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 palpitationsand 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 theor 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 thetrash 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.
As a bonus, he’d probably fix the whole unlovable-and-alone-and-broke thing, I figured, because he’d want to live an enjoyable life in my body. And even though the guy at the legal aid clinic had totally struck out on doing anything about the glowing orange logos, surely a demon would be able to get rid of those, too.
One of the few readable pages in the book had a spell I thought would work for me. According to the crabbed text, it’d summon a demon who would “enter in and take complete possession of the body to use as he doth will it and force the will to bend to his own.” It also promised he’d “fill the body with his vitality,” which had to encompass curing headaches, right?
I sat down at my kitchen table with my cup of tea, took a bracing sip, and laid out the spell and its components, which I’d put together a few weeks ago in a fit of nostalgia and longing.
First, a selection of herbs and spices: basil, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, and cayenne pepper that I’d scraped out ofthe bottoms of a few different jars in my cabinets. They’d have to do, whatever. I didn’t have the cash for better. The spice aisle at the store might as well be called the bankruptcy aisle. And it wasn’t like using high-quality spell components had done much for me in the past.
Then the spell had called for, of all things, the intestines of a sheep. I mean…ewww, and that was a terrible pun, so—yuck. Not happening. I’d done the best I could, given the limitations of my squeamishness and the discount grocery outlet two blocks down from my apartment, and grabbed a can of menudo soup. Maybe extra hot and spicy would be a plus for summoning a demon.
Olive oil was next, but I’d opted not to buy any of that, either. I had a can of spray-on avocado oil I used for when I heated up takeout leftovers in a frying pan, and that had to do.
“The raw, wet, pulsating flesh of a luscious oyster” was next on the list. By this point, I’d started side-eyeing the writer of this spell pretty hard, but I was determined to get at least some version of everything, even if I wasn’t going to spend much money. Luckily, I’d found a small flat can of smoked oysters on a dusty shelf near the menudo.
Last of all, the spell demanded “the supplicant’s sweet salt.” That one had really confused me. None of the spells I’d used before had included that.
In the end, I’d decided to put some of the fancy Himalayan pink salt my sister had given me last Yule into a bowl with a glob of honey on top. Honey seemed more magic-appropriate than cane sugar from a bag. Even if it came out of a plastic bear.
With all of it arranged in the spell’s mandated concentric circles, I stepped back from the table, slugged the rest of my tea, and fumbled around in the junk drawer. There were a few battered tea lights in there, plus a box of birthday candles,and I managed to get the four cardinal points plus two extras representing me and “the flame of my desire.” At the last moment, I switched two of them so that my “desire” would be one of the tea lights instead of a pink striped birthday candle with remnants of chocolate frosting on the bottom. That just felt too pathetic.
Although I’d have murdered a chocolate cake right then.
Focus, David.
I lit the candles, tilted the spell toward their light and squinted—with a spike of pain, and oh, this was not doing my hopefully fading headache any favors—and read the spell aloud in as strong and sonorous a voice as I could project.
