Unmistakably. A large pool of it, and a trail leading away.
“Ceri!” they both shouted as they followed the bloody trail.
What could have happened? The only people that should have been out here were their own group and the guards, unless…
“It can’t be Professor Marin,” said Weyland. “She was in the dining hall when we left. You saw her.”
“What if she crossed the courtyard? She would have beaten us here.”
“You think she went out in that?”
The rain crashed against the windows in waves.
“No, I suppose not.”
Lady Sibba had been ashamed of her prejudice against Professor Marin, but she’d truly believed vampires to be bloodthirsty killers by nature for most of her life. It was hard to rewrite something like that in her mind, but she was trying.
“The trail ends here.”
They had followed the trail down the corridor, down the stairs, and to the door leading to the woods behind the campus.
The door rattled in its casing, battered by the winds outside.
Weyland reached for the handle anyway.
“Wait,” said Lady Sibba.
She knelt and lowered the candle to the bloodstain on the doormat. “This isn’t right,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
It had been decades, but Lady Sibba had seen violence firsthand. It had been during her travels through the eastern continent, not long before she came to Herot’s Hollow. The Unified Pantheon hadn’t taken in that part of the world. Out there, there were still bloody conflicts over the faces of the death god or whether it was the goddess of the hearth or the goddess of the home. The kind of fight that had plagued the peoples of the world since they’d first drawn air.
Lady Sibba had seen blood spilled. She knew the way it poured out of wounds, the way it could splatter from a violent thrust, the way it trickled from small cuts. This blood looked like it had been dropped from a bucket from several feet up.
“It’s fake,” she said. “These aren’t real bloodstains.”
“They look pretty real, Sib.”
“They aren’t. Look at that splash. It’s like spilled milk. Blood doesn’t splash like that, not even from an artery. It forms arcs with the beat of the heart.”
Weyland gave her a look that said he’d ask her later how she knew this, but he believed her.
“If it’s fake, who did it?”
“I don’t know,” said Lady Sibba. “But I’m willing to bet it wasn’t Ceri. Let’s go back.”
They looked to the ground to follow the trail back, but it was gone.
“Impossible,” said Weyland.
“Magic,” said Lady Sibba. “Be on your guard. There’s something going on.”
She looked up at him. He nodded at her, his red face resolute. He was determined to keep them safe.
If you had to be stuck in the magically haunted hallways of an ancient college campus during a hurricane, there were worse people to be stuck with.
Chapter Thirteen
