PAINTED IN BLOOD

The iron gates of Aldermoor Academy of Fine Arts opened like a mouth. I told myself it was just a gate. Iron, rust, and old hinges that screamed when the wind pushed them. I told myself the feeling crawling up the back of my neck was nothing more than nerves — the kind every scholarship student feels when they arrive somewhere they were never supposed to belong. I told myself a lot of things that night. None of them were true. The taxi had refused to go further than the bottom of the hill. "End of the road for me, love," the driver had said, not quite meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. He handed back my change too quickly, like he wanted his hands free. "Academy's just up the path. Ten minutes, maybe less." It had been twenty. Twenty minutes of dragging a suitcase up a gravel path that wound through trees so old and dense they blocked out the sky. The kind of trees that didn't sway in the wind — they just stood there, watching. By the time the academy revealed itself at the top of the hill, I was breathing hard and my right hand was numb from the cold. But I stopped walking the moment I saw it. Aldermoor Academy was not what the brochure had promised. The brochure had shown sun-drenched courtyards, ivy-covered walls, students laughing over easels in golden afternoon light. It looked like a place where art happened, where creativity breathed freely and professors were the kind of people who wore paint-stained linen shirts and talked about feelings. What stood before me now, under a sky thick with clouds and a moon so full it looked swollen, was something else entirely. The building was enormous — gothic stone towers clawing upward, arched windows bleeding amber light into the dark, iron railings lining every balcony like teeth. It looked less like a school and more like something that had been built to keep things in. Or keep things out. A single lamp post flickered near the entrance. I counted to three, told myself to stop being dramatic, and walked through the gates. The woman at the reception desk had the energy of someone who had seen too much and chosen to feel nothing about it. "Layla Blackwell," I said, sliding my acceptance letter across the counter. "First year. Painting and Visual Arts." She didn't look at the letter. She looked at me — a long, flat look that started at my face and ended somewhere around my collarbone before she reached for a key on the wall behind her. "Room 14, East Wing." She set the key on the counter. "Curfew is eleven. Common rooms close at ten. The west corridor on the third floor is restricted — students are not permitted inside under any circumstances." "What's in the west corridor?" Another flat look. "Storage." She said it the way people say fine when nothing is fine. I took the key. Room 14 smelled like old wood, dried paint, and something faintly floral that I couldn't name. It was small but not unpleasant — two beds, two desks, a tall window that faced the courtyard, and walls that had clearly hosted a hundred students before me, judging by the faint outlines of old tape marks and the tiny ink smudge near the light switch that looked almost like a handprint. Almost. My roommate had already claimed the left side with ruthless efficiency. Her desk was buried under three different sketchbooks, a ceramic mug shaped like a skull, two half-eaten granola bars, and a string of fairy lights that she had somehow already managed to string up in the hour she must have arrived before me. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed when I walked in, eating a fourth granola bar and reading something on her phone with the focused intensity of someone defusing a bomb. She looked up. Her eyes were huge, dark, and immediate — the kind of eyes that made you feel like she was already three steps into figuring you out. "You're late," she said. "I was starting to think I'd get the room to myself. I was genuinely excited about it." A pause. "I'm Cora. Cora Night. Don't make fun of the surname, I've heard everything." "Layla Blackwell." I dropped my suitcase by the right bed. "I wasn't going to make fun of it." "Everyone says that." She tucked her phone under her pillow. "Scholarship?" "Is it that obvious?" "You walked up the hill. The taxi drivers won't come past the bottom gate after dark." She said it simply, like it was a fact she had memorised. "It's a whole thing. Nobody talks about it during orientation but everyone knows." I looked at her. "Why won't they come past the gate?" Cora opened her mouth. Closed it. Tilted her head slightly, like she was making a decision. "Superstition," she said finally, and smiled. It was a perfectly normal smile. Warm, even. I almost believed her. I didn't sleep well that first night. It wasn't the unfamiliar bed or the sound of wind pushing against the old window frame. It wasn't even the low, distant sound I heard sometime around two in the morning — something that might have been music, or might have been nothing, drifting up from somewhere below the courtyard. It was the portrait. I had noticed it on my way in, hanging in the entrance hall — a massive oil painting in a gilt frame, the kind of thing old institutions put up to remind students that history is watching. Most schools used portraits of their founders. Stern men in high collars, women in pearls, that sort of thing. This one was different. The subject was a man. Young — or at least, he appeared young — with dark hair swept back from a sharp face and eyes that were painted in such precise, unsettling detail that they seemed to follow you as you moved. He was dressed in the style of the mid-1800s, one hand resting on the back of a chair, the other at his side. No smile. No warmth. Just that gaze — steady and dark and knowing, like he had been waiting for the painter to finish so he could get back to something more important. I had stood in front of it for almost a full minute before I noticed the small brass plaque fixed to the bottom of the frame. D. Voss. Faculty. Est. 1847. Faculty. I looked at the painting again. At the sharp jaw, the composed posture, the eyes that gave nothing away. Faculty, I thought. So he's a professor. Or he had been, once, nearly two hundred years ago. I told myself it was probably a family name. A dynasty of professors. It meant nothing. I went to bed and stared at the ceiling for three hours. Orientation was held in the Great Hall at nine the following morning, and it was there that I learned three things. One: Aldermoor had twenty-six students per intake. Scholarship spots were rare. I was one of two. Two: the academy ranked its students at the end of every semester based on a combination of faculty assessment and peer review. The ranking was posted publicly. Everyone knew where everyone else stood. Three: according to the girl sitting next to me — a quiet, precise girl named Seren who wore her hair in a tight braid and spoke in careful sentences — the student ranked first at the end of the year had not returned for their second year in thirty-two consecutive years. "What do you mean, not returned?" I kept my voice low.