Page 37 of Will It Hurt?

Jinn

The house across the street wasn’t adequate shelter, and so I was forced to contact a local nest. The Conan Doil House had once been located in a quiet part of New Town, but it was now swarmed with tourists and the intermittent buzz of a nearby tram stop.

A pub teemed with drunkards on the street corner, while the nest itself rose high above in a labyrinthine refuge with tinted windows inlaid in the historic townhouse.

The Night Council had owned this property for years—it stood at a junction of the street that wasn’t at the mercy of the questionable Scottish sunlight, sandwiched between a crumbling cathedral and a gothic church.

Admittedly, it was a strange place for a nest of vampyres to take residence, but hiding in plain sight had always been our modus operandi.

The wrought iron gate was cool beneath my fingers as I unlatched it and stepped into the shaded back entrance. Nat had texted me the security code to the building along with my travel instructions, and I keyed it into the new-fangled digital lock to let myself in.

As the door swung shut, the outside din faded, leaving me in blissful silence.

A stairway stretched high above, lit by clam-shaped lights that sat flush against the wall.

Beneath my feet, a deep burgundy carpet was pinned neatly in place by brassy rods that ran upwards with each step.

The rods had small decorative finials on either end—tiny, understated flourishes that were no longer the norm. But I appreciated them.

A stale scent lingered in the stairway, like wisps of old incense.

At the top of the stairs, a handmaid answered the door, dressed in a long black jumpsuit with an open collar and a dark velvet choker across the base of her neck.

“We’ve been expecting you, Ms. Waters,” she said with a small smile. Her deep Scottish twang indicated that her roots were likely further up north. “Your assistant called ahead.”

I acknowledged her greeting with a nod and stepped into the nest.

“You’ve arrived at the perfect time. The nest has settled in for their supper.”

She held out a hand for the bag I still carried. It was incongruous to my ensemble, but I couldn’t bear to part with it. It was the last part of Belle I could still hold in my hands.

I shook my head and the handmaid turned away with a click of her heel.

Hands deep in my coat pockets, I followed the quick-moving human as she padded across the tiger-print carpet that ran in a thin strip throughout the hallway.

As I passed a decorative side table with an eight-pronged candle holder, the scent of wax mingled with something faintly metallic, like diluted blood. Blood wine, perhaps.

We turned a corner, walking across a windowless hallway with walls the color of dark moss.

A gallery of portraits hung on both sides with gilded accent lights illuminating each one.

They were painted similarly in oil with a dark, inky grey background.

I counted twenty portraits exactly—ten on each side, neatly lined such that they were facing each other.

The handmaid walked too quickly for me to study them, but I appreciated the details that the artist had etched into each life-like creation.

There was a surprising number of people in attendance for supper. Unlike the formal, performative sessions that Indira hosted at Mészáros, everyone seemed more at ease here, lounging in an armchair, sitting by an easel, or playing with a scaly pet in a large tank.

“Mr. McAllister is visiting a friend,” the handmaid said, her voice blending easily with the notes from the phonograph. “He said to treat his nest like your own.”

The space was certainly vast for a townhouse. Heavy brocade drapes in steel blue fell from the ceiling to the floor, sectioning off corners of the room for a small measure of privacy.

Above me, a chandelier of gold and crystal had been twisted to look like moose antlers, and the light that emanated from it was a beautiful shade of dappled gold.

A few people nodded in greeting, but didn’t seem too inclined to speak. They turned back to their newspaper or easel after offering me a fleeting smile.

Perhaps they received visitors often—too often for them to invest time in each one that walked through the door. Fine by me. I was in no mood for small talk.

I eyed the sprawling chaise lounge to my left, upholstered in burgundy velvet.

It dominated one curtained corner, its clawed feet gripping the floor.

Across from it, a high-backed chair of rich mahogany sat in commanding solitude, its black leather seat glistening faintly as though it had recently been polished.

Tables carved with intricate gothic designs were laden with peculiar treasures: a crystal glass half-filled with something dark, a clock with hands frozen at midnight, and a bone-handled letter opener resting on a stack of yellowed envelopes .

I had already turned to ask the handmaid to show me to my room when I caught sight of a familiar figure behind a sweeping curtain.

“Willa?”

The vamp glanced up from her age-browned book, blinking as she registered my presence. A smile softened the serious angles of her face.

“Jinn!”

She rose from a little alcove by the window to embrace me, and I wondered how she smelled exactly the same after all these years.

“It’s been too long,” she said, tugging closer. “Far too long.”

She sniffed the air. “You smell unlike yourself.”

It was a not-so-impolite way of asking what I’d been up to with a human.

I deflected the question with one of my own. Willa and I hadn’t seen each other for the better part of a century, and it would be far too forward to admit that I’d ducked behind a black bin to suckle on the lapel of my coat, seeking every drop of blood the wytch had left behind in the market.

While I doubted that Willa would judge me for it—we’d both done far worse in our mortal days—it was an experience I’d rather keep to myself.

“We’re long overdue for a catch up,” I said instead.

“Indeed. You rarely leave London.”

“The horrors of home are familiar,” I said, my gaze lingering on the familiar lines of her cheekbones.

“Why bother with immortality if you’re not going to explore the world?” she said pointedly.

“I have,” I said curtly.

“After airplanes were invented?” Her brows rose in question .

I kept silent, refusing to start an argument with Willa, although I knew it was one of her favorite things to do.

Neither of us were sure about her ancestry, but her Greenland roots indicated that she might be Inuit. Immortality had many perks—immense strength, speed, and mind control, for starters, but it couldn’t help us dig up our past.

As she stepped close, I noticed a little smear of blood she had missed at the corner of her lips. It would be impolite to point that out to her, akin to humans telling each other that they had food stuck in their teeth. I chose silence instead.

“Come,” she said, gesturing to the chair across from her. “Sit. Talk to me.”

The phonograph skipped and stopped, bleeding silence into the room. The handmaid in the jumpsuit stepped forward to select another record and placed it delicately on the waiting turntable.

More soft jazz hummed in the air, barely discernible from the last tune.

“When was the last time we saw each other?” Willa asked, her grey eyes soft.

We had once been mortal friends bound by poverty in The Devil’s Deuce, a gambling den known for a minimum of two stabbings a week in the east end.

I’d been little more than sixteen then, serving drunk cocks older than my grandfather while dressed in an ensemble that would make a milkmaid blush.

Willa had escaped that trap. Instead, her unusual looks had worked in her favor, and she had built up a steady stream of paying clients that she serviced in a room above the Deuce.

It had taken me almost a year to figure out that she wasn’t a dollymop. Her rented room was a stage to hold seances to communicate with the dead.

“You seem… Off, ” Willa said, her gaze narrowed meaningfully. “Something has tipped you off balance. ”

I glanced out the window, eyeing the frost that had formed on its edges.

Willa had a way about her. People like me—non-believers—would call her perceptive. Or batty. But those who bought into the idea of ghosts and ghouls and spirits and angels tended to think of her as a spiritual guide.

I believed that Willa was simply very good at her craft. She’d never once admitted to this, but I assumed she studied her clients carefully and picked out the most generic things to say—generic enough that they would readily resonate with it and provide more information on their own.

After all, if there were such otherworldly things that existed among us, I would’ve encountered them in my extended time on this earth.

The handmaid appeared at our side with two crystal decanters, both filled with red liquid. One blood, one wine.

“You know how I like it, darling,” Willa told her, a slight inflection in her tone as her lips curved around the endearment.

The handmaid nodded, deftly filling a waiting glass with a generous splash of both.

“And yourself, Ms. Waters?”

I stared at the offered libations, watching the dim light shimmer through the semi-translucent red wine.

It wouldn’t be enough. I knew it with unerring certainty. Even if the blood was sweet from a willing donor and mixed with the headiest vintage red, it would not compare to a single lick of the wytch’s blood.

Curse it all.

Is this how it would be now? Would everything else—blood, wine, conversation—feel like a pale echo of something greater? All because I had ingested a few drops of her blood? It haunted me, the rush of warmth and power, the newfound heartbeat that coursed through me like molten gold .

“Just wine.”

Willa’s sharp look indicated I’d been too abrupt with the handmaid.

“Thank you,” I added.

She handed me a glass and I accepted it by the stem. Two pairs of eyes stared at me expectantly, and I tilted the wine to my lips.