There was still work to be done. Ivan finally pried the knife free and began wiping it on the parts of Dennis’s shirt not yet soaked in his blood. She told him, “That is the tool of your transgression. We’ll use it to complete the ritual. You’ve done so well, Ivan.”

“I can feel it,” he said, voice muffled by his mask. “Something’s different.” As he moved to pull the mask off, Cam stopped him:

“Keep it on. We’re so close now. You’re ready. Let me see the knife.” Ivan started to dig through Dennis’s pockets. “What are you doing?”

“I keep souvenirs,” he explained. “Something small, wouldn’t be noticed.” He found a dime, looked it over, and put it in his front pocket as he stood.

Cam’s mouth went dry- she couldn’t ask him for the knife again without raising suspicion- but Ivan handed it over unprompted.

Now that she held it, she could see the handle wasn’t made of real deer antler. It was plastic, and it pissed her off in a way she couldn’t understand. Cam said, “There’s a tremendous psychic energy embedded in this weapon. Have you used it before?”

“First time.”

“You christened it with an act of great change,” she observed. “This will be the perfect tool.”

“What’s next?”

“We create an altar. We’ll use his blood to draw the necessary seals.”

“You alright? Look like you’re going to be sick.”

Cam locked her eyes on his, daring him to try and doubt her. A sense of finality settled heavy over her. The feeling of exaltation she had gotten when Ivan first began to believe surged through her again, and she looked at him in that moment as an object fully, firmly in her possession.

“I’m nervous,” Cam told him. “We’re undertaking something tremendous. But you and I are both capable of this.”

He was quiet for too long. Her hand cramped around the knife’s handle, the injection mold line digging into her palm; her vision swam, and a feverish disconnect from reality smeared her thoughts into a senseless blur.

Ivan said, “You’re special, Cam. Never met anyone like you. We’re meant for greatness, I believe that.”

“Yes. That’s right. What you’re going to do is take Dennis’s blood and draw a circle on the floor big enough for you to stand in. There’s space by the fireplace there.”

Ivan dropped down by Dennis’s side and stuck his fingers in the neck wound, rubbing them together as he pulled away to see how much blood his gloves had taken on. He asked, “There a sponge in the kitchen?”

“Use his shirt,” she told him.

“Yeah. Good idea. Gimme the knife.” He held out a hand expectantly.

Cam faltered, but only for a beat. “We can’t use this tool for anything else except the ritual. It will lose too much of the psychic energy you put into it.”

“Right, right,” he said, earnest and thoughtful. Taking Dennis’s shirt in both hands, he worked to tear it off the dead man.

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Cam came up behind him slowly. Ivan was too engrossed in getting the shirt to notice her. She raised the knife with one hand, decided it best to use two, fixed her grip, adjusted her footing, steadied her breathing, and plunged the knife up to the handle just left of center into Ivan’s back.

He fell forward on top of Dennis. The air rushed out of him in a stifled groan. Rolling onto his side, he tried to reach around his ribs and then his shoulder, his fingers searching, but he couldn’t stretch far enough to get at the weapon. Ivan shifted his head, likely trying to get a better look at her through his mask.

For the first time in over seven hours, Cam was safe. That realization spilled out of her in uncontrollable laughter intercut with sharp, cathartic gasps of precious air, as though she hadn’t taken a good breath all night. She sank down to her knees and held her head in her hands, stopping short just before her laughter turned to crying. There was no sense in adding her bodily fluids to the scene of the crime.

“I don’t know how much you really believed,” she said to Ivan, “but I hope it was one hundred percent. I hope you feel betrayed and idiotic, ashamed that you let this happen to you.”

Ivan gargled, making efforts to speak, but unable.

“I’m not special, and neither are you. You’re selfish and egotistical in the most ordinary ways. Feeding into that was simple. You want to know something else?” She lifted her head to stare into the eye of the deer skull. “That ritual wasn’t even to prepare a person for transformation. It was to prepare a sacrifice. My father tried for months to get me to do it. Sacrifice one of his cult members to the demon Foras. Great President of Hell, who grants knowledge of herbs and precious stones, who maketh men to live long. How insane is that? The irony isn’t lost on me, by the way, that the ritual did technically extend my life tonight. You still alive?”

He’d grown silent and still.

“Who knows, Ivan. Maybe there is some kind of afterlife. Maybe my father is there now, watching me, and maybe he can finally, finally fucking see that none of it was ever real. Maybe he can even rest in peace now.”

She wrapped both hands around the knife handle and wrenched it free. Another rattling groan indicated he hadn’t died yet, and she took advantage of that fact.

“I just figured out why your knife pissed me off so much. It’s embarrassing. I mean, look at it.” She held it up to the skull’s eye socket. “I can’t believe someone pathetic enough to own this mall ninja shit tried to take my life. You know how insulting that is?”

She used his shirt to rub the handle down thoroughly before placing it in his hand, a small gesture to assert that Ivan had brought all of this upon himself. A sobering effect came on as her adrenaline surge finished running its course. She needed to move. Every second’s delay might mean getting caught.

The lighter fluid she’d picked up still sat in the same bag as the snacks. Cam dug it out with one hand and patted her pockets for her lighter with the other. She doused the bodies of Ivan and Dennis with the entire bottle, save for a small trail leading to the front door. Something tugged at her mind. Something forgotten or overlooked. Should she put the dime Ivan took from Dennis back in its place? No, that wouldn’t make any difference. After an inventory check- she had both flashlights, hadn’t dropped any food wrappers, pocket knife, or phone- Cam pulled her backpack on and bent down to light the fire.

It wavered and stuttered on its path. One foot out the door, Cam wondered if it would even reach the bodies, but it picked up speed as though understanding its purpose. Ivan and Dennis ignited with a brilliant flash and less sound than she’d expected. Neither of them so much as twitched.

The dime still bothered her. Halfway through telling herself to stop getting stuck on a pointless detail, she rushed to Ivan’s body. He took souvenirs. He’d spent the entire day in her apartment, had every opportunity to take one from her. Undeterred by the fire, Cam shoved him onto his back and searched the pocket she’d seen him put the dime into such a short time ago.

Her spool. The little plastic sewing spool she’d loaded with fishing line, the one she’d ditched by the sink earlier that night. Ivan must have taken it in the few moments she’d left him alone in the bathroom. She fell backwards and scrambled away from the growing flames, unnerved by nearly missing what might have turned into an important piece of evidence. Who else kept fishing line on a sewing thread spindle?

If only to snap herself out of it, Cam said out loud, “It would have melted, anyway.” She pocketed the spool and quickly checked her hands for burns, finding none. “Go, you idiot.”

Cam returned to the forest.