Page 49 of Which Witch is Willing?
This thought dropped the room into sudden quiet.
“All right,” Moira said holding her hands out to Aerin, who had retrieved the Grimoire from a nearby end table. “Show me the ritual.”
Aerin snagged glances with Julian and drew the book closer to her chest—a first, given its cover was basically a patchwork quilt of leathery human skin and squicked Aerin out something fierce.
“What?” Moira asked, her stomach growing heavy even as her head grew light. “What aren’t y’all tellin’ me?”
Julian cleared his throat. “There is perhaps one detail we ought to discuss before proceeding.”
“And that would be?” Moira folded her arms, her sandal-clad foot tapping expectantly.
Aerin looked to Tierra and Claire who in turn cast nervous eyes to their respective horsemen. Dru and Bane continued the chain by turning to stare at Nick.
“Would y’all quit eye-ballin’ each other and just spit it out?” Moira asked, sweat beginning to accumulate in places the sun didn’t shine.
As was typically the case when some destiny-altering bit of information to be shared, the task fell to Julian. “The Ceann Dorcha can only be conceived by those whose souls are one.”
Moira blinked at him, the words rattling around in her head like Scrabble tiles in a bag. All at once, they landed in order with a clarifying clack.
Nick Kingswood.
In order to bring forth the Ceann Dorcha, she was going to have to soul-bond herself to Nicholas Fucking Kingswood.
23
All the air in the room miraculously turned itself into cement. The weight of it pressed against Moira’s chest even as struggled to drag it into her lungs. Faces blurred. Walls swayed and bulged, and before she knew it, she was shuffling backwards.
“I…I need a minute.”
With Cheeto on her heels, Moira sprinted up the stairs and down the halls and didn’t stop until she burst through the small access door to the widow’s walk crowning Maison de Moray. Just a small, rectangular patch on the roof of the sprawling Victorian home, but it had become the place where each sister in her turn seemed to come when heavy contemplation was required.
Moira wandered over to the wrought iron railing, the night air settling on her skin like a humid cloak and her ankle warm where Cheeto leaned against her. She’d often wondered why it was people always came to high places when they needed to think. Like somehow the elevation might shrink their problems just like they did the trees and cars and houses from this vantage.
Her eyes drifted out to the sea, dark and heaving, the moon’s reflection a boiling cauldron of blood red on its surface. For the briefest of moments, Moira imagined that beyond it, she could see the fires, the hurricanes, the ash-choked sky. Moira didn’t think there was a cricket’s chance in a chicken house there was any place high enough to lessen the trouble at hand.
Bringing forth potentially evil offspring was one thing. Moira guessed if Rosemary could love her yellow-eyed, black clawed, cloven-hoofed infant, she could probably manage to form some kind of bond to whatever it was she and Nick would create.
But to bind herself to Nicholas Kingswood for all of eternity? Eternity was an awful long time. Hell, it wasn’t time at all. It was the absence of time. No beginning and no end. Just now. Forever.
Moira shivered.
Before she’d even known exactly what she was, before she’d known about her sisters, and the horsemen and Lucy, she’d had an often unadmitted daydream of herself as she would be when her hair had gone silver and her tits migrated towards her knees. Sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of an equally old house, snapping the stems off green beans and shouting at the pack of feral bayou kids to get the hell off her lawn. Well, it wouldn’t have been a lawn. Not really. Nothing so manicured and fussy as all that.
A vegetable patch maybe. Wildflowers and ivy.
Her own kids had never figured in. Nor the presence of an old man in a matching rocking chair next to her. Of course, Nicholas Kingswood would never be old. And if Tierra’s experiences with Bane were anything to go by, neither would Moira if she went through with this.
In this particular moment, she couldn’t say with a surety that she planned on doing so.
She leaned forward against the railing and damn near jumped over the edge when someone cleared his throat behind her.
Moira turned, half expecting to see the horseman in question hunkering in the shadows. The silhouette she saw instead helped return her heart from her throat to its normal position in her chest.
“Uncle Sal?”
He stepped forward, swiping the trucker’s hat from his head and holding it against his chest in an oddly touching deferential gesture. “Hey, darlin’.”
Beside him, the lithe and unmistakable figure of Julian Roarke bowed. “I’ll leave you two to your counsels.”
