PAINTED IN BLOOD

PART 2 (Chapter 5: Something in the Dark)

He looked at me steadily. "The others were taken as warnings. Messages, directed at me. Because Lucian is also, among other things, patient. And thorough. And he has understood for a very long time that the most effective way to ensure my cooperation is to make me watch people I have failed to protect."

The last sentence arrived differently from the others — quieter, and stripped of something. The composure was still there, but underneath it, just briefly, was something that had no composure at all.

I sat down. Not because he had asked me to. Because my legs had made the decision before my head caught up.

"You've been here for two hundred years," I said slowly. "And every time someone like me arrives — someone with this bloodline — Lucian takes them. And you can't stop him."

"I have stopped him." His voice was very even. "Eleven times in forty years, I have stopped him. The students who left suddenly, who withdrew for unexplained reasons — I got to them first. I got them out." A pause. "The ones I didn't reach in time are in the gallery."

The candles last night. The way he had looked at the portraits.

"So you paint them," I said.

He said nothing.

"You paint them and you put them in the gallery because you can't — " I stopped. Started again. "Because it's the only thing you can do for them."

The silence in the room was very complete.

"You should go to your next class," he said finally. His voice had returned to its usual register — level, controlled, giving nothing. "Don't walk back to the East Wing alone after dark. Use the main corridors where there are other students."

I stood. Moved toward the door.

"Professor Voss."

He looked at me.

"Thank you," I said. "For the eleven times."

Something crossed his face — too fast, too complicated to read — and was gone.

I left.

I took the long way back to the studio, through the main hall, past the portrait in the entrance.

I stopped in front of it.

D. Voss. Faculty. Est. 1847.

I looked at his painted face — the composed expression, the dark eyes, the hand resting on the back of the chair with the particular stillness of someone who has learned that stillness is the safest thing to be.

I thought about eleven students.

Eleven times in forty years he had gotten there first. Had seen someone in danger and moved to stop it, quietly, at cost to himself that I didn't yet fully understand.

I thought about the silver scars on his forearms in patterns that didn't look accidental.

I thought about what it cost, doing the same thing over and over for two hundred years, watching and waiting and losing and trying again.

I looked at his painted eyes.

He had been a painter once, he had told me. Before.

I wondered if he had painted the portraits in the gallery himself. I thought, looking at his face in the painting, that he probably had. That it probably cost him something new each time.

I turned away from the portrait and walked toward the studio.

Behind me — I was almost certain, though I didn't turn to check — the lamp by the entrance flickered.

That night, at two forty-three in the morning, I heard the sound again.

The not-quite-footsteps in the corridor. The careful almost-movement of something that was either very good at being quiet or didn't make sound the way that ordinary things made sound.

It stopped outside our door.

I lay in the dark. My heart was doing something loud and unhelpful. Cora was perfectly still on the other side of the room in the way that meant she was awake and listening too.

The door handle moved.

Just slightly. Just enough to establish that something on the other side was testing whether the door was locked.

It was locked.

A long silence.

Then — and this was the part that stayed with me, that I turned over for days afterward — a voice. Low, almost below hearing, coming through the door with a clarity that should not have been possible through an inch of solid wood:

"Soon, little painter."

Then nothing.

Cora's fairy lights came on.

We looked at each other across the room.

"Lucian Grey," I said.

Cora's face was very still. "You know his name."

"Yes."

She looked at the door. Back at me.

"Layla," she said quietly, carefully, like she was choosing each word before she set it down. "My grandmother's notebook. The warning she left." She paused. "There was one more line. After do not let him see your work."

I waited.

"Trust the one who stays," Cora said. "He has been there longer than the dark."

The fairy lights hummed softly in the quiet room.

Outside, the corridor was silent.

But neither of us slept.