Page 132 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
The Goddess blesses you.
Be whole again.”
Moira nodded with appreciation, eyes still closed against the chilly water.Nowthatsounded like a real-ass, honest to goodness spell. She ought to write that one down. She could have saved an awful lot of critters with a spell like that.
Now wait just a gods-damned minute, she thought.
How in the hell was she thinking anything? She was dead. Like, Apocalyptic arrow through the heart, fall from a hundred-foot cliff, land on the ocean floor-dead. Real dead. Super dead. Deader than a corpse’s pecker dead.
Her back still stung from the reverse belly-flop she’d done when hitting the water’s churning surface. Ethereal blue light pried her eyelids open, and Moira found herself surrounded.
Cod, steelhead herring, spiny dogfish, sea otters, starfish, and even an orca whale had drifted by to examine her intrusion into their realm.
She felt scorn in their judgy, goggled eyes.
What the hell are y’all lookin’ at? Half of y’all aren’t even vertebrates.She reached out to their pure and simple minds as she had with Old Methuselah, elder statesman of the catfish colony back home.Nothing to see here.
But perhaps she was wrong about that.
Moira glanced down at her middle, where Nick’s arrow still skewered her like a cocktail wienie on sample day down at the A&P.
She’d never had much of a mind for math, but by her rough estimate, she had at least twelve inches of the arrow’s feathered butt end sticking out of the second “O” inHoodoo Shackon the front of her tank top and another twelve jutting out of her back, ending in the arrow’s pointed tip. Which left at least eight inches of the arrow still inside her body, puncturing all kinds of organs she’d planned on using ripe into her dotage, when her love of beignets and Irish butter gave her the ‘Beetus and a four-alarm heart-attack sent her toppling off a barstool.
She took a gander at her surroundings, all illuminated by the same otherworldly glow whose source she couldn’t find. Kelp forests moved in the water’s caress with balletic grace. Fish swam idly by, seeking food or mates. She spotted an ancient, barnacle-crusted lobster and gently picked it up by its tail only to have it squirt a foul jetstream of curmudgeon crustacean invectives into her mind about other things she could dip in butter and shove into her mouth aside from him.
Fish back home had been a lot friendlier—that had been for damn sure, not banging on aboutsustainablethis andWashington Department of Fish and Wildlifethat.
Moira’s hair, black against the glowing blue, floated around her in an amorphous cloud. She touched it, then her face, to test the solidity of her body before examining her hands and finding them raisiny beyond recognition. Sea creatures were insulting her left and right for invading an area protected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and judging by that weird-ass blue light, she was shot through, sure as shit, underwater, but somehow alive.
And speaking of that weird-ass blue light, just exactly wherewasthat coming from—
Moira’s scream released the remaining oxygen in her lungs through a cluster of iridescent bubbles when someone gently tapped her on the shoulder.
She whirled around in the slow motion movement the water would allow.
There was a woman in the water.
A beautiful woman emitting an eerie blue glow. A woman whose gossamer garments floated about her like something Moira had seen in ads for washing machines or tampons.
Eyes the exact shade of aquamarine as hers looked upon her kindly from a porcelain-pale face surrounded by a veil of hair a shade darker than hers.
Not Mirelle, her mother, but the resemblance was keen enough to smart.
An angel? Come to welcome her sorry, sodden behind to heaven?
If thiswasheaven, Reverend Dupuis was more full of shit than a manure truck.
The woman’s smile widened. “This isna heaven, I’m afraid. And I’ve been accused of being many things, but an angel was never one of them.” She winked at Moira, her full lips curving in a mischievous smirk that only enhanced the lyrical lilt of her Scots accent.
“How come you can talk underwater?” Moira asked, realizing her own words were not distorted as she had expected them to be.
“Because lass, like you, I am a water druid. My name is Morgana de Moray, sister of Malcom de Moray.”
Moira recognized the name instantly. Malcolm, who had written to them in the Grimoire. Malcolm the Earth Druid king whose crown and wand Tierra had found.
“I’m guessing you don’t just hang out down here all the time, so would I be correct in postulatin’ that your presence here might have a little something to do with my being turned into a human shish-kabob by Conquest?”
“Yer postulating would be correct, Moira de Moray. I’ve come to pass along to you certain relics in my possession that are now yers to command.”
