Their appointment, a second-year student named Ayer, grinned broadly and swept a stiff pile of laundry from an old couch.

He nodded appreciatively at Sao. “Neat coat. Futuristic.”

Ayer’s own coat was a huge flared tent of burnt-orange wool, with a broad stripe of blue across the chest, wrapping all around the back. Amidst the blue was faint mint-green embroidery, trees or snowflakes. When seen from a distance, he looked like a large traffic cone.

That was exactly the sight they’d been greeted with when they met him in front of his dormitory. It was one of the apartments on the west side of the campus, outside the walls. The block was simpler than Ace’s vintage inn, but still charming in its own small ways, with red brick facades and tall windows, each with its own snow-covered planter.

Ayer removed his coat and dropped it over a bedpost. The orange cone had been concealing a set of very muscular limbs and a deep tan.

“Did you come all the way from Mainline too?” Ayer asked Sao. He took a seat on his bed between piles of unsorted clothes, and dug up a notepad to scribble down Rai’s badge number.

“He was in town last night for the air con bust,” Rai answered. “But he slept at a friend’s house.”

“When did you get to bed in the end, anyway?”

“Me?” Rai was deadpan. “I told you, I wasn’t planning to.”

“An all-nighter after all those shots? You don’t even look that hungover.” Ayer turned twinkling eyes on Sao; they were the same pale blue as the pattern on his coat. “This guy must have an inhuman gut. Every time I looked he was throwing one back. Hey - were you trying to lure out the person who’s been taking the pictures?”

“No. I didn’t think of that.”

“He has a high tolerance,” Sao said, hoping Rai wouldn’t put the idea into practice now that someone had prorposed it. “Perhaps the amount of coffee he drinks in the day staves off the hangovers.”

“That’s a myth. You’d just get dehydrated,” Ayer declared. “I was kind of worried when you said you were going to hit every dorm. You being new here, if you got lost or passed out…” He shuddered. “You know, one of the cold snaps here killed like twelve people in one night. It was last year, the run up to Valentine’s too, four guys passed out in the snow and when the cold came through…”

“I’m pretty resistant to cold. Well, maybe not to something that extreme. But you don’t have to worry about me after a couple of light drinks.” Rai drew the glove off one of his hands, filling the corner with the white-blue light radiating from his skin, the magical glow that ran through his veins from his fingertips to his wrists.

Ayer’s eyes grew nearly as bright at the spectacle, catching the light like polished mirrors. “Shit, you’re a Life Fountain. It all makes sense. How old are you?”

Rai grimaced. “I didn’t inherit the lifespan. So about as old as him.” He jerked a glowing thumb at Sao.

Sao watched Ayer’s face flicker, not quite frown, but register a change in the mood, the pressure of the air. He hid whatever analysis he’d made with a slow blink and leaned over to Rai, clamping the proffered blue and with both of his like he was catching a butterfly. All without once dropping the look of wonder.

It was an oddly romantic gesture. Rai, who apparently hadn’t anticipated a handshake at all, tried to get away by flattening himself into the couch.

“Sorry if I’m freaking out,” Ayer said. “I’ve just never met a Life Fountain before. Okay, I interned at a hospital that sort of had one, but I never got to see them.”

“I know some guys in the hospital network. Where was this?”

Ayer shook his head. “Not anything in the Central. It was at a private start-up in Highland. I actually just got back a couple months ago. What a crazy coincidence this is where I first see aura in person.” Without releasing Rai’s hand, Ayer crowed over his shoulder, “Hey! Check this out, it’s the coolest thing!”

Sao had been trying not to stare at the fourth person in the room.

The room was slightly larger than Ace’s had been and while not in total disrepair, was noticeably shabbier. A heating pipe with peeling paint ran down one of the walls, the couch was patched, and the flooring was scraped and faded wood. Approximately half the room was carpeted with clothing and plastered with yellow sticky notes, evidently Ayer’s, while the other was nearly immaculate, devoid even of books, except for an explosion of wires, adapters, and loose machinery shoved in the corner.

The space was split in such a way because it housed two students. Ayer had a roommate, a large figure curled vulture-like over a laptop on his otherwise barren desk. Sao could only estimate his posture by the strange hanging of his head; the roommate’s shape was drowned in a dark hooded sweatshirt. He had not turned to look at them even once.

He ignored them this time, too.

“Let’s get back to photos,” Rai suggested, pulling his hand out of Ayer’s with, Sao though, considerable force. “Should we do this here, or would you prefer someplace, I don’t know, more private?”

Ayer came back to them with a distracted smile. “We’re not bothering anyone here.”

Rai glanced at the roommate’s hunched back. “Alright. So from what I picked up last night, someone, or maybe more than one person, has been catching people unconscious at or after parties, stripping them in some way and then biting their necks.”

“Like vampires.”

“You think that’s relevant?”

“At this school? Maybe. Oh, and don’t forget the writing on them.”

“I guess so. I only saw the one from last night. It went up on Neocam anonymously.” Rai drew out his phone. “You accepted my account into the Neocam group. Are you an admin? Can you trace whoever let the poster in?”

“If you really want to see some others, I’ve got a few… where’s my phone?” Ayer lifted a bundle of pants, looked underneath. “But admin rights, no. The group’s a free-for-all. Anyone can let anyone in and anonymous posting has always been allowed. I don’t think the owners still go to the school. When someone wants a picture taken down, they have to report it to the site itself, which can take a while. That means alums from ages ago are being alerted to these pics… it’s gross.”

There was a buzzing from his desk, where a stack of freshly folded shirts sat beside a mass of socks. Ayer bounded over and excavated his phone from behind them. “Thanks,” he said.

At the desk in the corner by the window, there was the clack of a phone being set down. The roommate must have rung Ayer to assist the search. Such searches were likely common on Ayer’s side of the suite.

Ayer presented to Rai a photo very similar to Ace’s, though blurrier and blown out by flash, though a familiar chocolate coloured carpet could be made out in the lower shadows. The victim was a male student, somewhat less substantial than Ace, with fine blond hair and a round face, crumpled in a corner. Face slack, limbs rubbery, clothes undone and neck marred with a bruised and ring of bloody teeth marks. On his chest, red letters formed the word:

CAM GIRL

“This was just last week. He was found in his room,” Ayer said sadly.

“I assume this isn’t a girl.” Rai tilted his head. “What’s with the writing?”

“Who knows? His name’s Zed. His family’s in banking, they’re one of the school’s big donors, so the admin must be freaking out. Lucky for them, like all the other victims he’s been trying to act like this never happened. Although, the day after it did, he passed out in class. He regained consciousness in time to refuse an ambulance ride, though.”

“Might have been worried what he’d find out in a medical exam.”

“I’d say that’s definite. Can you blame him, though?” Ayer shuddered. “These well-connected, well-off guys usually think they’re safe. That’s how they get to be the way they are. To realize they’re as vulnerable as anyone else, that they might have accidentally been painting bigger and bigger targets on their backs all along, it’s like an earthquake. And nobody else has complained. Who’d want to be the first? Who would you even be fighting? The whole student body, the reputation of the school? The staff already know and do nothing.”

“So what’s there to do, but play it off?” Sao mused.

Ayer clicked his tongue and nodded.

“You’re fighting back,” Rai mumbled. “But you, yourself, were never one of…”

“Not to my knowledge.” Ayer smiled, almost wistful. “I’ve been told I’m a drama queen. People can tell I’d happily make trouble for them. Call me complacent too, but I’m pretty sure the biters would look for someone else.”

Sao inspected the picture over Rai’s shoulder. There was something distantly familiar about the pale face here, alongside the carpet. “This Zed wouldn’t happen to be in the Investment Club, would he?”

“He is. Like Ace, the guy who got caught last night. I know how that sounds - but hardly any of the other victims are in that club. I don’t have the rest on hand but I’ll get ‘em for you. Hey, Jin.”

This time Ayer got up and sauntered over to the silent roommate, clapping his hands down over - or rather, into - the dense folds of sweater-covered shoulders.

The roommate, Jin, finally deigned to make eye contact. He had prematurely greying hair and a puffy face, adorned with a slightly reddish pout that looked very surly next to Ayer’s easy grin. The look didn’t last long. He caught Rai’s doubly surly glare and swiftly faltered, retreating to his laptop screen.

“Got the pictures?” Ayer asked. “Here, lemme give you the investigator’s number.”

“Give me a moment,” Jin snapped. “I can’t believe you really called the cops.”

“I didn’t. They happened to be around.”

“They arrested the air con guy. I know. And we’re gonna regret it in the summer.”

Jin had a voice like a stuffed drain and he seemed to want to disappear into his sweater. One look from Rai could do that much. Sao and he realized he was smiling. Rai squinted at him briefly and turned to the duo hovering over the laptop.

“I see both of you are into the investigation,” Rai said.

“Jin’s in the IT program. Plus, he isn’t constantly losing things like me. So I asked him to catch or dig up anything related. Track the hash tags, or whatever. I don’t know if he’d like me to say he’s involved, but I will say I trust him completely.”

Another clap on the shoulders. Jin tried feebly to shake Ayer off. “The connection’s slow as fuck. And I got class in fifteen minutes.”

“Skip. Everyone else is.”

“And why?” Jin gathered the energy to face him with a sour look. “You think anyone believes I was even invited to one of those drunken messes last night?”

“But you were.” Ayer simply smiled back. “I invited you.

Jin clawed his hands over his face like he intended to take his eyes out, and failing to do so, retreated once again to his screen. “Alright, I’ve sent them.”

“Awesome.” Ayer patted him once more on the shoulders and dislodged. “And you should come next time.”

“With my luck I’ll be the next one found stripped and dumped in a bathroom.”

“Not if the investigators put an end to it.”

There was never a look so dismally, painfully devoid of hope as the one that Jin tossed him. But Ayer had already danced back to his bed, kicking his feet happily when he sat.

“Are these all recent?” Rai panned through the photos Jin had sent him, holding the phone too close to his chest for Sao to see.

“They have the dates in the filenames,” Jin snapped as he closed his laptop and shoved it in a backpack.

“Right, thanks,” Rai said, not too curtly to Sao’s ears, but Jin recoiled and slid along the wall to put as much distance between himself and Rai as he could, until he was out the door.

“See you tonight,” Ayer shouted after him. “And how about you two? Maybe come and do some recon? It’s gonna be another wet one, if you catch my drift.”

“Drinks on Monday and Tuesday night? That’s quite the schedule,” Sao said.

“They’re going to be going every night, all week,” Ayer admitted. “Countdown to the Valentine’s brunch on the weekend. Just a silly tradition, like the vampire mascots. Nobody’s expected to get wasted every night, at least, I hope not. I guess they want to give everyone a chance to, I don’t know, find someone to spend the big day with. To take to lunch.”

“Oh? And do you have someone in mind?” Sao asked with a smile.

The feet began to flick more rapidly, the mattress creaking. Ayer’s handsome tanned face went bashful for the first time. “Kind of. I still gotta ask her, but, uh, I will.”

He was looking out the larger window opposite his roommate’s recently vacated desk, a tall pane mottled with age and the crust of old rain and melted snow. There was the small planter full of brown weeds in reddish soil, hanging outside. Ayer’s eyes had become as clouded as the glass. Was he dreaming of flowers?

It would have to remain a dream. Nothing was going to grow in a winter with cold snaps that killed young people on the street.

In some malicious corner of his mind Sao could sense, in whatever lamentation had befallen him, Ayer was wide open for the taking. He thought again of the sharpness in the boy’s eye when he heard Rai admit he wasn’t immortal. The pivot to another subject, with a smile unwavering. He was impressive, but not flawless. Sao could probably make him admit something, now. But what?

Both were saved from humiliation by Rai lurching to his feet. His eyes were still glued to his phone. The springs of the beaten couch bounced Sao back to reality.

Ayer’s raised his head to look at them. “So? Did you see anything in the photos?”

“Maybe.”

“Any patterns? Clues? Reflections showing the photographer?”

Sao stood too. “We’ll need a little time to really look.”

“Are you serious?” Hearing his own voice ringing around them, Ayer flushed and averted his eyes again. That Rai paid his outburst no mind must have been a small comfort. “I guess there’s no rush. Not like acting one way or another will stop the pictures turning up.”

Rai’s brows furrowed. “I know you want to help. But we just got these.”

The broad shoulders eased, or were forced down. In any case, the dreams of flowers were gone, along with the brief moment of openness. “Yeah, of course. Just, keep me in the loop, okay?”

Ayer opened the door and even gave a little bow as they exited. But his steps had become heavy, and the door closed behind them slowly. Sao was reminded of Marsh and the guilt he inspired, however unintended. This was some who’d been looking for an ally, or a friend, in a strange new place full of dangers. Of course, he couldn’t help but feel they’d abandoned him.

—

“Tell me if there’s a pattern.”

“I haven’t had a chance to look yet.”

Rai was mangling a salad he had ordered for lunch. “It won’t take you long.”

They were occupying a booth in the dining room of the Atrium, a lengthy but narrow sort of hall, very beige and compact and almost cozy. The booths were tucked into alcoves which afforded them plenty of privacy. There were few sit-down diners, but a steady stream of pick-ups were coming and going through the lobby, snapping paper bags off the bar.

Despite the emptiness of the room, Sao wedged himself deeper into a corner where nobody could spy his phone screen from behind him.

After meeting the victim Ace, the pictures no longer horrified him but made him sad, impressing in him a lingering, subtler tension. As far as he and Rai knew, all victims were alive and well and hadn’t made any public complaints. No punishments were made, no dramatic moves. That any of the bite victims could come striding through the doors of the Atrium was mortifying. Sao flipped through the slides as quickly as he could while Rai nibbled at his lettuce like a rabbit. Perhaps the same thoughts had disturbed his stomach.

The bare, bloodied breasts of unconscious women didn’t do much for the appetite.

Sao put down the phone and inspected his burger. “Except for Zed and Ace, they’re all women.”

“So I’m not out of my mind. Pretty important thing for Ayer not to mention. And he seemed so concerned. Is this guy so progressive he’s actually blind to gender? Or maybe he thought we would call him closed-minded for pointing it out. Or he was waiting to call us out.”

A burger was really nothing like a human neck. The scent of caramelised onions and garlic was irresistible. Sao picked it up.

“What do you think about the words written on them?” Rai asked.

Sao chewed slowly to give himself time before answering. “There seems to be an… imbalance on the part of the women.”

“Come on, don’t pull an Ayer on me. The girls had whole lists of shame written on them while the two guys just got one word apiece. Ace got ‘Hooker’ and Zed got ‘Cam Girl’. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

“The pictures are in order of date - meaning Ace and this boy Zed are the most recent. The one before them, a petite girl with red hair - she’s actually got the same two words written on her. In addition to—” Sao paused, but Rai did not care to finish his sentence for him. “‘Waitress’ and ‘Whore’.”

“Yeah. But the same words were repeated in a lot of the other pictures. I feel like ‘Whore’ shows up in a third of them. Anything you can tell from the handwriting?”

Sao’s formal assignments, which he spent his desk time on (between naps), were transcriptions of handwritten records from the Central HQ archives to be indexed in the virtual database. Rai, never a fan of longhand cursive, had always been mildly impressed at what he could parse from the disastrous scrawl of their predecessors.

”I’d have to take a closer look.” And Sao couldn’t say he was looking forward to it. “All I’d bet right now is that there’s definitely more than one person’s handwriting. The four words on the red-headed girl look like the writing of four different writers, and the ‘a’ in ‘cam’ is written completely differently, even for two consecutive pictures… Now you mention it, the writing on the women looks to be done with pen. Or, I’m not sure, some writing tool, or lipstick? But the words on the two men used blood, or wanted to look it.” Sao sighed. “All this suggests is that more than one person is behind the problem.”

“It’s just too strange that nobody, staff or student, tried to cut this off. Even Ayer is giving us the run around. And the victims…”

“They’re the ones I can somewhat understand.” Sao took another bite and made Rai wait until he swallowed. “Shame is a terribly strong motivator. Knowing many come from traditional families, it makes sense. The mystery to me is who’d start a trend like this. What’s the appeal? Stripping, biting, writing, photographing; it’s convoluted even for a power play.” His burger had vanished faster than expected. Sao scrubbed his hands with a napkin. “Don’t tell me this sort of thing occurred at your school.”

“Eh. There was always some kind of scandal happening. My school had fraternities.”

“I’ve heard of those.”

Rai angled an oddly benevolent smirk at him. “Mainline college kids are always up for a fight. Well, I guess I’d call them campaigns. Not to say that justice always prevailed, or even nailed half the assholes it should have, but… if the entire school was blasted with a picture of a girl knocked out and ‘Whore’ written on her naked chest, it wouldn’t have been like the casual viewing we got last night.” The smile was gone. “They don’t have frats here. Just clubs.”

“I wonder why.”

“To avoid solidarity with the rest of the national network? Some schools are desperate to mimic the charters. They wouldn't be the first.” Rai threw down his fork with enough force to make Sao wince. “So we have two male victims and like fifteen female. And we only know the names of the men. I shouldn’t have shoved Ayer off so soon. Maybe he really is just dense, or he didn’t want to bring up the girls. What was his roommate’s name?”

“Jin, if I recall.”

“We could try talking to him.” Rai did not sound particularly enthused. “I don’t know, I don’t really feel like waving these pictures all around campus asking who they are. Hell. These people are probably nearby, trying to lay low, which makes it even worse.”

Sao gingerly took up his phone again to glance over their evidence. “Perhaps we can focus more on deterring future incidents without bothering past victims.”

“Easier said than done. If we catch the biter in the act and hope to get an arrest, it’s going to fall back on the victims. At least one’s probably going to have to make an official complaint. If it’s multiple offenders, linking them back to only the relevant victims will be messy.” Rai grunted and pulled up his own phone. “I have to file all this crap away as evidence now too. I just couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

“Can we really call this ‘well enough’?” Sao was both trying to look at, yet not look at the photo of the stick-thin redhead who had been bitten before Zed and Ace. Zed had been smaller than Ace, and she was tiny even in comparison to him. The profanities - a list of four - scrawled on her seemed to overwhelm her, the weight of the letters pressing her onto her back.

“I was looking through the Neocam group for the days these pictures went out. Assuming they were posted when they were taken, most of them happened on party nights - like Ace’s. Zed’s was taken in his room, but I’ll bet he was at the Investment Club’s charity pool match with the Art Club, or its afterparty. The girl before them…” Rai must have been looking at the same picture. “January 31st. The only thing turning up is a job fair at the Alumni House. Doesn’t sound like a place people get wasted…”

“I saw on a leaflet that the highly anticipated Valentine’s brunch is going to be held there,” Sao said, with the uneasy realization that everyone else in the dining room at that moment was part of a couple.

“Then maybe someone got her at the job fair.” Rai frowned. “If it’s like the fairs at my school, there should have been someone taking attendance. We can get the girl’s name that way and maybe the attacker’s too. Although, at my school they only kept tabs to stop strangers coming in for free food.” Rai reached for his mug and found he was out of coffee. He looked up nearly frantic for a waiter, and spotted none. “Perfect. I’m going to have to get up and face that pit bull bartender again.”

“We can just wait until a waiter returns.”

But Rai, who lived by coffee as much as his impulses, was already up.

—

He thought she was going to punch him in the jaw.

Rai waited for a lingering teenager to pick his takeaway bag off the counter and leave, so he and her would be the only two in the lobby. That was a mistake. When the kid left he felt a sudden creeping of dread, trickling across his skin like sweat.

But he strolled up to her anyway.

“Hey. Last night, when you saw this picture,” Rai said, pushing the photo of Ace under her nose, “You said ‘not another one.’ I’ve been looking into it. I wanted to ask you, since you seem to have some prior knowledge, which of these pictures have you seen?”

She didn’t reply at first, and even looked at what he was showing her. Ace on his back made no impression. She also took the image of Zed pretty well. The next one, of the skinny girl with the wet open mouth and four words, made her face pinch a little. The next went by and she wasn't looking at them anymore, just firing a vicious glare at him. But she couldn’t stop her eyes from twitching back to check the screen, just for a second, whenever the picture changed. He panned back to the first girl’s photo and she leapt off her stool and smacked his phone off the counter.

Her movements until then had been so minimal, so reluctant and languid, that Rai didn’t even register the strike for a few moments.

“Why don’t you go harass someone else?” she hissed.

Rai knelt for the phone and wondered if she would take the chance to kick him. “I’m glad this bothers you. You were the only person who seemed even a little upset last night. That’s why I’m trying to stop whoever’s coming up with these. I’m an investigator.”

“Fuck off with that filth. If I looked sick, it’s because I was dealing with you.”

“Really? These don’t bother you even a little? In Plaza or Murnau, tossing around some unconsenting kid and ripping their clothes off might make for a fun night, but once they graduate out of here and try looking for a job or getting married, these kinds of pictures could ruin a life.”

“Why are you acting like I’m next? Maybe you should be looking at why your precious little angels were chosen for—“ her lips pressed together, and she pointed wordlessly at him. No, at his phone.

Rai stared.

That’s when she probably should have hit him but instead she twirled 180 and pushed her head through the window behind the bar, pounding the sill where dishes were sent out for the servers. “Dee! What are you still doing back there?”

So the interview ended without incident. Rai admittedly hadn’t gained much, but at least he hadn’t been kicked in the head. He was also able to finally learn the bartender’s name.

“Saki isn’t so bad once you get to know her,” Dee assured him. Rai had been expecting the jumpy young waitress on the previous night but had misheard the name, and instead found himself escorted to the other side of the lobby by a balding man who might have been even more bashful than Vee.

Rai was dubious. “I gotta ask, does she really work here?”

Dee started to laugh, but stopped when Saki shot a searing glare their way. He’d barely gotten past the first guffaw. “Of course she does. We couldn’t get by without her.”

“She does seem to be here day and night. Balancing classes with work, she must be…” Rai sifted around and somehow his thoughts landed on Sao. “Tired.”

“Oh, uh, Saki’s not… she’s not a student right now. She’ll probably start again, she can do it anytime, but,” Dee’s whispering only intensified Saki’s lasers. “She’s taking a break.” He trailed off with a squeak as if the word itself had broken him. The pictures would probably not get a good reaction. Rai wondered if Saki would whip out a shotgun if she saw him with his phone open again.

Dee sensed the mounting danger. “Lemme get you your coffee.”

—

Rai loitered in the lobby to keep an eye on Saki - to make sure she didn’t spit in his coffee when it came out. It was once again empty except for the two of them, the only noise some tinny piano tune barely dripping out of the mounted speakers. The sound system was way too small for the space. Also disproportionate was the Atrium’s namesake, the tiny circular skylight above the lobby that was showing a sky so plain flat and grey it might as well have been a concrete panel.

Saki had lost interest in him. Propping her chin on her palm, she tossed down her phone and began scrolling.

So she wasn’t a student. Surrounded by kids her age, being forced to wait on them (or being expected to; whether they got any service at all was up to her), he began to feel for that attitude of hers. Since she was here, she was likely a local, maybe she had even applied to or attended Murnau for a semester or two, which her being in their Neocam group would attest to. Had she burned through too much money, or flunked, been taken out by some kind of emergency? When Rai had been a student, one of the top candidates for valedictorian had lost her parents in a mugging gone wrong and immediately had to drop out to tend to terminal grandparents. A fate that made Rai shudder.

His own mother, for all her faults, would never do that to him. She and his gramps, real Life Fountains with their legendary lifespans, would be alive and spry as they were now for decades - no, centuries - after Rai was dead and reduced to worm food, worm crap, dry dirt. He didn’t have to worry about outliving anyone. When Rai said anything like that, it made Sao shudder.

He knew they both preferred stories about bad grades or blowing tuition money on noisy cars.

As he juggled his perspective on Saki, his coffee came out of the kitchen window, alongside two takeaway bags. Saki slouched to the side to glance at the numbers and called, “Order Twelve to go. And one coffee.” She moved the bags and coffee to the bar counter, and jerked over the mug in a way that looked a lot like spitting.

Rai was prepared to saunter over and force her to listen to him talk about vampire photographers and dead parents for the rest of the afternoon, but the door opened and Ace walked in.

It was more that the cold wind blew him in. He didn’t look too solid. He was swaying on rubbery knees, and his face was as colorless as the afternoon sky. He moved past Rai as fast as he could and picked up the two bags of Order Twelve. But he finally faltered as he tried to get out the door, pausing against the doorframe for balance.

When Rai went to check up on him, he coughed. “I can’t believe you were waiting in here to jump me, why can’t you leave me alone?”

“I was just having lunch.” Rai paused. “Actually, I was talking to Saki.”

Ace groaned.

“I wanted to talk to you again too. We managed to find some of the photos that were like yours, and I wanted to ask if you know any of these people, or places –”

“I really don’t want to look at that right now. I got people waiting for me outside, so — see you.”

Ace looked like he might knock himself out fighting with the door, so Rai pushed it open for him. “Watch the ice.” After a moment, he stepped outside too. Behind him, he heard Saki shout in a surprisingly brassy voice, hey asshole, the bill–

“Actually, you should go see a doctor,” Rai said. “You don’t look too good.”

Ace’s arms were hanging so limply his coat was sliding off his shoulders. Whenever he tried to adjust one side, the other dropped. “No can do. I have to go for drinks tonight.”

“You were knocked unconscious less than twenty-four hours ago. For your own sake, you should at least be resting right now.”

Ace’s teeth were clenched. “And let people talk? Say I got taken out?”

“You did. You were knocked out and dragged somewhere you didn’t want to be.” Rai was suddenly afraid that Ace was about to start crying. His cheeks were going purple. “Do you have a girlfriend or someone who’s expecting you? I’m sure if she really cares she’ll understand.”

“No. Not here, I mean. At home.” Ace shook his head.

“East?”

“What? I’m from Core.” Ace frowned. “And she’s a fiancé, not just a ‘girlfriend or something’.”

Rai, who had never had a fiance in his life, stopped in his tracks. Ace took his chance to sidestep him and immediately slipped on a patch of ice. Rai grabbed him by the back of his coat, which was so slack it was barely any help, but it pulled taut just before his teeth could hit the ground. Suspended like a hiker by lifeline, Ace slowly descended until his hands and knees touched the ground. His takeout bags were left standing on either side.

Since it seemed too cruel not to, Rai helped him up - Ace tried to pry him off - and that’s when he saw it, the dark blotch on the long white arm. He had about three seconds to look before the sleeve was back in place. “Have you been to a doctor recently?”

Ace squeezed his eyes closed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Then are you on any—”

“What are you doing?”

The question came sour and whiny, but Ace snapped upright like a soldier. Somehow, his coat stayed on this time.

A boy, around Ace’s age but at least a head shorter, was staring them down with deep, dull red eyes. He was wearing a track jacket that didn’t look warm enough and had a head like a sea urchin, with some of the darkest and spikiest hair Rai had ever seen. His arms were straining on both sides with two convenience bags. Rai could see the imprints of cans and bottles against the plastic.

“Let me carry those, you’re going to give yourself a hernia,” Ace commanded.

The kid pulled away, almost throwing himself off balance with the weight of the beer he was carrying. “No, I’m good. Happy told me to go look for you-”

“Why’s he in such a rush? The kitchen was just taking their time. And why didn’t you put the stuff in the car if you passed him by already?”

“I dunno.” The kid locked eyes with Rai and failed to hold for more than a few seconds. “Who the hell is this?”

“A cop,” Ace said.

The kid dared a second look, and this time, Rai thought he saw a spark of interest. “Oh. Is he here about what happened last night? I’m really sorry, I thought it was something when I called but…” The spark fizzled. “It was really nothing special. Just a drunken prank. Sorry, it’s my first year. I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. It was nothing.” Ace glared at Rai. “This guy’s just an investigator. He was checking up on your police report. They gotta do stuff like that.”

“Do they?”

The smaller boy kept looking at Rai with a strange glint of hope that he was trying desperately to conceal. If he’d made the call about Ace the previous night, then this was probably Rip. Rai’s suspicions were soon rudely confirmed.

A bottle-green electric car rolled up the street, slowed beside them and lay on its horn. Rai almost jumped out of his skin. Ace groaned visibly if not inaudibly and Rip dropped his bags.

The window came down. “Ace, you’re alive. Rip was so worried.” The driver pushed up his pair of massive sunglasses and smiled beatifically at Rip, who was struggling to retrieve some dropped cans.

“Did you come here just for the view? Here - my arms are fucking killing me.” Ace hurled his takeaway bags in through the driver side window. The driver cursed good-naturedly, but rolled up the window so when Ace took Rip’s bags he had to walk around to drop them through the opposite window.

“Hey!” squealed the front passenger, leaping out, just as Ace and Rip hopped into the back seats. The fourth member of the squad was slimmer than Ace and taller than Rip, and had a dusting of yellow hair spilling out around an oversized hat.

Something clicked in Rai’s head. “Zed?”

Zed glanced over at him then quickly away, stuffing himself back into the car over the clatter of bottles. Rai watched him go. They were ignoring him. The disgustingly cool driver had managed to not even spare him so much as an accidental look. The car glided off, back toward the campus, and as it did a pattern that had been a blur before slowly took shape, pulling into focus.

When the car was gone, something else came into focus. Across the street.

Someone had been watching the proceedings silently from one of the alleys. In the slant of shadow below a two-storey thrift store, Rai saw a pale head, hovering. The face was whiter than Ace’s, skin colorless as the afternoon sky, ghostly from a distance, with stabs of red around the eyes and lips. Around the face floated hair just as impeccably white and translucent.

Then he saw the mask wasn’t floating. It was attached to a long black coat, the low tails fluttering slightly in the wind, flaring like wings when the figure turned on his heel.

The vampire (Rai wasn’t sure why he was already thinking of the man as one) had noticed Rai staring and ran backward into the alley.

—

The man was tall - yeah, classic vampires were supposed to be intimidating, unless they were being feminized next to a werewolf or something - but his pace was something else. Ace and Ayer had both been taller than Rai, and maybe running circles around Ace had made him complacent, but he just could not seem to catch up with the tall man in the trenchcoat.

It took way too long to get across the street with the uneven pebbly surface and ice to look out for in the cracks, and by the time he crossed, the man had fled the alley with a substantial lead. When Rai saw him again, he disappeared around another corner, then another.

Rai was panting, puffs of breath obscuring his vision, and he chased the man around another dark corner and was hit with a wall of grey light. The maze he had been led through ended at one of the entrances of the school, one of the archways on the south side.

He had a good view up and down the street to his left and right, and the man was not on either. A shift of shadows under the arch pulled him back on track. The man had entered the campus and was camouflaging himself between the long dark trees and white snow.

Rai charged across the street and under the arch, past the refurbished clock tower where the warlord’s skeleton had been found over a hundred years ago (and where Sao’s buddy now had an office) and wound up in front of the student office where he had ordered his morning coffee. Across from it was one of the libraries, a cathedral-like building with two spires and a circular stained glass window, and next to that, a building of similar style but rectangular, a giant gray brick. Its huge wooden doors were like fortifications of a castle, with metal bars and rivets. One of the doors was lazily swinging shut, and he thought he saw the ends of a black trenchcoat disappearing behind it.

The car horn must have really knocked his senses loose, because while the door seemed to be taking its time closing, the moment he touched the front steps, the door clicked shut. He rattled the large metal ring that served as a handle, but it wasn’t any good.

The castle doors had an electronic scanner lock. There was nothing resembling a doorbell.

Rai stepped back and looked up at the gloomy gothic facade. The vampire had gotten away. He was in this building. A place like this. He’d gotten away - with what? Rai was smiling like a maniac and wasn’t sure why. He’d probably just chased a random bystander who had been watching Ace and his friends make a scene.

Still, why look him in the eye like that, why watch from an alley, and why run?

He might have been scared. The next person to emerge from the building certainly was, coming face to face with Rai’s uncontrolled smirk. Rai stopped smiling.

“Who was the guy who just went in that building?” Rai asked, before realizing how ridiculous he sounded.

The man who had come out was disappointingly plain, beige and middle-aged. He looked back at the building, mystified. “People go in and out all the time. It’s full of offices. Is the scanner broken again?”

“Nope.” Rai walked down the steps with him. “I’m actually just visiting the campus. I thought I saw a guy I knew. Like, from the news or something.”

“Well, we do have some well-known professors. I’m in mathematics myself, a rather obscure niche, so I’m guessing you’ve never seen me.”

“Nope,” Rai said again. “Sorry.”

The campus, which had seemed devoid of life during his pursuit, was suddenly flush with movement; kids with backpacks and hats, professors with hot drinks and briefcases, and people who he couldn’t identify as one or the other. There was nobody to blame but himself, yet he couldn’t help but feel offended. It was like they were only willing to show up to celebrate Rai embarrassing himself.

The campus began to glow with the reds and golds of a sunset. But the colors were not coming from the sky.

“Look at that,” said the professor. Rai looked, not up but ahead. The trees of the Row were blinking alight, one by one.