PAINTED IN BLOOD

Chapter 6: The Truth Beneath the Canvas

I reported it to no one.

This was a decision I made before the sun came up, lying in the dark with Cora's fairy lights making small warm shapes on the ceiling, listening to the silence where Lucian Grey's voice had been.

I thought about going to the administration office. I thought about the flat-eyed woman at reception and the orientation speaker who had spoken for forty minutes about materials policies and studio hours and had not once mentioned that students were disappearing with annual regularity. I thought about what it meant that Aldermoor had an entire restricted gallery full of portraits of missing students and had apparently continued operating for thirty-two years without anyone shutting it down or asking sufficient questions.

Whoever ran Aldermoor knew.

Which meant the administration was either complicit, compromised, or afraid.

None of those options made reporting to them a useful exercise.

So I said nothing. I went to breakfast. I sat in the studio for three hours and painted badly — distracted, uneven work that I scraped off the canvas twice before giving up and cleaning my brushes. I went to Art History and Theory and sat in my usual seat and took careful notes and did not look at Professor Voss any more than I usually did, which was already more than was strictly necessary.

After class, when the other students had filed out and I was taking longer than I needed to pack my bag, he said:

"It came to your room."

Not a question.

I looked up. He was standing at the head of the table, and he was looking at me with an expression I hadn't seen on him before — controlled, as always, but underneath the control something that had edges.

"Yes," I said.

"What did it say?"

I considered not telling him. I considered it for exactly as long as it took to remember that I was ranked first on a list that had thirty-two names on it and that Lucian Grey had been standing outside my door at three in the morning.

"Soon, little painter," I said.

The edges underneath his expression sharpened.

"He knows you paint," he said. It came out quiet. Precise. The tone of someone putting pieces together rapidly and not enjoying what the picture looked like.

"I'm at an art school."

"He knows what you are when you paint." He turned away from the table, toward the window, his hands clasped behind his back. "There is a difference. Your blood carries something specific, Miss Blackwell — something that becomes more concentrated, more potent, when you are in the act of creating. Lucian can sense it. From a distance." A pause. "He has been able to sense it since the day you arrived."

I thought about the library. The flickering lamp. The way certain lights in this building moved at moments they had no practical reason to move.

"He's been here since the beginning," I said.

"He's been near here since the beginning." He turned back. "Lucian doesn't come inside the building — not yet. The treaty still holds enough to make that costly for him. But the boundary is the building's walls, not the grounds. He's been on the grounds since your first night."

Since my first night.

I thought about the taxi driver who wouldn't come past the gate. About the feeling on the hill — the one I had told myself was nerves.

"The grounds," I said carefully. "So last night, when he spoke through the door—"

"He has people inside." His voice was very even. "Not vampires — humans. People who work for him. Who have made arrangements with him in exchange for things he is very good at providing."

I thought about the woman at reception. The flat eyes. The way she had looked at my collarbone.

"How many?" I asked.

"I don't know precisely. Enough." He moved to the desk, picked up a folder, set it down again — the first time I had ever seen him handle something without purpose, the unconscious motion of a person whose hands needed something to do. "This is why I told you not to report what you heard to anyone in the administration."

"I didn't."

He looked up.

"I decided that before sunrise," I said. "I figured whoever runs this place either knows and doesn't care, or knows and can't stop it, and neither of those makes them useful."

Something moved in his expression — brief, unreadable, gone.

"No," he said. "It doesn't."

I found the photograph in the library that afternoon.

I had gone back — not to the restricted section of the third floor, but to the main archive, the yearbooks. I had been thinking about what Damien had said: he has been able to sense it since the day you arrived. Which meant Lucian had been watching me. Which meant there was a pattern to how he chose his targets, and patterns, given enough data points, became visible.

I pulled the yearbooks again. But this time instead of looking at the missing students, I looked at what happened in the weeks before they disappeared. Club memberships. Event attendance. Studio schedules — the academy printed term programmes going back to the eighties, bound and filed in the archive with the particular institutional thoroughness of a place that wanted its records to look orderly even if what they recorded was not.

Two hours in, I found it.

It was tucked inside the back cover of the 1991 term programme — a photograph, small, slightly blurred at the edges in the way of photographs taken in low light. It showed a section of the main courtyard at what looked like night. Three figures. Two of them I didn't recognise — tall, still, positioned at the edge of the frame in a way that suggested they were watching rather than present. The third was standing closer to the camera, face turned slightly away, but recognisable.

Professor Damien Voss.

He was standing between the two figures and the entrance to the building. Arms at his sides. Not moving.

It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at.

He was blocking them.

He was standing in the courtyard at night between two figures I couldn't identify and the entrance to the building, and the quality of his stillness in the photograph was different from his usual stillness — it was the stillness of someone who is prepared to absorb whatever comes next and has made peace with that.

On the back of the photograph, in handwriting I didn't recognise:

He holds the line. But for how long.

No date. No name.

I sat with the photograph for a long time.

Then I put it in my jacket pocket, next to the list, and went to find him again.

He was in the gallery.

I found out because I went to his office and it was empty, and then I stood in the corridor for a moment and thought about where a person went when they needed to be somewhere that mattered to them, and then I went to the third floor.

The gallery door was closed this time. I knocked.

A long pause.

"Come in."

He was standing in front of Anisa Reeves' portrait. Not looking at it directly — standing at an angle, the way you stand when you want to be near something without confronting it fully. He didn't turn when I came in.