Page 1 of My Demon Neighbor
One
Pythor
I couldn't do it.I just couldn't.
It would be so easy. All I had to do was change into my incorporeal form, and walk straight through the wall of my living room, across the pathway, and through the wall of his living room, and I could figure out just what was wrong with my neighbor. Why did he insist on playing music in the middle of the night?
To be fair, he didn't play it too loud, and it wasn't ear-piercing music like heavy metal or something. He had a playlist he listened to again and again, night after night. All songs by the same pop singer, and while she wasn't bad, I was getting sick of hearing the same songs over and over and over.
Icouldput a silencing ward around my place. All it would take was a snap of my fingers. But I also couldn't.
I wasn't just a demon chilling in the human world on a vacation. I had a mission: find and capture the dark souls who'd escaped from the Burning Chasm... and the demon Mammon, who'd gone dark at some point without me or any of the other demons realizing.
I couldn't put up a silencing ward, because what if the dark souls passed by, and I didn't hear them because of it? I knew the likelihood was low, but it wasn't zero, and that meant I couldn't do it.
I'd been trying to convince myself to walk over to his place in my incorporeal form—which would make me invisible as well as untouchable—to do a little reconnaissance, but I just couldn't. As much as my neighbor drove me up the wall with his oddities, I couldn't encroach on his privacy like that. His home was his domain, and if I wasn't a demon with heightened senses, he'd be a model neighbor.
The only reason his...actions annoyed me was because I was a demon. If I was just another human, I'd never hear the music he played every night, and the lights all around his porch and inside his house—that he kept turned on all fucking night—wouldn't bother me through the thick, dark curtains I'd bought. A few times, I'd flicked those lights off with my magic, but it was like it'd woken him up instantly, because they'd turned back on a few minutes later.
I didn't know what his deal was, why he insisted on doing these things, but I was going to figure it out.
A few days ago, I'd gone to the demon realm to take a nap in my familiar, comfortable room, and Eshim had come by with his human mate. His mate had suggested I try talking to my neighbor and telling him that his lights and music were messing with my sleep, and I thought I might have to find a way to do that.
The problem with that was that my neighbor never left his house. Ever.
I'd only recently moved to this house a few months ago. While it had been around nine months since we demons moved to the human realm, I'd started off in an apartment a few miles from here. But I got bored of the place after a while, and the pesky neighbors who were far too friendly for my tastes—the only people I was friendly with were my fellow demons, and the people at the community center—so when I saw this place on sale, I snatched it up.
It was a nice house, and if not for my neighbor, I'd be perfectly content living here for the rest of my stay. Was this karma because I wasn't friendly to my last neighbors?
I shook my head, then checked my phone. My neighbor was taking up far too much space in my head. I needed to stop thinking about him and focus on other, more important things.
Like the fact that I was going to be late for my shift at the community center. Being a demon, I didn't need to work, which was why I instead volunteered. It was a way to pass the time, and I also enjoyed helping people.
My reasons weren't completely altruistic, but the people atthe center were far more tolerable than most of the other humans I interacted with. They seemed more real to me, more... relatable, in a way the people living in this high-class gated community didn't.
Leaving my house, I locked up—not that anyone would be able to get in my place without me knowing—then went down the porch steps. While I could just teleport right from my living room to the closest secluded place near the center, I preferred to at least get out of the house and walk out of the gate before doing it, so the other humans wouldn't think I was also a recluse like my neighbor.
I had to make sure I didn't stand out in any way, because humans couldn't know what I was.
Sticking my keys in my pocket, I glanced up and saw a car parked in front of my neighbor's place. It was a vehicle that returned every weekend, sometimes staying all day, but today was the first time I caught a glimpse of the person who drove it.
She was a few inches shorter than me, but appeared quite strong for a human. She had long, bright pink hair that reminded me of the sugary confection Calux's new child seemed to love, and a lot of piercings. She had three in each ear, and two in the right nostril. I bit back a smirk as I realized she looked like someone had smashed my two demon friends, Elva and Kali, into one.
As I watched, she juggled far too many shopping bags, containers, and what looked like blank canvases as she tried to close the car door with her foot, and I hurried over, closing the car door for her and catching a container—that seemed to be full of cookies—just as it toppled off the top of her stack.
"Fucking hell," she muttered, then glanced at me, a smile lighting up her face as her blue eyes roamed over me. She clearly liked what she saw—which seemed to be the common reaction among most humans—as she gave me a second onceover, and I placed the container on top of her stack, watching for a moment to make sure it wouldn't fall again. "Thanks."
"You're welcome," I said, and she blinked, then carefully held a hand out, three shopping bags hanging off the wrist as I shook it.
"I'm Vanessa."
"Pythor."
"That's an unusual name."
"It is."
An awkward silence hung, and she took her hand back after a moment, then tilted her head toward my neighbor's house.
