Page 113 of Bone Year

“You’d expect the neck.”

I move down her collarbones. Shoulders. Chest under the sheet, which Ellavee lifts only enough for me to look and not enough for me to feel like I’m violating her. Nothing. We check the inside of her elbows, the soft skin there where a careless drinker would go. Clean.

“Wrists,” Ellavee says.

We turn her left hand.

Nothing.

We turn her right.

There are two puncture marks on the underside of her right wrist. They are almost too clean, perfectly spaced, perfectly round, the kind of wound I have seen in a textbook diagram. There is no tearing, no bruising pattern suggesting a struggle. The skin around the punctures is smooth and unmarked.

I stand and look at them for a long moment.

“Maelis.”

“Hold on.”

Ellavee waits.

“Two things,” I say finally. “Those are fang marks. They’re the right spacing, the right depth, and the angle’s consistent with a downward bite. That’s a vampire.”

“Okay.”

“Two. They are too clean.”

“What do you mean?”

“Malric bit me.” I swallow. “It was not like that. It was messy. The marks on my throat look like I was in a fight or something.” I gesture at Senna’s wrist. “This is careful and clean, like it was done with a tool or whoever did this took their time.”

“So?”

“I don’t know what it means. Malric could have been careful. Vampires can be careful. He doesn’t strike me as careful when he drinks, but he could have been.”

“Or it wasn’t him.”

“Or it wasn’t him.”

“Or he wanted us to think it wasn’t him.”

“Or that.”

Two taps on the door.

Both of us freeze.

One pair of footsteps in the corridor fade away.

I look back at the wrist.

“Ellavee, do we tell someone?”

She thinks for a long moment. “No.”

“No?”

“The headmaster’s investigating. Bale, probably. Cane. Whoever else. If we tell a professor we were in here, we’re dead. If we tell a professor someone else’s theory, they’ll ask where we got it. And if whoever did this is paying attention to who’s paying attention to them, we made ourselves into targets.”