Moira stood back, admiring her handiwork. “Don’t he just look cuter than a gnat’s ear?”
“Actually, gnats interpret sound vibration with their antennae,” Julian pointed out. “The sound waves are then passed through clusters of cells—and I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”
“Maybe just a smidge.” Moira held up her thumb and forefinger in a rough approximation of that particular measurement.
“I get that you two are supposed to be nauseatingly in love and all now, but what I want to know is how on earth Moira convinced you to raid Hank Williams’s closet.” Claire seemed to have remembered that she not only had a mouth, but words to match, her apparent shock only incrementally less than Nick’s own.
“Actually, I must admit to finding this attire far more comfortable than I expected.” Here, Julian reached up to tug the cuff of his new tawny, tanned-leather gloves. “Did you know that these vests are made from waterproof leather and come equipped with not one, but two concealed-carry pockets?”
“Last time I checked, the only thing you carried concealed was ass-rotting super viruses.”
“Oh, he’s concealing much more than that.” An impish smirk darkened one corner of Moira’s lips as she cast an appreciative glance right about where a saddle would split Julian’s legs.
And Julian, waster of nations, fountainhead of insidious diseases and decay, actually, fucking, blushed.
The desire to see that same blood gout from Julian’s every orifice rather than flush his pale cheeks was approaching crisis point.
Moira must have sensed the tide of carnage rising in Nick’s blood, for she angled her body between his and Julian’s and ducked her head to whisper.
“Okay, everyone’s got their orders for tonight, right? We all know where we’re going to be and when?”
“I’ll be waiting in the closet in Julian’s quarters with the Grim, ready to cast the exorcism spell we went over,” Claire answered dutifully. “Dru will wait with me until you give the signal.”
“Perfect.” Moira turned to Julian. “And you, mister?”
“I’ll be in bed,” Julian said. The small hill of his Adam’s apple bobbed as he worked over a swallow. “With you.”
Nick felt and heard his knuckles creak as he welded his fists to his sides.
“And you?” Moira’s eyes softened when they fixed on Nick’s, a shift as subtle as a shadow passing beneath the water’s surface. A graduation of expression only someone who had watched her face in moments of unguarded pleasure would catch. That he could, that he did, provided Nick with a most welcome stab of savage pride.
“I’ll be out in the hall,” Nick said. “Not killing anything.”
“Good boy.” Her voice carried a promise of wet heat that spoke straight to his cock. Whether Julian and Claire had heard this too, Nick didn’t particularly care. At the moment, his sole purpose was to finish this business so he could fuck Moira in two with all due haste and expediency.
The end.
Or not the end.
A flash of white in the corner of Nick’s vision lured his attention in that direction.
Nick didn’t harbor any special pride on the score of his memory. Living as long as he had, he learned long ago to dump all non-essential information every time the sun slid below the horizon. In spite of this, his immortal mind maintained detailed warehouses on two subjects alone.
Everyone he’d ever wanted to fuck. And everyone he’d ever wanted to kill.
The figure etching itself into his peripheral vision landed soundly in the second camp. Slim, small, sliver-haired. Clutching a book to the breast pocket of his linen suit.
The Reverend Bill Blanding. “Oh, that I should live to see such times as sin congregates so boldly upon the streets.” His preacher’s cadence unfurled itself down the sidewalk like a velvet altar cloth, driving the last of the pedestrian traffic off the street.
In the wake of all that had befallen Port Townsend, the locals had developed a talent for waiting out the weird shit indoors.
Apparently, a showdown with a mob of witch hunters in broad daylight would be no different.
Nick felt Julian’s anger kindling like a sudden swarm of bees, the memory of extracting Aerin from the Reverend’s clutches all too near for comfort.
“Damned if he don’t look like Colonel Sanders,” Moira muttered. “Only it’s his disposition that’s extra crispy instead of his chicken. Anyone ever tell you you’re awful uptight?” she asked, turning to Blanding. “It ain’t your fingers need licked, if you ask me.”
“Stop your tongue, whore.” Reverend Blanding held up a bony hand, fingers splayed as if he could pull Moira’s words directly from the air. As if in response, figures seeped from the deepening twilight shadows, coagulating in a circle around them.
Nick had seen their kind many times before over the centuries.
Blank eyes turned stony by hate. Empty hearts. Heads aswarm with the greedy anticipation of exacting punishment.
Out of instinct, Nick and Julian herded Moira and Claire between them, reducing the witch hunters’ possible angles of attack.
“It’s you who might want to stop your tongue, Blanding,” Nick said. “That is, if you have any desire to keep it in your head.”
“Blanding?” Claire repeated. “As in Reverend Bill Blanding the asswaffle who tried to kill Aerin?”
“The same.” Julian’s voice had gone low and deadly smooth.
“You see?” Blanding raised his arms in supplication as his eyes scanned the faces of his followers. “By fornication do they enchant others to do their bidding. Now you understand why all who are in league with the enchantress must also be destroyed.”
Murmured agreement worked its way around the circle.
“Now wait just a toad-suckin’ minute there, Colonel Cluck-bucket. The only fornicatin’ I ever did with this one here was so he’d agree to kill me, which I’d have thought would thrill you clean out of your linen britches.”
“Moira,” Nick hissed through his teeth. The heat coming off her skin radiated through his dress shirt when their arms brushed.
“No, sir. I ain’t about to be bullied by some Bible-beating carpet-bagger with a witch fetish.” The same wand Nick had seen earlier in the bathroom at Maison de Moray had appeared in Moira’s white-knuckled grip. “We’re fixin’ to see how Reverend Ratfuck and his boys do with a little synchronized swimming.”
Moira’s arm swung high with the wand, and there she froze. The sickening sound of rock meeting bone, the awful, unmistakable crack, and her body collapsed into Julian’s waiting arms.
Later, they would have to have a little discussion about who did the catching when Moira had been knocked the fuck out. But for now, Nick’s attention had been hijacked by Claire, who was alternately screaming and gagging as she fumbled for the object that had been hurled with such brutal force at her sister.
Brimstone.
“A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood…shall be upon them.” Blanding smiled wide enough to reveal the fissure where his dentures met his red, raw gums.
Nick smiled too.
He smiled, because he thought he would have to suffer through the day without killing anyone.
He smiled, because Reverend Blanding thought that if brimstone stopped witches, it would stop a Horseman, too.
He smiled, because they had both been very fucking wrong.
Chapter Eleven
Nick had never been much for guns or knives when it came to offing a motherfucker.
To his way of thinking, weapons were kind of like condoms. He understood the need for them in theory but had always resented the distance they created in actual practice.
Using his hands was far more satisfying. Particularly when shattering a man’s philtrum—that bony little ridge above the teeth but below the sinus—so the bony splinters could wreak havoc among the recesses below the frontal and temp
oral lobes of the brain.
So fell the closest of Blanding’s minions. Watching one of their brother’s faces collapse on itself like a deflated beach ball was sufficient motivation to send a score of them skittering back to the shadows like cockroaches.
“You mind keeping an eye on the ladies here so I can have a chat with the rest of our friends?” Nick asked. By this point, bleeding the pure anticipatory elation of the coming carnage out of his voice required significant effort.
Julian was already slipping out of his gloves and tucking them away in one of his vest’s many pockets. “By all means.”
Nick stooped and picked up the chunk of brimstone that had felled Moira. “Who threw this?”
“The righteous fear not evil!” Blanding held his tattered leather Bible out like a shield. “Nor will they be dissuaded by the words of the adversary.”
“Let me rephrase that.” Nick lobbed the mottled gray and poison yellow stone upward and let it fall to his palm with an ominous slap. “Whoever tells me who threw this won’t get his testicles ripped off and shoved down his throat.”
Several arms swung out, fingers at the end of them pointing squarely at a weasel-faced man sporting an old-fashioned friar’s robes knotted at the waist with a length of rope. The man’s eyes went wide, his gladiator sandals scraping backward with a cartoon character’s swiftness.
Reverend Blanding’s face had gone bone white as he backed into the protective circle of bodies already shuffling in to surround him. “But behold, the hand of the one betraying me is with mine on the table!”
A surge of pure pleasure bloomed hot in Nick’s blood.
The more, the merrier. Every body that put itself between him and Reverend Blanding was one more he’d have the chance to break.
But first…
Friar Tuck’s elbows bit into the concrete as Nick came down on his back, knee lodged between the faux-monk’s shoulder blades. The air rushed out of the man’s ribcage as his lungs deflated in a satisfying whoosh. Nick felt a couple ribs splinter like Thanksgiving wishbones when his full weight was brought to bear.
“They will be destroyed.” Blood dampened the monk’s words, choking off the sibilant S into a wet cough. “Kill me if you will, but there will be others.”
“If you insist.” One quick jerk was sufficient to snap the man’s spinal chord. He shivered out straight like a clubbed fish.
Nick climbed off him before the inevitable void of bodily fluids had the chance to soak through the rough brown cloth of Friar Tuck’s get up. Taking the chunk of brimstone from the pocket of his dress shirt, Nick nudged the man over onto his back with the toe of one Italian leather loafer and jammed the rock into his mouth like the traditional apple in the maw of a suckling pig.
With the singular focus he enjoyed only when killing, Nick located the cowering form of Reverend Blanding in what remained of the crowd.
What followed next would remain in Nick’s memory as nothing more than a strange collage of color and sound. The world painted with sprays of crimson and serenaded by the lullaby of breaking bones and scattering teeth as he cheerfully worked his way through the pack of witch hunters.
He had a vague sense that he might have ripped someone’s arm off and beaten him with the wet end at one point, but he could never be really sure. It was entirely possible that he merely picked up the limb after a brush with Julian had relieved it of the connective tissues once anchoring it to its former owner.
There were a few odd body parts decorating Water Street’s gutters by that point. Hard to keep track.
Especially after Moira, having recovered her consciousness in addition to a goodly measure of the fighting spirit Nick had grown to…respect, grabbed Julian from behind and commenced to aim him at a second wave of witch hunters bubbling up from a sewer grating like so many rats.
“Moira, what are you—” Startled by the sudden skin-to-skin contact, Julian had spun sharply enough to nearly relieve him of his trucker’s hat—a happening Nick observed with growing interest over the exposed tendons of his current project.
“Just trust me, all right?” At this, Moira yanked Julian’s denim jacket down off his shoulders, revealing that Pestilence was not only wearing a flannel shirt, but a sleeveless flannel shirt at that.
Which disclosure inadvertently caused Nick to curb check one unfortunate witch hunter’s teeth not merely down his throat, as he planned, but clear through the backside of the man’s skull.
Collateral damage.
Much like the head Nick inadvertently ripped from its stem when Moira tore open Julian’s shirt and vest, sending pearl snaps and buttons scattering in every direction.
Once bared, Julian’s torso—a good deal more toned than Nick would have guessed, he was sorry to note—became home to Moira’s hands. Her fingers threaded together, making a cage directly over Pestilence’s heart as her forehead came to rest against his naked back.
Together, they looked like something you might see on the cover of a romance novel about a lonely rancher—the rancher fed his cattle on the broken bodies of religious zealots.
“Honestly, Miss de Moray,” Julian protested. “I don’t think now is the time for this kind of—gods! What are you doing to me?”
If Nick had been afraid he would find Moira’s hands had migrated to Julian’s crotch, he was wrong by several orders of magnitude.
She hadn’t shifted one iota.
But Julian had.
Attenuated arms shot straight out from his body in the posture of a sleepwalker. Every muscle of his torso carved in high relief by whatever current passed from Moira through him. From the open palms of his outstretched hands, a dense fog the color of swamp water billowed and swelled, climbing up the legs of those witch hunters nearest them.
Moira had turned Pestilence into an aerosolized weapon.
Dumbfounded, Nick watched in a mix of jealousy and awe as sanguine as the rising screams. Howls of pain. Sounds barely even recognizable as human.
Sounds that bred in Nick a fresh wave of jealousy.
“Hey!” Nick called to the leather-clad figure straddling a felled goon and quietly burning him alive from the inside out.
“Kinda busy here, Kingswood,” Claire called back.
“Do you see that shit happening over there?” Nick gestured in Moira and Julian’s direction with a hand bathed in a cocktail of blood and gore. “Fifteen fucking people. They just took out fifteen fucking people in less than thirty seconds.”
“You’re counting?”
“Counting? Fuck no.” Counting implied purposeful effort. Could he help it if he was a businessman whose mind naturally apprehended numbers? Numbers like thirteen. Which just so happened to be how many people whose souls he’d personally freed up for Killian Bane to collect. “I was just thinking maybe you and I could—you know. That is, combining our powers might be an efficient way to address the challenge at hand.”
“I’m going to say they have a pretty good handle on this.” Claire stood, dusting ashes from her hands as she surveyed the damage. Heaps of broken bodies were piled on the sidewalks, spilling down into the streets. Smoke swiveled up from the eyes and ears of corpses who had gained an appreciation for the fire witch’s talents first hand. “Where’s Reverend Blanding?” she asked.
“Son of a bitch!” Nick scanned the wreckage, searching for the telltale flash of white. Nothing. He had gone. Probably sometime while Moira was groping Pestilence’s chest, and it was all Nick could do not to wade through the miasma and end them both.
They were winding down now. Moving together over the field of the dead and dying like a crop duster, giving a little extra blast to those still twitching.
For a man who didn’t count, Nick could recall many times when he and Julian had sifted through fields of devastation far larger than what now lay at their feet. In all that time, he had never before seen Julian look as he looked now.
Not because of what he wore on his body, but because of what he wore on his face.
/> Relief.
Nick understood something in that moment. A truth slipped through the sudden alignment of many windows in the long years of his experience.
For the first time in his entire existence, Julian Roarke had not been required to touch the person he would kill.
The same opportunity Nick longed for and relished with undisguised avarice, Julian had been forced to by Lucy. None of them had been given the choice as to their purpose, but Julian had been robbed of even the manner in which he could carry out his calling.
Until today.
Moira had done this for him. And for a moment, no matter how brief, Pestilence had been freed of his curse.
It was just the sort of kindness that lived within her soul: her essential goodness.
He called his attention to the flickering warmth this thought created in his chest. Cupped his awareness around it as one would cup a candle flame from the wind. If he could hang onto this feeling, protect it from the buffeting of the darker side of his nature, he might just survive what the rest of the night would bring.
“It’s about that time,” Claire announced, picking her way toward Moira and Julian. “Do you think you know who was watching this?”
“I sure as hell hope so,” Moira answered, handing Julian his discarded denim jacket. “If Nick’s reaction was anything to go by, watching me and Julian melt those minions together should have just about fried her wires for good.”
“My reaction?” Nick crossed his arms across a shirt stiff with drying blood. “I was perfectly calm. In control of my faculties the entire time.”
“Is that man’s leg protruding from his own anus?” Julian inquired, buttoning the jacket against the evening chill rolling in from the Puget Sound.
“He must have fallen on it. Happens all the time on the battlefield,” Nick said. It was patent bullshit and they all knew it, but Dru wasn’t around to call him on it and none of the others was inclined to argue those kinds of gritty details.
“I guess we better scoot toward the castle,” Moira suggested. “We need a little extra time to get cleaned up before show time.” She and Claire walked ahead toward the earth witch’s borrowed economy go-cart.
Which Witch is Wild? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 3) Page 22