How to Hack a Wedding ft. Lucifer (ONC 2024)

1. summoning & shaming

I lit the fourth candle and stood back to assess my work.

The rug had been removed from the middle of the floor, and I had managed to draw the most perfect circle right in the centre of the apartment. Four candles had been placed facing the cardinal directions. The two pints of pig blood poured in a chalice of tinted glass glistened in the sunlight penetrating the windows and the partially open curtains. (That had been the most awkward purchase. The butcher had kept giving me nasty stares.)

I placed a raw processed chicken in the centre of the circle, and drew a pentagram around it.

Everything was now in place.

I took out the crumpled piece of paper from the back pocket of my faded blue jeans, and straightened it.

My mind wandered back to Elaine, and her conviction about demons making the perfect dates. To be fair, she had actually meant it romantically and not socially. The demon she usually summoned was an incubus, and if her blissful expression was anything to go by, he knew how to use his tongue, and his tail, just the way she liked.

My situation, however, was not as simple as one of bodily pleasure.

My sister, Paris (our parents were raging alcoholics and we often cracked jokes about how they must've thrown darts at the world map to pick out the names of their children- Paris, Sydney and London), was getting married next month. She had been the driving force behind convincing me to RSVP with a plus one and showing up with a date, now that she was getting married and London was bringing her new beau.

I couldn't stick to them, and not socialise with anyone else, like the fifth wheel I desperately wanted to be.

Elaine, Paris' best friend and maid of honour, had overheard that conversation last week, and had offered her own solution.

Go summon a demon.

I had originally scoffed at her idea, letting her know in painstaking details how demons couldn't possibly be real, but she had produced some hard proof in the form of photographs, videos, and a very real incubus coming to pick her up from the bakery we had been at tasting cake. She had handed me the piece of paper with the spell necessary for the summoning, letting me know that she had already memorised it and did not need it anymore.

Throwing a wink in my direction, she had gone off with her handsome boyfriend from hell.

For some reason that I couldn't quite fathom, I hadn't been able to throw the incantations away.

See, I know I don't look that bad. In fact, I would go so far as to call my face aesthetically pleasing to many. But looks had never been my point of insecurity.

I had simply always been more comfortable around computers and numbers than I had been with people. All my dates were disastrously awkward and embarrassing.

If there was an Olympics of saying or doing the worst possible thing in a given situation, I would win all the medals and then fall on the sponsors while making my way to the podium to accept my award. I was that bad.

And so, the more I thought about it, the smarter it seemed to simply summon a demon and sacrifice a couple of chickens in return for him to be my date to my sister's wedding. I did not want to risk bringing a real date and somehow managing to not only waste both of our time, but also ruin my sister's big day in the process. I had stopped underestimating the rippling effects of my actions.

If there was an opportunity to socially humiliate myself, I did. If there wasn't, I created one and then embarrassed myself, anyway.

My hands started getting clammy, crunching up the paper even further.