Page 22 of The Villains of Winter

If James had possessed a sharper knife than a dull plate knife, Lucien would’ve gargled on his last cries of air.

Instead, everyone pretended as if they did not witness what happened that night. The cantatrice finished her mesmeric aria with a brilliant flourish. The pianist pranced his lithesome fingers across the keys as though nothing of horror occurred. The vampiric actors entertained throughout the final course.

The caped servers vanished into the fog-machine mist afterward. Their retirement cued the end of the night, a few courses short.

No one spoke when the paramedics burst in, not even Lucien himself uttered a word of it, struggling to remain on his feet. Though he gasped and gasped for oxygen, clutching his intestines with bloodied, paled hands.

Lucien Montclair was a hemophiliac. He couldn’t stop bleeding everywhere.

The freshmen students fled the blood-soaked scene. The sophomores buried their eyes in every crevice except for the entry where the police had entered. The upperclassmen resumed their meals of copious amounts of delectable meat, their feet bathed in thin inlets of Lucien’s blood.

After all, Lucien was an elector, an official member of Rector Rawsthorne’s office. It was a gruesome assault against the Æscwulf University’s authority itself. It was a direct offense against the entire administration.

If it were known that James had cut him open, bled him, then the entirety of the Rædwine Refectory would be expelled from the premises for criminal association. Anything that the local police could pin on them.

The authorities were paid an exceptionally steep salary for a reason.

The students might’ve been interpreted as actual accomplices, enemies of the pagan state, heretics, if the high pagan leaders learned James had ranted and disavowed the ritual, but it was never reported by anyone. One never knew how Provost Aldous Tytheridge would respond, only that it would be unsparing. Draconic.

No one spoke a word. Not to mention, James was the prize tragedian at Æscwulf College. With his brutal talent, he had led them to a three-year lauded streak of prestigious international acclaim. He was the favorite of politicians that spoke at convocations and lawmakers that held policy conclaves with the students.

Therefore, there was only the inescapable tension in the halls to deal with as Elliott tread beside James inside of Winterthur. For once, it was silent, there weren’t childish, rollicking freshmen racing each other up and down the corridors; there were no sophomores studying on the stairs; there were no juniors exigently pouring over recondite texts behind their doors, seniors swankily indulging in wine for the night by the grand piano.

Samhain night was dead before midnight. The midnight costume competition was canceled.

Elliott’s golden brown skin was stippled with sweat.

Kitty trudged after them, squeezing her arms around her little books, protective of herself. She hiccuped.

Her left foot still had a footprint of blood.

Elliott, belatedly, realized she was crying and he hurried her into his private dormitory. He scattered his star sheets, dispersed his mess of constellation charts, and made room for her between the massive, metal telescopes, although there wasn’t much space left among the chaos.

He sat her down. He kneeled before her to catch the tears. He skimmed his thumb over her small, reddened eyes.

“You’re alright. There wasn’t as much blood as you think.”

He repeated himself until he felt she could hear him. Kitty threw her arms around him, burying her wet nose in his shirt, sobbing. “It was all my fault–”

James snapped, “No, it wasn’t. He knew what he meant when he said that.”

Everyone knew the sordid reputation of the rector and his electors. For years, the upperclassmen women restricted the freshmen girls from entering the ink-strewn offices, even if the women had to use their own body to barricade the wretched doors themselves.

There was a reason why the rector’s secretaries banned underclassmen from the office for the sake of the girls.

There was a reason steam curled from James’s nostrils now near the wintry windows etched in frost, exhaling bullishly in vehemence. “I shouldn’t have stabbed him in front of you. He shouldn’t have touched you. It was the fault of two different men, not you.”

Elliott refused to allow Kitty to take responsibility either. He held her young, trembling hands. “This wasn’t your fault. I should’ve removed him from–”

“You don’t understand!” She cried out over them. “Lucien is on the trust of electors. He is one of the seniors that selects the sacrifice–”

Elliott felt his soul leave his body.

“It’s all my fault,” she wept. “I should’ve been the one to stab him. Outsiders can’t be selected. He would’ve graduated by the time I’m a senior!”

The gravity sunk into Elliott, drowning him in grief. He knew the truth. This was the fault of a sadistic provost. The greed-driven wealth class. The powerful paganists of the barbaric arts. If the pagan leaders heard him, he’d be condemned as paganphobic and rebuked.

However, none of the Crucian traditions were focused on pagan religion, it was focused on the exploitation of pain.