Page 106 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
“Yeah, well, I don’t imagine walkin’ on them cloven hooves of yours would be all that easy even if you weren’t spreadin’ your legs for every horny, humpbacked, eight-legged demon oozing around the fiery depths of Hell.” A little stab of victory spread warmth in Moira’s heart when white spots appeared at the corners of Lucy’s scarlet lips. She could swear she caught the flash of a grin on Nick’s face as he made his way over to a walk-in closet twice the size of her entire shack back in Stump Bayou. “While we’re on the subject,” Moira continued, “do you have to have them boots made special? What do they call them guys that shoe horses?”
“Ferriers,” Nick called from the closet. He leaned into view, a long, cut body clad in slacks that made his butt look like two scoops of ice cream and a white T-shirt that didn’t so much fit as worship his torso.
“But shoeing cloven-hooved animals isn’t customary in many cultures.”
“Huh,” Moira wondered aloud. “I’d have thought—”
A metalliczipprefaced Lucy’s knee-length boot dropping to the floor. Her delicate, perfectly-shaped foot, toenails lacquered red to match her manicure, flexed at the cuff of her leather leggings. “Sorry to disappoint,” she said.
Smaller than her own feet, Moira noted with instant dislike. Purtier too, though she’d always liked what she saw when she happened to look down while she was ambling barefoot down the oyster-shell backroads nearest her shack. Maybe there was something to these pedicures Aerin was always jawing at her about.
Thinking her sister’s name awoke an ache deep around Moira’s heart. They’d just started getting used to each other. Bonding over fried chicken and decapitatin’ zombies and such. It had been weeks since Moira thought about sawing all the heels off Aerin’s shoes or using one of them fancy suits she liked to make a patchwork quilt.
And now…Now she saw Aerin only through a shifting mist. The kind of dark, damp wall of fog the bayou would throw off sometimes in winters. And it was growin’, this thing. Taking a little more and more of Aerin and Claire every day.
Moira was pretty damn sure the fair-haired minx admiring her own foot like it was the Mona Lisa had something to do with it.
“Well sure they look normalnow,” Moira said with exaggerated speculation. “But I bet if you shed that skin suit you’ve got aholt of, you’d be just as ugly as sin itself. Big old horns, fur, little black goatee, one of them chins looks like a ballsack…”
For a split second, flame flickered in Lucy’s blue eyes, doused just as quickly by the sight of Nick Kingswood swaggering out of his closet, tightening his tie.
A small movement, but carried out with the same unstudied precision Uncle Sal used baitin’ a hook. Something he could do with both eyes closed and one hand curled around the neck of a moonshine bottle.
She felt Nicholas Kingswood’s age then. The dizzying sense that long before tightening his tie and picking up his briefcase, he’d closed the helmet on his suit of armor and hefted an axe.
“He’s fun to look at, isn’t he?” Lucy asked, her voice dreamy with admiration.
“Can’t disagree with you on that point I s’pose,” Moira admitted. Or, she could, but she’d be outright lying, something she tried not to do as a general rule. She remembered her first encounter with him within the confines of the airplane’s first class cabin. Stealing glances at his long, powerful thighs and patrician profile from beneath her dark lashes as she’d feigned sleep. They sure didn’t make men like that where she’d come from. Not Stump Bayou, where dentistry on long fishing trips as often as not involved a pair of pliers still smudged with engine grease and an extra slug of whiskey for the pain.
“But then, you’ve never seen him the wayI’veseen him.” Lucy unzipped her other boot and let it fall to the floor before rising from her chair. Without her six-inch slut-boots, she looked diminutive next to Conquest’s towering body and had to reach up to run her claws down the length of Nick’s tie.
“Should we tell her about some of our more daring, exploits, darling?” Lucy suggested. “How I fucked you to victory in the Austrian-Ottoman wars? Or about the evenings we spent demonstrating every sexual position we’d invented for that Vatsyayana fellow? Lovely little book he wrote about it, theKama Sutra.Or perhaps how after the Iberian war, you bent me over a pile of the defeated and—”
“Is this the part where I’m s’posed to get jealous?” Moira asked. “Cause I got to tell you, all that yakkin’ of yours ain’t giving me much more than a headache.”
Lucy’s knuckles whitened as her grip tightened on Nick’s tie.
“I think perhaps you ought to leave us for a chat, Nicky darling. A little…girltalk.”
“These aremyquarters,” Nick insisted, brushing Lucy’s hands from his tie. “I will not—”
“You will do exactly as I say, or I will make chitlins from this water witch’s intestines before you’ve had the chance to break her will.”
Nick’s eyes drank darkness from the burnished cherry wood around him. Muscles bunched at his jaw. He looked to Moira, hoping—she suspected—for some kind of pleadingdon’t leave me alone with herglance. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, as much as her mind might be repeating that very thing.
So much for that.
He turned on the heel of his loafer and slammed the door on the way out.
“There now.” Lucy sauntered over to the bed and seated herself cross-legged in the indentation at Moira’s hip, casual as a college co-ed at a dorm slumber party. “You and I can really get to know one another.”
Moira raised an eyebrow at her. “All I need to know about you I learned from Reverend Dupuis over the Sunday service pulpit. And just for future reference, girl talk don’t usually start with threats of disembowelment. I ain’t sure if you’re aware, but the reason it’s calledgirltalk in the first place is on account that the ones talking are girls. Not a prisoner chained to someone’s bed and the Evil One acting like we’re besties or BFFs or whatever the hell y’all call friends in these parts.”
Lucy’s delicate brows drew together in surprise. “Out of all your sisters, I had hoped that you and I might be able to understand each other best.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, we both know what it’s like to be persecuted by other women, for one. You were born with the power to heal. I was created to maintain balance in the world. And yet, the very world we try to protect scorns us for the method we employ in trying to achieve our purpose.”
