A Shrine to an Unknown God

CLOSED FIST

I GATHER everything she needs for a second time, plus I find a knife strapped to the thigh of a warrior that died in battle. (It's still crusted over with blood.) Each time I return to her, she's still crying, her ghastly face red and puffy and stained with tears.

By the time she has the pit dug, I still haven't found a sheep. We both go out hunting for one, looking along all of the riverbank settlements and in the rowdy crowd gathered at Kharon's dock.

Finally, we find one following behind a little boy that couldn't be more than twelve or thirteen, the same age as Marisol's younger brother, Jaden. (So young and already so dead.)

Dahlia heaves when she sees the animal. "I think I'm going to be sick," she tells me. "You... you get the sheep. Meet me back at the pit."

"You have the knife, right?" I ask.

She shows it to me, flicking it through the air, and hurries back in the direction of the pit.

I click my tongue at the sheep, holding my hand out in a closed fist like I have food in it. It has no lead, and I have nothing to lead it with, so I'm going to have to coax it into following me. It turns its head to look and baahs at me. I shake my fist and click my tongue harder.

To my surprise, it comes to me.

I back up towards the pit, still clicking my tongue, still shaking my fist. The sheep follows me, baahing every once in a while.

I nearly knock into Dahlia once I reach the pit. "You have to do everything fast," I tell her. "There's nothing holding the sheep here or keeping its owner from coming for it."

Without saying anything in response, she pours the three kylikes into the pit, then dusts them with flour. She repeats the same prayer she came up with earlier, though she changes the wording around a little bit.

"Do I just... do I just kill the sheep?" she asks, running her fingers along the edge of the knife's blade.

"Slit its throat," I instruct. "Let the blood pour into the pit. We're supposed to go through the process of flaying it, roasting it, and eating it, but by then, the ritual will be done; if it was done correctly, Ezra and Medusa will already be here. We won't really have to unless we want to avoid pissing the gods off anymore than we already are."

Dahlia's skin is completely white. I can only see the side of it, her cheekbone and the arch of her nose. "I'm cool with pissing off the gods," she says.

"You're stalling. Just get it over with. The faster, the better."

Shakily, she raises the knife, resting it against the sheep's throat. Her lips are quivering, tears openly leaking down her cheeks. She squeezes her eyes shut.

"I... I can't do it!" she sobs. "It's just a little baby!"

"Yes you can," I reply. "It's already dead. You're killing a ghost."

She sobs louder. "I'M KILLING A GHOST SHEEP!"

"You already thought you killed a god. You just need to... just this once. And then you can go back to veganism and pacifism and never hurting anything."

With a roar—I can't tell if it's a cry or a scream—she digs the knife into the sheep's throat. With one last pained, helpless, and strangled baah, the sheep seizes for several minutes, obviously in great pain, and then dies.

Dahlia struggles to hold it over the pit so that its blood drains into it.

Then she passes out, falling backwards. And the sheep falls into the pit... which starts to violently bubble and froth, making these unreasonably loud popping noises. The scent of sulfur explodes out of it.

And then so does two humanoid lifeforms, or dead-forms, I guess. Shades, ghosts, spirits, whatever you want to call them. One a scrawny twenty-something guy, one a fierce-looking woman with vibrant green snakes where her hair should be.

Ezra Plath, son of Dionysus and my half-brother, and Medusa, the Gorgan, the victim you know as a monster.

Dahlia Boivin-Rot successfully summoned the dead.

I grin to myself.

My friends are a bunch of badasses.