The Ritual

some urgent play had been disrupted by a parent.
    Hung loosely over one of Loki’s shoulders was the dark wood of a stock and the dull gleam of gunmetal. A hunting rifle. If Loki’s white-faced devil hounds had not pulled him down,
Loki would have shot him anyway. He was not leaving here. Luke lay back and closed his eyes on a grey world that did not seem to want him in it any more.

FIFTY-SEVEN
    ‘Luke. I am having the hard time keeping you alive right now.’ Loki’s eyes were bright and blue and smiling in the beam of dusty light that fell through the
little window. Loki was in a playful mood, a good mood. Grinning, he tossed his mane of black hair over one shoulder. He didn’t seem so dour, so intensely serious now; it was as if the
arrival of Luke’s butchered friend had relieved the tension in the air. And he was drunk. Beside the closed door he had propped the rifle against the wall.
    Luke had been lying still for hours before Loki’s arrival. He could not breathe through his nose, which felt like it had swollen to four times its normal size, and his head was open like
split fruit. Both of his eyes were swollen, one nearly shut. It felt puffy. He was covered in scores of hard red itching lumps from being bitten senseless by the bugs in the hideous bed. Scores of
cuts and scratches covered his ankles and forearms, and he had not washed in a week. He stank. He was thirsty. He was hungry. He was broken. He realized he did not care about much any more.
    And he hated himself for being relieved the giant was in a good mood. And he loathed himself for feeling some gratitude towards Loki too; since they dragged him out of the forest, Loki had now
saved him from the other two twice.
    But saved me for what?
    He was tired of being helpless. Sick and tired of being sick and tired of this room, and of the stinking box bed in it, which would not dry and now reeked of his own ammonia. He had already been
exhausted by his fear and pain and wretchedness before they even found him, and now the thin, indefatigable, but ultimately futile hope that had sustained him since he had awoken in this place was
exhausting; the hope that somehow these young people would recognize some common humanity they shared with the dirty wounded man from the forest, and that upon recognizing that he was a good
person, they would let him go. Its twin, the pathetic clawing infantile hope that help from the outside world would suddenly materialize way out here, was also exhausting. Hope was now more tiring
than anything else. Its perpetual rise and fall through the terrible ache in his head, and its arrival and its disappearance while he passed in and out of consciousness, and while he moved from one
strange world to awake in another crueller place, was more painful and more hateful to endure than the sadism of these adolescent bullies.
    He supposed he was near the very end of himself.
    At last. So at last he could stop caring. And before he could start dwelling on what he would miss in his life, and who might miss him back in the world, he now decided, quite calmly,
that he just wanted it to end. And to end soon. Perhaps he could even hasten it. He smiled with broken lips.
    ‘Your tattoos are a fucking contradiction, Loki.’ His voice sounded thick, unrecognizable. Blood poured into his throat from the back of his nose and he coughed it onto his chest.
Sat up. Spat his mouth empty. Looked at Loki and suddenly hated him so intensely and desperately, that when his loathing abated his mind was clear.
    The giant paused in his expansive grinning. The morbid white face shook itself in mock surprise.
    Luke continued. ‘You despise Christianity. Am I right? Your lot set fire to those old wooden Stave churches. Because you hate God. You have a pentagram on your chest, another one on your
shoulder, and an upside-down crucifix on your stomach, should anyone need further proof that you are a devil-worshipping badass motherfucker.’
    Loki laughed, slapped his thighs, then swigged from his drinking horn.
    Luke would not be silenced. ‘Which all implies that you once believed in the devil. In Satan, Loki. But then you also have pagan tattoos. Heathen runes and shit like that. Old Norse runes
all over your knuckles, Loki. A Thor’s hammer, I see. Pre-Christian. A different belief system. So I’m guessing that you and Fenris are all about Odin these days. Yeah? Which implies
you do not believe in the Christian God, or the devil any more.