It had been one year. One long, long year. One fucking year.<em>I’d be growing cobwebs down there if I didn’t take care of myself.</em>Tegan thought, as she swept a batch of spider-silk away from the books in the storage room. She sighed, fingers running over the cracked leather tomes with indistinguishable lettering on the back. It was Old English. More like German than anything else. Why did the museum even have the books? They weren’t out with the medieval section, and they certainly weren’t going to start a witchcraft exhibit any time soon. The outcry would be overwhelming.<br/>Sweeping her long, copper bangs away from her forehead, and squinted at a particularly heavy volume. Nobody even looked in on the books spare her. Every week she came down to the unwanted artifacts room, and dusted. Every two months she took inventory. She was supposed to be a history student, not a maid. “Seriously, this blows.” She muttered, punctuating her observation with a sneeze.<br/>She eyed the slab again, and then around her. There were no cameras down here, even though it was a big museum, even though these rejected artifacts were worth a small fortune. A mischievous thought snaked into her mind:<em>take a book.</em>The museum did treat her like shit. They shafted her at every chance they got, and they sent her to dust the not-quite-exciting-or-PC-enough artifacts half of the time.<em>I barely get paid enough to work here…</em><br/>A sly grin curved her pink lips, and she removed the book from the shelf. Making sure to dust extra-well, to avoid a silhouette belying the book’s lack of presence, she carefully put the tome in her backpack, and finished up in the room. It was time for her to go home, anyways. She was tense, walking towards the employee's exit, and smiled wryly at the catatonic student security guard.<em>Bingo.</em><br/>“Yo, you stealing anything?” He asked, barely stirring himself.<br/>“Just an old book on witchcraft.” She replied honestly, grinning with a shrug, as if she were joking. The boy rolled his eyes, and waved her through.<br/>“See you tomorrow, Ty!” She called back, and ran towards the bus stop, fishing her metro pass from her back pocket, almost faint with relief.<em>Are you serious? This is nuts. I did NOT just steal a humongous book from the museum I’m working for!</em><br/>Her hair curled in the August humidity as she rode back towards her apartment building, and she shivered, stepping into her room and carefully taking the book. It was the biggest and creepiest of the bunch. And she stole it.<em>Now what?</em>She couldn’t put it on e-bay.<br/><em>You could read it,</em>the same sneaky voice whispered in the back of her head. She shivered at the serpentine thought, but looked at the oversized book. It would be more interesting than doing nothing.<br/><br/>Tegan hit pay dirt a month and a half later. October 17th. A spell to summon an incubus. ‘Two weeks… that gives me just enough time….’<br/><br/>Hallowe’en. Samhein. Tegan slowly poured salt on her kitchen floor. A circle five feet a cross, and then a star within. Her eyes brushed over the still-unfamiliar words of the spell, in a vain attempt to understand more. She’d gathered everything she thought she needed over the past two weeks: salt, candles, a dagger, representatives of earth, wind, fire and water. It was time. Slowly, she lay the tome out, chanting out the spell, moving around the circle in a dance, her nude thighs brushing, hands sliding over her chest and belly.<br/>She paid respect to the directions, the elements, laying a representative at each directional peak, and she prayed to anyone that would listen, for a companion for the night. A really good lay and a gentleman. Her hand slid down her body and cupped herself as she pleaded; head tilted back, her words penetrating down into hell, as opposed to the direction she thought.<br/>She’d learned Old English from Google, and had been able to understand most of the spell. There were bits that evaded her, but she ignored them. She had to do it when the worlds were closest together, or she would have to wait another stinking year for Hallowe’en.<br/>Holding her palm over the pentagram, she cried out, sliding the dagger along her heart-line, staring to the ceiling. She fisted her hand tight, squeezing<br/>One…<br/>Two…<br/>Three drops of her blood to hit the center of the star before stepping out of the circle, and backed away, staring, heart thundering, daring to hope, hating herself for this ridiculous exercise.<br/><br/>Little did she know that what she had stolen was one of the basest, most arcane, and most evil black magic codexes ever recovered. She had summoned a lover all right; an incubus. Furthermore, not only had she summoned an incubus, she had bound It to herself with those three fatal drops of blood unto death. The chunk of text she had misunderstood was this “Use the blood of a sacrifice, and keep it close at hand. To banish the creature, slit the sacrifice’s throat at dawn in the Sacred Circle, and the blood in the creature’s veins will die with the sacrifice, and it will be banished for whence it came.”  All she had understood from it was the occasional mention of chicken.