“Fuck, no!” Aerin rose so fast to her feet, she almost toppled over on her stilettos.
“Holy shit!” Claire followed Aerin. “You think one of us is pregnant, too?”
“Oh, hell no.” Moira flipped the book shut and tossed it to the coffee table where it landed with a slap.
A gleeful sound escaped Tierra. She wasn’t the only one knocked up. “Fill your bladders, sisters. Looks like you’re all peeing on a stick today.”
II
Moira
By Cynthia St. Aubin
14
“I got me a bad feeling about this.”
Moira de Moray reckoned she’d had enough bad feelings in her short but exceedingly strange life to recognize that distinctive cocktail of foreboding and dread when it flooded into her heart like swamp water. Each time, it had arrived on the heels of some person or other telling her something she would have preferred not to know, and usually meant it would be dragging a gut-full of suffering in its wake.
The examples were plentiful and varied.
The time Uncle Sal had shared his plans for converting an extra pontoon motor into a moonshine bottling device.
The time she’d agreed to trade Nicholas Kingswood some nay-nay in exchange for his help in offing herself to stave off the impending Apocalypse.
The time she’d guilt-allowed her pet teacup piglet, Cheeto, to eat a whole head of cabbage.
And right the hell now.
Now, she sat on the edge of the antique clawfoot tub, aiming a serious stinkeye at the slim thermometer-shaped gadget perched precariously on the edge of the sink.
A pregnancy test.
The kind that promised results six days in advance of a period in absurdly cheerful script on the front of the package.
The plan was, they’d all take the tests at the same time, come out into the living room, and unveil the results on the count of three, rock, paper scissors style.
And believe it not, synchronized piddling had been the easy part of the plan. The hard part had been laying hold of a pregnancy test in the first place. Like everyone else and their flea-ridden dog, the sisters de Moray had done their share of pantry stocking against the End of Days, but pregnancy tests weren’t something they’d thought to buy in bulk.
Just a simple trip to Port Townsend’s one grocery store had become more treacherous than catfish noodling in a gator pit.
And if you happened to survive the gauntlet of people trying to shoot your ass full of bullets over the last package of non-vegan hot dogs a la Drustan Geddes or back over you in a fit of black-brained Nicholas Kingswood-esque road rage if you happened to take the parking spot they’d been after, there were those whose lives Julian Roarke had touched.
Like, with his hands and stuff.
You couldn’t swing a dead cat—and Goddess knew the Apocalypse had produced an alarming number of those—without hitting someone hideously afflicted with some sort of face-liquefying super-plague.
Moira was getting awfully sick of hosing globs of skin off Tierra’s eco-mobile every time she left the damn house, even if some of that skin may or not belong to that demonic twat Lucifer. Imagining what had become of she-Satan’s face the last time Moira had clapped eyes on her brought her first smile of the day.
She’d seen half-eaten pork chops with more sex appeal than Lucy had now.
Something warm and wet nudged Moira’s calf, startling her out of her thoughts.
Cheeto sat at her feet, velvety pink skin fuzzy in the glow of the bathroom lamp. His small eyes squinted as he gave an impatient grunt.
She didn’t have Tierra’s talent for yakking with critters, but she was pretty certain she knew what he was saying.
Get on with it, biped. That stick ain’t gonna pee on itself.
“All right, all right. I’m going.” Moira stood on legs gone numb from sitting too long on the edge of the tub and hovered over the toilet, pausing when she saw Cheeto blinking up at her from the bathmat. “If I wanted some male in here eyeballing me while I squat on the pot, I’d have invited Nick in here.”
Not that she’d had to invite him.
He’d invited himself.
In fact, she’d practically had to slam the door on that chiseled jaw he was so damned proud of.
Even now, she could hear the footfalls of his expensive loafers echoing up and down the hallway where he already paced like an expectant father.
Nicholas Kingswood. An expectant father.
Now that there was a colon-loosening thought.
But no more or less troubling than Bane, or Julian, or Dru as potential baby daddy Moira supposed.
And truth was, as of this particular moment, any of the immortals in question might have been the one to supply the de Moray baby batter, so to speak.
When Julian had toted Paladin Planetary Magic and Tierra had insisted that it mean one of them was knocked up, they’d all been forced to admit—after copious denials and general panic—that they’d each, at one time or another, boned their respective Horsemen bareback.
Moira, when chained to Nicholas Kingswood’s bed, thinking she was going to die anyway.
Aerin, when she’d finally relieved Julian of his millenia-long virginity.
And Claire, when she and Dru had bumped uglies in addition to souls.
And Tierra…well, no one needed a pregnancy test to know she was heavily knocked up.
“All right.” Moira sat down and angle the stick toward what she approximated would be the splash zone. “Here goes nothing.”
15
Moira was the last to arrive in the parlor, a room that looked cozy when it was just the four sisters, but positively claustrophobic with the addition of the four Horsemen, who’d they’d been sharing quarters with since Claire had accidentally reduced Manresa Castle to a heap of smoldering ash.
As was their way, each Horseman had chosen a strategic position. Death, as close to the bulging-bellied Tierra as the furniture would allow. War, with his back to the corner and his broad chest facing the exits. Pestilence, near the bookshelves from which he seemed to draw strength. And Conquest, where the architecture would best magnify the sound of his voice.
A surge of ardor doused the flame of irritation Moira had been fanning against him.
Hearing him was one thing. Seeing him was another.
Tall against the corner where wall met wall and the ceiling vaulted overhead, his head tipped back against the plaster at an insolent angle, the lamps casting amber sparks into hair the color of brick roux it had taken Moira pert near ten years to master. Arms crossed over his chest, his biceps strained the midnight blue fabric of his tailored dress shirt. Not for the first time, Moira marked that Nicholas Kingswood didn’t so much wear a suit as force each seam and panel to worship the planes of his body. Not that Moira could blame them. Lord knew she’d done plenty of worshipping at the temple of Conquest in the days of their acquaintance.
She felt his awareness shift from his favorite focus—himself—to her. A subtle rearranging of the room’s molecules around her as a center axis. His gaze lasering away everything in the room that wasn’t her, his warm whiskey eyes tracing the coastline of her body with a cartographer’s zeal. Shores he had mapped with his lips, fingers, and tongue. His face slid into that particular grin he got when she caught him looking at her naked. Not that he ever really tried to hide it. Nick Kingswood wasn’t prone to much by the way of remorse as a general rule. It was something Moira both loved and hated about him depending on the day.
“Finally. What did you do? Fucking forge the plastic from scratch?” Aerin de Moray perched on the edge of the chaise longue, her long legs creating sharp, slim angles in their expensive slacks. She still dressed every inch the high-powered, ball-busting businesswoman she’d been before coming to Port Townsend, just as Moira still favored her ratty cut-offs and threadbare tank tops. In times like these, a body wanted to hold on to everything, any shred of comfort or familiarity it could find.
“You try relaxin�
� enough to pee when you’ve got this guy marchin’ up and down the hallway outside the bathroom door.” Moira jerked her chin toward Nick, who detached himself from the wall and took a step in her direction.
“I just wanted to be nearby in case you needed any help.”
That voice.
That goddamn talk a nun out of her starched knickers and sell a glacier to an Eskimo sinfully smooth drawl.
Her usual ritual of feigning indifference in Nick Kingswood’s presence would be a hell of a lot easier without that voice. Not that the sight of him helped any.
“And how exactly were you gonna help me?” Moira asked. “Hold the stick?”
Nick’s eyelids lowered, his wicked mouth tugging up at one corner. A subtle suggestion that he’d have been willing to do that and more.
Much, much more.
“Enough already.” Claire pushed herself up from the sofa, the pregnancy test poking up from the hip pocket of her curve-hugging black jeans. Her face was drawn and pale, her lips as bloodless as her cheeks. “Can we just get this over with?”
Moira glanced down at the pregnancy test clutched in her own sweaty hand. It had taken every ounce of her meager self-restraint not to peek at the little window on the walk from the bathroom to the living room, which had felt more like a walk from a jail cell to an electric chair. “Y’all ready?”
“Ready like for a vivisection.” Aerin sighed and stood, picking up her test from where it rested face down on the end table and holding it out at arm’s length between her thumb and forefinger.
“Oh my hell, this is so exciting!” Tierra, swathed in layers of loose-fitting skirts and scarves, clutched her hands against her baby-swollen boobs. “I’m going to be an aunt!”
Killian Bane dropped a possessive hand over her shoulder, his obsidian black eyes drawn to the globe of her belly as if it housed a magnet rather than a miniature immortal. “You’ll be a mother first,” he said. “Or have you forgotten about the babe, my gazelle?”
Dark-haired, built like several brick shithouses, and capable of a sphincter-tightening glare, Dru made a sound somewhere between a gag and a grunt. “It’s a fucking baby, all right? B.A.B.Y. We’ve all been around long enough to pick up the nuances of modern English language. Well, all except for Julian. But he makes that shit work for him.”
Darkness seemed to gather around the region above Bane’s head. A pretty impressive trick, Moira had to admit. “It’s my child and I’ll call it what I like,” he said.
“I know what I’m going to call it,” Nick said. “Road kill. Because it’s half Death and half gazelle.”
Julian covered his lips with one gloved hand, the fine lines stretching from the corners of his pale blue eyes deepening to an almost imperceptible degree. To anyone else, it might have looked like mild shock or dismay. But in the time they’d pretended to be a budding couple, Moira had learned a thing or two about interpreting his infinitely subtle expressions. This right here was amusement.
Bane’s fists tightened. From the way his jaw flexed, he might have been trying to chew a rock. “So help me—”
Moira stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled the way she’d used to when she had to call Uncle Sal home for supper from three bayous over.
“Look, we can bust out the kitchen scale and weigh your sacks after this is all over, but for right now, we need to figure out which one of us is baking a bun and what the hell we’re supposed to do about it. So y’all two quit ruffling his feathers and hush up.”
An uneasy silence returned to the room.
“All right,” Moira said, turning back to Aerin and Claire. “We flip on the count of three.”
They counted together. Same voice, three slightly different accents.
Well, two slightly different accents and one alien-strange Southern bawl.
“One, two, three.”
They flipped.
They looked.
Three, big fat NOT PREGNANTs across the board.
Moira exhaled all her breath in a huge whoosh as Aerin fist-pumped the sky.
“Ha! Suck a bag of dicks, Paladin’s Planetary Magic!”
Claire folded forward at the waist, hands on her knees, loose hair falling around her face. Moira had never actually seen anyone gag with relief before, but she was pretty sure that’s what exactly what Claire was doing.
Moira pressed a hand between her sister’s shoulder blades. “You okay, sugar?”
Claire nodded, slowly rolling up to standing again. “I’m just…relieved.”
But relief wasn’t at all what Moira was picking up. The emotional signature rolling off her sister in erratic waves wasn’t nearly so simple. It bled into the space around her like weeds in a swamp. When Moira tugged on one, several others came with it.
Sadness. Anger. Fear. Regret.
“But how could this be?” Tierra rocked forward on the couch, finally making it to her feet with Bane’s assistance. “The prophecy said—”
“Perhaps we were a little hasty in our original interpretation of the prophecy.” Julian, far too polite to glance at Tierra directly, cut his eyes toward the well-preserved leather-bound book on the coffee table instead. The volume of Paladin’s Planetary Magic that their father, Stian the Wanderer had brought through to their mother through the standing stones. “If you recall, it said the four born of one will conceive two children. It didn’t say when, precisely. Tierra is obviously the first. The question that remains is which of you will be the second.”
Icy fingers squeezed Moira’s chest as she swallowed around a lump in her throat roughly the size of a duck egg. “Are you sayin’ that in order to fulfill the prophecy, one of us is going to have to get knocked up willingly?”
Julian looked at her, his eyes full of the extra measure of kindness they’d brought to her ever since they had worked together to free Aerin of Lucy’s unholy dominion. “That, Miss Moira de Moray, is precisely what I’m saying.”
16
“Nope.” Aerin backed out of the circle, her palms up like she was trying to stop an oncoming train. “Nope, nope, nope. No babies. Not me. Not ever.”
“So you’re just arbitrarily deciding that it has to be me or Moira?” Some of Claire’s fire had leapt back into her amber eyes, flecks of gold sparking deep within their depths. “How is that fair?”
“I think the more important question is why does it have to be any of us?” Aerin had begun to pace, the color in her cheeks hectic and her silvery eyes wild. “Why are we making reproductive decisions based on the ramblings of some centuries-old fuckwit who uses ridiculously arcane and obscure terminology? I mean, four born of one and one good the other evil. I’m sorry, but no. Just. Fucking. No.”
“Regarding that part of the text, I have a thought.” Julian’s smooth, imminently sane diction lowered the room’s temperature by a couple degrees. “The medieval mindset was far more primitive in its understanding of the forces governing the universe. I would suggest we take a more enlightened approach. Rather than thinking of it in terms of good and evil, I think we could substitute light and dark. Entities neither good, nor bad, who will restore balance to the world.”
As he so often did, Julian paced the length of the room as he walked, that long body, elegant as an undertaker, making liquid work of the steps from one end to the other. His dark hair, threaded with silver at the temples, tied back into a queue so orderly its mere existence seemed to rebuke the chaos of the world around them.
“Call them entities, call them babies, call them crib lizards whose chief exports are misery and shit, but the point is, none of them is welcome here,” Aerin said gesturing toward her middle. Little hairs had escaped the tether of her bun, the sweat on her forehead making them coil up around her face like springs popping out of a broken watch.
Moira had to school a rogue smile away from her face.
Together, they’d faced down zombies, ghosts, apocalyptic Horsemen, and even the devil herself, but they’d just now stumbled ass-over teakettle into the
thing that scared Aerin more than all of them combined.
Babies.
“Look, I ain’t especially crazy about the idea either,” Moira admitted. “I mean, if I wanted myself a, needy, immature boob-leech prone to temper tantrums, I could have soul-bonded myself to Nick.”
“I heard that,” Nick said.
Moira had been counting on it.
“Well if you aren’t crazy about the idea, then why are we even discussing it?” Aerin asked.
Moira walked over to the windowsill, which she’d cracked only minutes ago to allow in a blast of autumn air to cool the stuffy parlor. She dragged her hand across the surface then held it up for her sisters to see. “Look here.”
“So we’re not much for the housekeeping lately with everything going on.” Aerin shrugged. “I think we can be forgiven for that given the circumstances.”
“It’s ash.” Claire stared out into the middle distance, her eyes going wide and glazed. “Wildfires are eating up the coastline. I can feel them.” She hugged herself and shivered.
It was a feeling Moira understood all too well.
She’d known about the floods long before they’d made the news. She’d awoken to a feeling of dread the likes of which she’d never felt before. A sick tightening deep in her guts. A profound ache in her chest. Not because she felt the pain of all those who had been affected, but because she felt the deep yearnings of the element that it was her curse and blessing to bear.
The water wanted this.
The same way it wanted to break on the shore and spit curds of foam against the rocks. The same way it wanted to spin eddies and form currents. To babble over river rocks and glide over fish scales.
It wanted to wipe the planet’s surface clean.
To rinse everything clean away and start over.
And it would.
Until they put the world back to rights.
Which Witch is Willing? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 4) Page 8