Nick couldn’t bring himself to bestow the distinction of car to anything with fewer than eight cylinders.
“Nicholas,” Julian said, slowing his gait to buy them some privacy. “May I ask you something?”
“Sorry,” Nick replied. “I’m fresh out of sheep and I know for a fact you don’t have a sister.”
Julian, master of diplomacy, bestowed a perfectly-seasoned courtesy chuckle. “Actually, I wanted to ask you something about Moira.”
Nick stoked the little flame in his chest, banking its power. “I’m counting on you not to ask me anything that will make me want to kill you. Again.”
“When she touched me—”
“Too late.”
“Allow me to rephrase.” Julian’s hands folded together behind his back, the gesture completely at odds with his current attire. “You have touched her more—intimately—than anyone. Have you found her capability to heal communicable in that fashion?”
“You mean, can she heal people just by touching them?”
“Precisely.”
Deep breaths, Nick. Deep breaths. “The way I understand it, she heals people by fucking them.”
“Oh.” Julian, crestfallen, considered the pointy toes of his ostrich skin boots.
“Why?” Nick asked.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
But Nick already knew what his brother had been getting at. He paid at least that much attention in his conversations with Julian, ever the scientist and student of his own condition.
Pestilence was contagious.
Both infected and infecting in nature. If Aerin could provide him with a portion of her sensitivity to emotional signatures, could Moira not impart to him the ability to heal? To undo a measure of the desolation he wrought?
Nick, whose own nature inclined him toward an understanding of unconquerable desire, felt the all-consuming need rolling off Julian in thunderous waves.
It was a shame Nick would have to burn the entire world to the ground before he could allow Moira to heal Pestilence in that way.
That was the trouble with natures.
One could occasionally outrun them, but never escape them.
“Let’s get back to the castle.” Nick beeped open the Ferrari’s doors with a remote key fob. “I need time to practice not killing you. And my suit is a fucking mess.”
Chapter Twelve
“I say, I feel myself a sudden urge to wrassle a gator and also shuck some crawfish.”
Moira fought the urge to giggle, not only because giggling when you were wearing nothing but a boob tube and panties made all kinds of jiggling not only possible, but inevitable, but also on account of the icy earnestness in Julian Roarke’s eyes.
Goddess bless him, he was trying.
“Oh, yeah,” Moira agreed a touch too enthusiastically. “That was real good. Only…”
“Only what?” Julian rolled onto his side, facing her beneath the downy warmth of the duvet. And Moira had no doubt that a duvet it was, because in Julian’s suite of rooms in Manresa Castle, only a duvet would do.
Dark wood, plush carpets, endless book shelves, and more reading lamps than most people had under-britches back home.
He was bare chested, though Moira was pert near certain he was wearing something on his lower half. They sort of kept their backs to each other as they had stripped down just enough to be convincingly bollocky bare-assed when Lucy/Aerin busted her way in about ten minutes from now while still minimizing physical contact.
“Only, no one really wrassles gators any more down in Stumps. Not since the local game warden caught Cleevis McQuee doing much more than wrasslin’ one out behind the Hoodoo Shack one night and they outlawed recreational wrasslin’ for the whole parish.”
They both looked up when a dull thump on the other side of the closet door rattled a painting on the wall. Claire and Dru were already in position.
Which position that might be at the moment, Moira couldn’t hazard a guess.
Lord knew she wouldn’t blame her sister one lick for doing a little recreational wrasslin’ of her own after being trapped in such small space with the likes of Drustan Geddes.
Truth to tell, that had been part of the reason she insisted that they lie in wait in the closet together anyway. Tommy wasn’t getting any fresher, and Moira didn’t like the way she caught him eyeing the parts of her that would make for the best eating.
“I suppose that makes sense,” Julian allowed, leaning on his elbow. The bed shook gently with his laughter, which somehow managed to be both dignified and charming. “You are refreshing, Moira de Moray.”
“So is this,” Moira said, lifting her wine glass from the adjacent nightstand and taking a sip. “What did you say it was?”
“Chateau d’Yquem. From the Girondes region in Bordeaux. One of my favorites.”
“Well, it’s a far cry from the ‘shine. Doesn’t make my nose run or my eyes bleed or anything.” She took a larger swig than was perhaps customary for one savoring a vintage that probably cost more than Moira’s first car. “Time’s running low. Should we practice?”
It was a good thing Julian hadn’t been sipping at his own wine, for Moira was pretty damn certain he would have done a solid spit take. “Practice?”
“Yeah. You don’t think Loosey Goosey will be mad enough to hop on out of Aerin if she doesn’t really think you were giving me the bone, do you?”
Moira wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Julian actually blanched paler still.
“It’s all right, sugar. Come on over here.”
“Over where?” Julian eyed the remaining room between them. “We’re already in the same bed.”
“I’m not sure what Nick’s been telling you, but that ain’t all there is to it.”
“But—”
“Oh, for the love of lard.” Using what remained of the extra strength Nick had gifted her with earlier that day, Moira grabbed Julian by the hips and rolled him on top of her. He was quick to transfer his weight to his hands, making sure his pelvis didn’t connect with hers at any angle.
“We could put a Bible between us if you’d prefer,” Moira suggested. “Or you could just lighten the hell up and realize that this is no different than when I put my hands on you earlier to get rid of them witch hunters.”
Julian vanished from behind his eyes for the space of a few seconds. Their darkening marked his return. “I wanted to thank you for that.”
“For what?”
“For what you did today. I can’t adequately put into words what it meant to me. Not to have to—”
“Don’t mention it.” Moira remembered then what it had been like to hold his body to hers. To feel the loneliness seeping from his bones. He had been all angles at first, rusty from disuse and accustomed only to shaping himself around the empty space where his love for Aerin lived and breathed.
With the mutability of her element, Moira had let herself slide into the void her sister left behind, filling it in, if only for season. Only for the sharing of pain.
“No,” he said. “I need to. You see, because of who I am, what I am, I felt what it would be like. If I were able to do more than just destroy. Just for a second, through you, I knew how it would feel.”
His arms had relaxed as he talked, the weight of his body becoming tangible on her skin in the places where gravity chose to join them. The belly. The thigh. Ankle and foot.
“And how did it feel?” It wasn’t sex lowering Moira’s voice to its smokier registers, but another kind of longing. The healer in her stirring, turning, rising.
“Exquisite.” It was little more than a whisper. The desire in it not for her, Moira knew, but for what she had made him feel.
Julian’s dark hair brushed her cheek as his face lowered toward hers.
All at once, Moira could smell his skin, and his lips, the blood in them, and she knew exactly how Julian Roarke would taste with the singular, prickling awareness that came only before a first kiss. The first taste of someone new
.
In the last seconds before their lips met, Julian’s body went rigid beneath her fingers as his gasp stole what little breath Moira had been able to conjure.
“She’s here,” he said.
****
Lucy moved down Manresa’s dark halls as quietly as the many ghosts who had made it their home. Restless spirits she had pressed into her service with the promise of an afterlife she had no intention of providing.
Still, it had been enough to convince them to spy on the de Moray sisters and Horsemen alike. Even the lovesick Skunk had crumbled at the prospect of a one-way ticket out of Earth’s limbo, informing her of what had passed between Nick and Moira in the bathroom. No wonder the little slut couldn’t keep her hands off Julian.
She’d received a healthy helping of Conquest’s legendary libido.
From her station on the roof of the Palace Hotel, Lucy had watched the spectacle unfold, numb with shock and horror. In all her millennia, she had never witnessed anything so reprehensible. So wantonly and violently unnatural.
Julian Roarke…in Wranglers?
Even the memory set Aerin keening from her personal purgatory at a decibel to shame even the most odious banshee.
And the way Moira had plastered herself all over him to exterminate the witch hunters. It shouldn’t have been possible. Wouldn’t have been possible had the soggy skank not inherited Morgana de Moray’s wand.
Lucy’s hand flashed out, her razor-sharp nails opening long gashes in a dowdy eighteenth-century oil painting as she passed.
Would that it were the water witch’s face.
The melancholy chimes from a grandfather clock downstairs tolled a quarter past eight.
Where the fuck was everyone?
She’d found the library deserted despite the clear emotional signatures informing her that Nick, Julian, Moira, Claire, and Dru had been there, and recently.
“Hello?” Lucy waited, wishing for the first time in the several weeks that she had access to the hearing capability of her own, immortal body.
At first, she thought she heard an echo but quickly realized she was standing in the middle of a small, carpeted hallway. Also, last time she checked, echoes generally sounded like at least some part of what had been originally said.
This sound hadn’t been anything like “hello.”
More like the sound someone might make if they were in severe pain.
Splendid!
Lucy sprinted down the hall, visions of medieval torture devices dancing in her head. She froze mid-step, one of Aerin’s stilettos hovering above the refurbished carpet.
Julian’s suite.
The sounds were coming from Julian’s suite.
She pressed her cheek to cool wood faintly scented of some citrusy furniture polish and listened.
Rustling. A thump. Another thump. A gasp.
“Yes, Julian! Yes! Give me that vitamin D, you virulent stud!” Moira’s swamp-sludge twang was as unmistakable as it was inimitable.
Lucy jerked back as if slapped, unable to manage the sudden onslaught of Aerin’s rage. The force of it sent her staggering backward, stomach lurching, knees weakening as Aerin’s body revolted against the heart-breaking, gut-wrenching insult of what her own sister was doing.
Unwelcome tears blurred Lucy’s vision and spilled hot down her cheeks. She swallowed the bitter taste of bile.
No. This couldn’t happen. This could not be.
Every feeling Lucy had suppressed over the past weeks came surging up from Aerin’s pit and she was drowning.
Fear. Misery. Desperation. Self-hatred. Despair.
“Prepare to be infected by my love, Moira de Moray!”
Clutching a nearby tapestry, Lucy clawed her way to her feet. Oh, they would pay for this betrayal. With blood, and bone, and suffering greater than any mortal or immortal had yet experienced in the history of this wretched planet.
Now.
The door broke open under the pressure of Lucy’s well-aimed kick. Unfortunately, so did the stiletto heel of Aerin’s shoe. Lucy no longer cared.
She limped into the room, hair stuck to her face with sweat and tears, shaking and crazed with the desire for retribution.
Hell had assembled itself around her. Not because she had conjured it, but because the vision unfolding before her eyes was as close to eternal torment as Lucy had ever strayed.
Julian’s knuckles paled from the effort of grasping the headboard. The long muscles of his back tensed and slackened in time with lean hips bucking beneath the blanket.
And her.
Moira de Moray writhed beneath him, dark hair flooding over the pillowcase in the disheveled eddies and whirls of passion.
A red polished claw raked down Julian’s back and disappeared beneath the bedclothes. In the next instant, his head whipped backward, his throat becoming a long, pale arc that Lucy would have liked to rip out with her teeth. His unhinged cry of pleasure was soon joined by Moira’s—a shriek that split the very air molecules, freeing the water they held to fall on Lucy’s skin in a chilling mist.
So absorbed were they in their shared climax that neither had even noticed her enter the room.
She would not be ignored.
Lucy grew beyond the limited container of Aerin’s body, marshaling the darkness she had been forced to relinquish while inhabiting a human form. It bled into Aerin’s body, sliding between her cells, seducing her innate abilities into a twisted tango with her own.
Wind whipped the bed curtains and made a blizzard of the papers on Julian’s desk. Books blew open, their pages piling from one side to the other on the sudden gusts. The locks Lucy had bound into a chignon at the back of her head escaped under the pressure, climbing before her eyes like black cherry flame.
“Now, Claire!”
Lucy barely had time to register the closet door flying open before strong hands closed over her biceps, dragging her backward, pinning her to the wall.
Nicholas. And Dru.
Her own curses and promises of retribution were lost, eaten up by the cyclone unleashed within the room.
Moira and Claire chanted over the maelstrom, a wand in the first witch’s hand and a book in the second’s. Julian stood apart, an expression bearing equal parts hatred and hope on his face.
Tricked.
Lucifer, the mother of lies had been tricked. Betrayed. And by her very own henchmen.
The chamber filled with a silvery light—vile, slippery, loosening Lucy’s grasp on Aerin’s body, prying her out of every space where she yet held dominion.
She was already sliding from the grip of War and Conquest when a blinding flash of green bloomed large, rendering all present in the hue of a night vision camera.
“Tierra! No!” The water witch’s scream pierced the swirling maelstrom of color and sound.
And as it is for so many, Killian Bane’s face was the last thing Lucy saw before she descended into the swarming dark.
Chapter Thirteen
Moira, Tierra, and Claire knelt over Aerin’s prone form, the four of them held by a strange, sacred silence.
Aerin was alive, but there was no telling how long Moira or Claire would be if Julian continued to pace and sigh in such close proximity.
Nick and Dru had been kind enough to escort him to the library in search of a drink after he’d been the accidental progenitor of a bacterium that ate through all the bed curtains and half the area rug.
Tierra twisted the strand of amber beads at her throat. “Will she be okay?”
“Don’t know yet.” Moira looked up from Aerin’s face to find Tierra’s green eyes darkened by worry. “The exorcism spell Claire and I were casting was in the two witches, one wand section of Grim. The extra power might have cooked her kooky.”
“Didn’t you ever watch Ghostbusters growing up?” Claire chided. “Never cross the streams.”
“I’m sorry, okay?” Unshed tears pooled in Tierra’s lower lids. “When I saw you two casting a spell at Lucy—”
“At Lucy?” Moira asked. “Since when was going blind as Dr. Lector a side effect of being knocked up?”
“But I did,” Tierra insisted. “I saw Dru and Nick holding Lucy down and you two chanting a spell and Lucy writhing and spitting.”
“Maybe the bun,” Claire said, glancing at the gentle swell beneath Tierra’s flowing peasant dress, “has some kind of x-ray vision that can spot demonic spirits.”
“I s’pose that’s possible.” Moira mopped Aerin’s pale brow with a damp cloth. “But then, we wouldn’t know what the tadpole’s been up to lately on account of you deciding to have yourself a little babymoon with Death.”
“That is not what happened.” The bracelets ringing Tierra’s arms gave a fierce little jingle as she folded her arms across her growing bosom. “Killian abducted me. I didn’t have a choice.”
“Yeah. You look like you’ve been pure miserable.” Truth was that Moira had been delighted to see her sister again. Relieved she had made it back to them safely. But the gladness she felt had quickly been boiled away when she’d observed the healthy, rosy glow of Tierra’s cheeks and the beginnings of a bronzy tan on her chest and arms.
It was the kind of look folks always brought back from places where drinks were named after natural disasters and fluffy, white towels appeared in the hands of broad-chested cabana boys.
“You shouldn’t have just run off like that without telling us where you were going.” Claire said this with the relish of someone who had been on the receiving end of the same admonition from Tierra’s lips a time too many.
“I did!” Tierra sat back on the heels of her sandals, indignant. “I specifically told Jinx to made sure you read it if anything happened to me.”
“Have you forgotten you’re the only one who can talk to land critters?” Moira asked. “Meeeeaaww sounds just as much like watch out, I’m fixin’ to bend a cat biscuit as it does by the way, Momma’s gone off to Hell. What if something had happened to you?”
“Look, I didn’t fly all the way back from paradise just to be given the third degree.” Tierra pushed herself to her bare feet and propped a hand on her hip. “I don’t owe you or anyone else—”
Which Witch is Wild? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 3) Page 23