Page 1 of Demon Next Door

Everyone always thought pain was the worst part of a migraine.

That is, if they even believed migraines were real. The idea that literal head pain was just figuratively in the sufferer’s head was a lot more widespread than I’d have believed without proof.

Proof like my ex-boyfriend, whose voice grated even more over the phone than it had in person during the year I’d wasted trying to live up to his expectations. It’d taken me that long to figure out that he couldn’t live up to mine, either, no matter how moderate I kept them.

“It’s seventy-five degrees out, David,” he said—shouted—into my ear, and I winced, panting through the wave of nausea brought on by the spike of pain. “No one could possibly be cold. I’m not going through all my stuff today, I’m busy. Suck it up. Use some willpower, gods.”

Willpower. Yes, of course. I counted down from five. Four, three, two, one…

“Men don’t feel pain they don’t want to feel,” he said, right on cue. “It’s biological. So like, go to your therapist, or something. I don’t even know what fucking heating pad you’re talking about, okay? Just buy one or something. I have to go.”

“Hello? Kenny? Please don’t—damn it,” I moaned, moaning again when the first moan sent a throb through my right eye, slumping down into the couch with a final, hopeless whimper.

Gods, I was like those knights in the Monty Python movie who kept saying the word that hurt them over and over again, until they were caught in an infinite feedback loop of screaming and flailing and covering their ears.

Except that for me it was moaning.

And calling my ex.

The heating pad. Ugh. I curled into a shivering ball, dropping the phone on the coffee table next to the couch and wrapping my arm around my head.

Migraines made me so cold. The pain was seriously the least of it, even though that sucked giant swinging balls, too.

It was the shivers. The queasy tilting of my stomach.

What had possessed me to think that Kenny would a) remember that we’d owned a heating pad when we lived together, b) try to find it in the stuff he’d taken from our closet without my permission, or c) spend thirty seconds of his day thinking about someone other than himself?

Maybe if the heating pad had come equipped with a mirror, a set of weights, and a flirty personal trainer named Scotty, it’d have been of some mild interest to him.

Kenny and Scotty. They probably didn’t need a heating pad at all in their migraine-free, perfectly fit and toned existence, unless it was useful for muscle aches from too much lifting.

Or no, sorry. Men didn’t feel pain unless we wanted to.

And yet they couldn’t bother to give the stupid heating pad back to me.

Buy one . Thanks a million. I’d never have thought of that on my own.

As if I could leave the house like this.

Someplace might have one available for delivery, but it’d hurt too much to try to use the app I had for groceries and stuff.

Looking at my phone was agony when the headache had really gotten its claws into me, and anyway, my vision blurred so that I couldn’t see the screen.

It made me weepy, too. Not always. But this one was turning into a real tear-jerker.

Like, how had I not known Kenny was cheating on me?

When he’d been turning me down for sex for—well, most of our relationship, actually.

And when he spent four hours a day “at the gym”?

Although sadly, they were such gym rats that they probably were working out in the traditional sense most of the time rather than having sex at Scotty’s place.

Tears trickled down the side of my nose and spread all wet and slimy over my cheek, gluing it to the tweedy fabric of the couch cushion and sticking strands of my overlong blond hair to both.

I could do better than Kenny, right? Of course I could.

Not that I had either before or after, or anything.

I had no idea why we’d been dating in the first place except that he’d suggested I blow him when we were standing near the same bar, and then we’d kind of kept hanging out, and eventually moved in together, because we both liked action movies and me blowing him. Also, his lease had expired.

But any second now, a better guy would come along, and my lack-of-love life would take a dramatic turn for the better.

Yeah. Aaany second now.

After hours, or maybe an eternity of shivering on the couch and crying, I lapsed into something like unconsciousness.

When I woke, I blinked into blurry gloom.

Somehow night had fallen. Light from the walkway outside my apartment shone in through the gaps in the vertical blinds, letting me see slivers of my living room.

I fumbled for my phone and squinted in the sudden glare of the screen.

Nearly eleven, which meant I’d been out for… a bunch of hours. Who fucking cared.

The throbbing had died down to a sullen, lurking echo of my previous misery, but I knew from experience that one wrong move would have it roaring back.

Moving like a creaky geriatric, I pushed myself up, swung my feet to the floor, and slumped there, panting.

Migraine hangovers were such a bitch—and yet another thing people didn’t believe existed.

My stomach lurched, but I needed to eat, or at least drink water, to get some strength back.

Kitchen. That meant standing up and crossing the room, but I managed it.

Turning on the kitchen light left me temporarily blind, and I staggered around with a hand shading my eyes, getting the water (which I spilled all over myself before the cup made it to my mouth), putting on the kettle (the lid clattered to the floor, reverberating in my skull, and bounced painfully off my toes), and finding a mug for some tea.

Gods, this really couldn’t go on. Over the last couple of years, my migraines had gone from once every few weeks, to once a week, to their current rate of every other day.

It was crippling. Most of the time I couldn’t go to work when I had one, I could barely work the day after, and if it got much worse I wouldn’t be able to go to work at all.

My job as a bookstore stocker and internet shipper had super flexible hours, and my boss was cool.

But he’d fire me for calling in sick eventually.

In fact, I was supposed to be there right now. But it’d need to wait for tomorrow, and I’d have to go all the way to the big central post office that had Saturday hours instead of the nice, close one…

Slumping into a chair, I dropped my head in my hands.

Ow. Okay. I still needed to move more slowly than that.

And seriously, this couldn’t go on. This much pain, this often, with no time to have a life…I was starting not to care if I lived or died.

Which scared the hell out of me.

I’d tried all the medical and pseudo-medical options to no avail. Migraine prescriptions, which gave me heart palpitations and shooting pains in my toes that lasted a week post-migraine. Massage. Acupuncture. Homeopathy.

With standard and non-standard medicine exhausted, I’d paid a well-regarded witch an eye-wateringly high fee to fix me with magic.

The no-refunds clause in her contract had been written by a very smart lawyer, I discovered, but on the bright side—literally—I now saw sparkly neon-orange auras made up of tiny logos for her magic business in my peripheral vision at the moment my headaches began, and also every day at four PM precisely.

On top of the medicine and magic, I’d tried changing my diet (sort of, because anything that didn’t include chocolate was inhumane and also I didn’t really like fruit), yoga (which had actually stuck as an enjoyable habit but didn’t do anything about the migraines), and drinking more water, usually with either coffee beans or tea leaves soaked in it for a while for some flavor. None of that had worked either.

That left me with only one idea to try.

And gods, I’d stopped doing that years ago.

Broken the addiction. Gotten over the disappointment.

Thrown out the candles and the bits of chalk and the fancy herbs and the stupid cloak I’d worn to do the rituals.

Well, the cloak was somewhere in the back of my closet, but it was like I’d thrown it out, right? Since I couldn’t see it.

I didn’t want to go down that road again, but it was this or…I didn’t want to think about the or what . Life stretched ahead of me like an endless gray tunnel with only one way out.

Maybe tonight was the night to try the last solution before I ran out of possibilities.

After the kettle boiled, I poured my tea and left it to steep while I went to find the book I’d been unable to resist snagging at work, a discard that our used book buyer had tossed into the trash due to its unsellable condition.

The mildewed cover hid a multitude of sins, including missing pages, indefinable stains, and marginalia scribbled by someone with either palsy or their eyes closed.

But I knew enough to be sure the book was legit.

All of the books I’d used over the years had been legit.

My repeated failures had been my own fault, I was sure, because other people managed to do successful summonings, didn’t they?

But maybe my current desperation would give me the boost I needed.

And besides, all of my other attempted summonings had been focused on binding a demon to my will: getting him to make me rich, or handsome, or successful.

For this one, I’d changed my objective. Instead of trying to control a demon, I’d offer to let him control me. Because at this point, I was more than willing to be possessed by a demon and be a passenger in my own body if it meant not hurting like this anymore.