Page 3 of Demon Next Door

“Who—the fuck—fuck,” I gasped, staggering back and slamming into the wall, bonking my head on the cutting board I had hanging from a nail. “It worked. I can’t believe it—”

And then I froze in place, the words withering on my tongue, as all of my brain functions went on standby.

In the low, flickering light of the array of small candles, the owner of the voice was a huge, terrifying shadow filling the kitchen doorway.

It stepped forward, looming over me, head nearly brushing the doorframe.

Well, he stepped forward.

Definitely he. If the broad shoulders, masculine bare chest, and deep voice hadn’t been good clues, the enormous bulge in the front of his tight black leather pants made it clear.

He had to be nearly seven feet tall, skin a light reddish-bronze, his shoulders and chest and arms bulging with muscles that would’ve had Kenny or Scotty curled up in the corner crying.

Long, long legs encased in those pants—the only thing he wore.

And a harsh-featured face with—yes, a hint of fang peeking out between firm lips.

Glittering, metallic dark-bronze eyes. Hair like flame, vermilion and burgundy, curling around his temples.

A demon. I’d actually summoned a real live demon. Using smoked oysters and birthday candles.

For fuck’s sake, it’d never worked at all when I was wearing my snazzy velvet cloak. Now he decided to show up?

Although if this particular demon had made an appearance when I’d started trying to summon one at fifteen, I’d have passed out cold from terror.

Even now, as a grown-ass adult, I slumped as my knees tried their best to give out. I pressed my damp palms to the wall behind me and stayed upright through sheer willpower.

“Well?” he demanded abruptly, voice a cranky rumble. “Are you all right or not?”

All right? Was I? For now, I guessed, unless he decided to do something horrible to me.

My nose twitched from the scorched scent of fire and stone and something even spicier than all the nonsense I’d put on my kitchen table.

Definitely a demon, even though I could hardly believe it.

Nothing else could possibly have a scent like that.

It was the most enticing thing I’d ever encountered: the smell of pure temptation.

“I didn’t think you were supposed to have your own body,” I managed to say.

The demon took another step forward, the battered old wood floor creaking under his weight.

I squeaked and shrank back further against the wall, shoulder blades aching.

He stopped abruptly, brow furrowed, and crossed his arms. The way his pecs and biceps rippled and bulged would’ve given Kenny and Scotty some kind of religious experience, or maybe an aneurysm.

Gods, I wished they were here to see this and feel deeply, horrifically inadequate by comparison.

Although with my luck, the three of them would all go bond over the keto diet or something and leave me here with the oysters and my migraines.

Actually, no. As I recalled from Kenny’s endless monologues, the oysters were keto. So they’d even take those.

“You’re definitely not all right,” the demon said. “In the head, if nothing else. Are you seriously afraid of me? You summoned me! Not that we don’t get that a lot. People are obnoxious.”

Not right in the—obnoxious—how dare he!

“I beg your pardon,” I sputtered, stung enough to push off the wall toward him, heedless of the potential danger. “My head’s fine! Mentally, I mean,” I added a bit anticlimactically, as I remembered that I had in fact summoned him because my head was the opposite of fine.

The demon uncrossed his arms, hands going to his hips in a posture uncannily reminiscent of my great-aunt Barbara. He shot a pointed look at the clear evidence of insanity laid out on the small table, and then leveled his gaze on me again.

“Yes, clearly,” he said, and I winced. “I mean, this,” and he waved a hand at the guttering candles and stale spices of my spell, “is pathetic and kind of insulting. Canned soup? And that—what the fuck is that?” He leaned down and peered into the bowl of pink salt and honey.

“You finally make it work, after so many times—is that supposed to be a joke?”

He glanced sharply up at me, frowning, and I fell back against the wall again under the force of those gleaming eyes.

“It’s—sweet and salt,” I stammered. “Like it says. In the book? Seriously, aren’t you supposed to be here to take me over and, and, I don’t know, possess me?”

The demon blinked at me slowly, crimson lashes casting long shadows on his cheekbones. And then he reached over the table and twisted the dimmer switch on the wall, flooding the kitchen with an eye-watering glare.

“Ow!” I said, throwing up a hand in front of my face, temples throbbing and everything going a little sideways around me. “Shit, warn a guy!”

“The mood lighting was starting to feel a little bit clichéd,” he said, and those words in his raspy, demonic growl were the weirdest thing I’d ever heard.

I dropped my hand and stared at him, as he continued with, “For one thing, of course I have my own body. For two, shouldn’t you be naked and on your knees?

Or on your back? Can you cross your ankles behind your head? You do yoga.”

My stare turned into an outright gape. I opened my mouth, closed it again, blinked—and no, I still had a giant half-naked demon crowded into my tiny kitchen telling me he expected me to be on my knees, and also asking if I did yoga.

No, he’d stated that I did yoga. How the fuck?

“How the fuck do you know I do yoga? Have you been watching me? No, stupid question, I just summoned you a minute ago, but I mean, do demons have powers like—”

“Of course I haven’t been watching you. Why would I have been watching you?” he said in a hurry, and he was looking off to the side, not meeting my eyes. Weird. “I walked through your living room. And I, ah, saw your yoga mat.”

“Oh.” I swallowed, feeling my cheeks and neck go all flushed. “Well, yes. I do yoga. And that’s my yoga mat,” I added lamely.

He raised one thick, dark-red eyebrow and looked down his nose at me…way, way down, because I scraped five foot six in my favorite boots.

“You dodged the really important question,” he said, flashing a wicked, teasing, fanged smile that hit me somewhere in the solar plexus. And lower. Deeper. “Can you cross your ankles behind your head or not?”

Suddenly I could almost see and feel it: my back curled and my legs hiked all the way up, the way my feet would be caught between my head and the pillow, the compression of my lungs that’d have me panting as I peered up at him between my thighs.

Big, hot hands on the curves of my ass, a gleaming grin and glowing eyes and the terrifying jut of his massive…

“Oh, gods,” I whimpered, and snapped back to the present, panting as much as if I really had been…

wherever I’d been, with heat pooling in the pit of my gut and behind my balls, all molten and tight and shivery.

My palms slipped on the wall, sweatier than ever.

Seriously? I didn’t even want that. Kenny had told me I looked ridiculous in positions like that because I was too chubby and it gave me rolls in unattractive places, and he wasn’t the only one. And yet…

I blinked, and there he was, right there, with one of his hands braced by my head as he leaned down and in.

My eyes fluttered almost shut, and I peeked at him through my lashes.

The radiating warmth of his body toasted me from head to toe.

It was better than any heating pad in the world.

His eyes glowed faintly, like the coals in the depths of a fire, the way they had in my little vacation from reality.

“You smell like you’re ready to take me inside you,” he said, all low and raspy, his breath brushing my lips, a delicate caress that made my skin tingle. “Here? Or in your bedroom? Humans care about things like that, right?”

Ready to take me inside you .

My brain went staticky, a radio tuned to whatever frequency corresponded to a demon appearing in my kitchen hell-bent, so to speak, on…hell-bending me? Over. Bending me over.

Oh, gods, I’d lost it. And my whole body had started to quiver.

He leaned nearer. All my hair stood on end. The parts of my skin nearest to him got prickly and tender, every cell in my body responding to him.

But…no, no, I had to focus, I didn’t want that at all, I wanted him to possess me, not…

Oh, fuck.

Possess had more than one connotation. I’d screwed up the spell somehow.

Or misunderstood it completely in the first place.

Damn it, I knew that fucking spicy menudo had been a bad idea.

“Wait,” I gasped, as his free hand curled around my hip, hot as a brand even through my clothes. A shockwave coursed down all my nerves. His hand was so big. Gods. “Wait, that’s not why I—”

My next words faded into a garbled moan as the demon leaned all the way down, curving his huge body over me, and pressed his face against my throat. A hot, wet tongue slipped out. And out. And…up, fuck, flicking my earlobe and teasing the shell of my ear.

“How long is that thing?” I choked, my hands coming up of their own accord and grabbing onto his shoulders. Granite under satin. Fucking gods, he felt good. But this wouldn’t help me! I wanted him to take over, make my life easy, and cure my migraines!

But he didn’t seem eager to move in and control my body—unless you counted the enormous erection that brushed my stomach as he shifted his weight and leaned even closer.

Strike good . It felt incredible.

When he chuckled against my skin, that felt even better. His tongue whipped back into his mouth, leaving my skin tingling in its wake. “How long do you want it to be?”

My eyes crossed and rolled back in my head simultaneously, something I hadn’t even known was possible. Need clenched the pit of my stomach. My body clenched up in all kinds of places, in fact.

Well, mostly one place.

Gods, I was so empty. He could fill me. Impale me, heat me from the inside …

“…possess you completely, just like you wanted,” he finished in a growl against my neck.

His words. All of it. Echoing in my ears and in my mind—taking over my mind, only not the way I’d expected.

The world had gone all soft and gooey around me, morphing into strange shapes.

He had to be messing with my head. Hypnotizing me.

“I’ll forgive you for the pink salt because you taste even sweeter than I thought you would. ”

There was a hard, muscular arm around my waist, and I was moving, his teeth scraping against my neck, veins throbbing where he threatened them with his fangs.

The tiny frisson of pain and the possibility of imminent death shot adrenaline straight down to my balls, and behind them.

You couldn’t actually be in gasping pain from how much you needed a cock up your ass, could you?

I wouldn’t have thought so. But I squirmed and whimpered, trying to cross my legs to alleviate the desperate tightness between them, my fingers clawing into the demon’s chest.

A low growl rumbled out of that chest, and he clutched me closer, plastering me against acres of hard muscle.

I blinked, and that was my living room ceiling, my head tipped back on his shoulder.

Was I walking? Not sure, but I blinked again and moaned as everything tilted and I caught a dizzying glimpse of the nerdy poster on my wall that Kenny had always made fun of me for, even though he liked the movies too. So sue me, Sean Bean was so hot.

This demon was even hotter, literally and metaphorically.

And he was laying me down on my bed, hence the tilting.

“You’re going to belong to me after this, David,” he said, tone matter-of-fact, and I blinked again, not sure if I was hallucinating the reddish glow in his eyes or not. “I’m finally here, and I’m going to stay inside you. Until you can’t feel anything but me.”

The last of my resistance evaporated—not that I’d been putting up much of a fight.

Part of me had wanted to, though. Intended to, anyway. Considered it in the abstract. Not because I didn’t want this, but because it felt so much like an accidental pity fuck.

But now—that really sounded like he meant to possess me after all, didn’t it? Maybe. It could be read that way. He’d fuck me, and that was how he’d get…inside. Maybe his body would disappear, or something.

Damn it, I didn’t have a lot of leisure time to think it through. He’d already knelt between my sprawled legs and popped the button on my jeans, wrapping one big hand around my left thigh to hold me in place while he tugged down my zipper with the other.

My cock strained at the front of my pants, and I groaned as it slipped through the gap in the denim, tenting the blue plaid cotton of my dorky boxers. Fuck, I really would’ve worn something else if I’d known I’d be getting ravished by a demon tonight instead of inventorying used cookbooks.

I hadn’t expected this to work, just like it hadn’t worked the hundred other times.

Why had it? It nagged at me, along with how he seemed to know things about me…

like my name, but I couldn’t think or focus, because he’d moved closer, and his knees were pressing my legs apart, pulling my ass open and stretching the tender skin behind my balls. Gods, I needed him, I needed…

No, I had to—I had questions first!

“I won’t be able to feel my migraines with you inside me, right?” I slurred, trying to push myself up onto my elbows. “And wait, how do you know my name?”

The demon looked up and bared his teeth at me in something that could’ve been a smile. “I won’t hurt you,” he said, which didn’t actually answer either of my questions. “And my name is Xan, if you care,” he added.

“Xan,” I whispered, trying my best to try to duplicate the odd, throat-clearing pronunciation of the first sound. “Nice to meet you.”

His eyes widened and he let out a low growl that froze me in place like prey and raised goosebumps on my arms. And then he wrapped his huge hands around the waist of my jeans and boxers and yanked them down.