Page 109 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
“Try planning a battle sometime.” Dru had seated himself on the long leather couch, knees spread lax in their faded fatigue pants. “Covert maneuvers areourspecialty, brother.”
“Does walking across the goddamn living room and grabbing my keys seem like a covert maneuver to either of you? I just need to go somewhere.”
“It’s your hesitance to share your destination with us that has engendered our suspicions, Nicholas,” Pestilence pointed out. “If it’s a simple errand, why be so evasive regarding the details?”
Nick’s empty stomach churned with an acid mix of rage and irritation. They weren’t going to let this go. “Grrrss,” he grumbled.
“Come again?” Julian asked.
“Yeah,” Dru piped up. “I’m afraid we didn’t catch—”
“Grits! I’m going to buy some fucking grits, okay? And some butter, and some cheese. You happy now, you nosy fucking pricks?”
“Aww,” Dru mocked. “Conquest is going to make his water witch a nice breakfast. Are you sure you don’t want to throw some biscuits and gravy in there too? I hear those backwater Southern broads eat that shit right up.”
Nick had no recollection of having crossed the room or leaping onto the couch. His first conscious memory after Dru’s comment was the sensation of War’s teeth biting into Nick’s knuckles through the flesh of his lip. His fist rained down again, connecting with Dru’s cheekbone as an unforeseen haymaker caught Nick’s temple, releasing firework bursts of a kaleidoscope cosmos behind his eyelids. He swung blindly then, but managed to land a solid right just below Dru’s chin, rewarded with the hollow echoing crack of a trachea. War gagged, then coughed wetly.
Nick had threatened to punch people in the throat before, but never actually doneit.
Dru’s knee jammed upward, catching Nick’s inner thigh, mere millimeters from a far more serious hit. Both of Nick’s hands found the weak spot on Dru’s neck and squeezed, releasing a rattling gasp.
“Get. The fuck. Off. Me.” War choked through teeth coated in blood from his split lip.
“You willneveragain refer to Moira as dumb, you brainlessfuck.” Nick’s thumbs dug deeper into the tanned, stubbled flesh of his brother’s neck. “You understand me?”
“Now, boys. If you insist on engaging in these kinds of pissing contests, I demand that you at least make them useful.”
That voice. Perhaps the only voice in all creation capable of freezing both War and Conquest mid-fight.
Julian alone did not look up, thumbing another page in his book.
“Nicholas, get off your brother, and go sit down like a good boy. I have a matter I would like to discuss with all three of you.”
Nick grudgingly untangled himself from Dru and took a seat at the far end of the couch. Dru wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand and righted himself on the sofa. These dust-ups were neither unusual nor infrequent. Bring War and Conquest in close contact with one another, and they were just as likely to soil the field with each other’s blood as they were their enemy’s. The addition of females to fight about or fight over introduced an entirely different element. One Nick was neither pleased about nor eager to contemplate further.
No longer barefoot, Lucy beat a stern rhythm across the wood floor in her black leather boots. Rather than seat herself in the empty spot on the couch between them, she settled into Dru’s lap like he was some sort of surly, tattooed armchair.
“Well, we seem to have a serious problem on our hands,” she said.
“And other appendages,” Julian tossed out, casting a pointed look at Dru.
“I’ll let that slide for the moment, Julian, but I would suggest that you not test my patience today. I’m afraid it’s rather thin at present.”
“Moira decide against becoming your BFF then?” Nick asked. He’d had a vague idea of what Lucy might have had in mind when she’d dismissed him from his own room. When Moira had shot him a defiant look pre-departure, he’d had to fight off a fond—no, notfond—he immediately corrected himself.Aknowingsmile. If Lucy thought her odds would be better with a simple Southern girl than they had been with the power-hungry air witch, she was more wrong than tentacles on a housecat.
Jesus Christ. Where the fuck had that expression come from?
“She was…resistant, yes. But, she has some qualities I think we might find useful.”
“Such as?” Nick asked.
“Such as, she considers her life to be worth far less than that of her sisters,” Lucy announced casually as she picked threads from a hole at the knee of Drustan’s fatigue pants.
“She told you that?” Nick kept his jaw from dropping by a sheer effort of will.
“She didn’t have to,” Lucy said. “I’m a woman. Women sense these things about each other.”
“As do Leviathans, apparently,” Julian muttered under his breath.
