Page 102 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
Moira
Cynthia St. Aubin
1
Goddess of power, I’m stuck real hard
Turn these shackles into lard
If it’s your will, so let it be
By earth, air, fire and sea...
Moira de Moray looked at her reflection in the crazed antique mirror on the ceiling overhead, seeing herself as she might be reflected on the surface of a brackish pond in Stump Bayou, the place she had once called home. Her lips moved only a little as she whispered the spell.
She closed her eyes and waited, attempting what she hoped was a reverent silence. When after a moment of unbearable stillness she opened one eye to peek at the mirror, she found she was still bound hand and foot by iron shackles to the bed of Nicholas Kingswood, better known as Conquest to whomever had scratched out the Bible.
“Damnation!” A deep metallic clanking was the only reply to her bitter oath.
Okay, so maybe spells weren’t her thing. Lord knew she’d tried enough of them this morning to choke a deep-throated goat.
Please dear Goddess, I know I’m whiny, but could you make my hands really tiny?She had thought—hoped?—that if she could slip her tiny hands of their cuffs, she could work her feet free, and once she escaped, one of her sisters might be able to reverse the spell. Even if they couldn’t, for the chance at escaping the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—in whose compound she was now held captive—she was willing to consider a life with hands no bigger than a buffalo nickel. She’d just have to make more trips to carry in the groceries was all.
Please dear Goddess, I ain’t fakin’, turn these shackles into bacon. Now,thathad been the real heartbreaker. Her stomach growled something fierce and she would have been more than willing to gnaw herself free. Technically, she knew the use offakin’was a cheat on the rhyme, as much of her bayou patois had begun to fade these months with her sisters in Port Townsend.
Fading like her memories of a loon’s mournful call just when the sunset sewed gold sequins on the bayou’s surface. Or the whisper of a summer breeze threading through the Spanish moss outside her window in the shack she shared with Uncle Sal. Truth was, she’d been shedding herself like a snake shed its skin. Letting her sisters sand away her rough spots—and Lord knew there were enough of those.
Tierra patiently trimmed Moira’s borders like she were a patch of overgrown herbs.
Aerin’s breezy uptown parlance had filtered her own backwater blabber into something clearer, cleaner.
Claire burned off Moira’s untended dead edges like autumn leaves, helping her find her own shape beneath beliefs that no longer served.
She could see the good in all of it, but wasn’t sure she’d see her sister’s faces again.
Moira huffed out a frustrated breath and gazed down the length of her tanned legs past her customary cut-off jean skirt to the metal cuffs at her ankles. She tried to draw her knees in, but judging by the chain’s weight, the cuffs had to be made of lead or something.
Silver lining: if she did a few more leg lifts, that oughta count as her work out for the day, at least.
Her own irritated visage stared back at her when she flopped back on the pillow, which she was pretty damn sure was made of the finest goose down and covered in a pillowcase with a thread count in the quintuple digits. Nicholas Kingswood would have nothing less. The comforter beneath her bare thighs was no less silky and seductive in its buttery caress. These luxuries did little to allay the chilling effect of the rest of the room however, particularly the creepy-ass masks staring at her from their cases with blank shadow eyes. Helmets long since emptied of their heads. Swords and spears, still rusty with blood of the conquered. Newspaper clippings sandwiched in frames worthy of Baroque masterpieces. The word surrenderfeatured prominently in just about every headline.
Trophies.
Trophies belonging to the man Moira sensed but didn’t see. She smelled him on the sheets beneath her, that particular mix of expensive cologne, aftershave, and lust for domination. It was this last that eased her fear for her life.
Nicholas Kingswood could not help but come and lord his position of superiority over her before he allowed her to meet her end. And he would end her. Of this she had no doubt. In this way, he differed from his brothers.
Dru, War’s own iteration, the blade and the bullet made in flesh, could not hide the lust for Claire rolling from him in heady waves.
Bane, Death on wings, as necessary and unstoppable as the sun’s rising, collector of souls, broadcast to Moira a deep wound within his own immortal fabric: he couldn’t bear the death of his own child, or Tierra who carried it.
Julian, embodied Pestilence in the dark, languishing form of the fiercely romantic vampires in books she’d swooned over on their back porch in the Louisiana summer heat, rocking herself with a broom handle in a hammock fashioned from old fishing nets. His longing for Aerin could pull the world off its axis.
But not Nick.
Oh, he wanted to bone Moira, sure enough. But the only reason he’d kept Julian’s or Dru’s sword from providing her a hasty introduction with her maker was because it was his right. He had been sent to kill her, and no other would bear her blood as their victory banner. Nick needed to own her, body to soul, bones to blood. Needed the knowledge that shebelongedto him. And when he was through with her, a braid of her black-red hair might end up in the case right next to oldCreepy Eyes.
“Well fuck that,” she said aloud, readying herself to try another spell. Scarcely had she opened her mouth to begin an invocation involving motor oil and a llama when a sound snapped her lips shut.
