Demoncember writing prompt — Demon who did not bring a sweater, and is not at all prepared for how cold the mortal plane is
The succubus makes a long-drawn-out trembly noise, quivering.
Kate clears her throat a little. “Sorry,” she says, “I didn’t quite catch that.”
The demon — wedged under Kate’s chin, plastered as close to her body as it can get, the two of them huddled under a heap of every piece of bedding Kate could layer onto her bed — shifts a little. “I said I’m sorry about this,” it says, only marginally less indistinct. “I’m new.”
“It’s okay,” Kate says. This had seemed like — well, not a good idea, truthfully, but an idea the not-goodness of which was subjectively offset by just how badly Kate needed some fucking thing to get her unstuck from her interminable straight-girl crush....
(“The risks to your soul are massively overblown,” Sarah had said airily, on a girls’ night out a few weeks ago. “Typical religio-cultural suppression of positive sexual agency. I’ve done it myself loads of times—” and slopped her cocktail on herself. “Oops!”)
Unable to get the germ of the idea out of her head, she’d managed to navigate both the slings and arrows of preemptive guilt and the side-eye of her common sense, ordered the cheapest summoning kit off Amazon that didn’t look like all its customer reviews were AI-generated puff, and booked a couple of contiguous days off work in case she needed to wallow afterwards.
Neither she, nor apparently the succubus, were prepared for what happened the instant after it materialised: its pathetic wail and reflexive curl into a huddled ball. For a terrible moment, a montage of recrimination unreeled through Kate’s mind: that the demon was hiding its lingerie-clad body from her, that she’d sex trafficked an unwary supernatural entity — and then, through chattering teeth, it had managed to blurt, “C-c-cold!”
“I guess it’s warmer in…where you come from,” Kate says, for something to say, trying not to be weird about the near-naked shivering demon clinging to her.
“Yeah,” it agrees, nodding a little. “I could, um. I could make it warmer in here, but I don’t want to accidentally toast you or anything—”
“It’s winter,” Kate says. “I can’t afford to run the heating — you mean could just make the place warm?”
The succubus tentatively untucks itself from under her chin, peers out from under the blankets. “Yeah?” it says cautiously, and the air in the room flexes into Kate’s face, like a huge animal’s hot exhalation. She pushes a cautious foot out of the bed, feels the air temperature.
“You don’t do regular client discounts, do you?” she says hopefully, doing rapid mental calculations about the relative cost of demon summonings versus late capitalist survival needs extortion, and the succubus snorts in an amused way.
“I’m not being funny,” it says, “but we’re not renting out space heaters, you know? You want this place warmed up, somebody’s gotta get off—”
“Bonus,” Kate says gravely.
