ticket for a ride on the Pestilence Pony.” She resisted a glance at Julian, mostly because she already had an idea that his grimaces so far today would pale in comparison to what the term Pestilence Pony might conjure. “This is just like the time when we had a nasty old snapping turtle living in the little pond out behind our shack. Every spring, that big, old bastard hunkered down in there and ate the feet off all the little ducklings. Well, one night I got me a chicken carcass an d tied it to a rope and waited for him to bite. As soon as he did, I hauled him out of the pond and booted his reptilian butt right back down into the bayou. I mean, I don’t know if any of y’all have ever had to fit a duckling for prosthetic flippers, but I’ll tell you right here and now. It’s a hell of a lot easier to just get rid of the snapping turtle in the first place. You follow me?”

  At that moment, Moira could have heard a mouse break wind.

  Julian, gallant soul that he was, made the first attempt to wade in. “May I assume that I am the tethered remains of poultry in this colorful metaphor?”

  “Yes, sir,” Moira confirmed. She’d fallen out of the habit of using formal appellations since coming to Port Townsend, but something in Julian’s attire and bearing seemed to warrant it.

  “And you are suggesting that we may be able to lure the turtle out of the pond by convincing her that the reward she seeks lies elsewhere, i.e., the bayou?”

  The fact that Julian appeared to be following her train of thought and had not yet made an attempt to cast himself violently off the tracks encouraged Moira perhaps a touch more than it should. “Exactly!”

  “Is it just me, or does this sound like a plot from some messed up Disney movie?” Dru asked.

  “I was going to go with something Machiavelli might do, but close enough,” Nick said.

  “Wait a minute.” Claire pushed herself up from the couch with a sultry sigh of leather. “So, you’re proposing that we lure Lucy out of Aerin by convincing her that he and Aerin are on the outs?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “And exactly how the hell are you going to do that?” Claire asked.

  “I believe Moira is suggesting that we make it appear that I’ve fallen in love with someone else.” Julian’s silver-blue eyes were alive with thought. Moira could see him tracing the implications and potential outcomes of this plan down many paths at once.

  “Yeah.” The edge of incredulity in Nick’s voice gave this word the weight of a laugh. “But, who?”

  Moira took a deep breath and made sure her body was nowhere near the direct path separating Conquest from Pestilence.

  “Me,” she said.

  Chapter Six

  “Abso-fucking-lutely not.” Nick leapt from his station on the couch’s arm as if someone had applied a cattle prod to his taint. Which, Moira suspected, was about what her words had been to him. She hadn’t expected Conquest to be all together thrilled about the idea of willingly letting his brother Horseman horn in on her, but she intended to make it worth his while at the first available opportunity.

  Purely to keep the peace, of course.

  “At least hear me out before you object,” Moira insisted. “Chances are Lucy’s going to be madder than a double-plucked hen when she finds out Tierra sprung Death and they flew the coop. Which means she’s going to be looking for vengeance, and I don’t know about y’all, but the idea of that demonic old twat using Aerin’s powers to carry it out scares the ever-loving sheep dip out of me.”

  “And me,” Claire admitted. “We saw what Lucy did with an army of zombies. I don’t even want to think what she might be able to do with the convention of witch hunters that’s been camping on our doorstep.”

  “I’m for slaughtering them all,” Dru remarked. His surprised absolutely no one. “Hunting doesn’t work so well when you’re dead.”

  “I wouldn’t mind acquainting Reverend Bill Blanding with the finer points of Hemorrhagic Peritonitis.” Julian’s eyes had gone the ephemeral shade of an iceberg’s underside. “Assuming we were able to locate them. They seem to be rather at home beneath the city.”

  “What is it with Christians and catacombs?” Dru’s expression was one of nostalgic fondness. The golden age of Rome must have been something like the good old days, or so Moira guessed.

  “Eradication. Extermination. Wanton bloodshed and recreational torture. Now these are ideas I can get behind.” Nick’s mood had lightened considerably.

  “Satisfying as that may be, it doesn’t do fuck-all about Aerin bein’ possessed.” Moira felt herself become the proverbial storm cloud, darkening the sky of their excitement and making a soggy mess of their plans. She was past caring. Those witch hunters would get what was coming to them, of this she had no doubt. But not before Lucy did. “I was ready to chew open my own wrist after being trapped with that evil whore for a couple hours. Can y’all even begin imagine what it must be like to share your head with her every minute of every day?”

  This thought drew a dark curtain over the room in general and Julian in particular. He sank back onto the settee, chin coming to rest on the leather knot of his clasped hands.

  “You can joke about Aerin being a foul-mouthed bitch all you want, but she’s my sister dammit, and I ain’t about to let that malevolent twatsicle treat her like some magical Mercedes. Lucy’s had her fun. I think it’s high time she got her a mouthful of the misery she so enjoys shoveling down other people’s throats.”

  The ghost of a smile flickered across Julian’s lips. “Moira de Moray, I am with you.”

  “You know I am, sister.” Seeing the fierce determination in Claire’s eyes felt like looking into a mirror, and she was pleased to find the image staring back at her stronger than she’d remembered. Her sister. Her blood.

  “Look, I don’t want to be the one to shit all over your love-fest here, but how do we know this will even work?” Nick had remained on the outskirts of their circle, pausing now and then to examine details in the woodwork in his restless orbit. “But in case you’ve forgot
ten, you’re talking about potentially canoodling with Pestilence here.”

  “Don’t be so modest, Nicholas.” Julian crossed his ankle over his knee and adjusted the pleat of his trousers. “I think we all know which of the two of us is more likely to give her syphilis.”

  Nick—resembling a boiled crawdad in both color and expression more every minute—pointed a finger at his brother. “You want to swallow some teeth along with your next swig of centuries-old Bordeaux?”

  “Might complement the chalky finish,” Dru suggested, drawing a raised eyebrow from Julian.

  “If it’s the whole infectious disease thing that’s got your boxers in a bunch, then relax.” Moira stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled short and sharp. Seconds later, Cheeto came trotting into their midst, her pearlescent wand clasped high in his snout. Moira reached down and took the wand, giving her pig a quick scratch behind one velvet ear in lieu of their usual baby talk.

  To Moira’s delight and amusement, Cheeto tottered a long, curving arc back to the kitchen, pausing to sneeze a delicate, flaming snot ball on Nick’s loafer. It was no bigger than a lit match really, and certainly didn’t warrant the florid curses streaming from Nick’s mouth.

  Claire’s hand was clapped to her face, her eyes watering with mirth behind it.

  Moira pointed her wand at the offended shoe and put it out with a quick spritz. “See? Good as new.”

  “Do you have any idea how much these loafers cost?” Nick’s black scowl did nothing to dissolve the errant giggle lodged at the back of Moira’s throat.

  She was tempted to make a jab about Payless, but somehow thought this might hurt her chances of winning Nick to the cause.

  “Look, I’m real sorry about your shoe. But my whole point was this,” she said, holding her wand aloft. “I’m pretty sure this puppy can tackle anything Julian here can dish out.”

  “Is that so?” Julian appeared genuinely intrigued. His eyes brightened with the fervor of a scientist as he examined the length of smooth, iridescent wood in her hand.