“Wait- um- Jezabel- stop. Freeze, Holdup. We gotta go to the principal. Call my dad, at the police station, get help.”

The led Zeppelin girl looked back at me crossly, speeding through the school corridors with me at her heel.

Five more minutes until fourth period ends and the classes will be emptied out into break and I was walking around with a massive black eye, clay all over my clothes, and a girl holding two large turquoise knives.

“Okay, first of all, my name is Jez-e-bel, not Jez-a-bel.” she said.

“And secondly; are you freaking crazy?! We can’t fess about this! They'll think we’re insane!”

“Well, are we?” I caught up to her, walking briskly as I hurled my backpack over my shoulders and then gently touched my eye to check if it had somehow magically gotten better in the last five minutes. It had not.

“We’ve been over this, haven’t we? Of course I am not. I don’t really know you well enough to make that judgment call yet. . . but you seem well enough.” All the time as she spoke, she was walking around at a stressed pace. Her hack was close to the walls and her hands gripped her knives so that her knuckles turned white.

“Why was that thing back there?” I asked, though I recognised it to be a Golem from the old mythology stories. I glared down at my watch nervously; two and a half minutes.

“Oh, you mean the Golem?”

“What else could I possibly mean-”

“-You know; big scary clay monster. Super obedient to its master. They can be completely harmless, depending on who controls them and how much that person wants to see you die. Boy, if my mom knew what I had just done to a fellow Jew. . . whew.” She swiped the back of her hand over her forehead, like she was wiping away a bead of sweat.

“And how did you do the thing with the water?” My eyes dropped down to the knives in her hands. Some part of me was still a little paralyzed with shock and fear. My heart wasn’t even pouding; it was vibrating. But at least my headache was gone; left without a trace. What a remedy; next time my dad gets a migraine, I’ll recommend getting attacked by a Golem. It works like a charm.

She turned to me, her hair snapping at her neck. “Listen, Blondy, I’m sure you have a ton of questions, I know how you feel, truly, but I’m trying to think, and I need you to shut up.”

She spoke to me like a mother to a child. Her smile was so large and fake that I could nearly see her braces all the way around her teeth. Her voice was wet with sarcasm and her very existence seemed to patronize me. I realized suddenly that she was threatening me and it shocked me to my core. No one threatened me. Ever. Well, sometimes the older kids, like Dax and Avery, but someone like her? No, I didn’t like that one bit.

I took a step closer to her, the finger she was holding up in the air now pressing against my chest. I pulled my shoulders back.

“Or what?” I asked slowly, allowing the words to really hover in the air before sinking slowly. I expected a little more fear than what I received.

“Or we can see about having your right eye match your left.” she said, lowering her register to mimic my voice. She lifted her knives slightly and scraped the wall with one of them, making a noise like nails on a chalkboard.

Then she smiled again and the tension was relieved. I almost sighed, but then remembered that I have a tad more honor than that.

“Your dad has already been told of your departure, so don’t worry about trying to go back and explain this stuff to him.”

I was speechless for a moment, trying to swallow the words.

“My- my dad? Departure?”

“Yes. What do you think, we’re gonna take you without your dad knowing and proving? It's rude to assume that just because we come from hell we’re evil.”

Hell? What type of sick, sick joke is this?

Jezebel tapped her knives together and they flickered for a moment before disappearing and returning to their little magnet shapes. She slipped them into the pocket of her jeans as she counted down from three. Just as she reached the number one, the bell blasted through the hall, with the sound like that of a lot of pots and pans falling in synchronization.

“I’m-I’m sorry,” I said in confusion. Jezebel pulled my hoodie over my face to cover my eye as the students began to evacuate their prisons. “But I just don’t understand.” Jezebel placed her crusty finger over her lips to silence me, but even if I had yelled “I JUST SAW A CLAY MAN FIGHT WITH THE AVATAR.” No one would have heard me over the cussing, kissing, and creating awkward conversation all through the hall. No amount of noise can drown the insanity that is a high school hallway right after the bell rang.

Jezebel dragged me away by the sleeve, wrestling me with strength unbefitting for someone as pale and scrawny as herself. It was like trying to walk a cat on a leash.

She pulled me through the door to the library.

Looking around quickly (there was obviously no one there) she hunched over behind the shelf farthest away from the entrance; the shelf with all the vampire romance novels. AKA; the most detested place in that whole dead silent room, if not in the whole school.

“I don’t understand.” I whispered again, wide eyed. I tried to face her as well as I could, but the girl wouldn’t sit still, constantly looking around.

“You talked to my dad? How do you even know my dad? Where are we going?”

She blew a raspberry. “To Heaven’s Paradiss hotel of course. Where else would we-'' in a second, her face was stripped of all color. It was like someone had pressed the off switch of light in her skin and she became pale and unbelievably terror- stricken all at once.

“Oh no.” she said, her lips not moving as she spoke.

I felt as though I should turn around. I had the itching uncomfortable feeling that someone was standing right behind me. But she was looking at me. Her eyes fixed over mine.

There was no amusement in her now. She looked as though she just witnessed a terrifying methodological clay- man standing outside on the quad and fighting against a smart mouthed girl with sharp knives. Who could imagine?

“No.” She looked away from me and sank back against the bookshelf, rubbing the dirt- painted heels of her hands against her eyes. “No, no, no. This can’t be! You really don’t know what I’m talking about? How can you not know?! But we got your signal and everything . . .” the more she spoke, the paler her face became. And the paler her face became, the redder mine got.

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“Signal?” I whispered back at her. (She wasn’t whispering, but it was, after all, still the library).

“Yes, the signal!” she made a rude, anger- fueled imitation of me as she stressed the last word. “Your dad never told you? Really? So now I have to do it? I have to try and break this news to you?!”

I thought the exasperation might just make me burst into tears. What was she talking about? Why was this happening to me? And why on the first day of school? Can’t all this have happened in the second semester? By then I should be bored of school anyways and might have even found this to be entertaining.

But then again. . . I think it would have freaked me out even then.

She took a deep breath, assisting some color in making its way back to her face. Her big, fiery eyes were still buzzing around the room.

“Okay,” she whispered now, after a long moment of self- collection.

“Alright, okay, so. . . you’re gonna laugh, really. . . okay, so basically. . .” she bit down on her lower lip, shrinking down as she spoke, like the words were heavily sinking onto her shoulders and she was struggling to keep them over her head.

“You’rekindofademon.” She spoke too fast for me to catch exactly what she said.

“What?”

She took another deep breath, composing herself. This time she spoke very slowly, articulating each word. “You are kind of a demon.” She clenched her eyes shut and held her fists to her chest.

I looked at her blankly. “Well you haven’t been too nice either, okay? It's just been a really long day-”

“No, no, no, no, no. I mean . . . I mean you’re literally a demon- or, a half demon, I should say. You mom is a demon and you’re a half demon. You’re a semi- demon. Got that? Okay let's go!” She got up to her feet with ease, the weight that the words had pressed on her earlier had now vanished and left her feeling young and feathery.

I couldn’t move.

“You’re kidding.” I didn’t ask it, I just stated it, like; ‘you must be kidding, because what you just said makes absolutely no sense.’ I mean, she just had to be kidding, right? I didn’t even believe in demons! What can this mean? She had to be kidding. But then again . . . I didn’t really believe in Golems either and yet there was one just outside on the quad. What would this mean for me? Why would my dad ever have. . . I mean, how?

“A demon?” I whispered, feeling a wave of nervous laughter throb in my stomach. I laugh sometimes when I feel uncomfortable.

Jezebel sighed, her tight shoulders relaxed and she sat back down beside me, the grin wiped clean from her face.

“I don’t believe you.” I said in a very matter- of- fact way. It was true; I didn’t believe her. I wasn’t just saying it.

“You’d be pretty gullible if you did.” she nodded thoughtfully, with a voice that had a kind of dark, sad shade to it.

“I don’t believe you.” I said again, dry mouthed. I didn’t believe, and yet it made sense. Did I not believe? Or did I just not want to?

“I don’t even know that I believe in God. . . I don’t even know if I’m religious. . . you know I can’t actually believe you.”

She gave me a short scoff. “Yeah. I’m an atheist. You don’t have to believe in the big guy to know that demons exist. Unicorns don’t exist, but zebras do. You know how it is. But please try to imagine the shock of my Jewish mother when she found out she cheated on her husband with a literal demon. Furthermore, imagine her shock when she got pregnant and then gave birth to a little red baby with horns.”

I had no idea how I was supposed to react. I had no idea what to say or whether or not I even believed her. I mean she was clearly lying. . .

Right?

She swiped a stray hair from her face, which seemed unnecessary since her hair was otherwise disheveled.

“The rule is that a demon needs to tell the human if one of them gets preggers. Then the human has to keep and raise the child and tell them of their. . . heritage when they reach the age of six so that they can start to learn about the things that, um, make them different, to put it lightly. So usually when, in their early teens, they send out the ‘signal’, they can be conscious of what they are doing and aren’t totally shocked when we come and take them to Paradiss.”

My eyes were so focused on a far off spot on the ground that I nearly forgot to blink.

“You can’t expect me to believe this.” I scoffed, finally turning my head back in her direction. It felt crazy to even linger on the thought, but I had just seen this girl fight a Golem. I had seen her sprout horns and tail and turn all red and scary. I had seen her control the water from the water fountain. How can I not believe everything she says?

A sudden heat shocked me. It melted downwards over the girl, bringing with it a glaze of red over her skin again. The pale white color was replaced with a shiny, blood- red, the same way Mystique's skin turns from white to blue.

She gave a dry smile and ran her hands over the two horns poking from the top of her head. They were thin and only slightly curved; smooth and black, with a deep shine that slid along their bases and gave a sparkle at the tip when she turned her head the right way.

Her tail slithering behind her like it had a mind of its own. It was red with the same color as that of her skin, slashing on the floor, spiraling behind her with a tip like a very sharp teardrop.

I gasped and jumped back, away from her, knocking my head against the bookshelf with a silly little whimper.

The heat her body projected was dry, almost choking, and made my throat feel sandy.

“Shh!” her skin turned back to its original color effortlessly, without a movement of her body or a flick of her hand. Like it was never there to begin with; the horns had just been devoured by her skull and hair, and the tail just- well, I don’t really want to know where the tail went.

The heat had gone too, making me feel like I could breathe again. But her eyes were still red. I wished they could have changed as well, but they were still red. Moving in quick, halting motions in her head. Darting around the room, examining me as though they were trying to understand something about me.

“See?” she said with a sweetened tongue, satisfied by my reaction. “I’m sure you believe me now-”

“I’m not coming with you.” I said clearly, my voice coming out unexpectedly smooth. I was no longer whispering.

“What? You can’t tell me you’re scared of me!”

I looked her over once more. “I’m not scared.”

“Oh, I think you are! I think you’re a little scared demon- chicken!”

“Shut up! I’m not scared. And I’m not coming with you. I like my life. That was. . . whatever that was, I don’t want it. I don’t need it in my life.”

Her smile wavered and she shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, Blondy. . . but you don’t really have a choice. Paradiss is the only place safe for people like us. Now that you’ve sent out the ‘signal’, everything in the world that wants to kill you is aware of your existence. You can either stay here and meet more Golems and Ghouls and Spirits and crazy priests- or you can come with me. And not die.”

She paused (maybe for dramatic effect) and peered nervously through the bookshelf.

“I-I just- I don’t know why- okay, why do you keep looking around like that?!” I snapped, annoyed at the lack of attentiveness she was giving me as I tried to make such a difficult decision.

She swung her head back to face me.

“There’s someone here.”

“What?!” I asked it quite aggressively, since I was still on a bit of an adrenaline kick from getting mad at her for not looking me in the eye.

“Who in the world would spend their short lunchtime break in the library-?” I gasped as the realization dawned on me. “DiDi.”

Jezebel raised her brows and rested her hands on her hips, waiting for me as I flashed a quick look at my watch. 10 minutes.

“Okay.” I got up. “Wait for me outside. We’ll leave as soon as the break is over. I need to talk to someone.” She gave me a single nod, turned around and left out the back door.