PAINTED IN BLOOD

Chapter 5: Something in the Dark

I started locking the door.

Not because Professor Voss had told me to — or not only because of that. I started locking it because on the sixth night at Aldermoor I woke at two forty-seven in the morning to the sound of something moving in the corridor outside my room, and the sound was wrong in a way I could not immediately explain and did not particularly want to examine.

It wasn't footsteps. It was more like the suggestion of footsteps — the sound a person might make if they were moving very carefully, or if they were not entirely a person.

I lay still in the dark and listened.

Cora was breathing slowly on the other side of the room. The fairy lights were off. The window let in a thin strip of moonlight that fell across the floor between our beds and stayed perfectly, unnervingly still — no shadows moving through it, no shift in the light.

The sound in the corridor stopped.

I counted to sixty. Nothing.

I counted to sixty again.

I did not go back to sleep for a very long time.

In the morning I told myself it was an old building.

Old buildings settled. Old buildings had pipes that knocked and floorboards that shifted and corridors that carried sound from one end to the other in ways that made ordinary things seem strange at three in the morning. I was tired and stressed and my imagination had been running at an elevated pace since the moment I arrived at Aldermoor, and none of that was conducive to accurate sensory interpretation.

I told myself this all the way through breakfast.

I was halfway through telling myself this in the studio when Cora sat down next to me, opened her sketchbook to a fresh page, and said without looking up:

"Did you hear it last night?"

I put my brush down.

"The corridor," I said.

"Mm." She began sketching something — loose lines, abstract, the way she drew when she was thinking rather than drawing. "Third time this week for me. Always between two and three."

"You didn't say anything."

"Neither did you."

I looked at her profile. The careful neutrality of it — the expression of someone who had decided to be calm about something that did not entirely deserve calm.

"Cora," I said. "What is it?"

She was quiet for a moment, her pencil moving in slow circles.

"I don't know," she said. "But it stops outside our door." A pause. "Every time."

I went to find Professor Voss.

Not because I had decided this was a good idea. Rationally I understood it was probably not a good idea — the man had told me he was dangerous, had told me to go back to my room and lock the door, had given every available signal that increased proximity to him was inadvisable.

But he had also said he had been making sure I was safe.

And something had been standing outside my door at three in the morning for three consecutive nights, and I was not interested in waiting to find out what it wanted.

He was in his office on the second floor — a small room at the end of a corridor lined with framed prints, the door half-open, sitting at his desk with a book open in front of him. He did not look up when I knocked on the door frame, but he said:

"Miss Blackwell."

"You knew it was me."

"I heard you coming down the corridor." He turned a page. "You walk like you're trying to make a decision."

I pushed the door open further and came in without being invited, because I had decided on the walk over that I was done waiting to be invited into conversations that involved my own safety.

"Something is outside my room at night," I said. "Between two and three in the morning. Three nights in a row. It stops at our door."

He closed the book.

He didn't look alarmed. He didn't look surprised. He looked like a man who had been given information he had already suspected and was now making rapid internal calculations about what to do with it.

That, in some ways, was more frightening than alarm would have been.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'd rather stand."

"I know." He stood instead, moving around the desk to the window. He looked out at the courtyard below — the students crossing it, the autumn leaves, the ordinary daylight world going about its business with no idea what lived at the edges of it. "How long has Cora Night been having the same experience?"

I stared at him. "I didn't say anything about Cora."

"No." He turned from the window. "But you wouldn't have come here alone if she hadn't confirmed it. You're careful that way — you don't act on single data points." Something in his expression shifted. "It's one of the things that makes you difficult."

"Difficult."

"Difficult to keep safe," he said, and there was something in his voice when he said it — something underneath the composure, brief and unguarded, that was gone before I could properly identify it. "Most students who start asking questions stop when they become frightened. You ask more questions."

"Is that a problem?"

"It is," he said, "an extraordinary liability." He looked at me for a moment. "It is also, possibly, the reason you're still here when others weren't."

The room was quiet. Outside, a door closed somewhere down the corridor.

"Tell me what's outside my room," I said.

He turned back to the window.

"Someone is watching you," he said. "Not me — someone else. Someone who became aware of your presence at Aldermoor and is attempting to assess you before making a move."

"What kind of move?"

"The kind," he said carefully, "that I am not going to allow."

The certainty in it was absolute — not a reassurance, not a promise, but a statement of fact with the weight of someone who had made decisions like this before and intended to make this one with the same finality.

"Who?" I asked.

He was quiet for long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer.

"His name is Lucian Grey," he said finally. "And he is considerably older and considerably more dangerous than I am, which is not a sentence I say easily." He turned from the window. "He knows you're here. He knows what you carry in your blood. And he has been waiting for someone like you for a very long time."

The name settled in the room like something with weight.

"What does he want from me?"

"Your blood." Simply. Directly. The way he said everything difficult — without decoration, as though he had decided long ago that softening hard things did not make them softer. "There is something in your bloodline — rare, specific, appearing once in several generations — that is of significant value to someone who knows what to do with it. Lucian knows what to do with it."

I thought about Anisa Reeves looking toward something off-canvas with an expression between fear and decision.

"Is that what happened to the students in the gallery?" I asked.

A long pause.

"Some of them," he said.

"And the others?"