Page 128 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
“Guess I’ll have to carry you then. The gravel in the driveway is sharp. Wouldn’t want you to cut your feet.”
“I’m not fixin’ to be princess carried to my own martyrdom,” Moira insisted.
“I wouldn’t have to carry you anywhere if you didn’t insist on being taken to Siren’s Cry. I could shoot you right here and save us time. In fact, we might be able to get in a couple more fucks before—”
Moira punched him as hard as she could in the solar plexus, gratified by the suddenwhooshof air exiting his lungs. “Are youreallysuggesting that you kill me here just so you can get your rocks off a couple more times?”
“And yours.” Nick managed to shrug even with Moira in his arms. “We get to fuck more. You still die. Makes excellent sense, if you ask me.”
“You really are a bastard,” she said, unable to keep the wonder from her voice.
“Have I ever claimed to be anything else?”
“Listen here, you toad scrotum-suckin’—”
“Shhh,” Nick urged. “Think you can keep that smart mouth shut for the length of time it takes to walk from here to the front door?”
Moira smiled, and tweaked his nipple as hard as she could through his shirt.
“Fuck!” Nick growled.
“Shhhh!” Moira lifted her finger to her lips in an exaggerated gesture of censure.
Nick’s eyebrows lowered like storm clouds as he paused with his ear to the door, listening—Moira supposed—for some sign of War or Pestilence. After a moment, he silently turned the door handle using the same arm braced under the backs of her knees.
All right, so this wasn’t exactly the heroic march Moira had pictured herself making, but she had to admit it wasn’t altogether unpleasant, being carried by Nicholas Kingswood. His muscled forearms deliciously brushed her calves, his heart beat against her shoulder, his warm body was a living cradle for her tired limbs.
Nick inched the door open and they were down the hall, across the living room, and out the front door with a speed and grace that superseded anything in Moira’s experience.
Moira pulled the heady scent of velvet night into her lungs, the signature mix of salt air and damp, mossy verdant life she’d grown to love in Port Townsend. It settled on her skin, moist and cool where her body didn’t touch Nick’s. Far away, the ocean’s lullaby called to her, every spent wave whisperinghushas it foamed onto the sand.
Only the sound of Nick’s shoes crunching on the gravel and the beating of her own heart within her ears interrupted the heavy silence. “Where are we going?” she asked, when Nick had walked them far beyond the driveway and out to a dirt road.
“Her Royal Darkness set up a witch-proof perimeter, but I can get you out, but doing so requires that we bemountedto pass over the boundary. Also, escaping works better if She-Devil isn’t in the immediate proximity.”
“No wonder none of my sisters showed up,” Moira said, a tightness in her chest loosening with the revelation. “And what do you mean bymounted? I thought that’s what we were doing all afternoon.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you weretryingto goad me into fucking you on this forest floor so you can get your soul devoured by Satan. I don’t know how long she’ll be gone, Moira. I know only that she’s not in the vicinity for the moment, and if you really want to go through with this, we need to move now.”
Her body bounced in time with his long-legged strides.
“How do you know that ol’ Serpent isn’t here?” she asked.
“Because the soul-sucking maggot queen of the infernal realms has a pretty unmistakable astral resonance,” he answered. “Also, I don’t smell the blood of virgins.”
“But you didn’t seem to mind planting your flag between her demon thighs, according to her.”
“I didn’t know what she was then. None of us did. Well, except for Julian. He always was the brains of the operation. Refusing her landed him the curse of never being able to touch a single living creature without destroying it.”
“’Cept for Aerin,” Moira pointed out.
My sisters.All at once her heart filled with an ache large enough to split her chest wide open. Images unwound through her mind like an old-fashioned film reel. Tierra jangling into the room, all scarves and swaying fabric, smelling of herbs and earth and all things clean and good. Claire slouching at the kitchen table in her leathers, warming Moira with her easy smile and cinnamon-scented kisses on the cheek.
And Aerin. Lord, how they picked at one another. But Moira had long suspected it had more to do with similarities than the petty jabs about clothing and diction. A common wound they didn’t have to acknowledge if they didn’t get close enough to share. Stubborn pride keeping Moira from letting Aerin know just how much she’d wanted her approval. And Aerin’s smooth-as-glass exterior, against which all things emotional and maudlin left unwelcome smudges. Fragile, glass was, beautiful and ethereal as the air that gave the molten particles their shape.
What she wouldn’t have given to hug each one of her sisters one last time.
Last. This one word stuck in her mind and attached itself to everything she now smelled, thought, felt, and did. The last time she would watch the moon glow over the bay. The last time she would smile, laugh, feel the hot water of a shower slide over her skin.
