Columbine

Sarah broke the invisibility spell when we finally ducked into the small pyramid. I massaged the spot on my arm from which the duct tape had been anxiously torn off. Scarlett had gone on ahead of us to unlock the door, so there was just the four of us, with two volunteers in tow.

“I don’t understand…” Dennis said.

That had turned out to be the name of the man with the piercing eyes who’d volunteered with George -- the burly biker-looking guy.

They’d reluctantly revealed their names to an abusive Charlie during the half-hour during which we’d frantically made our way to Pyramid 23. Something told me that if it weren’t for the music, they’d probably have taken off running. Hell, they wouldn’t have even come with us to begin with if we hadn’t shown off the blood solution in the tavern.

“This was all a trick, wasn’t it? The music was all a spell, right?” George accused. “You’ve got us alone in here, so you’re going to kill us now, aren’t you?”

“Don’t over-think it.” Charlie sneered, kicking open the trap door. The two men looked a little shocked and wary for a moment. I couldn’t exactly blame them. I’d have been reluctant to jump down into dark spaces with a group of creepy-looking strangers, too.

“What are you waiting for?” Charlie asked when he saw that they weren’t going down through the trap door.

“How do we know you’re not lying?” Dennis all but accused. Charlie’s expression darkened.

“You don’t.” He snapped.

“But you could just kill us if we go down there!” George protested.

“Well, you should have thought of that before volunteering.” Charlie said, and jumped down into the passageway below.

“Go on -- we‘re really not planning anything weird.” Sarah encouraged the two men. Her voice was certainly much more pleasant than Charlie’s, but the volunteers didn’t look entirely convinced.

“Would it make you feel better to have a gun?” Valentin suddenly asked.

Everybody looked at him, me with the most confusion of all. Not only was he bringing the subject of guns into the conversation, but there was also the fact that he had snapped the question, which was strange. Usually he was more polite to people than that.

“Actually, yeah.” Dennis snapped back.

“Then, by all means, pull out the one you have under your shirt.” Valentin said, almost leering at an outraged Dennis.

“What?” Sarah squeaked. I blinked in shock.

“Or the knife you have in your pocket should do just as nicely.” Valentin added.

Dennis looked surprised for a minute, then his expression made a smooth transition into anger. Without saying anything else, his hand reached behind him, and came back holding a slender black object. I almost screamed when I saw that it was, in fact, a gun.

“What kind of a creature are you? Mage? Demon? What!” He spat at Valentin.

“Just observant.” Valentin replied with an unnatural calm.

I instinctively grabbed Sarah’s arm, my hand shooting out in the darkness to find some kind of limb to keep hold of for my currently endangered life. She squeezed my hand back with more force than I had bargained for.

“I want to know what the hell is going on.” Dennis said firmly.

There was a load of confidence in his voice that hadn’t been there before -- probably because he was pointing a gun at Valentin.

George was behind him, holding his stance. Now that I paid attention, I noticed that George had an unnerving amount of muscles on his arms. Was he waiting to start wailing on us?

“Hey, what’s going on up there!” Charlie yelled up from below. “Has Denny-boy finally pulled out his gun?”

“Shut up!” Dennis yelled down at Charlie. “And don’t call me Denny-boy!”

“I was kind of thinking he’d never pull that thing out.” Charlie yelled. “I guess I owe you money on that one, huh, Asmodeus Jr.?”

A very scary kind of silence ensued, and I took that time to visualize how I was going to bring Charlie’s life to a long-awaited end. By the way Sarah’s hand tightened around mine even more, I knew that she was thinking the same thing. A quick look over at Valentin revealed that he clearly had first dibs on Charlie’s murder.

Dennis’s face became blank as he realized who he was pointing his gun at. George’s stance faltered, and the two of them looked terrified for a moment before adopting an even angrier status.

“What did you say?” Dennis growled down the trap door at Charlie. “Who did you say this guy was?”

“Asmodeus Jr., was it?” George answered before Charlie could even think to correct his tragic, deadly mistake.

“You can’t be serious!” Dennis yelled. “You’re saying that this--” He jabbed the gun in Valentin’s direction, “--is that demon asshole’s goddamn kid?”

Nobody answered that.

Having Dennis put it like that made Asmodeus sound much less frightening than he really was -- something Dennis might have been well aware of.

“Just what the hell are you all trying to do with us!” Dennis yelled.

Then something that I hadn’t expected happened. He turned his face to me, though, thankfully, the gun stayed pointed at Valentin.

“You.” He snapped at me. I felt my eyes widen. “Yeah, you.” He confirmed.

“W-what?” I stammered, my grip on Sarah’s arm growing slick with sweat and unstable.

“You said that your blood made the music play.” He growled.

I felt all the blood leak from my face. Somewhere deep in my heart, I’d been almost completely sure that this was going to happen. Someday somebody would need proof. That somebody would shoot me. As it turned out, that time and somebody was here now.

“Um.” I choked.

“I’m not going anywhere until I get proof of that.” He said, and continued to glare at me.

“Alright, that’s it.” Valentin said, his voice more annoyed than concerned.

Before any of us could predict what was coming next, much less say anything, Valentin’s arm shot out and snatched the gun right out of Dennis’s hand.

“What the--!” Dennis yelped when he noticed that his hand was empty.

“You won’t be needing this anymore.” Valentin said.

Then he pressed some unseen button on the gun and it ejected what I knew from movies was called a ‘mag’, which contained the bullets. Valentin took that out and put it smugly in his pocket.

“Y-you!” Dennis stuttered angrily. “You fucking piece of demon shit!”

Had I not hurled such insults at him before, Valentin might have been genuinely insulted, but because of my very unusual training, he’d grown almost unsettlingly immune to things like that.

“I knew we shouldn’t have picked him.” Charlie sighed from below. “That’s the male version of Columbine if I’ve ever seen one.”

I turned red everywhere, and was immediately grateful that it was almost completely dark under the pyramid.

“What?” Dennis snapped down at Charlie.

“You two are like birds of a feather, honestly.” Charlie shrugged.

My teeth clenched, and the redness that was all over my body turned from embarrassed to angry.

“At the moment, that’s all unimportant.” Valentin said, cutting that branch of the conversation tree short, which I was copiously grateful for. “What is important is reaching an understanding.”

“In which you all murder us?” Dennis asked, anger seething from his voice.

“I thought we’d explained it to you.” Valentin said. “We need people from the outside to help us set up the dance club and then show others how to get here.”

“And what if you were lying?” Dennis asked.

“Then we went through a great amount of trouble.” Valentin said.

It was obvious from his voice than he’d had just about enough of this crap. Truthfully, so had I. And without the gun, Dennis wasn’t nearly as dangerous as he’d seemed. George, however, was another matter. He’d been standing several feet behind Dennis the entire time, body trained to pounce and start wailing on the first bastard that would dare cross him.

“I still need proof.” Dennis said defensively.

“If you expect me let you hurt her,” Valentin all but growled at him, “Then it’s the last thing you’ll ever--”

“I’ll do it.” I interrupted, to my own shock, as well as everyone else’s.

“W-what?” Sarah squeaked, her voice coming hoarsely alive for the first time since the gun had been so gallantly introduced into the scene.

“It’s not like it’ll kill me.” I said weakly. “It’s just a little cut.”

I wasn’t lying or toning it down for anyone. I’d cut myself countless times before, and most of the scars had faded into invisibility under the hot Egyptian sun, so it wasn’t exactly obvious that I was either into self-harm or just prone to falling on sharp objects.

I’d taken the act of cutting to a stage where it was almost a surgically precise art. It was shallow, moving little more than a millimeter deep. The goal wasn’t even to cut the vein, so depth wasn’t a very big factor. True I didn’t have my clean and polished razor kit with me, but I could always improvise. Sort of.

“Are you crazy!” Sarah screamed, jerking me out of my world of thoughts in a way that left my ears ringing.

“You’re just going to mutilate yourself each time somebody asks for proof?” She continued.

“She’s right, you know.” Charlie yelled from below. “This jerk isn’t worth another scar.”

“Sarah can fix the wound later. It won’t leave a scar then.” I said nervously. “Besides, I can make my own decisions.”

I may have heard a smirk from where Valentin was standing, but I chose to ignore it until a later, more opportune time when I could make a real good, stinking scene. At the present moment, it wasn’t all that appropriate.

“I’m not going anywhere until I know you’re not lying.” Dennis announced one more time.

“Yeah, we got that part already, sparky.” Charlie said. Dennis looked very mad for a moment, but seemed to just barely squelch it down.

“So…” I cleared my throat. “Anyone got something sharp?”

“Here.” Dennis said, bending down and fumbling with his pant leg for a minute, until he returned with small switchblade. Valentin had been right about that, too, apparently.

I tentatively took the knife, looking up at Dennis’s face with even more nervousness. He looked mean, I had to admit, but his face seemed poorly suited for that particular emotion. It looked a little like his facial muscles were having a hard time holding it together under the strain.

“You’re being totally stupid.” Sarah told me as I tried to position my arm in a way that wouldn’t make the task of cutting it difficult.

“You’ll thank me later.” I shrugged, having suddenly noticed that my hand was trembling a little bit. Shit.

“Believe me, I won’t.” Sarah said.

I propped my elbow against my stomach and clenched my hand into a fist. The memories that came flooding with this all-too-familiar routine might as well have been one and the same.

The image was always that of me sitting alone in a locked room, nobody home, heart racing as the razor got closer to my skin, my ears expectant yet still uncertain, still expecting that I’d snap out of it and find that it was all a dream and my blood didn’t really do anything. But each time some tune would begin to play and I almost laughed with relief. Each time I got less and less uncertain, more demanding and confident, until I didn‘t have to check my blood on a daily basis. The entire phenomenon became more natural to me, kind of like the fact that my hair was brown. Eventually I only cut myself once a week, holding in my urge until some allotted date. It really was special then -- almost like basking in my own personal superpower.

And now I was showing that superpower to a complete stranger.

With a deep breath, I pushed the tip of the knife very slightly into my arm, then pushing up under the skin until there was a hole the size of a small button. I removed it with care, pleased to see that there was a sufficient amount of blood oozing from the wound. The song playing then was some kind of jazz mix.

“My god…” Came from Dennis and George, who were both obviously shocked by the whole thing. I had a feeling that neither had believed me to begin with.

“Is that enough proof now?” Sarah snapped at them before they got too immersed in the moment. They blinked.

“How is that possible?” George asked nobody in particular.

“We’re not sure exactly.” Charlie answered. “But we do know how to distribute it so that our little girl doesn’t have to do this for every prick that wants to hear smooth jazz.”

“What’d you say?” Dennis growled through the trap door.

“You heard what I said.” Charlie sneered.

I wiped the knife off on my jeans and anxiously handed it back to Dennis. He didn’t look quite as angry now, but his expression still seemed a little wrong for his face.

“You can fix it now.” I told Sarah.

“You’ve got some nerve.” She spat at Dennis as she put her hand on the bloody hole in my arm. “Making a teenage girl cut herself just so you can get off!”

“I didn’t get off!” Dennis yelled, the outrage evident in his voice.

With a scoff, Sarah tightened her grip over the wound, making it a little more painful before it just started to feel weird. It actually felt a little bit like a cluster of worms burrowing into my arm until, a moment later, Sarah lifted her hands to reveal little more than a bloody smear that was still playing jazz at a dying volume.

“Can we get on with this now and finally give you a grand tour?” Charlie asked.

Dennis still looked a little suspicious, although George didn’t look so much like an over-muscled panther ready to pounce, which was good.

“If you say no now, goddamn it, I really will kill you.” Valentin growled, which seemed to speed up Dennis’s decision-making process.

“Can I have my gun back?” Dennis asked.

“If I can keep your bullets, then sure.” Valentin said, handing him the empty gun. Dennis took it was a sour expression on his face, which was definitely a step up from angry.

He and George finally made the fateful jump down through the trap door without another complaint, discounting the ones of twisted or possibly broken ankles.

“I can’t believe you did that.” Sarah hissed as we crouched down, ready to jump in after them.

“Well it worked, didn’t it?” I shrugged.

“Do you really not get it?” Sarah asked. “Do you not get that you can’t just start cutting yourself whenever some asshole won’t believe you?”

“And I won’t!” I insisted.

“Because if you keep that up, you might as well just get up on the human sacrifice altar voluntarily.” Sarah said. “There’s plenty of whack jobs in the world that might just decide killing you will fix something.”

“I know that.” I said, slowly, one syllable at a time.

Sarah, still unconvinced, let me jump down into the tunnel, and then landed, butt first, on my ankle, like a true and faithful friend.