“What about the hurricanes?” Moira asked, turning to Aerin. “Don’t even try to tell me you can’t feel them storms tear-assing all the way up the east coast.”
“Well, yeah,” Aerin admitted. “The wind may be just the tiniest bit homicidal lately. But who hasn’t, really?”
“And what about this?” Moira walked over to the coffee table, picked up the book, shoved it at Aerin, cracking it open on the page of the illustration where four women stood in a circle, elemental crowns on their heads, wands in hand. “Are you going to try and pretend that this ain’t us? That it don’t give you a case of the all-overs just lookin’ at it?”
“Yeah, but see, these four women all have their crowns and wands, and I don’t, so technically...”
Tierra gasped, her hand going to her belly reflexively has it did so often these days. “What if that’s what you have to do to get your wand? Get pregnant!”
“It would require an act of bravery on your part,” Claire pointed out. “That seems to be kind of a pattern in how we got ours.”
Aerin assumed the haughty posture she often did when something had tweaked her tail good and hard. “Even if I agreed to this ridiculous plan—which I’m not—and Julian and I successfully…conceived—which we won’t—who even knows what the…fetus might get with Pestilence for a father?”
Julian’s already pallid skin turned a shade closer to chalk, whether because of the idea of fathering an ill child, or just a child in general, Moira couldn’t be sure.
“Now, I know there ain’t no one accusing me of being the sharpest ax in the shed, but last time I checked, Julian didn’t infect himself and you’re immune. So, stands to reason that your offspring would be, too.”
“Yeah, but you’re forgetting one vitally important thing,” Aerin said. “It’s the Apocalypse. Who even knows if my tailor is even still alive? I mean, have you seen how fucking hideous most maternity clothes are?”
Tierra folded her arms beneath her ponderous bosom. Which was, for the present moment, at least, clad in an empire-waisted peasant blouse she’d bought from some place with a name like A Bun In the Oven or a Pea in the Pod.
“I mean like, on me,” Aerin amended. “On you, though—”
“We’re the same person!” The copious bracelets ringing Tierra’s wrists jingled as she threw up her hands. “How could they look bad on you, but not on me?”
“That’s not what I…that is, what I meant to say…” Aerin’s eyes darted desperately around the room as she considered her sisters, neither tact nor apology being her particular areas of expertise. “But Moira though!” she finally blurted out.
“Moira though what?” Moira raised a brow at her sister, as excited about this turn in conversation as she would be to tongue wrestle a rattlesnake.
“Think about it,” Aerin insisted. “She’s a water witch. And what’s a womb but a biologically complex water balloon? Think of how nourishing she could make that shit.”
And all of the sudden, Moira started to sweat in places sweat had no business being.
Because everyone was staring at her.
Three sisters. Four Horsemen.
Not to mention, Jinx, Dr. Lecter, Kai, and Cheeto—who had, it seemed, been secreting themselves nearby all so they could add to the drama of this moment.
But the creepiest shit of all?
The way they were all looking at her.
With the same expression she’d seen on the faces of local farmers considering the prize brood sow at the county fair. Mentally prodding the thickness of her hide, calculating the span of her hips, already imagining the heaps of healthy piglets that could surely shoot from her cooter.
“It’s not a terrible idea,” Claire ventured. “I mean, Aerin isn’t wrong.”
“And you’ve always been a natural nurturer,” Tierra added.
“Maybe so,” Moira admitted. “But y’all are forgetting one very important consideration.”
“What’s that?” Tierra asked.
“I’m only one half of this equation,” Moira said. “Raise your hand if you’re comfortable with the idea of Nick Kingswood’s child being responsible with restoring balance to the Universe.”
The silence following her question was so total, Moira would have sworn she could hear a cricket chirping. When Nick failed to provide the searing rejoinder to her flippant insult, she hazarded a glance in his direction. He glowered at her. Sullen, but wordless.
It was so out of character for him, so far from the man—or whatever he was, exactly—she knew, that for a moment, Moira was quiet herself. For the briefest of moments, she wished she could dip into his thoughts the way Claire did Dru’s.
“It doesn’t have to be Nick.” Dru, who had remained largely silent during the proceedings thus far, cleared his throat and stepped forward. “Once you’ve identified the field of battle, it makes sense to pick the soldiers best suited to launch an attack against that specific terrain.”
Nick’s cold laugh sent chills crawling down Moira’s spine. “If you’re suggesting that it’s going to be anyone other than me conducting the invasion, you are seriously fucking mistaken, my friend,” Nick said in a voice that was anything but friendly.
“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” Claire began, “but I have to agree with Conquest on this one. We ran into enough trouble when Moira and Julian were just pretending to be a couple. We start swapping partners, and the world is going to end sooner than later.”
“All I’m saying is that when troops need to be lead into battle, you always choose the best commander for the job, and I’m not sure Nick is it.” Dru’s perma-scowl deepened and he flicked a glance in Nick’s direction.
“And you are?” Nick gave Dru’s shoulder a shove.
Moira quickly slid between them, not that she’d have been able to stop them if they really got after it.
“Okay, first off, I haven’t agreed to anything and second, if y’all could stop talking about my body like the beach at Normandy, and your immortal super-spunk as troops and soldiers, I’d sure appreciate it on account of it’s squickin’ me the hell out.”
“I’m not saying I am,” Dru said, ignoring Moira’s attempt playing referee. “I’m just saying you’re not.” He planted a hand on Nick’s chest and gave him a shove twice as hard as the one he’d received, nearly knocking Nick into a bookcase.
“Hey!” Tierra shouted. “No fighting in my living room! There are too many breakables.”
But Dru and Nick didn’t seem to hear this either.
“You know what I think it is?” Nick leaned in closer, his voice dropping a register as he towered over Moira, bringing his heat to bear on the left side of her body. “I think you’re so bored with being soul-bound that now you’re looking for any excuse to dip your wick in a different sister.”
“Excuse me?” Color flared into Claire’s cheeks as she came to Dru’s side.
“Or maybe you’re just so bitter that the water witch won’t bind herself to you that you haven’t stopped to consider why,” Dru fired back.
Shee-it. Moira had sort of been hoping that wouldn’t come up.
She was too close to observe the changes in Nick’s face, but knew them all the same. The darkening of his eyes. The flaring of his nostrils. The thunderheads gathering in his countenance. Since the moment they met, she’d discovered she had a particular talent for teasing his meager irritation into a full-on, orphan-kicking rage.
Instinct made her step back as she felt every muscle in Nick’s body tensing. Coiling. Ready for a sudden, violent release.
And then, as the saying went, all hell broke loose.
Nick lunged at Dru. Bane lunged at Nick. Julian, who was too polite to lunge, slowly rose to his feet and tried to pry his three brothers apart with more dignity than the situation called for. Tierra, jacked on pregnancy hormones and possessed of a terminal case of nesting frenzy, tried to wade into the fray, while Aerin and Claire did their best to hold her back.
The sounds of all their w
rangling voices morphed into a high frequency whine that filled in all the blank spaces in Moira’s head. She shut her eyes against it, preferring the darkness to the endless, painful gray of the world around her.
She heard screaming, and realized too late that it was her own. The words she’d shouted had been muffled by her hands pressed against her ears, returning to her only when the room and everyone in it had once again fallen silent.
“I’ll do it.”
17
If Nick lived another ten thousand years, he’d remember this moment.
Standing beneath the canopy of trees, leaves and ash falling all around. The dying sun bleeding into the bruised evening sky as distant fires made lava lanterns of the clouds.
Moira in his arms.
Her long legs—clad in jeans one wash away from dissolving into denim confetti—draped over his forearm. The thin, ratty t-shirt she wore failing to conceal the gentle bounce and sway of her unbound breasts. Her whole, warm, living weight pressed against him.
It was so beautiful.
She was so beautiful.
That is, until she opened her mouth.
“You put me down this second, you skunk-licking snake turd! Just cause I agreed to birth some Universe balancing baby don’t mean you need to haul me around like a sack of taters.”
Truly, he hadn’t planned on princess-carrying her out to the garden. Chivalrous shit had always been Julian’s forte. But getting what he wanted? Definitely Nick’s wheelhouse. What he had wanted was to talk to Moira immediately and alone in the wake of her volunteering to play brood mare without so much as a discussion.
As usual, she had balked, refusing first a polite invitation then second, a not-so-polite suggestion to accompany him outside for a walk.
So he’d taken the walk for both of them.
One small problem solved, a sack-shrivelingly large one looming.
“I think you surrendered your right to make demands right about the time you obligated me to knock you up.” He lowered her to the ground feet first, stepping back to avoid the wild swinging of her fist. It gave him something to do, dodging a blow. All the better to ignore the odd tightening the phrase ‘knock you up’ had woken in his chest.
“I didn’t obligate you.” Moira folded her arms across her breasts—disappointingly depriving him of one of his chosen default focal points—as she cocked her hip and her head at an angle that usually meant trouble was coming and fast. “I obligated myself. You just assumed you’d be the one doin’ the knocking.”
Nick took a step backward, his mind infuriatingly empty of all but one soul-shredding thought: was it actually possible this woman was incapable of the honor he would be bestowing on her by even considering putting his baby in her belly?
Nick didn’t like to pace. Or he did, but not in front of people. It was a weakness. An outward physical display of the inner conflict and gave away too much. Just this moment, he couldn’t stop himself from storming the length of the earth witch’s devastated flower bed, his irritation growing with every step.
“Do you have any idea how many women have asked, no, begged me to father their children over the centuries?” he asked, pausing for dramatic effect.
“Not directly,” she said. “For some reason, I just didn’t figure there would be a big line of broads begging for your nut butter.”
She shrugged.
Fucking. Shrugged.
“These are women who changed the course of the world’s history, and out of any man on earth, they wanted to breed with me. Me.”
“On account of they were a bunch of pinchy-faced old harpies with leather twats?”
“Because they wanted their potential children to be born with even half of my intellect. My drive. My physical prowess. My—”
“Staggerin’ humility?” Gentlemanly lack of neck hair?
“Humility doesn’t build dynasties. Humility doesn’t start revolutions or unseat despots.”
“Well neither would our child if I had anything to say about it.”
Our child.
The words pierced him like the flaming arrow he’d once shot into Moira’s chest.
Fatherhood.
Family.
A legacy.
All his long years, this had been denied him. He, who had watched entire dynasties be born, rise, and return to the dust. He who had shaped not only nations, but entire civilizations. He, who had brought about entire legacies, had no legacy of his own.
No heir to carry on his name, as well as his genetic material.
He could see entire empires he had caused to be, but never a child with his own face.
If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
Everyone thought Nietzche had said that, but it was really Nick.
Just one of the kings, conquerors and philosophers he had influenced over the years.
He looked into the abyss, and met with his own cavernous want. He wanted to have a child with this woman. He wanted to see her belly round with his seed and know he’d caused this thing to be. He wanted to see her waddle. To rub her swollen feet.
Worse, he wanted her to want this as much as he did.
“You want to stop lookin’ at me like I’m a smoked turkey leg you’re fixin’ to shove down your neck hole without chewin’?”
It was this sentence that did it.
The pure auditory displeasure of it. The offensively crude diction and imagery.
His donkey-like bray of laughter startled them both and sent her damnable pig scampering in the direction from the porch. The walking pork sack was neither a fan of loud noises nor Nick, and especially not loud noises from Nick.
Nevertheless, Nick found himself unable to stop.
It was the hardest he’d laughed in years. Centuries, maybe.
“You gonna tell me what’s so funny, or do I have to set Cheeto here to broil?”
Nick shook his head, one hand pressed against his aching abdominals, the other knuckling a tear away from the corner of his eye. “Irony,” he finally managed to gasp.
“Irony?” Moira’s sapphire blue eyes narrowed at him. Not, he knew, because she lacked an understanding of the concept. Presuming there was any correlation between her backwater bumpkin dialect and her IQ was a dire mistake and one Nick had only made once.
“I could have had any woman in the world,” he said. “Any woman. Cleopatra. Catherine the Great. Marie Curie. Frida Kahlo. Joan of fucking Arc. All women who would have paid dearly for the pleasure of jumping on my dick.” Nick reached up and loosened his tie, suddenly aware just how much the unaccustomed feeling of laughing had made his throat feel swollen and strange. “I mean, why do you think Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen? Because I fucking turned her down. That’s why.”
“I’m assumin’ you have a point and are plannin’ on arriving at it sometime before the actual Apocalypse?”
Nick exhaled a long breath, taking a step closer to her. “My point is, for millennia, I’ve been persued by the world’s most remarkable women. Queens. Literary geniuses. Famous artists. All these women, and the woman I want is you. You. You, who come from a part of the country where road kill is a food group and the swamp is deeper than the genetic pool. You don’t see the humor in that?”
“Right now, the only funny thing I’m seeing is how you’d look with a tire iron shoved up your ass.” Moira’s delicate chin tipped up a notch as the solid country stubborness that irritated and turned him on in equal measure stiffened her spine.
“Look, it does neither of us any good for you to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Before you’d left the bayou and you didn’t know that the world beyond the borders of the swamp was full of people with complete sets of teeth, I could almost understand you being nostalgic about the suckhole from whence you sprung. But now that you’ve been in actual civilization—”
“Actual civilization?” Her eyes, usually a placid sapphire, flashed like lightning on the open ocean. “And what would you call t
he people who raised me? Gator bait?”
“No. Well, yes, but that’s not what I’m saying at all.”
“And what exactly are you sayin’, Nicholas Kingswood?” The animated pork chop was back, its beady little watermelon seed eyes narrowing at him in concert with his mistress’s.
Gods, he loved it when she used his full name.
“I’m saying that despite your repellent upbringing and your hideous grammar and your appalling choice in clothing, it’s you I want. I could have had any woman in the world, but it’s you. It’s always been you.”
There.
He’d done it.
He’d said it.
She was apparently as shocked to hear it as he had been to say it.
Staring at him, her plush lips tightened into a perfect ‘O’, a shape that stoked a heat deep in his belly thinking of the puzzle piece he might fit there.
Understanding something of pride, he took the first step, holding his arms out in open invitation for Moira to rush into them.
“Why, Nicholas Kingswood,” she whispered, floating over to him with more grace and poise than he’d imagined her capable of.
The heat of her body found his skin through his shirt as she closed in, bringing with it her signature scent of rain and wild muscadines. A shivery rush slithered over him as her lips brushed his ear.
He prepared himself for the sweet words that unnamable and unacknowledged part of himself had been so longing to hear.
“Fuck. You,” Moira said.
And drove her knee up into his crotch.
Nick sucked in air against that particular sick, gut-churning ache dragging nausea in its wake.
And gods, the pain.
As his knees failed him and he crumpled to the earth, he hissed their names, welding them together with the filthiest words he knew in languages long dead.
Who’s fucking idea had this been? Which one of them specifically had come up with the idiotic concept of chaining an immortal to a human body? When he found out who, he was going to personally rip their spine out of their ass and beat them with it.
He was wrath. He was ruin. He was Conquest. And yet he could still be felled by a knee to the nads.
Which Witch is Willing? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 4) Page 9