Page 89 of Which Witch is Willing?
Aerin whirled on him. “Don’t fucking pop my balloon right now, bucko, I’m on a roll. We’ll figure that part out, but first thing’s first. We go after Beelzebitch.”
“First thing’s first,” Tierra echoed. “To even hope to do that, we need to be at maximum power and you still don’t have your crown and wand yet.”
“And to get your crown and wand,” Moira said. “You’ll need to do some selfless act of sacrifice.”
At that, Nick started laughing, startling them all. “Oh man,” he guffawed. “Aerin has to be selfless? Humanity is well and truly fucked.”
42
Hours later, Aerin climbed to the de Moray Mansions widow’s walk and jumped.
I’ll show them selfless, she thought as her blood thrilled to the feeling of her broom catching an air current to lift her above the treetops.I’ll be so mutha fuckin’ selfless and sacrificing, they’ll put my picture next to the words in the dictionary. And magnanimous. And altruistic. And heroic just because I’m saving the world and shit.
Question was…What did the cosmic wand/crown decision makers want from her?
A list of things she’d already tried:
1.Donated maybe a bazillion dollars’ worth of designer clothes and shoes to charity. Even some of the shoes the hillbilly herdhadn’truined.
2.Stopped drawing her salary from Windmark Tech, her cloud company, and disseminated it as bonuses to the lowest paid, along with offering everyone shares in the company. Decreased work hours and increased paid days off.
3.Donated her entire savings to feeding the hungry. Literal millions.
4.Gave Julian his first blow job. Okay, granted, not exactly altruistic because she’d enjoyed the hell out of his awestruck extasy. Also, if they were counting—which they werenot—she was still behind him in the oral sex-o-meter because after she’d taken his virginity, he’d become some sort of tongue-twisty vagina junkie. Dined. Out. Er’ry. Night. Still, she was keeping it on the list because her jaw was tired.
5.She even babysat for Tierra and Killian so they could enjoy some private time. It lasted all of fifteen minutes, but she’d been donzo in fifteensecondsof drooling and random screaming, so math told her she was fourteen minutes and forty-five seconds ahead.
And still nothing. No crown. No wand. No dice.
So, she’d decided to take to the skies and see if she could Wonder Woman her way into her powers. Basically, the plan was to fly around until she spotted someone in distress and use her magic to save said person.
Problem was, Port Townsend was a hamlet of maybe ten thousand souls, give or take the summer tourists and the occasional infestation of poltergeists and/or zombies. On top of that, the entire place went to sleep around 9pm. Especially since aforementioned zombies became a thing.
The fifth seal had called the souls of innocent dead to cry vengeance against the blood of their enemies, or whatever that prophecy was, so really you only had to be worried about a zombie situation if you ever did someone a bad turn and then they died before you made it right.
The first wave had been astonishing, and Lucifer had learned how to, through admittedly impressive necromancer powers, direct the undead rage toward the de Moray witches. But that seemed to calm down once they blew her up and melted her corporeal form, so she had to body snatch.
Felt like a victory until she started body snatching powerful witches.
Hindsight? They could have planned that better.
Man, how awesome would it be to have necromancer powers? Like, to rule the dead? Raise armies? Own the darkness and—
Nope!Aerin slapped herself so hard she almost fell off her broom. Don’t go there. Evil. Bad. Darkness. Destruction.
She was an air witch and air powers were cool enough.
Plus, there was always the lightning. Who needed dominion over the undead when you could zap people?
Where was she?Oh, Zombies. Zombies had gone back to trying to kill their still-living enemies, and all in all people seemed to know what—and who—to expect and how to kill them. Sometimes for the second time.
Zombie killing was pretty basic for anyone with cable TV. Shooting them in the head. Cutting off their head. Squishing, crushing, or shattering their head.
Burning also worked in a pinch.
In the daylight, zombies were generally easy to spot and outrun. Hell, most of Port Townsend’s population—which 30% was over fifty-five and still astonishingly granola fit— could powerwalk away from their worst enemy while melting them down with a lighter and some aerosol hairspray.
But at night it was a little trickier to see in a place with so few streetlights, that a body might not notice the vengeful undead until one’s enemy was gnawing on one’s leg like store bought rotisserie chicken.
