PAINTED IN BLOOD

Chapter 2: The Professor Who Doesn't Blink

I made a decision that first morning.

I was going to be normal about this.

Professor Damien Voss was a man. A person. A faculty member at an art academy who happened to share a surname with a portrait painted in 1847, which meant absolutely nothing because surnames were inherited and families were long and coincidences existed. He had looked at me during orientation because I was new and people looked at new things. His eyes had seemed red because the lighting in the Great Hall was terrible and I had been awake for most of the previous night.

Normal. Completely normal.

I repeated this to myself all the way through breakfast, through my first studio session, and through the fifteen minutes I spent standing outside the door of Room 204 — Art History and Theory, 10 AM — talking myself into walking through it.

I was still repeating it when I sat down, opened my notebook, and looked up to find Professor Voss already watching me from the front of the room.

He looked away before I could be certain.

The classroom was smaller than I expected for a subject with Aldermoor's reputation — twelve students arranged around a long oval table, high windows letting in the grey morning light, walls hung with framed prints of paintings I half-recognised from textbooks. The kind of room that smelled like old paper and careful thought.

Professor Voss stood at the head of the table.

He hadn't written anything on the board. He hadn't distributed any materials. He simply stood there, one hand resting lightly on the back of his chair, and waited for everyone to settle with the patience of someone who had learned, long ago, that people always settle eventually.

When the room was quiet, he spoke.

"Art," he said, "is the only honest thing a person can do."

His voice was low. Unhurried. The kind of voice that didn't need to raise itself to be heard — it simply expected to be listened to, and the room complied without question.

"Everything else — conversation, behaviour, the face we present to the world — is performance. Negotiation. A careful arrangement of what we want others to see." He moved then, slowly, to the side of the table. "But when a person makes something — truly makes something, from the part of themselves they cannot edit — the truth comes out. Whether they intend it to or not."

He stopped walking.

His eyes swept the room — that same slow arc I had noticed during orientation, deliberate and complete, like a man taking inventory.

"Which means," he continued, "that by the end of this semester, I will know each of you better than most people in your lives ever will. Your work will tell me everything." A pause. "I suggest you make peace with that now."

No one spoke.

Somewhere near the window, a girl cleared her throat quietly. The boy across from me had stopped writing mid-sentence, his pen hovering above the page.

I realised I had pressed my notebook closed without meaning to.

Professor Voss looked at me.

"Miss Blackwell."

My name in his mouth was strange — precise, like he had already decided exactly how it should sound.

"Yes?" My voice came out steadier than I felt.

"You closed your notebook."

"I — yes."

"Why?"

The question was simple. It shouldn't have been difficult. I opened my mouth, and for one unnerving moment I couldn't think of a single reason that didn't sound like an admission of something.

"Force of habit," I said. "When I'm listening, I stop writing."

He considered this for a moment that lasted slightly too long.

"Most people do the opposite," he said. "They write more when they're uncertain. It gives their hands something to do." Another pause. "You close the notebook. You don't want a record of what you're thinking."

It was not a question.

I didn't answer. He didn't seem to require one.

He moved on.

The class lasted ninety minutes.

For ninety minutes, Professor Voss talked about art — not the history of it, not the technical mechanics, but the why of it. Why humans had always made things. Why every civilisation on record, no matter how brief or isolated, had produced art before almost anything else. Why the impulse to create was, in his words, the single most persistent proof of something worth preserving in the human condition.

He was, without question, the most compelling lecturer I had ever encountered.

He was also deeply, profoundly unsettling.

It wasn't anything specific. It wasn't the way he spoke, or the things he said, or even the fact that he seemed to have memorised more art history than any one person had a reasonable right to know. It was something underneath all of that — something in the quality of his stillness. The way he stood without shifting his weight, without fidgeting, without any of the small unconscious movements that people make simply because being still for too long becomes uncomfortable.

Professor Voss was never uncomfortable.

He also, I noticed somewhere around the forty-minute mark, did not blink at the normal rate.

I told myself I was imagining it.

By the sixty-minute mark, I had counted three blinks in twenty minutes.

I told myself I needed to stop counting and pay attention to the lecture.

By the time the class ended, I had filled four pages of notes and developed a headache that sat directly behind my left eye, and I was no closer to explaining why a grown adult man might blink less than twelve times an hour when the medical average was fifteen to twenty.

It means nothing, I told myself, gathering my things.

"Miss Blackwell."

I looked up.

The other students were filing out. Professor Voss stood at the head of the table, holding my sketchbook.

My sketchbook.

I looked at the empty space in my bag where it should have been and felt the particular cold clarity of realising something had happened that I hadn't noticed.

"You left this," he said.

I crossed the room and took it from him. Our fingers did not touch. He had been careful about that — holding it by the corner, leaving enough space.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded once.

I should have left. I was already turning toward the door when something stopped me — the same instinct that had made me stare at the portrait in the entrance hall for a full minute, the same pull toward the thing I probably should not look at too closely.

"The portrait in the entrance hall," I said. "D. Voss. 1847." I turned back. "Is that a relative?"

The question landed in the room and stayed there.

Professor Voss looked at me for a long moment. His expression did not change — it never seemed to change, not really, just shifted between variations of composed — but something moved behind his eyes. Something that was there and then wasn't.

"Yes," he said.

One word. Perfectly even.

"You look very alike," I said.

"Family resemblance." He picked up the folder on the table and turned away, toward the window. "You'll be late for your next session, Miss Blackwell."

It was a dismissal as clean and precise as everything else about him.

I left.

I found Cora in the east courtyard at lunch, sitting on a stone bench with her sketchbook open and a sandwich she wasn't eating balanced on her knee. She looked up when I dropped onto the bench beside her with significantly less grace than I intended.

"Voss," I said.

She looked at me.

"Art History," I said. "First class. Ninety minutes."

"And?"