Page 111 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
She stopped on the corner just outside the witches’ protective wards, purposefully standing in a shadow where only her vague outline could be seen. She wore a pair of cutoff jeans, a tank top that showed plenty of boob, and Moira’s own cheap rubber sandals. The last, she considered a significant sacrifice on her part.
Now came the real fun. Using the voice she’d stolen from that backwater slut. Well, not so much stolen. It was more of acopy and pastekind of proposition.
Moira had brought it on herself really. Had made one too many sly jabs at her, the Lord offuckingDarkness herself. Instead of bonding over their shared abilities and proclivities, Moira had insisted on insulting and contradicting her at every turn.
Until Lucy broke Nick’s bedside lamp over her head. An impulsive move perhaps. Not ideal in terms of attempts at future bonding. But, extremely effective in shutting her up. As was what she had done next.
With one hand pressed against the water witch’s blood-sticky temple in a gesture almost motherly, Lucy had uttered the words that would allow her to borrow Moira’s voice. She’d ended the rite by kissing the witch’s pillowed lips and drawing the breath from Moira’s own lungs. The water witch’s voice had felt like smoke and silk sliding down Lucy’s throat.
She had pushed the hair away from Moira’s temple so it wouldn’t become clotted, slowly licking the water witch’s blood from her fingers. It had been there, she had tasted it.
The self-loathing. The self-hatred. The shame. The deep, ravenous desire for acceptance. The gnawing fear of rejection.
All hideously self-destructive. All perfectly useful.
It was while she walked from the Horsemen’s compound toward the de Moray home that Lucy had considered how best to use this information, and now, she had a pretty good idea.
Shrouded in shadow, Lucy clicked from her own voice over to Moira’s, an action that reminded her of depressing the tab of one of those multiple colored pens yuppies had been so fond of in the 80’s. Now blue, now black, now red, now Satan, now a water witch.
“Cheeto,” she whispered on the wind. “Momma’s home. Come on, baby. Come see momma.”
Lucy pinpointed the exact second when the tiny pig heard his witch’s summons. A burst of eager porcine energy reached out to her, and she could almost hear his little hooves pawing against the front door of the house across the street.
“All right, for fuck’s sake. Hold your fucking wad,” she heard a voice say, muffled through the wooden door.Aerin. Vicious dislike flared within Lucy. How she wanted to punish the air witch, the one who had tastedherJulian.
It would have to wait.
The door cracked open, and a blur of pink shot through, scarcely heeding the warning called after him.
“Stay in the yard, okay? The last thing we need is someone flattening you into a breakfast patty before we can figure out how to get Moira back.”
Once the door closed, Cheeto nosed his way through a crack in the fence and sped across the street, only to pull up short when his small hooves clicked to a stop at Lucy’s feet.
“Gotcha!” She seized the warm body, which started to squirm the instant Lucy’s hands made contact with his skin. She tried to speak to him in low, soothing tones, but the fucking walking pork chopknew. Heknewshe wasn’t Moira and his anger at being duped vibrated through all three-and-a-half pounds of pork clasped between her glassy nails. “Ugh. Let’s get this over with then.”
She grimaced at the feeling of his wet snout against her palm, but wanted to hold his maw closed lest any ill-timed squeals alerted the sisters prematurely.
“Hold still little piggy. This won’t hurt me a bit,” she whispered close to his velvety ear. And just as she’d slid into Sunny’s tattooed and pierced body, so she slid into the body of this tiny pig, Moira’s familiar, who could come and go from the de Moray house as he pleased.
Space between the cells of her immortal matter shrank, sinking into and below the skin, the subcutaneous layer of fat. Her body fusing itself with the pig’s until there remained nothing visible of Lucy.
Only after the process was complete did the memory of being cast into a herd of swine return to her. That hadn’t worked out so well.
This would be different. She could feel it already. For one, Lucy found the intelligence of Moira’s familiar encouraging. He lacked the wild self-will that had driven those stupid beasts off a cliff and into the sea below, where they had drowned, and she had evaporated to reassemble herself elsewhere.
But there was something else she hadn’t counted on.
Resistance. This fucking piglet was actuallyresistingher presence in his body. Only when she caused him pain equivalent to a cattle prod to one of his plump pink ham cheeks did the pig yelp and scamper across the street and back toward the house, where she intended to listen most carefully to every word spoken inside.
Lucy pawed the front door with a hoof, deliberately fighting for control. Cheeto’s heart expressed a longing to curl up on the porch swing, where he could watch for hisrealmomma, though he hadn’t thought this in so many words. The pig’s desires registered as a lower frequency hum, deeper even than emotions she’d felt run through some humans.
“In or out? Out or in? What’s it going to be, bacon bit? Because if you come inside, you’re staying this time.” Aerin de Moray’s Louboutin patent leather pumps appeared at roughly eye level in the opened doorway, and for a brief moment, Lucy considered seeing if Cheeto had anything in his abominable intestines to squirt at them as she passed. But then, she would likely wind up booted back into the yard, which served her purposes not at all.
She scampered in and toward the kitchen, where she heard female voices escalating in tension.
The cat dozing lazily in the corner chair startled to all fours the second she caught Cheeto’s scent, her back arched, tail puffed like a bottlebrush, a low, deep growl issuing from her throat. A paw swiped at Cheeto’s snout, lightning-quick, and Lucy felt the stinging pain of the scratch.
“Jinx!” the earth witch scolded, scooping up her familiar. “What in the Goddess’s name has gotten into you?”
