Read Online Indecent: The Moray Druids #2 (Highland Historical) by Kerrigan Byrne - Free Book Online Page B

carrying the torch toward the adjacent pyre upon which Niall stood was enough to force the pain into the background.
    Vikings sprawled across the courtyard, though whether dead or unconscious, she couldn’t tell.  
    Flames licked at Kenna’s feet, but they didn’t burn, only fed her ire, and the Berserker’s power surging through her veins. Fire might not be a danger to her flesh, but it would kill Niall, especially in his weakened state.
    “What have you done ?” she called above the crackle of the flames.
    Mother Superior turned at the sound of her voice, buying Kenna precious seconds. “I have done what I must to protect those innocents under my care.”
    “By killing everyone?” Kenna asked, incredulous.
    “Those pagans are not dead, only under the influence of the belladonna we slipped into their wine.” A shadow of smug victory hung above her smile. “We hadn’t the time to build enough pyres, but we will deal with the rest of them in due course.” She lifted the flames to the firewood beneath Niall’s feet as he struggled against his ropes as ineffectually as a mortal man might.
    This was her fault. She shouldn’t have let him weaken himself to save her. If she used her powers to redirect the flames, it would drain her strength against the Wyrd Sisters.
    “Don’t,” she ordered. “You need him, and you need me against the witches who are, even now, plotting violence and terror without these walls.”
    “I have no need of you, harlot,” the old nun hissed. “I’ve made my own deal with the devil.”
    “What deal?” Kenna gasped, the smoke now becoming a real threat. She’d need to do something soon, take action.
    “All will be revealed,” she hedged.
    Kenna was so absorbed in the trajectory of the old woman’s torch toward Niall’s pyre as she tossed it onto the wood, that she almost missed the two nuns release the bolt to the abbey’s heavy gates.
    Mother Superior turned toward her, eyes glittering in the light of Kenna’s own fire. “I know I’ll be absolved before I die, which is more than I can say for you.”
    Kenna’s heart leapt from its perch in her chest and took a dive into her stomach as three figures were outlined in the abbey’s gates.
    A maiden. A mother. A crone.
    “You know nothing,” Kenna addressed the wayward nun in a voice made low and dark, though she never took her eyes from the Wyrd Sisters. “For if you did, you’d realize the mistake you just made.”
    The Wyrd Sisters advanced in tandem, black-robed and coweled, a dark, malevolent ooze tainting the very air around them. Badb, on the left, the crone, her gnarled hands stirring the wind. Macha, the mother, on the right, calling upon the sea and darkening the clouds, promising the wrath of a storm.
    And, in the middle Nemain, the girl with dark fire in her eyes and flames in her hands. Kenna’s nemesis. It was because of her existence that Kenna’s life was obsolete to these dark witches. They only needed one fire witch, and therefore could destroy her.
    In Ireland they were thought to be the Morrigan, in England, the Wayward Sisters. Here in the Highlands, the home of their birth, they were the Wyrd Sisters. De Moray Druids who’d lost their way and let their greed for power take hold, turning them into creatures of darkness and avarice.
    Kenna felt the ropes give as her clothes went up in flames. She yanked her arms free, letting the conflagration consume her robes. Heat spread through her body, a pleasurable singe with a punishing scorch at the end as she beckoned the blaze to heed her call.
    Fire . Her element. A masculine, destructive, consuming force. It filled her, danced for her, and ignited a passion and a need for justice.
     “Your fires of judgment could never hurt me,” she taunted the speechless nun who’d just set the blaze to her lover’s pyre. “It gives me the fuel to fight.”

Chapter Nine
     
    Niall watched his mate disappear into the flames with a horrified sense of awe. Smoke