Page 131 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
She realized the time for her wise-ass rejoinders had truly passed.
Hertime had truly passed.
She was almost over.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She felt her eyes filling with tears again, the faces of all those she loved swimming on the backs of her eyelids when she pressed them shut.
Nick kissed her forehead, his hands splayed over her temples, letting his lips linger there until she closed her hands over his wrists and squeezed.
He thumbed the tears from her cheeks and dropped his hands to her shoulders, making sure she looked directly into his eyes before giving his instructions. Moira could not decipher what emotion lived in the amber depths of Nick’s gaze at that moment, nor read the thoughts spooling through his immortal mind, but knew on some instinctive level this night would take something from them both.
“Walk toward the edge of the cliff. Don’t turn until I tell you to.” The urgency in Nick’s voice dismantled what little defense Moira had left, and she could no longer stem the tide of her own fear in these final moments.
She drew a shaky breath and nodded before turning away from Nick, mechanically taking the first step, then the second, unable to keep herself from counting each as she moved toward the last step she would ever take.
Behind her, Nick spoke an incantation and the Earth beneath her feet shifted and trembled. Clouds appeared over her head where there had been none, circling above them like water around an unplugged drain.The bow and arrow. Nick was calling his weapons to him now.
“Now, Moira!” he ordered in a voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. She halted in place, close enough to the cliff’s edge to see the ocean spit and spray against the jagged rocks below.
When she did, she understood why Nick had asked her not to look until he bade her to.
The Nicholas Kingswood she knew was gone.
What remained was no longer a mere mortal, an arrogant business mogul destroying and overtaking paltry sections of the earth at will. HewasConquest, Horseman who would bring an end to the Apocalypse. Here, and now.
Light swirled and leapt around him like lightning in a glass jar. Smoke billowed and swirled as the clouds overtook the sky completely. Through the miasma, Moira could make out three points of light: the fire-orange glow of Conquest’s two eyes, and the sharp silver tip of his arrow.
Moira stared at it, waiting.
Conquest hesitated, the inner struggle evident in the outer manifestation of energy crackling and leaping, the fire in his eyes dimming like dying coals.
Please, Moira silently begged.End this.
Conquest’s eyes closed, dousing the coals to the twang of the bowstring and an arrow’s brief, whistling scream.
Pain exploded into Moira’s chest as the razor tip pierced her clean through. She felt intense pressure. Shock. Sorrow.
Relief.
Moira staggered backward, driven by the arrow’s speed and force. One bare foot found the earth’s crust. The next, only air.
How absurd, the last thought her mind supplied before she plummeted toward the ocean and the rocks below.
I never did get to finish those grits.
11
“Earth is our body.
Fire, our soul.
Air, our breath.
Water, our blood.
Flesh, knit to flesh.
Vein to vein.
