Page 26 of Will It Hurt?

Chapter Five

Jinn

Why don’t vampyres like train stations?

Too many crossings.

I pondered the lackluster joke as I slid into a hideous leather seat that had seen better days.

Traveling in a metal canister wasn’t my idea of fun, but the other options weren’t viable. I refused to take my shoes off in a security line at the airport, and using superhuman speed to travel over three hundred miles was an exercise in stupidity.

Nat had offered to drive me before, but I couldn’t imagine a more trying scenario than being stuck in a car with a sweating, nervous fledgling for eleven hours.

As much as I hated laptops, I despised cars even more.

One would assume that immortality would have proffered enough time to obtain a driving license—or at least hone the skill to operate a vehicle—but the desire had never swayed me.

And here I stood, a hundred and fifty years old since my rebirth, and still unable to figure out the mechanics of a moving tin can.

Which left me with the only viable option: the train.

I used to romanticize this journey—once, long ago, before such luxuries were affordable to the masses, I’d adored the idea of a train adventure.

Still old enough to sit on my father’s shoulder, I remembered being in a crowd of people outside King’s Cross when the Great Northern Railway launched its first train going up north.

That’s the Flying Scotsman, Jeanie!

I remembered peering into my father’s reddened cheeks.

Those things go at a hundred miles an hour! A marvel of engineering.

Years later, I’d learned that the Flying Scotsman traveled at exactly 126 miles per hour, but by then, my father had been long dead. It saddened me that he had passed without knowing the true speed of the trains he’d loved to watch.

I looked around the abysmal train decor now, taking in the drab silver and blue monstrosity that carried far too many people lodged next to each other like pickled eels in a glass jar.

Nat had booked a single free-standing seat for me at the very front of the train, which meant I wouldn’t have to see or speak to anyone on the journey. Perhaps there were perks to keeping him around after all.

The train pulled into the station at a little past nine. Overeager commuters waited in front of the doors, hoping to shave precious seconds from their commute. I stayed in my seat, waiting for them to clear off so I wouldn’t be plagued with any unnecessary niceties.

As train stations went, Waverley was a particularly beautiful one. While most places had divested themselves of their old-world charm in exchange for something more sleek or modern, Waverley still retained its Victorian roots.

Perhaps it was the old crumbling castle that stood above it, watching little humans scurry across the city from its perch on the hill. Or the stone walls with lattice-shaped shadows strewn across them. I felt more at home here than I did walking along the streets of London .

I weaved between the crowds until I stopped in the central dome with its glass ceiling. The iron framework was a masterpiece, tilting towards the sky like a large eye spying on commuters.

I found an empty space under the clock tower and shut my eyes.

I’d assumed I’d be able to pick up Belle’s scent the moment I stepped off the platform. But at this time of year, with the constant thrum of human life and their general state of filth, her scent had been eradicated.

As moonlight poured through the glass roof of the station, I stood in the middle of rushing bodies, trying to find the thread that tethered Belle to me.

Our connection had once burned brightly, clouding my mind in shades of gold. But as I stretched mental fingers into the dark void, closing over anything I thought may be Belle’s mind mark, nothing materialized.

It was quiet—eerily, frighteningly quiet.

A few days ago, when I’d stopped feeling Belle as keenly as I had before, I’d chalked it up to distance. Surely being apart would lessen the strength of our bond.

But that didn’t explain how my connection to Indira still pulsed strongly when I was hundreds of miles away.

At the back of my mind, Indira’s tangled thread glowed red like a weapon soaked in blood.

I knew she could use her influence at any time—she could call me back to her side with the power she held over me.

I should be able to do the same with Belle. Except… my mental fingers grasped at nothing.

Not good.

It was as though she’d fallen off the face of the earth.

I fished the blocky phone out of my pocket and dialed Nat’s number .

“There’s no trace of Belle,” I said in-lieu of a hello. “I need you to contact the people who sent her that email.”

“That was the High Coven of Wytches,” Nat said, his stiletto nails tapping out a rhythm on the keyboard. “I’ve been looking at their website and there is no option for an appointment.”

“None?”

“Uh, no, unfortunately not. There’s only one option on the site, but it takes some time for processing…”

“Do it. And while it processes, ask Indira to reach out to her contact at the High Coven. I refuse to believe these wytches are so elusive.”

“Well, yes, I can do that,” he agreed quickly. “I’ll update you in a couple of hours.”

He hung up with a stuttered goodbye.

I stood in the middle of the busy station, staring at people rushing past and tried to summon Belle’s familiar heartbeat back into my chest again .

Chapter Six

Aisla

The next assignment arrived five days after the last.

Maia was right, taking time off between jobs did help a little. Curling up with Anaia, a book in one hand and a cuppa in the other, had become my comfort over the last few days.

When the ancient printer began to whirr in my office in the attic, coughing and sneezing out a piece of paper, I sighed aloud, upsetting Anaia’s gentle sensibilities.

The cat stared up at me with distrust, her black eyes cloudy with sleep. With her dark tortoiseshell coloring, the only thing that stood out on her face was a pink tongue that always caught on the edge of her lips.

Silly girl.

I placed a kiss to her forehead and set her down on her cushion.

The assignment sheet awaited, stark and white against the greasy black heavy-duty printer. After twelve years of working for the High Coven, I’d begun to resent each letter that came through it.

But I still forced myself to retrieve the paper and scan the details. It was fairly straightforward—these cases usually were.

Female vamp, just shy of 150 years old, relinquishing immortality. Voluntary.

We as a community had several strange words for death and murder. Neutralizing, relinquishing, vanquishing. Perhaps this made it easier for us to understand the shitty nature of the things we were forced to do.

“New one?” Maia asked, standing in the doorway. She had been living in the oversized jeans for days, and this afternoon, she’d paired them with a baby tee that said GOOD TITS, BIG HEART.

I nodded, pulling out the heavy binder from the admin shelf and placing it on my desk with a thud. The heft of the binder released a burst of dust into the air.

The last assignment sheet I’d filed stared up at me, the print slightly smudged from the faulty old printer.

Annabel.

Somehow, between the pages of a steamy romance novel, I’d put her out of my mind. But now, she threatened at the fringes of my conscience, demanding to be let in.

I flipped the page quickly and unhooked the binder ring to slide the latest assignment to the back.

“When is it booked for?” Maia asked, running a finger over the printer to carve her name into the layer of dust that was caked there.

“Tomorrow.”

She made a thoughtful noise.

“That’s soon.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t unusual for the undead to want a quick shove into the afterlife. I assumed that after a hundred and fifty years, they’d know themselves well enough to make a decision regarding their mortality. Putting it off would simply mean dragging out the tedium of a life that never ends.

I wasn’t usually inundated by rush orders for neutralization, but every now and again, the request would pop up.

In the early days, I’d fucked up many times by asking myself why these undead had chosen this path. I’d tried to put myself in their shoes, analyzed where they were from, how old they were, and what could’ve led them to me.

That was a mistake.

It would be a steep drop into a hard grave if I humanized these assignments. Maia had once said my heart was too soft, and that I was too prone to ingesting the tragedy of it all. But over the last ten years, I had proven otherwise.

Sure, I sometimes found myself thinking about the way they hesitated at the very end, as if hoping for a reason to stay. Or when they looked at me as though I could make such a decision for them.

I was their executioner, for fuck’s sake. Just because I didn’t wear a thick black mask and hold an axe didn’t mean I could offer them hope in their final moments.

Maia leaned over to pick up the paperback from my desk.

“Camilla’s Sweet Undeath,” she read aloud, nodding as she studied the cover. Her brows rose appreciatively at the barely-clothed vampyre whose head was thrown back in ecstasy, revealing a perfectly smooth and pale throat.

“Questionable,” she murmured, flipping the book around to read the blurb. “Your fascination with vamps is so strange to me.”

Maia had always seen things in black and white—that was a wonderful thing about her, but also the most frustrating.

I’d spent countless hours trying to explain that attraction and duty weren’t mutually exclusive, even when duty meant spraying a fatal amount of aerated silver up vampyre nostrils.

I was their executioner, but I wasn’t blind to their otherworldly beauty.

That was my biggest problem.

It was a strange thing, really. A contradiction that should’ve unsettled me more than it did.

I tried to logic it away by telling myself that the vampyres who came to me weren’t monsters in the way the old stories painted them—not mindless, not cruel, not bloodthirsty beasts lurking in the shadows of human nightmares.

They were tired, longing for an end they couldn’t take for themselves.

And somehow, they always managed to be fucking beautiful.

They were just so alive in their final moments. It made it hard not to see them— really see them—as more than a job.

And so, my twisted obsession with vampyre smut had thrived, growing from mere curiosity to a full-blown infatuation.

It didn’t help that there was nothing to stop me from indulging in my little fantasies.

Vampyres and wytches existed alongside each other.

We weren’t enemies like the old days. There were no wars, no blood feuds, no desperate clashes for dominance.

That kind of history belonged to another time—a world that had long since shifted.

We had learned that survival was a better fate than destruction.

Now, we simply coexisted. Not friends, not allies, but not foes either. Just two species walking the same streets, haunting the same nights, keeping to our own.

Wytches had our craft, our rituals, our quiet power that tied in with the moon. Vamps had their hunger, their immortality, their ageless patience.

And lay humans—well, they were blissfully unaware of us both.

“You know what?” Maia said, interrupting my stream of thought as she set the book down on the desk. “I might have a lend of that once you’re done with it.”

My brows lifted a fraction.

“ You? ” I scoffed, unable to keep the surprise out of my words. “You want to read vampyre fiction? ”

“I don’t think it’s the vampyre part that draws me in,” she said, tracing a finger over Camilla’s smooth neck. “It’s the sapphic part that intrigues me.”

I shrugged. “Be my guest. There are also other paperbacks in my room if you want to read more.”

“Sapphic?” she questioned.

“Have you seen me read anything else?”

She propped a hip against my desk, staring down with a meaningful expression.

“What?” I asked, maybe a little too abruptly.

“Are you going to take the assignment?”

I couldn’t decide if the look I shot her was wan or hostile. “You know I don’t have a choice.”

“I think you’ve been brainwashed into thinking you don’t have a choice.”

Maia often had a habit of creating conspiracies out of absolutely nothing.

Her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed as she did the poorest impression of me possible: “This is my ancestral job. If I don’t do it, who will? I need to carry on my mother’s legacy.”

Despite the less-than-flattering mimicry, I couldn’t help but laugh.

“First of all, I do not sound like Tinkerbell,” I said, flicking her arm. “And second of all, that is the truth. If I didn’t do this job, I’d be the first in the Laxmi line not to carry on tradition.”

“So?” Maia demanded.

“That’s a bad thing?” I pronounced each word carefully, hoping it would sink in.

Maia shook her head, peering out of the fogged window in front of my desk. “Tradition means little when you’re sacrificing your mental health for it.”

“I’m fine. ”

Even to me, the words sounded rehearsed.

“Suit yourself.” Maia shrugged, pointing to the binder. “When you eventually have a breakdown, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

She sauntered away, the legs of her baggy jeans schlepping against each other as she hummed to herself.

Her words grated against my nerves, despite being nothing new. I’d heard them before—too many times, in too many variations—but somehow, they still managed to slip through the shields I put up. Maybe it was the way she said them, the tone laced with just enough judgement to make my teeth clench.

Or maybe it was the simple fact that beneath it all, I wondered if Maia was absolutely right.