Page 3 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
Mateo waves the old lady over and helps her before returning to orders. He needs their soothing, robotic simplicity. Printing, cutting, and laminating is the only therapy he can afford, but he can’t shake Topher’s nervous energy. It isn’t until the old lady exits, door slamming against the stopper, that he realizes the jittery sensation has morphed into an actual headache.
Pulse picking up, he automatically runs his tongue over his teeth to check for sharpness, which he finds, but he’s not angry, so it explains nothing. What the hell is happening? He puts both hands on his forehead, like he expects to find a gaping wound to explain the strange ache. Not just strange. Unprecedented. In his twenty-three years of life, he’s never once had a headache.
One of the benefits to Mateo’safflictionis that he’s incredibly resilient. His body can’t hold on to discomfort or injury. Never had a cold. Doesn’t worry about flu season. Even a broken bone will mend in about an hour.
This has nothing to do with his novice magic and everything to do with the fact that his mother turned him into the clandestine vessel for an ancient evil. And no, he doesn’t know why. She never wanted to talk about it, and she isn’t the kind of person who you ask things twice. His infant body must have been the only human-shaped receptacle on hand. Not that he’s got a whole complex about it or anything.
Which means this sudden headache is amazingly alarming. It’s gotta be a magic attack. Probably. Like, ninety percent sure. It’d be weird if he started getting normal-people headaches out of the blue, wouldn’t it? Unless the headache is a new symptomof his degrading human body losing out against the thing inside of him—like the dreams, the fugue states, and the shadows in mirrors and at the corners of his vision.
This thought’s too real, so he focuses on the magic-attack angle again. Maybe someone’s found him. Maybe he’s been sloppy in his warding and someone picked up his demonic scent. But the shop’s empty except for Topher, who’s staring dimly into the bin of poster tubes like he can’t work out their function.
Topher.
Mateo’s mom used to tell him there were demon hunters out there—to get him to do the dishes. Maybe Topher’s a demon-hating wizard and this ishismagic headache attack.
But why the hell would a demon hunter get a job here?
Not that Mateo can talk.
The headache is very real, though. Something is happening, and the backs of his eyes are throbbing in a way he’s never experienced. If this is somehow Topher causing it, then he’s way worse than Shitty Brian.
CHAPTER TWO
An hour of careful, side-eyed observation and Mateo’s bored again.
It’s not that he wants a demon hunter fight. Zero idea what that would even be, especially when they’re both of thenever thrown a punch in their livesphysique. But he’d welcome it over the newly discovered joy of performing his job with a raging migraine.
He tells Topher to take a lunch, and all Topher does is speed walk up the street like an uptight, suburban housewife—all jarring, high-stress motions. No threat there, just ridiculous looking. The tension in Mateo’s skull slacks with every power-walked step between them. As far as evidence of aggression goes, it feels circumstantial.
Pulling out a granola bar—hemp, sunflower, and pumpkin seed because Ophelia does the grocery shopping, and she’s disgusting—he leans on the counter and tries to reason out the unreasonable as a lone customer circles the bubble mailers.
If it’s an attack, it’s a weak one. Only mildly inconvenient and defeated by clocking out and going home. Could it be that Topher’sso annoyingly useless that he’s forced a normal human headache through a demonically altered body? Plausible but not likely.
It really probably is his human body dying around him.
Demon, sprite, faerie, god. They’re all technically the same thing: an entity from another plane of reality. The ones dubbeddemonare just the ones most incompatible with human life.
Mateo’s housing one of those.
A typical demon possession has some notable hallmarks: All-black eyes, bone-breaking contortions, vomiting demon gunk, and speaking in tongues. RealThe Exorciststuff. The human body can’t handle containing any of these creatures. It starts to break down pretty rapidly—props to his sucky mom on mitigating that. He’s lived for over two decades since she locked something inside of him. Which has to be the worst world record to hold.
But whatever she did is failing.Missing time, seeing things, invasive and violent thoughts, loss of control of his own bodykind of failing.
And using magic makes it worse.
Which begs the question: why would he want to do magic on the side if doing magic makes it worse?
Funnily enough, time makes it worse too. He can either wait to be overtaken by the thing inside him or scrape together enough money with the only questionable skill he has and hire someone to get it out. And the people who might be familiar with his specific problem—and not immediately kill him for it—are expensive and far away.
A real damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario, but the literal kind because no signs point to good stuff happening to his soul once he fully loses control of himself.
A soft buzz, and he scoops up his phone from the counter, knowing it’s Ophelia texting because he doesn’t communicatewith anyone else. It’s a picture of what must be their last DRIVE! Energy drink, held upside down and empty over the sink. Mateo fishes out his wallet, counts six dollars, does a little rent-dinner-paycheck-timing math, and then texts her back a sticker of a cartoon skeleton tenderly holding a bright pink heart.
Hemp seeds and sixteen fluid ounces of cranberry chemical is Ophelia. He wouldn’t tolerate such a hypocritical combination from anyone else.
Thumb hovers over the keyboard as he considers asking for help. They’re codependent but in a cute, probably psychologically healthy way, and he feels better when she’s involved. But what would he even ask? Hey, could you flip through one of those books in terrible old Spanish that we’re both bad at reading because our parents never taught us Spanish and check the index fordemon vessel gets a headache from a potential demon hunter with no life skills?
That isn’t what he’d ask, of course. He’d ask her to swing by. One look and she’d know if Topher was of the spell-wielding variety. Ophelia possesses both horrible taste in drinks and the Sight with a capitalS. But he can’t risk it. Not when he doesn’t know if Topher’s a threat.
