PAINTED IN BLOOD

PART 2 (Chapter 3: The Missing List)

He looked up from the closed yearbook. His eyes in the amber lamplight were very dark — dark enough that the red I had seen before seemed impossible, a trick of different light in a different room.

"No," he said quietly. "It isn't."

I waited.

He straightened. Pushed the yearbook to the side of the table with two fingers, like he was putting distance between himself and something.

"There are things in this building," he said, "that you are not equipped to understand yet. Things that become significantly more dangerous the moment you start asking questions about them in places where you can be overheard."

I looked around the empty library.

"There's no one here."

"You can see no one here," he said. "That is not the same thing."

The lamp to my left flickered.

I thought about asking what that meant. I thought about asking who might be listening in an empty library at five minutes to ten at night. I thought about the list of thirty-two names and Cora's grandmother's warning and the fact that I was, at this precise moment, alone in a room with a man who appeared in the same photograph across forty-seven years of yearbooks.

"Are you dangerous?" I asked.

The question came out quieter than I intended.

He was still for a moment — that absolute, uncanny stillness that had bothered me all through his lecture.

"Yes," he said. He said it without hesitation and without drama, the same way he said everything — like a fact he had made peace with long ago. "More than you could survive, if I chose to be."

"But you're not choosing to be."

"Not at present."

"Why?"

Something shifted in his expression. Not softened — Professor Voss did not appear to be capable of softening — but changed. Something behind the composure that was not quite as settled as the rest of him.

"That," he said, "is a considerably more complicated question."

He picked up my copy of the list from the table. Looked at it for a moment. Set it back down in front of me without comment.

"Go back to your room," he said again. "Lock the door. Don't come to this floor of the library alone after dark again."

He turned and walked back toward the shelves, and the lamplight moved strangely around him, and I sat in the sudden quiet of the empty library with a list of thirty-two names and the absolute certainty that I had just made the situation significantly more complicated.

My name wasn't on the list.

Not yet.

But somewhere in the shadows at the edge of the lamplight, I had the feeling that someone was already writing it down.