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Is this the part where I’m supposed to start feeling afraid? Blades ceased to scare me a long time ago. “I haven’t got anything valuable. Just my sketchbook, and you can’t have that.”
The boy smiles wider, and I realize with a plummeting sensation that he doesn’t care what I have. He’s only interested in taking things from me.
A cold, silent wind rushes through the rapidly darkening cemetery, and I know that we’re completely, utterly alone.
“Grab her arms,” he orders the boy to my right, who is a copper-haired boy in a dirty white T-shirt.
White T-shirt grabs my arm, and I pull away from him, my heart beating wildly, and open my mouth to scream. Black Sweater growls in anger. He lunges for me with the knife, and fire bursts in a white-hot line along the back of my forearm.
My skin is ripped open, revealing living, pink flesh. It’s always like this when you’re cut quickly. The blood takes a moment to fill the wound. There’s a moment where the universe stands still and the world grinds to a halt, and then the inevitable thick, ruby-red liquid wells up. I twist my arm back and forth in the deep blue glow of late dusk, enraptured by the glistening flow. Little rivers of blood run down my arm and splash onto a gravestone.
“Now you’ve done it,” I whisper.
“What?” asks White T-shirt. He and Blue T-shirt don’t seem as keen to hurt me as Black Sweater.
“You’ve broken the rule.”
“What rule?”
I hold my arm out as if that explains everything. “I’m bleeding.”
White T-shirt frowns. “So?”
“What are you? A hemo-thingy?” Blue T-shirt asks.
His friend punches his shoulder. “Dude, there’s no need for slurs. Just say lesbian.”
Blue T-shirt punches back harder. “Moron.Hemo, not homo. That disease that means you can’t stop bleeding.”
“I’m not a hemophiliac,” I tell them.
“She’s a dead bitch if she doesn’t do what she’s told,” Black Sweater seethes, a nasty sneer on his lips, and he slashes the air in my direction. He’s keen to get this mugging or rape or whatever it is back on track.
My pulse is racing so fast it’s making me feel sick, but it’s not these boys I’m afraid of. How dare these idiots mock me with something so stupid as that knife. It’s a shitty knife, but he doesn’t deserve it.
I want it.
I snatch at the blade and Black Sweater jerks it away from me, more from shock than skill. My fingers just skim the edge of the blade and close on empty air.
His eyes go wide. “What is wrong with you, you crazy bitch?”
Hasn’t he realized?
Everything.
Everything is wrong with me.
“Fuck you,” I snarl, and lunge for the blade again. I nearly have it. My heart pounds with delight.
A hand seizes my wrist in the darkness, one twice the size of mine and adorned with tattoos and rings. I freeze in place and stare at it.
A deep, unforgiving voice just behind me growls, “Vivienne. You know you’re not allowed to play with knives.”
The three boys stare in shock as a man steps forward, his pale blue eyes narrowed, his cleanshaven jaw tighter than the grip he has on my wrist, and his nostrils flaring in fury. He looms over me in a charcoal black suit like the devil himself has risen from one of these graves.
I recognize him instantly. We all do.
He glares at my bleeding arm and then accusingly into my eyes.
