Page 46 of Will It Hurt?

Aisla

I’d assumed it would be easy to spot a vampyre on a deserted street, but that was an incorrect assumption on my part.

Between the brown coat and the eerie stillness, Jinn camouflaged with the dark brick of the neoclassical building.

I looked straight past her as I dug through my coat pocket for the large key.

The Hall of Surgeons had originally been constructed as a surgical college where public dissections often took place. These days, it was little more than a tourist trap with surgical pathology specimens, artifacts, and works of art on display across several floors.

“Aisla.”

I whirled around, startled by her presence barely a foot away from me. My hand rose instinctively, brandishing the two-pronged end of an old-fashioned key from my clenched fist.

“Don’t do that!”

“Do what?” she asked, her dark brows raised.

“ You know what .” I let my fist drop. “Don’t scare me. ”

“If I had been an aggressor, you would’ve hardly deterred me with that rusted key and its blunt edges,” she remarked wryly. “At most, I’d need a tetanus jab.”

I decided that I wouldn’t dignify her words with a response. Instead, I turned and walked around the corner of the building into an alleyway that was sandwiched between two high walls.

She followed, her shadow falling over my left shoulder as I looked for the entrance that was fused to the back of the building. Finding the hidden gate was tricky, even when I had the key clutched between my fingers.

I cursed under my breath, letting my fingers wander over sharp corners of the gritty brick until… There.

A tiny divot, barely a couple of centimeters long—a mere slash in the brick. I knelt in front of it, angling the key and pushing it in.

The lock had rusted as much as the key, and it took a full minute of grunting and shoving to force it to turn a full hundred and eighty degrees.

I sat back on my heels, watching as the rocks trembled with a deep, rumbling noise.

At first, they shifted only slightly, dust falling onto the sparsely gathered snow—dark grey dust on icy white.

But soon enough, they moved as though newly awakened from a long slumber, stone grinding against stone, cracks smoothing out, edges blurring to form one smooth slab.

Like wax , I thought, watching the display. The first time I’d witnessed my mother unlocking our ancestral covenstead, I’d been mesmerized. At the ripe old age of thirty, I could safely admit that the wonder hadn’t ceased.

A sharp golden light traced the edges of the gate and I pressed my fingers against the smooth brick. It swung open, ushering us in.

“Impressive,” Jinn murmured under her breath .

She followed me through the gate and I sealed it behind me.

“Is this part of the museum?” she asked as the bricks rearranged themselves into their usual formation.

I nodded, stepping between two narrow aisles that were lined with glass jars of various sizes.

“It’s the basement—a storage area.”

“Certainly looks like it,” she said, eyeing the claustrophobically low ceiling. Black iron shelving had been drilled into the wall and covered most of the available space in the room.

Dim, flickering lights buzzed overhead, and the whirr of the heating system sounded somewhat distant. It was cool in here—not cold, but the temperature was low enough to keep the oddities from drying up.

The basement wasn’t meant for a casual visitor.

The exhibits upstairs were strange enough—Victorian death masks, antique surgical kits, faded diagrams of impossible medical conditions—but down here , the oddities were different.

Darker. The kind of things people whispered about but never truly believed existed.

As a child, the displays had made my skin crawl. As an adult, I couldn’t say any different. There was the faintest smell of formaldehyde in the air, like the echo of long-burnt sulfur, and a spikey note of vinegar.

Glass cases lined the narrow hall, their contents frozen in eerie, artificial light. I wanted to walk past the storage room quickly, but Jinn had other plans.

She disappeared into a different aisle, and I waited patiently as she perused the items stored on the shelves, her wingtips quiet on the stone floor beneath.

I knew what she’d find. Every strange item in this room had been embedded in my brain. At her eye-level, a collection of preserved organs floated in murky fluid, each labeled in neat, clinical handwriting.

A heart, grotesquely enlarged.

Lungs blackened by disease.

A human brain, neatly bisected, one half smooth and pristine, the other riddled with strange holes, as if something had eaten away at it.

I wondered if she could sense my discomfort; maybe it spurred her to test my patience.

Further down, the exhibits became stranger. A human fetus with two heads, their tiny faces eerily serene. A withered hand, fingers fused together by thick, rope-like strands of skin. A single, shriveled eyeball floating in yellowed liquid, its optic nerve curling like a tendril.

When her rings clinked against a jar with a severed hairy limb, I poked my head between two shelves and angled a meaningful stare in her direction.

“Has nobody ever told you not to touch displays at a museum?”

She shrugged, filling the silence with a shuffling noise from her coat. “There’s no one here to tell me off. So why not?”

“Because you could damage them with your undead hands.”

A single dark brow rose. “And if I do, who will know?”

It was never that simple. Nothing ever was. To others, this was a collection of oddities—ugly things stuffed in jars.

But I knew the darkness they contained—the captured monstrosity, the unnatural forces.

It was one of the reasons that the Elders had fought to keep the old covenstead beneath the surgeons’ guild. Sentimental value and a nod to our origins were only secondary considerations .

Power was the primary reason.

The pain that surgery, death, and preservation in jars elicited was perfect kindling for our magick.

It was suffering made tangible, pain captured and held still, locked inside glass and fluid.

And I could feel it now, like a slow, smoldering fire beneath my skin, waiting for the right breath of air to ignite.

Magick had always been strongest where humanity left its marks—where blood had been spilled, where bodies had been broken and stitched back together.

It clung to the remnants of shortened lives, to the instruments that had sawed and mangled flesh, to the dying protests of those who had not gone quietly.

The collection seemed like a museum of horrors, but it was actually a reservoir of power—the forgotten and forsaken gathered in one place. It leeched into the covenstead, spreading its energy into the stones that made up each brick.

I had never felt called to tap into its power before. But if I could find the spell that Jinn was after, I knew I’d need all the extra zhuzh I could get.

“This way,” I called over my shoulder as she lingered too long in front of a glass jar with the perfectly preserved two-headed fetus.

We turned a corner, then another. A flight of winding stairs led us down to a locked pit. Here, the stone was crumbled and damp, untouched for centuries.

I withdrew the key again and laid it flat on the stone, sliding it around until it fit into the grooves that had been designed for it.

Like the gate above, it shuddered alive with a noise that sounded almost like a yawn, and the ground fell away, revealing a gaping, dark circle.

I knelt, feeling around for the ladder and lowered myself into the hole .

Above me, Jinn hesitated briefly before she placed her foot on the first rung. The slight heel of her wingtip thudded hollowly on the old wood.

There was no electricity here—a fact that had once inconvenienced me greatly, but now, I’d come around to the charm of it.

Nothing had changed since the old wytches had carved this out of sacred land.

They had touched what I touched, smelled what I smelled, their feet tracing the same path mine did.

I breathed deep, taking in the scent of earth and damp.

To most people, this mixture of scents would be unpleasant, but for me, this was a childhood memory brought to life—wet stone, crumbling dirt, and the faint metallic tang of rusted pipes somewhere far above.

There was a slight undercurrent of rot, too, but I had always chosen to ignore that.

“ Agni paayatum, irul maaratum.”

Let fire strike and darkness fade.

My fingertips tingled as the incantations ignited my blood and the smell of ash rose in the air. The torches had rested for too long—after all, it had been years since I’d visited the old covenstead.

The first spark crackled in the darkness, a sharp hiss that echoed through the tunnel. And with a deep whoosh, the first torch came alive. One by one, the flames leapt from torch to torch, igniting each one as the path in front of us grew clear.

“There,” I said, pleased with myself. I wrangled the closest torch out of its bracket and raised it to the ladder. “That’s better. Could you pull the cord over there and latch the entrance? I don’t want anyone following us in.”

I moved forward to shine the torch on the ladder but she waved me away, stepping back up the bottom rungs quickly .

A look of alarm broke the constant coolness of her gaze.

Was she afraid of fire?

It made sense, I supposed. Fire was one of the few things that could vanquish a vamp, and waving a glowing torch so close to her head was probably more of a threat than help. I wished to explain to her that this wasn’t a real flame, but a little bit of fear was a good thing.

As she sealed us into the covenstead, I walked ahead, doing the routine checks to make sure no one else had trespassed in the space.

“I’m surprised this place isn’t warded,” she said, catching up to me with barely any effort.

“It is,” I assured her. “If I hadn’t given you permission, you wouldn’t have been able to see the entrance in the first place.”