The Ritual

the mottled hare came at him so fast he gasped. Two chubby fists struck his face. At least three times, before he dropped the jug and managed to seize one of the girl’s
wrists. It was doughy in the palm of his rough hand. The hare’s feet stamped and kicked at him. They whirled sideways, like a pair of drunks performing some ludicrous dance.
    He shrieked as her nails raked down his cheek. He thought one of his eyes had been clawed out. Hot salty water blurred his entire vision. Or was it blood?
    There was a long pause when nothing happened, and he was only able to detect a watery outline of the hare, swimming before his eyes. And then a small fist thumped down and into the open wound on
his scalp.

FIFTY-THREE
    Luke came to on a grubby floor, and wondered where he was. Looked up, at where the screaming voice so garbled with rage and grief was issuing from.
    He saw tall Loki clutching the hare to his chest. Holding her back. Back from him.
    Fenris was on his knees, moving groggily towards the door, moaning to himself.
    The girl kept up her shrieking. It was like glass smashing inside his head. Luke tasted blood in his mouth. His head was cold, wet, opened. He touched his face. Then put his fingers in front of
his squinting eyes. They were slick, bright red.
    Nothing could stop the girl from screaming and kicking her small fat feet in his direction. Until Loki lifted her from the floor and heaved her away, towards the door. ‘Let me cut
him!’ she screamed in English, directing her bristly face at Luke. ‘Let me cut him.’
    Loki shouted at her in Norwegian. But the girl was inconsolable. The glassy eyes of the hare seemed to fix on Luke, where he lay with a face all shiny and hot and wet. ‘Let me cut him,
Loki! Let me cut him up, Loki!’
    ‘No! Then there will be nothing left. Think. Think. Think,’ he repeated, though with his accent, it sounded like he was shouting, ‘Sink, sink, sink.’
    Fenris fell to his elbows, placed his head face down on the floor, and started a rhythmic moaning that made him sound like a child. His black hair puddled around his head. Luke stared at the
man’s ribs and the bony vertebrae under his blue-white skin. They were children, Luke thought. Kids. Damaged kids.
    The kicking girl grew tired. She struggled less, then relaxed her body and started to sob. ‘I want to. I want to,’ she said.
    ‘Not yet,’ Loki said, and held her very tightly.

FIFTY-FOUR
    If the hare had picked up Fenris’s knife, he would be dead. He would have bled out, brightly and hopelessly on the dirty floor of this room. An image flashed into his
imagination, of his dirty skin parted into long red mouths. He shut down his eyes and his disordered thoughts upon such a vision.
    The argument still raged below. On the ground floor. Sporadically, Loki’s voice rose out of necessity to force down the cries of the girl. For the first time in a while, Luke could not
hear Fenris.
    A chair scraped loudly across a floor, then toppled on to its side. Glass smashed. Upstairs in his little room, Luke flinched.
    He used his forearm to dab at the blood trickling down his forehead. His head was hot and weightless, and there was a swelling behind his eyes. The actual gash didn’t hurt so much any
more. But it would do again. Soon. Endorphins had merely surged. Their good work was temporary. It always was.
    The fight made him feel better. Stupidly so, because he had made things much worse for himself. Security would be tightened, grudges had formed, faces would have to be saved, revenge needed to
be taken. Inevitable, predictable, childish; the consequences of being human. It was the way of things. The ground rules were just being established between him and them. Every new grouping of
people formed a hierarchy. And he was at the bottom of this one; a disempowered witness to their moronic sadism. That was his role.
    ‘How? How?’
    Below, the girl made a chesty groaning sound, like she had screamed and sobbed herself dry. Loki’s voice rumbled. Still no sound from Fenris.
    Luke sat down on the box bed and wished he had water to drink. Strangely, he also hoped he had not hurt Fenris badly. He took no pleasure in the look of animal pain he had caused.
    At last his mind was really beginning to wake itself up. He welcomed this new urgency. Healing needed to be deferred, if that was at all possible. He needed to bite down on the pain and get the
fuck out fast.
    He had been taken from danger, from imminent