Page 110 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
“What was that, darling?” Lucy asked, her attention shifting to him abruptly.
“Nothing.” He offered her a frosty smile. “Just cross-referencing the Talmudic accounts of mythological beasts with the Apocrypha.”
“Right.” Lucy’s red-lipped smile thinned considerably. “Perhaps you ought to limit your comments unless you have something useful to bring to this conversation.”
“I beg your pardon,” Julian said, hand over ascot. “Of course.”
“As I was saying, the water witch’s belief that her life is not as valuable as the lives of her sisters is something we might be able to work with.” Lucy absently stroked the length of Dru’s muscled thigh. “I believe we might be able to use it to solvebothproblems at hand.”
“I was under the impression that stopping the Apocalypse was sort of the only problem at hand,” Nick said.
“Which will be quite impossible for you to accomplish without the fourth of your number,” Lucy explained. “Poor, poor Killian.” She shook her head, a gesture utterly devoid of feeling. As always, Lucy appeared to Nick as a mask without a face.
“If he is indeed in Hell,” Julian said, putting his book aside at last, “wouldn’t it be within your purview to free him?”
“I only wish it were that simple. You see, residency in Hell is permanent, no matter how you end up there. Unless…”
Lucy let the word hang there, tempting them all to ask the question she had been dancing around since she sat down.
Nick obliged her. “Unless what?”
“Unless Death makes a deal with the Devil.” Lucy’s smiled broadened. Her canine teeth were sharper than Nick remembered.
“Luckily for him, I already have some terms in mind.”
“He’ll never give you his firstborn,” Dru said, shifting his weight beneath her. “I wouldn’t even bother with that one.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Lucy’s elbows folded under her bosom in a defensive gesture.
“Already asked him, did you?” Julian’s ice-blue gaze came to rest on her face.
“Maybe,” she admitted.
“So what is it you want that could somehow also solve the problem of the impending Apocalypse?” Nick asked, rising from the couch, considering mixing a gigantic martini though noon Pacific Time was yet four hours away.
“It’s exceedingly simple, Nicholas.” Lucy pushed off of Dru’s lap and stood in the center of the room, equidistant from three of the Four
Horsemen. “I want the water witch’s soul.”
5
Oh, the expressions on those handsome Horsemen’s faces.
Lucy allowed herself the luxury of a laugh on her way up Water Street. Coming from other women, it would have been a giggle. Coming from her, the malevolent snigger caused everyone within a half-mile radius to take a sudden chill. The religious among them crossed themselves or uttered spontaneous, silent prayers for reasons unknown to them.
The expressions in question had not been surprise at her admission that she wanted the water witch’s soul. Knowing her for as long as they had, this revelation hadn’t exactly been a shock. She was the Devil, after all. Souls were kind of her thing. Souls, and expensive leather handbags and shoes designers actually paid her to wear.
No. The surprise had come from her announcement that she was dead serious about making the pissing contests useful. Once she had explained that she needed their urine as part of a witch-repellant perimeter she’d built around the compound, they had all blinked at her, wide-eyed and embarrassed as frat boys who had just heard the words “cavity search” uttered by a particularly foxy police officer.
Of course, that usually ended in the foxy police officer being a stripper, and the frat boys enjoying a personalized exhibition of T&A that they mostly wouldn’t remember after they binge drank themselves into oblivion and passed out under the coffee table.
Unfortunately, that would not be the case for her Nicholas, Drustan, and Julian.
A delicious late summer evening breeze lifted her blond hair from her neck, setting the leaves to whispering around her. It had taken her the better part of the day to secure a perimeter around the Horsemen’s compound much as the de Moray witches had secured their vomitously quaint Victorian home against the Horsemen.
Using thesamplesfrom Nicholas and Drustan—Julian had predictably refused to participate in anything so vulgar—among many other elements difficult for anyone but her to procure, she had done it, and done it well. Like it or not, there was no way any of Moira’s sisters would succeed in coming within a quarter mile of the compound where she and the old bitch Justine were being held, though she knew they would try.
And now, using a couple tricks she had perfected millennia before it even occurred to the de Moray witches’ parents to hump bareback, she intended to uncover their plans for doing so.
