Page 47 of Will It Hurt?

I glanced up at her and noticed that the top of her head almost brushed the ceiling. It made me question how small my ancestors had been.

“Did you bring me down here to trap me in an enclosed space with several open flames?”

“Why?” I said over my shoulder. “Scared I’ll try to kill you? Tit for tat?”

“You can try.”

A smile curled at the corners of her lips—a secret little thing that taunted me.

It wasn’t the kind of smile that invited you in; it was the kind that warned you what would happen if you stepped too close.

I dare you, the smile said. Come and get it.

I looked away hastily.

“This is our covenstead,” I explained instead. “The oldest home of the Layng wytches.”

“It’s under a tourist trap. ”

“Unfortunately, yes. The Elders owned the land above, but they built the covenstead underground to avoid persecution. When the university bullied us into selling, we did, but we kept the covenstead where it was—protected.”

We reached the edge of the tunnel. A dead end stared back at us.

“Most of my ancestors are buried here,” I said, placing my fingers against the cool stone. “Those who served the Layng coven. The Elders originated from two places—we can trace our heritage back to the Isle of Skye in the mid-sixteenth century, or Tamil Nadu almost a millennium ago.”

“How did they find each other across continents?”

My brow rose as I shot her a meaningful look. “Colonization, of course.”

I ran the torch over the crumbling wall.

“My ancestors bought passage on a ship run by the South India Company, not because they wanted to, but because they were facing persecution in their village. There was a great drought in the farmlands and people were looking for someone to blame. My ancestors were easy scapegoats because they lived in the fringes of the village. Personal recounts and diaries indicate that over half of them were sacrificed by the villagers to appease the gods’ fury before the rest were able to break free. ”

“Why Edinburgh?” Jinn asked.

I uttered a spell and the stones shifted beneath my palms, rearranging themselves like blocks of Lego.

“They didn’t know where they were going,” I explained.

“They only knew that they had to get away from the village, and the quickest way was through a nearby port. Boarding a ship bound for Glasgow was a mistake, but they managed to survive by finding their way to the Layng coven here in Edinburgh. ”

A rush of cool air brushed my curls back over my shoulders.

Beside me, Jinn tensed.

“One of my ancestors, Baanu, was the first to forge a treaty with the Layng coven. She learned their ways and adapted both magick systems into an even stronger spellbook.” I stepped through the entrance and glanced back at her.

“I know the wytches down south do things differently. Their covens are older and their spells are in Latin. That’s why we need to comb through the covenstead’s vault to find a spell that is equivalent to The Retractare. ”

Jinn nodded, studying the solarium warily. The high ceilings made our conversation echo with an eerie lilt, and somewhere deep in the crevices, the tap tap tap of a leak was highly distracting.

Centuries ago, this space had been used as a meeting point for wytches in the north. It was large enough to accommodate at least a hundred, and when the moon was full, the stones in the ceiling shifted to allow light to enter.

Now, only echoes of better times remained.

“It feels… different in here,” she said, her voice low.

“Different how?” I asked.

Her shrug made the chain of her pocket watch clink against her vest button.

“The air feels heavier. Weighted, maybe.”

I placed my fingers back on the stones again and they clamored back into their original position.

“Now that you’ve entombed us,” Jinn continued. “I can say it feels even heavier.”

“I always thought it could be the presence of the Elders looking down on us.” I slid the key back into the inner pocket of my jacket and zipped it up .

“Don’t you mean looking up?” she asked, following closely behind as I crossed the solarium to yet another entrance concealed in dark red brick.

“Very funny.”

“I’m not being funny,” she quipped. “Do wytches believe in heaven and hell?”

“We believe in a variation of it, yes.” I turned to her. “And what about the undead?”

My gaze lingered on the small, pointed cross between her chest.

“Vampyres believe in the other side, but not heaven and hell.”

I couldn’t claim that my small scoff wasn’t judgmental.

“When you spend your life draining people dry against their will, I imagine the afterlife can be a scary thing.”

I thought she might refute my statement, but she merely raised her fingers to unbutton her coat.

“You may have a point,” she said.

Interesting. A vampyre with a conscience. Or rather, the vampyre who had tried to murder me with her bare hands had a conscience.

Could my life be any more strange?

“The rules are simple,” I said as I led her to the back corner where an iron door halted our progress. “Do not touch anything unless I expressly say otherwise. Do not move anything. Do not take anything with you.”

I paused to see if she was listening to my instructions.

“Aye, aye, captain,” she said, a single brow raised.

“This is serious,” I countered. “You need to respect our hallowed ground.”

“Have I behaved otherwise thus far?”

Fine. She had a point.

“Just keep your hands to yourself. ”

I doubted a snort could be counted as acknowledgement, but I let it slide. The pads of my fingers tingled as I placed them against the iron door and a faint glow shimmered over the latch.

The vault opened in front of us, familiar like a strong hug and filled with every little thing my ancestors had cherished.

It smelled like them, like home, like the incense they had favored over the centuries.

I took in a deep breath and felt their embrace as I stepped into the room, the torch in my hands casting the contents in a golden glow.

Everything was in its assigned place. Nothing had been touched over the years. I took a brief inventory as I looked over the cabinets and lockers, checking that the most important tokens still sat behind their warded glass cases.

From the corner of my eye, I watched Jinn move around with her hands still firmly in her pockets. Perhaps she had chosen to heed my warning after all.

I ducked low beneath the broad oak table that stood in the middle of the room and pulled out a grimoire that had once been a part of the original Layng coven’s most prized possessions.

The ink had faded and the edges of the paper were in tatters, but the words were still legible.

Old Scots, however, was painfully hard to read.

“What are these?” Jinn asked, her fingers hovering over a glass panel. She wasn’t touching it, and for that, I was grateful.

I set the book down gently on the table and padded across the room.

There were no locks on the cabinets and no keyhole to access the contents inside. The glass was reinforced with a spell that would repel anyone that dared to touch it with malicious intent.

A small part of me wished to see what would happen if Jinn placed her fingers against it. She had been a model of calm—after trying to kill me, of course—and while I personally couldn’t gauge her true intent, magick certainly could.

But that would be cruel. Besides, if she harbored ill intentions against me and was subsequently thrown across the room, I’d have to rethink trying to help her.

And there goes early retirement.

I placed my palm flat against the glass, letting it warm to my heat. There was a moment’s pause before the outline of my fingers turned a deep orange-gold and the glass popped open with a snick.

“These are one of our most prized possessions,” I said, reaching for the stack closest to me. “We call them olaichuvadi or palm leaf manuscripts in English. When my ancestors got off the ship, they had these and little else with them.”

Gently, I let the pad of my thumb run over the grooves of the inscriptions.

The ink had long since faded, but the traditional way that these were made ensured they lasted a long while.

We had old records written in Tamil that described the process for anyone that might need to restore them in the future.

As a teenager, I’d spent my afternoon reading every log and diary entry in this room.

The process of creating olaichuvadi was a sacred one.

Palm leaves were hand-picked and harvested before being softened in hot water and dried to make them pliable for inscribing.

Traditionally, a sharp stylus made of reeds was used to carve the letters into the leaf, creating deep grooves.

A natural dye was then applied to fill the grooves with color.

The creation of olaichuvadi had been political, or so Elder Baanu had written in her diary. Only men had the honor of creating these manuscripts—usually used for josiyam or astrology—and they were often from a certain caste.

The act of creating our traditional spellbook had been my elders’ act of rebellion. Not only did they push against the idea that only certain castes could handle sacred manuscripts, but they also asserted that women could do it, too.

Rebellion runs in my blood.

“It does indeed,” Jinn agreed, and I realized I must have been thinking too loudly again.

“These are sacred,” I explained, flipping the page.

“The inscriptions are a step-by-step tutorial on how to cast a spell and each sheaf of olaichuvadi was written specifically for different aspects of life. The one I’m holding is for health.

We also have wealth, family, sins, harvest, and so many others. ”

“I don’t see anything,” Jinn said, squinting in the dim light.

“That’s because you need to have our blood.” The words sent a little shiver through me. “Only members of our coven can see the inscriptions. They would be useless to anyone else.”

I eyed her sharply. “So don’t steal them.”