Hunters
Hunters
Fiction: Three young adults in the San Fernando Valley chase the extremes of a runner's high.
At the start it was Alice's idea. I met Alice in 2022, on jury duty in Westwood. I was working at a medical office in Encino, living with my longtime buddy, Blake, in a sunscorched prewar Reseda bungalow. The grass smelled like dog piss, and we didn't even have a dog. Alice was dorming in Palms with three roommates and wrapping up her art history undergrad. Straight brown hair, on the taller side. Twenty years old. Smart. Blunt. What more could you ask for? She and I both had this burning inside at the time, like we wanted more than waking life could offer.
The case was a restraining order violation. The guy was abusive, physical with his ex. After the order, he’d driven past her at a strip mall and she’d called the cops. In the end, we let him off—there was reasonable doubt enough that it had been random chance, which failed the required standard of knowing intent. Halfway through, I'd struck up a conversation with number six about her bag. She had patches on her backpack, The Mummy and Frankenstein's Monster and all the Universal heavy hitters of the night. It was an easy enough cold open.
We got lunch on day three at a Chick-fil-A packed with students and bums. She had a glam party girl's air, like you might have found orbiting Stardust-era Bowie in the dressing room. More makeup than one might expect for a day in court. Her complexion, I would learn, was Sicilian by way of Baltimore. Underneath it all was a sharp, understimulated eye.
She clocked my lululemon hoodie and asked if I was a runner. Funny, in retrospect, that she asked me so early. I wonder if she knew all along how this was going to go. I told her I was, and so was Blake, and we'd grown up together running cross country in the East Bay. Already, I had the sense that she could be my next obsession. Something in her smile and the way she stirred her iced tea told me I could be hers.
It didn't quite work out that way at first. Alice and I got one more lunch, then we the jury reached our decision and adjourned. It was just as well. At that point, I had run out of paid leave days, and my geriatric dentist boss was pissed I'd been gone so long.
The evening of the verdict, though, Alice caught me in the parking lot. With a too-cool shrug, she invited me to a Rocky Horror midnight show with her pals at the Nuart. It was a ‘queer scene’ thing, she told me, making sure I wouldn't mind. I told her I was down with all that.
Her apartment was filthy, I mean seriously filthy. She blamed it with an eye roll on her neurodivergent roommates, but from the sight of her own bedroom I knew she was a willing participant. She played a Mitski LP, and we smoked pot, and nothing physical transpired as her lumpy, dye-haired friends came in one-by-one to greet me.
During the midnight show I worked my hand up the outside of her thrifted jeans in the dark, and she did the same on me. When it ended, she said she had to go, and I drove home on the desolate 101 with the feeling seared in my mind.
If you want a picture of me, you can think of any midwestern kid who made it on a track scholarship. If you want a picture of Blake, my housemate, imagine a preppy Welsh-stock guy working as an agent’s assistant, sweater vests and collared shirts and always a little under the gun. He wanted more, too. Who wouldn’t?
That Saturday found us sitting on the sofa doing nothing. He was watching Raised by Wolves, and I was texting Alice as if my fingers could slip through the phone screen and up her skirt. Afternoons, even in May, were hot as hell indoors.
I remember smells most clearly. He smelled like sweat and pavement. I smelled like Dove antiperspirant. There's an hour that passes where Blake gets back from a run and watches TV before he hits the shower. I tried a couple times to tell him to keep off the couch in his running clothes. Then I gave up. I don't mind the smell much, anyway.
He went off to shower and I wished Alice luck on her final final. Blake and I used to run together, but I prefer to wait until the cool of the day. He likes the pounding heat or the dead of night, no in-betweens. So, we each run alone.
The sun dipped down and I went to my bedroom and stripped out of all my clothes. I stood there a while, staring at the closet mirror. Staring at myself. Knowing myself. I traced the outlines of my two tattoos, occult in origin, ambiguous by design. Even then and in my college days the occult entranced to me.
After a while I pulled running shorts up to my hips and put on track shoes. I rarely wore a shirt to run, and sometimes I even went barefoot—specter of broken bottles be damned. The balance of pushing for a competitive time while watching for hazards to bare skin put a thrill in my heart. That evening, though, my focus was power, and power was best found in the rhythm of a treaded pace. So, the shoes went on.
The commercial corridors were packed with commuters at nightfall. I ran north up Reseda Boulevard, with mini-marts and boba shops and Chinese massage parlors filling my vision on the left. On the right, gray and bloblike cars raced past, grayer and more bloblike and more clueless with each passing year.
At the residential cross streets they drifted stupidly in front of me, always texting, watching TikTok, talking on the phone. At least six times per run I would nearly get hit. I would have been hit, if I weren't quicker, and constantly I imagined getting bowled over by a particularly negligent SUV. I imagined blood, tumbling, bones breaking, shouting and getting a good swing at the driver as he climbed out. What a thrill that would have been, getting hit by an SUV. That would have really been living.
The fates had other thrills woven for me. On a Saturday soon after that, I got back from a run to see that Alice had texted me twice. She was in the Valley, and she wanted suggestions for a good time.
Not being entirely stupid, I invited her over. “Company,” I told Blake, and we did the bare minimum to dress and tidy before her nineties Subaru Forester parked outside. I knew from having seen her place that her standards for cleanliness could not be too high.
This was June. I remember from the first heat ripples on the blacktop as the sun set. I hadn't showered, and my Warped Tour tee stuck to my stomach as I opened the door. I hoped it was a passable look.
There she was. Alice. A half-head shorter than me, harried from work and looking better than ever. She explained that she'd gotten a gig rigging lights for some bullshit fine arts exhibition in Sherman Oaks. It was as good a job as any for an art history major, I figured. Then I let her in. Her hoodie was black, unmarked, and she wore light wash jeans that showed the muscle in her hips and calves.
Blake tossed her a Coors Banquet from our freezer with a quickness I had never seen him demonstrate before. “Banq,” he said.
“Me too,” I told him, and he fetched two more.
We arranged ourselves on the rust-colored L-shaped sectional we'd thrifted from Panorama City the week we'd moved in. I didn't want to think of what it had been through. Blake took his usual spot at the far end, nearest the kitchen. I took the middle. Alice took the other far end, kicking her dirty shoes up and putting them nearly in my lap. There was no trace of shame as she did it.
“Are you brothers?” she asked, drinking. I'm pretty sure she already knew we were not.
“No,” I said, “but we go way back.”
The conversation trafficked in pleasantries half an hour. After the third round of beers, my head spun steadily in place, and there was no sign that any of us were ready slow it down. As a symbol of this dedication, Blake brought the remainder of the pack of Coors to the coffee table.
“I'm really into horror stuff,” said Alice, when Blake had again brought up movies. “I don't know, I think I just started too young, with my dad's collection, and now it's like a part of me.”
Blake leaned in. She remained reclined. I watched them both. “Like Hammer Horror?” he asked. “Freddy, or—”
I jumped in, cutting him off, jockeying for a moment in her gaze. “That's the very first reason I talked to you,” I said, “remember? Juror six, with the monster patches.”
“When I was fifteen,” she said, not looking at either of us but into some middle distance of her mind's eye, “I really wanted a werewolf. Like, you know, physically.”
I coughed involuntarily. “Didn't we all?” Blake laughed, sharper than me and not missing a beat.
“Would that be considered a furry thing?” I asked.
“It’s more like, the fact he’s strong and fast,” she said, “and he's totally abandoned any social graces, and no matter what you do he's going to chase you down and get you. It's the chase part.”
“Yeah, when I hit a PR I'm always thinking about chasing something,” said Blake.
“For real?” I said, sitting forward.
“Yeah, like, a guy that just stole my laptop. Or prey, like I'm a tiger. Different stuff.”
I crushed my empty fourth can in my grip, laughing incredulously. “I’ve never heard of this. Is this a common thing?”
“Who cares?” said Alice, nudging me with a dusty sneaker tread as she clumsily grabbed her own fourth beer. “It can be our thing.”
“Hey,” I said, pushed from thoughts of Alice's werewolf and Blake's tiger by her dirty shoe. “Can you not, shoes on the couch?”
“Take 'em off, then,” she said, pointing her toes at me. Reaching over, I pulled each lace untied before slipping the shoes off her small heels.
She did not pull away, or stop smiling, so I held them. “High arches,” I said, placing a thumb on the underside of her socked foot. The fabric was only very slightly warm and damp.
“Best of luck,” said Blake, watching it all, “finding a werewolf, I mean.”
“Oh, it's not a werewolf anymore,” said Alice. “It's just the idea of the chase. The running.”
Blake, who never lost the spark in his eye even when fully plastered, looked at me. He looked to my hands on her feet, then back to my face, pushing with a glimmering smile for me to speak. “We could chase you,” he said to her, after silence.
“We what?” I interjected.
“Would you be for real though?” asked Alice, challenging him. “I don't want you to start something and bow out when it gets going.”
“Hey, I did the LA marathon,” said Blake, pushing his chest out. “I'm a real runner.”
“She means,” I said, “to follow through.” I didn't want to have to spell it out to Blake, but I knew I knew I needed her, and this was the way I would get her. “I can do it.”
Her tongue rested on her lower teeth in thought, and her face looked completely transformed. “Let’s go, I’ll give you a head start,” I said, patting her shin to bid her stand. “Circle the block, I’ll catch you here, we can, we can come back inside.”
Alice took a ballpoint pen from the coffee table and pushed the tip hard to her lip, leaving a dark blue mark. “No,” she said. “I’m going to run up the street, and both you guys chase me as long as it takes. Then the rest happens on the spot, and don’t be nice.”
The silence thereafter was not giddy but shocked. “Sounds like a great way to get the cops called,” said Blake.
“He’s right,” I said, anchored by self preservation. “We could actually get screwed for life.”
“I think you’re just scared,” said Alice, tease-taunting.
“I’m not scared of what you just said, I’m scared of going on a registry, or to prison,” I snapped. We were all too drunk to not be blunt. As I said it, I pulled my phone from my pocket and pointed it at her.
“What?” she said, as I filmed her.
“I’m recording,” I said, “tell me what you want us to do, so there’s evidence. So it doesn't look bad.”
She stared at the lens. I stared at her in the screen. The clarity of the digital divide had a hyperreal intimacy all its own. “Just say it, for my peace of mind,” I said to her, and she did. Then I panned to Blake, and he looked like a deer in the headlights in the iPhone screen.
“Are we really gonna do this like she wants?” I asked him, the invisible narrator now.
“Yeah,” he said, breathless. And he was right.
I took three flying minutes to don black jeans, black shoes, a black pullover hoodie with a Swedish metal band logo. Blake reemerged from his room with similar choices. “On your knees,” he said to her, placing his hand on her shoulders to guide her down. She obeyed, and he turned to dig through a drawer in our media cabinet. I knew at once where this was going.
“Dude, no,” I said, as he drew a cast effigy of a rising, coiled snake from the cluttered drawer. Our dalliances with pagan ritual had been embarrassing and halfhearted at best. I didn't want them ruining whatever this could be.
“Yes,” said Blake, beyond committed. “Bow before Glycon.”
“Glycon,” said Alice.
“He’s a Roman snake god,” I started, almost apologetic at the theater. “We started—”
“Bow!” Blake thundered, and she jumped before falling prostrate before him. The power of his command and her submission sent a jolt of feeling through my body like never before. “Priest, something to mark her,” Blake said to me. Every hair on my arm was on end as I dug through her purse, searching for a ritual implement. Lipstick, I decided, would do well.
Taking her head in both hands, Blake brought her back up to a kneel. He squeezed her skull and her jaw just enough. I uncapped the lipstick and neared. “In the name of the great snake,” I said, drawing a triangle on her forehead, “I mark you to be hunted down and taken where you stand.”
It was just after midnight when we set off north. Not a soul was on the streets of Reseda.
Blake gave me a good goddamned run for my money. Every footfall, I heard him beside me, hot breath filling the night as we tracked our target like dogs. I imagined how his breath would change when we caught her. Then exertion drove imagination from my mind and I powered even harder up the sidewalk.
She turned the corner right where I’d advised her to, and we caught right where I’d expected. To this day I don’t actually know who touched her first. I covered her mouth as we pinned her, and she bit my hand too hard, and it bled down her chin and my arm as Blake shoved against her and gripped her shoulder. Watching it all, pressing into it all, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to be her or him or me. It ran together in a blur like absinthe and sugar.
“Do you surrender yourself to our master?” I said into her ear at one point.
“I do,” she said as best she could with a brick wall pressing her cheek. “I do.”
That was two years ago. The beginning of everything. Zero Day Alice. We walked her back to the house, sobering up in struck silence. She took her purse and briskly wished us goodnight before driving off in her old Subaru.
For five days we barely spoke of it, going about our chores in a simulacrum of banal domestic fraternity. In truth, it was all I could think about the moment I was alone. It was like every other idle daydream had been replaced with this image of divinity and violence and immediacy crashing into life. The image of her, and of him. It was the same for Blake, I suspected, judging from his long showers and the looks he gave me when he got out.
Then she texted, and she wanted to do it again. In the cold light of sobriety I relayed the news to Blake with a mumble. “She does?” he laughed, his aloofness a mask.
“Yeah, she does,” I said. “Do you?”
“Do you?”
“I…”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Obviously you do, or you wouldn’t have said anything.”
He had me. So, we did it again, and again I was transfixed by him and by her.
Something changed about us in those days. We were looser. Calmer. Less concerned with work. It was like our whole existence was now consumed by the confident rush of a runner’s high. My mile times had never been better, and neither had his.
I don’t know which of us started leaving the doors open first. I don't know which of us was the first to walk around in undress. It just felt right, after nights hunting together, not to hide ourselves. Like we had transcended the Apollonian world of light and all its insecurities.
For all our meetings with her, we barely spent time with Alice outside of the hunt. I think we all knew on some level that idle time together would take away the thrill. At least, that's what we thought back then.
There was one close call during the fourth time. We had caught her a little later, behind a Dunkin’ Donuts two storefronts down from a suburban street. I had her on the ground with my hand on the back of her neck when I saw a homeless guy staring from the sidewalk. He looked vaguely stupefied, maybe scared. Then he bolted.
My first impulse was to chase him. Lord knows what I would have done if I had caught him, though. Thankfully, better instincts prevailed. “Run,” said Blake, and I realized he was right. Running was the only way to go. We all dashed back to the house, and Alice left with her usual quickness, and I sat around with the buzzing frustration of incompletion in my chest.
After that, we didn't see her for a few weeks. The heat was blistering by then, too hot even for Blake to run by day. So, our run schedules started to converge on the warm evening hour.
“My times have gotten shit,” said Blake, as we were both lacing up for a five-mile circuit one Friday night. “I feel like I get a boost for about ten days after she comes by. Then it drops off.”
“You could try getting back on the apps like a regular person,” I said to him. “I remember when you used to do that. You are actually capable of normal human interaction.”
“It's not that part,” he said, and I wasn't sure whether to believe him. “It's the hunting, you know. It's the chasing, something about it.”
I stopped, and my throat hitched. Then I said something that I don't think either of us expected. “You could hunt me,” I offered, standing before him in my running shorts and track shoes.
That night he did.
It was an awkward sort of thing at first. Neither of us knew how far to take it, or what to say. We were pretty evenly matched in speed, and as a consequence both of us were beyond dead tired whenever he caught me.
The first time it was actually just a tackle, a moment of panting together as he pinned me to the ground, and that was it. The second time, he had marked me with a triangle for Glycon, and he didn't hold back. It barely affected our daytime relationship, believe it or not. We were still roommates more than anything else. He was still texting girls. I was still liking their stories on Instagram and waiting for them to initiate. I'd never been the best with bold flirtation.
Then, on August 16th, two days after my twenty-sixth birthday had passed without a word, Alice showed up in the afternoon.
It actually took me a second to recognize her. She was wearing a dress, something light and summery. I was on the front porch drinking a beer and trying to stay productive on my laptop. I think I was buying new car insurance. It was the heat of the day, and the slight breeze on the porch made it marginally more tolerable than a house with no air conditioning. I was close to going to the mall just for some AC when she walked up.
She told me she was dressed up because she'd just come from a birthday party. At least someone out there was celebrating their latest cycle around the Earth. She'd gotten a new client, the daughter of a very wealthy sculptor who did a lot of work in Amsterdam and Paris. The daughter was getting into sculpture as well, and had hired Alice to be the taste behind the enterprise.
“I think it's Glycon,” she said, to my shock and without a hint of irony. “I think he made this happen for me.”
“The snake,” I said, clarifying, even though I’d heard full well what she'd said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I looked the whole thing up, and there’s not much online, but I saw that he can bring good luck to the faithful. I think he brought good luck to me.”
I dusted off the cushion beside me, and she sat. It took a moment before I could speak. I was looking at her bare legs, toned and smooth. Her hair without a trace of dirt and asphalt. Her face lacking either her own blood or mine. We were so polite here, so committed to manners and smiles, that I found it hard to believe this was a body I had held and known. But, by light of day, here she was.
“That's why Blake and I started the whole thing,” I said. “It was a joke, initially, in college. We were both in the late Roman history unit, and this whole Hellenic snake cult thing popped up, and we both just seized on it. I think we were looking for meaning, looking for something beyond the day-to-day. We started making offerings and stuff from the dining hall for good luck before exams. Then we got the idol, and we just kind of rolled with it.”
“Because it brought you good luck,” she said, pressing.
“Honestly, yeah,” I said. “At a certain point, I kid you not, it really did feel like it was bringing us good luck. Of course, we never actually did the ritual right. Not the way it was called for. With that pre-Christian stuff, you know, there's usually a sacrifice.”
“Well, I think even without the sacrifice, I'm doing pretty good,” she said. “I guess he likes me as a supplicant.”
“Hey, where's my luck?” I laughed, and blurted the rest before I could stop myself. “I've been a good supplicant, too.”
“You have?” she asked, alight at this.
“I have,” I admitted.
After talking a while, we went inside the house so I could lend her the best book I had on the Cult of Glycon. There she was, in her dress, alone by the musty couch in my boiling hot living room. I had never been alone with her here before. As I passed her the book, a satyr calm overtook me, and I asked her earnestly if I could kiss her. She said that I could, and I did, slowly and sweetly. In the strangest way, it felt like we had never touched before.
I brought her to the couch and shifted her dress, and so it went. With vigor in her eyes, she asked if she could stay for dinner, and I said she could. Blake would be home in less than an hour. I smiled at the thought of him coming home, seeing the two of us together as domestic diorama. I felt like the center of a perfect and endless universe.
Dinner was supposed to be meal-prepped chicken, but due to the presence of a guest we splurged on Carl's Jr. At that time, our combined household income was around seventy grand. That might sound like a lot, but it really does not go that far for two adult men paying LA rent on a house.
Blake was in good spirits when he got home, and he cracked an evening beer to accompany his milkshake and bacon cheeseburger. It's insane how much you can eat and stay thin when you run all the time. It's the height of decadence. Blake asked what had led to the honor of her visit, and she told him about her interest in the master.
“She thinks it's what got her her new job,” I explained, eating an onion ring. “Dude, she's making more than both of us combined.”
“Good for you,” said Blake, patting her on the shoulder. I was shocked to see how casually, how fraternally he treated her. It was like she was just one of the guys, not an object of any special affection. Then again, I was one of the guys as well, and on our hunting nights there were certainly affections he paid me beyond the backslaps of friendship.
“I have a plan,” he said when dinner was done and the beer cans had all been crushed. “I have a plan, because I want to get out of my shitty job, and I think you're right about the snake. But we can't bullshit him. If we want his favor, we have to do things by the book.”
“The book that I'm taking?” Alice clarified. “Do you want to keep it?
“No,” said Blake, sliding it back to her. “I know it well enough, and I have my own materials. Just let me think this through, and be ready.”
“Do you need me for any of it?” I asked. It was exciting to watch him take initiative. He had always been so good at it.
“I will,” he said. “When the time comes, buddy, I will.”
I didn't expect that time to come at one a.m. on a Saturday morning, but it did. It's an insane experience to be physically hauled from your bed in the midst of deep sleep. You wake up literally on your feet, in a muscular grasp, transitioning straight from the profundity of dream to the tactile reality of life.
“Get dressed,” said Blake in the darkness, and I could see that he already was. I was naked, and in my moment of confusion he threw jeans at me from the floor as if to hurry me along. “Get dressed, you have five minutes,” he repeated.
I dressed in jeans and a tee and an outdoor jacket, not knowing what he had planned. In the depths of night it was not yet hot. “Come on,” he said, pulling me out the front door. With a strong arm, he led me toward an idling vehicle. I realized as I reached the back passenger door that it was Alice's Subaru Forester.
Alice, with a black cloth bag over her head like a firing squad victim, sat in the back. Blake pushed me in beside her, guiding my head as if he were a cop so I wouldn't hit it on the doorframe. “Put this on,” he said, and threw me a matching black bag. It was a good thing I didn't get carsick anymore.
“Is that you?” she said, as we both listened to Blake putting the car into drive. It's astonishing how keen your hearing gets with even a few minutes of blindness. I think I know the sound of that Forester engine better than any other car I've ever ridden in. I felt her hand reach out, touching my thigh. It was neither innocent nor sensual but something entirely new. It was the touch of surrender to the coming unknown.
“Yeah, it's me,” I said. “I guess it's happening.” I heard the turn signal, and I felt the acceleration as he took the on-ramp onto the 101. From there I didn't know which direction we were headed, though I had a suspicion it was north. Three hours passed with barely a word. No music, no chit-chat, just blackness within the bag and the beat of expectant hearts. Then the road below us grew very rough.
That was the first time I had the urge to take off the hood. My hands weren't bound, and I fully well could have removed it, but it felt wrong to cheat when Blake had clearly put so much effort into whatever was coming. Still, the jolts of off-roading knocked me around and raised my suspicions. “Everything cool?” I asked.
“All cool,” he said. “We're almost there.”
Twenty minutes of that went by, although the road was so uneven that we couldn't have gone more than a mile or two. It was colder here than where we had come from. I was glad I had brought the jacket. I thought about holding Alice's hand, but it felt wrong—too cloying, too pushy. She would reach for me if she wanted to.
The Forester came to a stop. We heard Blake turn off the engine and exit the car, shutting the door behind him. I could just faintly detect the sound of his boots crunching on gravel as he walked away. Without him, the intimate field of proximity between Alice and myself grew a million times more potent. Still, I stayed where I was and kept the bag on my head.
Soon enough my own door opened, and Blake guided me out of the vehicle. It was dark, shockingly dark, in the barren desert landscape where he had taken us. Thankfully, my eyes had been sensitized by the blackness within the hood, and so I could see faint details of rocky hills and mesas on the horizon. Past it, a city glowed gray, like television static coloring the western corner of the sky. For the first time in years, I looked up and actually saw the stars.
New hues on the eastern lip of the world suggested that dawn might be an hour away. “Come with me, both of you,” said Blake, urgent and alert. I wondered if he'd had coffee, and if there was any more.
We followed him up a stone path which did not look well-traveled, going about a thousand yards until the Subaru was far behind us. It was only at that point that I realized I didn't have my phone. I asked Alice if she’d brought hers, and she said she hadn’t. With anyone else, in any other relationship, these circumstances might have been cause for concern. I might have wondered if the man who had taken me here was wishing me ill, if he had planned some heinous demise. I had no such fear. I trusted him. I would give my body to him. I knew that I could exist, in his arms, as I really was.
At the end of our walk, we came upon the mouth of a cave. It was large, and from what I could see very deep. Small holes in its high ceiling allowed beams of moonlight to illuminate the floor. All of it seemed natural, as far as I could tell. There was no sign of human interference.
He had placed things inside. Along the cave perimeter, I counted six candles, and their glow inflected the interior with flickering orange as he lit each one. There was a backpack, which I recognized as Blake's, stuffed with food and an extra coat and other things that I couldn't quite determine.
In the center of the cave was a cage, about three feet wide and deep. In the cage was a moderately-sized living animal.
“Kneel,” said Blake, before I could get a clearer sight of whatever he had trapped. I didn't know how long he had been working on this, or how many trips he had taken here. I knew that the cage and the animal had not been in the car with us.
We knelt. He seemed proud, confident and calm, but at the same time weighed by the pressures of duty. He pulled something red from his pocket, which I later learned was an oil pastel, and drew a triangle on each of our foreheads. Then he knelt as well, and gave the pastel to me. With care, I drew a mark on his forehead to match.
After a moment, I decided not to ask questions about the animal or the preparations. I could tell well enough from looking at it that it was probably a coyote. There would be time for questions in the years to come, if ever the urge overtook me. For now, I was a priest of Glycon, and a supplicant to Blake's machinations. “Take this,” he said, handing me a hexagonal unleavened cracker with some kind of sticky, translucent substance on the top. When I put it in my mouth, I tasted honey.
Alice did the same, and as I watched her chew I noticed something fibrous and paper-like in my mouth. “Just swallow,” Blake said, noticing the look on my face. So I swallowed.
He took a candle and placed it in the center of the spot where the three of us knelt. Then he led us in a prayer of devotion to the snake of the world. We expressed our admiration for the master’s awesome power, and we humbled ourselves as we asked him with courtesy to grant us fortune in this life. Above all, we promised to do whatever it would take to please him and give him comfort.
I could tell from the holes in the roof of the cave that dawn was approaching. Toward the end of the prayer, I began to feel a strange electricity in my mind, a rising crackle of emotion. I don't have the words to properly describe it. I glanced over at Alice and she looked aflame. Her face was bright, confused and energetic, as if she was in a state of perpetual epiphany. I could feel by the tension in my jaw that I probably looked the same.
My heart beat rapidly, and for a moment I had to remind myself that I was not being poisoned. “You'll be fine,” said Blake, almost telepathically sensing my concern. He leaned forward, and in the light of the candles he kissed me, then he kissed her. It was a priestly kiss, not so much lustful as it was a sign of devotion. We were devoted to each other, devoted to the snake, and devoted to what was to come.
When he pulled back from kissing Alice, I saw that he had given her a knife. It was ornate, beautiful almost. If I had seen it in a museum, I would have believed that it was ancient. As it stood, I knew he had probably just found it in a pawn shop. Still, its gilded edge and long, straight blade carried ceremonial weight.
A rush gripped me firmly in the next few moments. It was not quite enough to rend reality, but it heightened my feelings and vision and touch to a constant extreme. I could tell Alice felt the same. “Are you ready to make the sacrifice, sister?” Blake asked her. Her face was so tensed with wonder she couldn't speak, but she nodded and crawled with Blake toward the cage. I crawled as well, keeping just behind.
Reaching forward, Blake unlatched the cage. I know I probably should have been afraid of the animal before me, but I was not. It seemed placid. Trusting. At peace. It had none of the fear you would expect from a beast of the hills.
From his jacket pocket, Blake pulled out a wrapped handkerchief and carefully unfolded each corner until it was laid out flat outside the cage. On it was about five ounces of raw steak.
In that moment, if the animal had not been there, I think I could have eaten it myself. Gingerly, it stepped forward and began to feed. Blake petted it softly as it bowed its head to lick up cow’s fat and muscle.
I realized as I watched that a canid is not innocent. Any carnivore has to rip the muscle from other living things to survive. It's the natural way. How much resentment could it hold, then, if its own body was in turn sacrificed to a higher level of existence? Such was life. Just as rabbits and stray cats ascended materially in the food chain in the maw of a coyote, so too would the coyote ascend to divinity in a sacrifice to Glycon.
It continued eating, and Alice crawled forward to touch it. She looked hesitant, although I could not determine why. I hadn't known her to be someone who showed fear. With the knife in one hand, she gently moved to hold the beast by the nape of the neck. Still, it did not resist. She considered it, looking it over as if it were a Thanksgiving turkey she had just been instructed to carve. In the end, she chose the throat.
I took a deep look at its black eyes, knowing that this was my last chance to see any expression in its face. Its time on Earth was almost done, and ours was just beginning. “I devote the spirit of this sacrifice to thee, O Master,” said Alice, speaking to the ceiling of the cave with no trace of humor in her voice. Then, with a strong lateral motion, she slit the throat of the animal.
The blood flowed as the canid’s twitches turned to stillness. It coated her hands, shimmering, and impossible patterns of circles and diamonds formed in the liquid as it coated her. Lowering her head with reverence, Alice shut her eyes and tasted the blood on the floor. Then she looked up at Blake, and with blood on her fingers she drew two more triangles on his cheeks.
Whatever she gave him, I wanted for myself as well. I crawled forward, close to both of them now, and all of a sudden I could smell the copper of hot blood. She gazed into me, and as I gazed back. The microscopic flicker of candles reflected in her stare.
Her eyes were dark brown, deep and rich and full of a million colors. They were, on their own, an eternity. She raised her hand, and on my cheeks she drew two triangles of blood. The moment of her touch was a pleasure incomparable to anything I had ever felt. It was a lust beyond lust, a savoring of each brush and press of flesh. We were bonded then and forever in fealty and action.
Animal blood from her hands stained my shirt and my hair as I kissed her neck. Looking back, I saw Blake behind me, and I smiled at him with a warmth of genuine love. He had always been there for me. He always would be. Beckoning, I brought him close and held him. There we lay, bathed in blood and dawn light, making the most of our divine state through silent, searching touch.
Things started going pretty well for the three of us after that. At Blake's urging, Alice negotiated a deal for income sharing with the young aspiring sculptress. Shortly after that, Alice was able to get her a two-million-dollar contract for the central installation at an upscale mall in Milan. I left the medical office after meeting a man at a bar in Santa Monica who got me interested in machine learning. After doing some contracting for him, I joined his startup, and shortly after that we did a funding round at a hundred-million-dollar valuation. As of late, that's been going incredibly well.
Blake didn't find any huge career success, but he did meet an actress at Philz Coffee last year and they've been dating for over ten months. She's the lead in one of those new artsy horror movies, and I guess it's a pretty big deal. I've started seeing her on billboards around town.
When they got serious, Blake and I decided to stop crossing any lines. That was fine by me. I don't need to touch him to feel like I have him. I'll have him forever. We still live together, although I expect that might change if the actress and him are for real. As for me and Alice, it's hard to put a label on what we are. We're ambitious. We're full of a lust for life. We're honest, and we're not afraid of chasing what we want. We both want more.
Every day I wake up with the feeling that this world is something to relish in. A playground of conquest and delight. The three of us do keep up with our worship and our offerings. We call it the college retreat, to our friends. Everyone we know now thinks Alice went to school with us, even though she's six years our junior. People will believe almost anything.
Every six months, we head out of town to camp and complete a sacrifice. The details always change. We're getting more ambitious now, and we're getting good at covering our tracks. Alice has a theory that the higher the being, the greater the blessing from Glycon. I think she's right. We've named her the high priestess, because of her devotion to the master. It's not just an obligation for her, it's truly a passion. I don't think we're ever going to stop. She told me last week she has a perfect plan for a ritual greater than any before. I believe her, and I know that with her brilliance we'll pull it off. There are a lot of souls in Los Angeles that wouldn't be missed.
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