Page 2 of Will It Hurt?

But I knew that wasn’t what she was asking.

She wasn’t afraid of the pain of leaving this earth—she had likely endured worse in the very moment she had been created.

Rather, she wanted to know if, at the very end, the world would be cruel to her one last time.

If it would punish her for this act of rebellion, or if it would finally show mercy and grant her peace on the other side.

Even as the thoughts sifted through my mind, I said nothing aloud. Because I had no answers.

Annabel’s porcelain skin creased as she glanced away from me.

“Stupid question,” she muttered under her breath. “Sorry. Do people ask you this a lot?”

It was my duty to remain quiet.

Instead, I repeated: “Do you wish to leave? ”

Her lips tightened, pulling into a cold dip.

“No,” she confirmed, her voice stronger this time. “Just…”

Red streaked down her cheeks, heavy and viscous like the stolen lifeblood that it was.

A foreign ache settled in my belly as I fought a frown. I had done this more times than I cared to count, but why did the idea of vanquishing this woman make strange feelings bubble inside me?

“Make it quick.” She paused. “Please.”

Stepping forward was my error. I could’ve done this from three feet away, but I chose to move so close that my heavy boots touched her sodden trainers.

The bloody tears had dried instantly on her cheeks, whipped into spidery red veins by the wind. Beneath the dried tracks, sharp brown freckles dotted her skin, each one more beautiful than the last.

I let my gaze linger over every coiled red curl and each wet eyelash.

Her eyelids slipped closed.

I withdrew the small silver canister from my pocket, feeling for the nozzle, and aimed it true.

“ Shanthi. ”

Peace.

For the first time in a long time, I wished it were true for Annabel… For the fear I saw clearly in every angle of her bo dy.

Chapter Two

Aisla

The process was deceptively simple—if mercy killing vampyres could ever be considered simple. My superiors at the High Coven of Wytches received a request for voluntary neutralization and interviewed the candidate to assess their suitability. Once complete, they sent the finalized paperwork to me.

I was merely a hammer in their toolbox, or a sharp screwdriver—whatever could inflict the most damage.

This wasn’t a job one could find advertised on Indeed. No, it was a role one needed to be born into, like my mother had, and my grandmother before her. The Laxmis were a proud line of neutralizers—or ‘executioners’ as we were called before the job title was changed in the 80s to suit the times.

There was a difference between a mercy killer and a serial killer—at least, in my books. I had no doubt that whenever a human thought about mercy killers, they pictured a nurse in pink scrubs with a fat euthanasia needle in their hand waiting to poke their next victim to save them from pain.

My job wasn’t even close.

Yes, most of the neutralizations were acts of mercy, but I didn’t get to decide who to off or when to off them.

Rather, I was just a tool for creatures of the night to use to vanquish themselves into the unknown .

That was the problem of being virtually indestructible—it could be too daunting to do it yourself, and taboo to ask your peers.

Despite the gravity of the situation—arranging one’s own death—it was a peaceful process. A slight scoosh of silver up their nose and their brain dies almost instantly. The rest of their body follows, disintegrating into ash swept away by the wind.

Assignment complete.

That was how I referred to them: assignments. They were a job, nothing more.

Kneeling in the snow, I gathered what was left of Annabel—fragments of her blue coat, her bag, her shoes—and bundled it up tight. At one point in my life, it had saddened me to know that these people eventually amounted to nothing more than pieces of debris on the ground.

There were no ashes left to mourn. The silver worked too well to disintegrate every last bit of flesh.

The thought brought no joy.

A heaviness settled in my chest, and try as hard as I did, I couldn’t push it away. It was forced to remain inside me, bubbling, festering, as I made the short walk back to the covenstead.

I tried to distract myself by reading over the final clue to the daily crossword.

J-O-Y-E-U-X-N-O-E-L

Clue: Merry Christmas to a Frenchman

Confetti burst over the screen in shades of green and red.

Complete. Finito.

Just like Annabel.

I was what the High Coven kindly dubbed an Eclectic Wytch—averagely good at any type of magick but gifted in none. It was our ancestral curse. All the women in the Laxmi line were born into our role as neutralizers and stuck as Eclectic Wytches.

We had records dating back two-hundred years that only served to prove that we’d never shown an affinity for any type of magick.

Not that we hadn’t tried. Each generation of women went through the trials just like everyone else—a course of consecutive tests to see what our magick responded to. And mine had responded to all in varying degrees of tepidity.

Surprise, surprise— our ancestral blood ran strong. It would have made global coven news if my power hadn’t matched my mother’s.

Either way, living in picturesque Edinburgh with its long history of wytch trials made our lives interesting.

Stories of wytches being drowned in the loch were now repeated to tourists in a heavily rehearsed script meant to draw oohs and aahs , but little did these people know that none of the women that had given their lives to the folly of men had possessed any power.

No, they’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong suspicious-looking beauty mark.

Only one of us had ever fallen victim to a wytch hunt, and her ashes now sat in a spellbound urn above our cauldron. The coven had kept Magdalene’s ashes as a warning to all others never to trust anyone outside the coven, even if they professed love and undying devotion.

Love wasn’t worth dying for. Sisterhood, on the other hand, was a different story.

Coven Layng had originated in the Isle of Skye, an island up north known for inhospitable winds and dramatic landscape. It was also a place only accessible by boat, and so, my ancestors had found themselves very much at home in its shadows .

The Great Migration, ordered by the High Coven, had brought most of the wytches to Edinburgh in the 1600s to allow for greater access to coven routes across Europe.

But the dispersion hadn’t been to our advantage.

Wytches integrated wherever they went, mixing thoroughly with the locals until they became one of them.

Now, only five of us remained in the north. Three here in Edinburgh, and two in the old castle in Skye.

I wished I could say there was hope for more little wytches in the future, but I was woefully inept at navigating spaces outside of my own coven culture. And my companions, Brodie and Maia, were a little…

Strange. Not in a quirky-fun way as most people might assume, but in a sheltered, socially-inept sense.

I stepped into the townhouse we called home, stomping out my snow-covered boots on the mat. Anaia glanced up from her perch on the windowsill, frowning at me with her little tufted eyebrows before curling into another impossible shape for a cat that was three kilos overweight .

“How was it?” Maia shouted down from her loft as I divested myself of the winter armor.

Her dark head appeared at the top of the banister, short curls hanging over her forehead as she stared down at me.

“Did you feed the cauldron this morning?” I asked instead.

“Aye, I did. But you didn’t answer my question.”

Irritation flared in my chest as I felt a familiar brush of soft energy against my forehead, seeking entrance past the permanent shield around my thoughts.

I cast Maia out with a hard mental shove.

“ Oi! ” she yelled.

“Boundaries, Maia,” I snapped, tilting my head up to glare at her. “You know I hate it when you try to read my mind.”

She sighed dramatically.

“I wasn’t going to read your mind, I was just trying to see how you’re feeling.”

That was what I didn’t want her to do.

I turned away to hang my coat next to Brodie’s empty hook. The brick above the hearth had started to crumble—likely from a combination of damp, heat and mold—but that wasn’t today’s problem.

“You want a cuppa?” I asked as I slipped my boots off.

“Sure. Bring it up.”

The covenstead existed in a state of organized chaos, but I often thought it wasn’t our fault.

This was the home we’d inherited from our mothers and their mothers before.

Every generation of Layng wytches had at one time or another lived in these walls, and each of them had left a jar or a hat or a dress or a bauble to remain in our sacred space.

The result was a jumbled mess, but a mess where I knew where to find things I needed.

Tea strainer? Top shelf behind the poison.

Sugar? In a tin marked ‘cat treats’.

Kettle? Boiling away on the heated bricks next to our well-fed cauldron .

It was hard to believe that our sisterhood had once been so large that not everyone could find a bed for the night.

In its heyday at the turn of the twentieth century, our coven had been blessed with thirty-two powered wytches, all of whom had been registered with the High Coven.

It was strange to think that just over a hundred years later, only three of us remained.

Brodie, Maia and I lived in a sprawling three-story home with the eerie echoes of good times past and the tangible burden of carrying on our coven’s legacy.

The latter was going to be a hard task, given that the sperm I made was lackluster on account of my lesbianism.

And Brodie was still finding himself after three years of confusing transition.

That left Maia—the chaotic pansexual wytch who might make an odd but fun parent.

I shuddered to think that in a hundred years, the Layng coven would be wiped out entirely because none of us could find the urge to procreate.