Page 35 of Will It Hurt?

Jinn

Wind whistled through the cracks in the window, ruffling my hair as it settled in the room. The street had been quiet for an hour, ever since someone in an ankle-length coat had strolled up the driveaway to the large house and wandered inside.

No sign of the wytch.

Coward, I thought, pickling in my anger as the lights went off in her home. I shouldn’t have expected anything more from her kind.

I felt the tug of the moon like strands of gossamer thread pulling at my temples. It eased an insistent pressure along my skin—dimming the anger until it was a simmer rather than an overflowing boil. I sighed into the muted darkness, feeling its embrace like a sweet velvet blanket.

What exactly did I hope to gain by lying in wait for the wytch? Answers, for one. I had to understand Belle’s last moments. The things she’d said, how she looked. If she’d had any regrets.

I wondered if the wytch’s words would work like glue to piece my heart back together.

A small part of me screamed that getting answers wouldn’t bring Belle back. Still, I had to try.

Perhaps it was a good thing I hadn’t strangled the wytch this evening .

A familiar weight settled in the crux of my palm—the old matchbox I reached for whenever I found myself navigating the choppy waters of anxiety.

The old paper rasped softly against the pads of my fingers.

No taller than the length of my thumb, the slim matchbox was the last physical tie I had to the person I had been before the change: the old Jeanette Waters, now long dead and happily so.

The term Matchbox Girl meant little to people now. Our history had been obliterated, erased by men who’d rather forget we existed than acknowledge their capitalist cruelty. But that life was part of my identity.

Many women I’d sat shoulder-to-shoulder with on the production line had found early graves with odd conditions like phossy jaw or necrosis.

For many years, I’d watched women try to voice their concerns, only to be replaced by other unsuspecting girls off the street who needed basic wages to survive.

I did not doubt that several more years under the fumes of phosphorus and smog would have put me in the same predicament.

The box I’d pilfered was the prettiest one the Paxton & Smithers company had ever produced—a special edition set of matches for the British India naval company, which had been at its peak in 1880 when I’d started on the line.

On the outside of the box was a bold print of a ship with a cloud of black steam. When the lid was flipped up, the underside was marked with the address of the company’s headquarters.

STEAM NAVIGATION CO.

Est. 1882

SIX ALDGATE

LONDON E.C.3

What I’d truly loved about this box were the matches themselves. Each one was inscribed with a port name that had once sounded distant and magickal—places with glittering waters held out of reach for people like me.

A.I. to India

A.I. to E. Africa.

A.I. to S. Africa

A.I. to Malaya

A.I. to Ceylon

A.I. to Burma

A.I. to Australia

One matchstick had been used, plucked cruelly from its resting place by an old friend who hadn’t thought twice about striking a simple match.

I had lost A.I. to Japan that day.

I still mourned it, over a hundred years later.

The British-India naval company had commissioned these boxes as a method of advertising. I imagined they’d handed it out to potential businessman at uptight networking events or smokey gentleman’s parlors, trying to drum up business.

I ran my nail over the striking strip that had been glued to the bottom of the box, now smooth from a century and a half of idle stroking. None of the matches would work now—they had dampened and dried on my travels, the once-beige sticks now a dull brown.

Many years later, I’d heard that several of the A.I. ships had sunk in the war, and I wondered at the sadness that threatened to take over. After all, my only connection to those ships was the matchbox I’d stolen when I’d been forced to work twenty-hour shifts at the factory.

How had this matchbox become a symbol of my humanity? The frail human I’d once been, struggling to scrape together two ha’pennies to keep a leaking roof over my head.

If Indira hadn’t laid eyes on me that night at the free house, nursing a glass of gin…

I’d always thought being undead had brought me back to life.

A shadow moved in the distance—dark coat, dark boots shifting under the cover of night.

Her.

Wytch .

I stood with a scrape of the chair, sending it tumbling to the ground.

She stood very still under a lamp post, the orange light shining around her shoulders like a halo, as though she was waiting for me.

Time to answer for your sins, wytch.