I’ve been told from an early age that magic wrangling is a science. Color me skeptical. It’s not that I don’t believe it’s a science. It’s that, for me, the whole process is really more of a hit or miss, try until you die proposition. It’s like I’m missing something that will make it easier. As if someone forgot to give me my magic wand when I reached my eighteenth birthday and came into my powers.

Or rather, my powers came into me. With a crash, thump, grab your rump kind of unexpectedness that left me hanging over the toilet horking and holding my head with both hands as it tried to split in two.

Even now, five years later, I still get the migraines. I wish I could say they’ve gotten easier over time. And maybe they have. But if you’re making a comparison between a tsunami and a level 5 hurricane, it’s really a distinction without a whole lot of difference for the people getting pounded by weather. Well, except one might kill you faster.

I’m thinking my shelf life might be a little bit longer these days, though I couldn’t prove it.

At the moment, with a thousand tiny gnomes wearing spiked golf shoes and using pickle forks as walking sticks dancing on my brain, I was thinking it might be preferable to die faster anyway.

The world suddenly erupted in a series of explosions which had a familiar cadence to them. I hid under my long, brown hair and fought my lids to get them to open. But they fought back, eventually snapping closed again as the explosions stopped and the door my intruder had been banging on swung slowly open. “Naida? Are you awake?”

All evidence to the contrary, I was, unfortunately, awake. I grunted something even I couldn’t decipher and my torturer took it as permission to come into my room.

“I closed up downstairs. Do you want me to make you some tea?”

My lips moved and more words nobody could understand eased through them. Fortunately, my loyal, if slightly annoying, assistant understood Migrainish Gibberish.

“I felt the magic arrive a few minutes ago, so I went ahead and closed up,” she cheerfully said as she picked up my teapot and proceeded to bang out the Star-Spangled Banner with it on my stovetop.

Not really, of course. But only because she wasn’t musically inclined and couldn’t recreate the Star-Spangled Banner if her life depended on it.

“Ugh!” I said, hoping she could interpret that single non-word as “Please try to be quieter. My head is killing me.”

Bang! “Oh say…” Crash “…can you see…” Clang “by the dawn’s early light…”

“Sebille!”

She jerked to a halt as I sat bolt upright in my bed, my blue eyes flying open with outrage. I immediately regretted the decision to move, my brain pulsing unhappily inside my head and the soldiers with pickle forks breaking into a rowdy rendition of the Irish Chicken Dance. “You’re killing me.”

True to form, my non-serious friend simply rolled her almost iridescent green eyes. “Drama much?”

I put my head into my hands and groaned. “Why do I bother?”

A steaming mug appeared in front of my face. The sweet, floral scent undulated toward my nostrils in a siren song I could not resist. Taking the mug, I sniffed first, letting the sweet deliciousness infuse my sinuses.

The headache eased a bit just from that sniff, and by the time I’d drained the mug a few minutes later, the pain was gone.

I sighed. “Are you sure you’re not a witch? Tea never works this well when I make it.”

Sebille dropped onto the edge of my bed. “You know I’m not a witch. I’m just tea-talented.”

I would have sighed but the extra air rushing through my system probably would have enraged the soldiers with pickle forks. “Thank you. I was working up the courage to make myself some when you assaulted my door.”

Sebille shook her head. “You always exaggerate so.”

I glowered at her. “And you have zero compassion.”

Shrugging, she tugged a strand of her bright red hair before tucking it behind a pointed ear. “That is unfortunately true.”

No remorse. Which, BTW, perfectly matched her lack of compassion.