Page 28 of Which Witch is Willing?
Please Goddess, let my child be the good one.
Killian tightened his hold on her hand, giving her much needed reassurance.
“One goodandone evil?” Tierra repeated hoarsely. “I’ve had an ultrasound. I’m not pregnant with twins. Just one little baby swimming around in here.”
Which left the question, who else among her sisters was pregnant?
“Fuck, no!” Aerin rose so fast to her feet, she almost toppled over on her stilettos.
“Holy shit!” Claire followed Aerin. “You think one of us ispregnant,too?”
“Oh, hell no.” Moira flipped the book shut and tossed it to the coffee table where it landed with a slap.
A gleeful sound escaped Tierra. She wasn’t the only one knocked up. “Fill your bladders, sisters. Looks like you’re all peeing on a stick today.”
II
Moira
By Cynthia St. Aubin
14
“Igot me a bad feeling about this.”
Moira de Moray reckoned she’d had enough bad feelings in her short but exceedingly strange life to recognize that distinctive cocktail of foreboding and dread when it flooded into her heart like swamp water. Each time, it had arrived on the heels of some person or other telling her something she would have preferred not to know, and usually meant it would be dragging a gut-full of suffering in its wake.
The examples were plentiful and varied.
The time Uncle Sal had shared his plans for converting an extra pontoon motor into a moonshine bottling device.
The time she’d agreed to trade Nicholas Kingswood some nay-nay in exchange for his help in offing herself to stave off the impending Apocalypse.
The time she’d guilt-allowed her pet teacup piglet, Cheeto, to eat a whole head of cabbage.
And right the hell now.
Now, she sat on the edge of the antique clawfoot tub, aiming a serious stinkeye at the slim thermometer-shaped gadget perched precariously on the edge of the sink.
A pregnancy test.
The kind that promised results six days in advance of a period in absurdly cheerful script on the front of the package.
The plan was, they’d all take the tests at the same time, come out into the living room, and unveil the results on the count of three, rock, paper scissors style.
And believe it not, synchronized piddling had been the easy part of the plan. The hard part had been laying hold of a pregnancy test in the first place. Like everyone else and their flea-ridden dog, the sisters de Moray had done their share of pantry stocking against the End of Days, but pregnancy tests weren’t something they’d thought to buy in bulk.
Just a simple trip to Port Townsend’s one grocery store had become more treacherous than catfish noodling in a gator pit.
And if you happened to survive the gauntlet of people trying to shoot your ass full of bullets over the last package of non-vegan hot dogs a la Drustan Geddes or back over you in a fit of black-brained Nicholas Kingswood-esque road rage if you happened to take the parking spot they’d been after, there were those whose lives Julian Roarke had touched.
Like, with his hands and stuff.
You couldn’t swing a dead cat—and Goddess knew the Apocalypse had produced an alarming number of those—without hitting someone hideously afflicted with some sort of face-liquefying super-plague.
Moira was getting awfully sick of hosing globs of skin off Tierra’s eco-mobile every time she left the damn house, even if some of that skin may or not belong to that demonic twat Lucifer. Imagining what had become of she-Satan’s face the last time Moira had clapped eyes on her brought her first smile of the day.
She’d seen half-eaten pork chops with more sex appeal than Lucy had now.
