Page 116 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
Lucifer, Daughter of the Morning, the Adversary and Deceiver, stood and dusted herself off. Since this possession wasn’t human, she didn’t have to count it, right?
And if she didn’t have to count it, she would never have to utter the phraseexorcism by pig fart.
Lucy held her blond head high as she walked across the street, the rhythmic slap of the water witch’s flip-flops marking her passage.
Never had she been quite so grateful that she made her home in the bowels of Hell andnotin the bowels of swine.
6
Moira awoke still chained to Nicholas Kingswood’s bed with her cheek stuck to a glossy magazine and a headache fatter than the hemorrhoids on a hog. The serrated edges of newspapers brushed her bare thighs. Her calves and elbows bristled against the smooth, sharp edges of sensational rags that were always claiming Elvis up and moved to Boca Raton and was working as a short order cook somewhere.
Truth to tell, she’d slept on worse.
The bed of Uncle Sal’s truck for one. That time Uncle Sal had damn near burned down the shack she’d grown up in trying to brew some moonshine with a Dutch oven and a healthy measure of lighter fluid. Camping he’d called it, as they watched the moon play hide-and-seek among the cypress trees and scribble the bayou with a disk of shimmering silver.
She’d woken up astride her share of men when healing them took a mite too much energy out of her and she’d collapsed mid-hump. Always awkward, waking up on someone whose nickname involved missing body parts or teeth you could count on one hand.
Then there were the times she’d awoken face-down on the bayou’s surface, her hair tangling with the moss, startling some poor fisherman so bad he’d nearly filled his waders with last night’s gumbo when he discovered she was still alive. She’d once floated as far as Lake Pontchartrain where a Coast Guard diver in a wet suit fished her out and insisted on giving her mouth-to-mouth long after she’d informed him she was just fine.
Just a few spells of sleepwalking, Uncle Sal had insisted, tears of relief funneling into the sun-weathered wrinkles at the corners of his tobacco-brown eyes. Moira hadn’t the heart to disabuse him of the notion. To inform him that most of the time, she wasn’t quite sure why she existed at all. That something deeper than the fossils below the bayou mud whispered nightly to her of sweet oblivion.
Until a much louder whisper had called her here to Port Townsend, where things had gotten awful weird, and according to the papers around her, the world was beginning to notice.
“Plague of fish descends on Port Townsend!” ThePort Townsend Leaderheadline screamed. “Locals fear the worst in a chain of recent freak events.”
“Rash of Violent Attacks Continues Across the U.S.” Tagline: “Undead or Unexplainable?” This one? Only in theNew York-goddamned-Times.
But it was the tabloids that sent cockroaches skittering through Moira’s blood. Apparently, theWashington Watchtowerhad taken a particular interest in the de Moray sisters themselves. Almost as if they had been…tipped off.
“Sinister Sisters at fault for trouble in Port Townsend?”Below it, a picture of all four de Moray sisters scrambling to gather the downpour of fish. Whoever it was had caught Moira with both hands in the air, summoning moisture from the sky to keep the fish from drying out. From the angle and distance, the photo had been snapped hastily from across the street.
And it wasn’t the only one.
A blurry shot of Aerin on her broom, coupled with the headline, “Witch Takes a Wicked Ride Through Port Townsend!”
But Lucy had saved the worst for last. Closest to Moira’s face, unfolded so she could read the entire article, was a full front-page feature. Front and center, a candid photo of Tierra, blissfully trimming herbs in her garden, her growing bump clearly visible through her light floral sundress. “Witchy sister pregnant with the Antichrist?”
Moira skimmed the lines of type, blinking against her pulsing headache, her gaze snagging on a quote from “noted demonologist and modern-day witch hunter Reverend Bill Blanding:”
“I’ve been saying it for years but my words have gone unheeded. The end of days is upon us, and it is only if the evil among us has been rooted out and destroyed that we might enjoy another season upon the earth. The battle has begun, and I, for one, don’t intend on staying idle while the Devil makes the earth his playground.”
“Get your pronouns straight, you pig’s pecker,” Moira grumbled.
Numb shock tingled from her fingers and toes straight through to her hammering heart.
All this time, they’d been so focused on fighting the Horsemen and dealing with the plagues each Seal had brought about that they had been blind to a bigger and much more dangerous picture.
And the question that came with it.
What would happen if the world knew who they were, and what they had done?
The implications of this thought had only begun to tease the edges of Moira’s mind when the door rattled once on its hinges, flying open under the power of Drustan Geddes’s boot. Expletives that would have made the saltiest catfish noodler blush to his britches streamed from his lips as he hauled a shrieking, biting Aunt Justine into the room and slung her into the chair Satan had occupied earlier. Before she’d decided to redecorate by busting a lamp over Moira’s head.
Her aunt’s arrival was about as welcome as a rash of ass boils before a ten-hour tent revival.
Up to this point, Moira had pert near forgotten that murderous hag had been nabbed too. Probably on account of she’d hoped Justine had died of fright the second War had slung her over his massive shoulder. Moira had never been that lucky.
Justine glared at her captor, hatred burning bright in her green eyes, her graying red hair wild and face pale with rage.
