Page 39 of Which Witch is Willing?
One of her eyes fell out of its socket and dangled against her cheek with the nerve still attached, dangling like a disco ball.
From the back seat, a toddler with hair a similar shade of chocolate brown shrieked. The tires squealed as the driver romped on the gas and sped off, leaving Lucy coughing in a cloud of oily exhaust.
“Hum ack!” she shouted, casting off a few fingers as she attempted to wave him down. “Other hucker!”
What the everlasting fuck was going on?
Staring at the gutter where two her fingers had landed in a somewhat appropriate peace configuration, Lucy began to wonder.
It couldn’t be happening already…could it?
She knew they had stumbled upon the prophesy from what she’d overheard Nick say to the water witch in the garden. Which meant they knew one of them would have to conceive a second child.
But none of them knew what Lucy knew.
What Lucy had known from the second the earth witch’s womb-rat had kept her from entering their mother’s sanctuary.
The earth witch carried the Tugadh Solas. The Bringer of Light.
And while it nudged her closer to her demise, the earth witch’s spawn did not spell certain disaster for Lucy because, after all, it was her darkness that balanced the light.
No.
From the way she had understood it, she wouldn’t be relieved of her powers completely until after the Ceann Dorcha, The Dark One, was conceived.
Surely they hadn’t had time to do that already.
From what she could gather, the water witch had volunteered herself as the vessel but had come to no consensus with Conquest as to his filling it.
Moira de Moiray had left Nick writhing in the dirt, and not even a being with Conquest’s stamina could recover from a shot to the junk so quickly. Nor could they have successfully conceived already, immortal swimmers or no.
But they would try.
Soon, they would try, and if Lucy didn’t stop them, they might actually succeed.
One thing was for sure and certain. She’d never be able to stop them if she kept shedding parts like a broken Barbie. She needed a new body, and she needed it now.
When she saw the headlights reflected in the eyes of the deer lazily strolling up the middle of the street, she knew she had her answer.
19
Moira had always thought of this as her place.
Just a simple pier crawling into the water on long, stilted legs. Gray, sun bleached wood complaining of its age under every stiff wind.
But it held so many of her memories.
Here, she had almost tried to drown herself.
Here, she had first kissed Nicholas Kingswood.
Here, she had crawled out of the bay with crown and wand in hand.
Here, she sat and spent long hours contemplating the end of all things as the waves crashed below her feet.
They crashed like that now. Angry curds of foam flying up as the water gnawed at the barnacled ankles of the pier pilings.
It wasn’t just the end of the world that stirred the water so.
