Page 29 of Will It Hurt?

Jinn

Rage pelted my skin, hard and hot, like heated needles demanding entrance to my flesh.

My vision had long since turned a botched red, obscuring reason and logic. Shadows slithered over my skin, coiling around my arms like restless little vipers, writhing, desperate to be unleashed. But this wasn’t their battle.

As they rose a little too far, tangled in my unbridled anger, I grit my teeth, snapping the shadows back to me as if yanked by invisible strings. They bled back into my skin with an annoyed little hiss.

This kill was mine— mine! I wished with all my undead, non-existent soul to feel my fingers leeching the life out of my child’s murderer.

My grip tightened around her throat, pressing down hard on the carotid artery that pumped so full of her lifeblood. Perhaps if I had been sober enough, I might have realized I was missing a great opportunity here.

Wytch’s blood was rare— no , not just rare, but impossible to acquire.

While they were alive, of course. All power was leeched from the mortals once they slipped into death.

A more level-headed person would have found a way to harvest the very last drop from her body before leaving her lifeless form to be discovered by her coven.

But no, I was already drunk—drunk on grief and anger and the need to tear someone apart with my bare fucking hands .

I felt my nails dig into her flesh, relishing the rivulets of blood that flowed down the back of her neck and disappeared into the thick, padded coat.

So overwhelmed by the need to watch her life leech from her eyes, I didn’t catch the first stirrings of magick in the air. I’d spent enough time around Indira’s spellwork to know that the acrid scent burning my nostrils came from the wytch.

The smell should have given it away—but I was past using any of my remaining humanly traits like logic or rationality. I bore down on her artery, counting the seconds.

Anytime now, her eyes might start to bulge. She would go limp. She might even piss herself. And I would stand over her unbreathing body and…

And what?

The first blow fell on my cheek with a sickening crack. Pain exploded across my skull, but the surprise in my chest snapped me out of the blinding rage.

I stumbled, releasing my grip on her as the saccharine taste of copper flowed across my tongue. My eyeline blurred as I watched her scramble backward on the snow-stricken ground, but try as hard as I might, I couldn’t clear my vision.

I raised a hand to my cheek.

No. No, no, no!

The force of her spell had shifted the alignment of my cheekbone, thrusting it up towards the corner of my eye.

The sharp spike of pain was hardly a deterrent. In fact, it was nothing more than fuel being thrown onto a raging inferno. I lunged for her retreating frame, fighting the wavering vision and the pain pounding in my skull.

With a single hand on her boot, I pulled her towards me, pushing her deeper into the wet earth. Any struggle would only deepen the hole that would eventually become her grave.

“Stop,” she rasped, the words struggling to escape her throat. “I’m protected. Stop . ”

The words meant little.

In the face of my rage, nothing could have prevented me from wanting her life in return for Belle’s.

The searing copper scent of blood rose in the air, curling around me as I tried to concentrate on the task of dealing this wytch the same hand she had dealt my only child.

Tit for tat.

But a whiff of sharp iron drifted across my tongue, warm with the tendrils of magick. It was just a hint in the air, but it soon lodged itself in every sparse inch of space between us.

Fuck.

A tremor ran up my forearms.

The call of her blood spread through me with an aching, hungry slowness.

I could end this, end her , with a snap of her fragile little neck. But I froze, staring into shocked, dark eyes that seemed to be bulging from the wytch’s skull.

The distraction was my downfall.

I felt the heated tingle of magick gathering around me, pushing me away as effectively as any wall. But I didn’t hit the ground as I expected. Instead, I watched, weightless, as my fingers fluttered over the wytch’s neck, inches away from their target, yet helpless to do anything but hover.

A paralysis spell.

It wrapped around me like a cobweb, weaving its way across my body until I was tied up tight.

I fought with every ounce of strength I could muster, but the spell seemed to be gaining power from my struggles.

The more I fought, the deeper I fell into the paralysis like a measly human caught in quicksand.

Every limb felt heavy. Weightless. Unresponsive. No part of me was mine to command .

The wytch was strong—stronger than she looked. With the power to cast spells forceful enough to hold a 150 year-old vampyre, I wondered why she hadn’t simply killed me already.

She had countless murders under her belt. What was one more?

The wytch scrambled out from under me, slipping on the icy ground as she attempted to sprint towards the gate. I tracked her breaths, rapid and uneven as she slipped back onto the street, boots heavy on the pavement.

Yet the magick held strong, keeping me buoyed in the air, inches above the ground, even as her breathing disappeared in the distance.

What the fuck?

Paralyzed. Hanging mid-air. Snow gathering on my back like a blanket and sinking through the thin cotton of my shirt.

Outsmarted by a wytch . I should be ashamed.

Every muscle screamed at me to move, to give chase, but all I could muster was a pathetic half-growl. And what did that accomplish? Nothing but airing my weakness.

Eons after her footsteps had disappeared from earshot, I felt the cobwebs loosen, the magick strands weakening their grip on my body. I tumbled face first into the ice, and my dislocated cheekbone protested as it pounded against the ground.

Slowly, unsteadily, I pushed myself up, tracing her magick in the air. It was overshadowed by the cloying, stubborn scent of blood, tugging at the part of me that screamed delicious!

I glanced at my left hand, staring at the smear of blood the little wytch had left behind. It was no longer warm, no longer fresh. The ice had done its best to wash away remnants of it, but a splotch still remained, painted onto the pads of my fingers .

I could smell it—sharp, metallic, tense with magick. Power thrummed from a mere leftover smudge.

I flicked my tongue over the surface, teasing out the remnants buried between the folds of my skin. Liquid fire, raw and wild, burst across my senses.

It was heavier than human blood—there was a weight to it, a depth I had never encountered.

My eyes burned hot as her magick swept through me, vibrating like the thrums of a tuning fork in my ear. It moved like a tide, chasing every corner and every nook in my body until all of me knew its power. The faint hum of magick morphed into a roaring pulse.

I had never tasted anything like it—never knew such delights existed.

My heart, lying weak and dormant in my chest cavity, shuddered to life. The world shifted and swayed, golden around the edges, as though I had been…

Drugged.

My vision blurred, but not in the way it usually did when the blood lust took hold—this was sharper, more focused.

Colors were brighter, more vivid, swirling together in hues I had never noticed before. The edges of the world seemed to pulse with a strange glow, like I could see the magick binding itself into the disheveled garden around me.

For long moments in the snow, I forgot who I was tasting, who I was so ardently licking off my own fingers.

When there was nothing left and the high receded, my fangs itched, demanding more, pressing hard against my own flesh. The urge to sink in and pull mouthfuls of blood made my jaw ache fiercely.

I’d opened the door to something uncharted—something dangerous. The entrance stood wide open, dark and cavernous, yet I wanted nothing more than to step inside and explore its depths.

Perhaps strangling the little wytch to death would be a waste of a precious commodity.

I raised my nose to the air, scenting the direction of her escape.

We were natural hunters. Running from us would always be a mistake.

The wytch didn’t stand a chance.

A large part of me—the part I’d trained to process things logically despite my murderous nature—didn’t want to kill her. But the anger and betrayal brewing inside me sloshed around like molten lava, setting every rational thought on fire.

After all these days of unknowing, an e-mail had finally come through as I sat in that dingy café waiting to confront the wytch that showed up.

It was a short note, merely five sentences long.

No condolences, no sympathies. Just a sternly written e-mail with instructions on how to collect Belle’s personal items. What irked me the most was an asterisk that explained in a generic footnote that Belle had nominated me to receive her belongings after her neutralization.

A cursory glance around the execution site only exacerbated the anger curdling in my stomach.

This was nothing but a bloody overgrown grave pit without any merit to its name.

Bare and abandoned, I couldn’t imagine standing in the middle of it and simply waiting for someone to end my existence in a humane way.

Humane.

The word stuck in my heart like a splinter. We were vampyres—a prerequisite of slipping into our immortal bonds was leaving humanity behind.

Why did our deaths have to be humane? Was it a term that brought comfort to those who thought they could trick the devil into thinking we were good people if we had a humane death?

I scoffed, my shoes sinking into the wet ground.

How many lives had this back garden taken? What atrocities had it seen? How many of my brethren had met their end here?

After days of searching for Annabel, wishing for her to return home, all I found was…

Nothing.

There was nothing left of her. Not her sweet smile or the snort she made when she laughed. Not the pesky curls that often fell into her eyes.

All because of… This bitch.