"Master, please allow me to go with you."

Lydia shook her head and winced softly at the spreading ache in her left shoulder. "No, Sebastian. You've had students coming to your room all night seeking help with their studies. If you were to be found absent for no discernible reason, people would begin to wonder. And Ciel has to be in his dorm room for lights out in less than fifteen minutes. If he isn't there, the dorm head will begin searching. I am not supposed to be anywhere in this school; therefore, no one will find it suspicious if I am not present."

Sebastian growled and reached behind him toward the medical box. Sitting on a chair beside it, Ciel handed him another strip of gauze and the demon laid it carefully over the still-scabbing wound she had received in the manor attack. "But master, you do not know your way around that place at all. If you are caught…."

"What other choice do we have but to take the risk?" Lydia asked, brushing a loose strand of hair out of her face. "We have to do something to move this case forward." She meant it, too. It had been four days since she had returned to Weston after her unsuccessful excursion to Renbourn Workhouse. She had hidden in the bushes at the base of the clock tower and waited for Ciel and Sebastian to come along. Once she had made contact with them and explained the occurrences of the night before, the three of them had decided to (very carefully) venture up the stairs to the room at the top of the tower. They did not find Derrick Arden, or anyone else, for that matter. The room itself was the same as it had always been; her trunk looked to be untouched. However, just as Lydia was beginning to question her sanity, Sebastian discovered deep, vicious fingernail gouges upon the outside of the wooden door. The chair she had been using to prop the door closed was smashed to pieces in the stairwell.

That was the end of Lydia's short-lived stay in the tower. Sebastian moved her possessions into the closet of his private room in Blue House dormitory, and Lydia began to quietly reside with the demon. She could not stay there all the time, however; only at night. In truth, although Sebastian had a "private" room, the domain of a housemaster was only considered truly private territory after lights out. During the day the maids came in to clean, fellow teachers came to leave papers on his desk, and students came to seek tutoring or advice. Housemasters were required to devote the better part of their days to their charges and colleagues, therefore Sebastian could not lock his door against them. From the hours of turn-out in the morning until lights out at night, Lydia was veritably on her own. Fortunately, having been raised by an inspector, she had some idea of how to keep herself from being discovered. Her father had taught her that it was generally easier to hide in plain sight than to hide outright, as nothing drew people's attention faster than something which looked as though it did not belong. To that end, Sebastian had procured her a standard uniform and loosened it around the chest area so it would not accentuate her breasts. Lydia had removed the piercings from her ears and taken to wearing her hair coiled in a low bun and tucked under the back of her uniform jacket. There had been some debate about which house to "place" her in; finally, Sebastian had settled it by returning with a full set of different-colored ties and all four house crests. The school crests were supposed to be embroidered into the uniforms, but Sebastian had come up with a system of hitches which allowed her to quickly remove one crest's "patch" and affix another to her uniform while making it look like it was sewed on. She had barely even had time to learn how to knot a tie before she was obliged to leave the safety of Sebastian's room and brave the terror of the school hallways.

The first day, Lydia had wandered around shell-shocked, expecting the end of the world at any moment. All of the masculine clothing in the world could not make up for the fact that she simply did not have masculine features. She was a woman, and she looked like it. She kept waiting for someone to comment, grab her shoulder, peer into her face, and ask her what exactly she thought she was doing, to which she had no reply. She waited and waited like a condemned man waiting for the noose….and it did not happen. Gradually, over the next few days, Lydia began to understand why. It was the most unusual thing she had ever seen, but there were actually boys at this school with features far more womanly than her own. At least, she assumed they were boys- unless this school was a popular destination for females wanting to cross-dress as high-class males. She had never thought she would meet a boy prettier than herself, but the first time she saw Edgar Redmond and his fag, Maurice Cole, she could not deny that she did not even come close to them in terms of beauty. It was a most bizarre situation, but it was to her advantage. Not a single person had yet questioned her womanly looks.

Of course, Lydia did not go to classes or attend clubs or do anything which might cause her to begin to develop a solid presence at this school. She wanted people to see her and assume she belonged without arousing their interest in her as a "student." She walked through the halls, wandered across the gardens, and occasionally worked up the courage to request a snack from the kitchens. During the times when she ought to have been in class, she usually hid between the bookshelves in the library. Sometimes she absconded with the books and hid on the rooftops of various buildings, watching the world pass by below. Lydia wore grey men's gloves to cover up her bandaged limb, and she was trying very hard to avoid getting into situations which required her to use her powers to leap away. She had twice been caught in a mandatory line-up of a particular house's members while wearing their house crest, and had twice managed to edge to the very end of the line, hunch over, and vanish while everyone else looked toward the prefect. On another occasion, she had been wrangled into attending a class by a teacher who apparently mistook her for another student and decided she belonged there. She had spent an hour surrounded by unfamiliar boys, terrified that one of them would ask why they had never seen her in class before. As soon as the instructor gave the class a break, she hurried to the vacant cloakroom and reappeared on a nearby roof, where she spent the next hour lying flat on her back, wondering what in the world she was doing.

Of course, Ciel and Edward provided some help in her floundering attempts to navigate the school unnoticed. However, she could not rely on them to get her through the days. Edward had his own worries and duties as the fag of Green House's prefect, and Ciel had recently encountered some adversity in his quest to enter the inner circle of the P4. Apparently Maurice Cole, the pretty fag of Red Fox's prefect, had come to feel threatened by her brother's "competence" in attending to his seniors, and was attempting to discredit him and ruin his reputation. This did not particularly worry Lydia. While she had no illusions about who was really doing the work that had caught the P4's attention, she knew that Ciel was shrewd and diligent. He did not need much help to foil a petty schoolboy's machinations, although he had asked her to stake out Red House's rooftop for several afternoons and report on the exact times of Maurice Cole's comings and goings. While Ciel worked on repairing his reputation and Lydia worked on what she hoped was acceptably masculine behavior, the case had languished. They were getting nowhere at this rate, and Lydia had finally decided she would have to force some results by going directly to the source of the mystery.

"I will be one hour," Lydia declared, returning to the present as Sebastian moved to make another protest. "If I have not returned by that point, you may leave your room to find me. However, I will most definitely do my best to make it back under that time limit, whether I find Purple House's roster or not. If I can manage to make off with it, then we can find out which rooms Derrick Arden and the others are in, and perhaps we could sneak in during the day and meet with them. It's all part of the process."

"And what if whatever it was that attempted to get through your door in the tower finds you?" the demon demanded, his red eyes flaring. "This would be so much safer if you let me go with you, master."

Lydia bit her lip and folded her hands as he finished re-dressing her wound. To tell the truth, the more she looked out the window into the inky black night, the more his insistence seemed to make sense. He had been like this ever since she had returned from the workhouse and revealed the note. Since then, Ciel and Sebastian had been incessantly theorizing about who could have written it and why. Sebastian had become ten times more possessive toward her over the past few days, and she knew what was eating at him. While the thing that troubled her most about the note was the last line, Don't stop or your world falls down, Sebastian had been particularly bothered by the fifth line: I will protect you in your demon's place. He did not seem to care too much about the fact that someone apparently knew his secret identity, but the presumption that anyone or anything could protect his master in his place had made him furious.

Just as Lydia was about to give in, there was a knock upon the door. Both siblings jumped and stared toward it in alarm. An authoritative male voice called, "Mr. Michaelis, may I come in? I would like to discuss house preparations for the fourth of June."

"Bloody hell!" Ciel hissed, bolting to his feet. "It's Bluewer!"

Lydia immediately lunged for her school robe and scrambled off the bed. Of all the people in this school she was trying to avoid, the prefects were at the top of her list. No doubt they would know the names and faces of everyone in their houses, and immediately be able to pick out someone who didn't belong. She raced on tiptoe toward Sebastian's closet, the demon trailing just behind her. "Master, please," he whispered, blocking the door with his hand as she tried to swing it closed. "Do not go alone. Let me send him away. He may think of it whatever he wishes."

Lydia grimaced and gently pried his hand off the door. "Sorry, Sebastian," she murmured, pulling it shut upon herself. "Keep him occupied so he doesn't become suspicious. One hour."

The last thing she heard as her fingers broke the gauze was the demon's muffled, furious snarl before she catapulted through the light and found herself landed upon the west lawn, facing the imposing dark exterior of Violet Wolf House.

The shock of the wind caused her skin to erupt in gooseflesh. Lydia shivered and hurriedly donned her school robe, reaching into the pockets of her uniform and thumbing through the different colored ties and crests within. She pulled Blue Owl's tie and crest off her body and replaced them with those of Violet Wolf, thinking that her actions would probably seem almost sacrilegious to an outside observer. She had taken note of the intense competition that existed between the houses and prevented students of one house from freely fraternizing with those from others. Switching houses in this way was tantamount to treason at Weston College, which only made it all the stranger that five boys from Red Fox had all been transferred by special order to Violet Wolf, directly contradicting the school's culture and oh-so-precious tradition.

Lydia shivered again and peered up at the darkened windows of Violet Wolf House as she waited for the mysterious bell to toll for lights out. She was not sneaking in tonight to try to find Derrick Arden or the others; to do that, she would have to enter dorm rooms full of students, which would guarantee her apprehension. However, Ciel had informed her that each of the prefects possessed a master list of all of their students, students' rooms, and other biographical information about them. Likewise, Sebastian had said that Derrick and his fellows had not attended classes for even one day so far, which meant they must be sequestering themselves in their dormitory. If Lydia could locate the master list for Purple House and find out which rooms Derrick and the others were in, it would be much easier for her to sneak herself and Ciel in during the day when all of the other Purple House students were in class. Then they could find out for themselves why the boys were refusing to come home or contact their families, and take care of any exigencies that appeared. And then they could finally leave this disturbing academy behind, and Lydia would have nothing more to worry about aside from the mysterious strangers who kept trying to kill her. That was the plan, anyway.

Somewhere across the shadowed campus, Lydia heard the bell. She waited several minutes to give any stragglers time to get into their rooms. Then she paced quietly up to the gigantic double doors that guarded the entrance to the dormitory. They looked very heavy, as though they would make a great sound if they were opened. Lydia took a deep breath and reached for the part of her bandaged arm over which she had tied a temporary cover to make it easier to remove. She pressed her forehead against the thick wood and focused intensely on the (presumably empty) space on the other side of the door. The next moment she had pulled herself through the light into it. Her feet materialized unevenly upon a staircase, and she wobbled for a moment and almost fell over. Catching her balance, the young girl quickly re-covered her arm and gazed around in awe.

Everything about the interior of Purple House was strange and beautiful. It looked as though the artists who boarded within had contributed significantly to its design and decoration. The banisters were carved into intricate spiral designs. Wondrous and complicated paintings hung on the walls, and sculptures made in every medium topped the display shelves of hallway alcoves. The walls were not covered in paper, but paint- they were gigantic murals. Even through the dim light, Lydia could see that serious thought had been put into harmonizing the color tones with the surrounding carpet and décor. She felt as though she were standing in the middle of a curious sort of museum. Lydia could not resist spending several minutes wandering about in the quiet gloom, admiring everything she came upon. Eventually, she had to forcibly remind herself that she had not come here to sightsee- she had a mission to attend to, and less than an hour to accomplish it. She had to find the private room of Violet Wolf House's prefect.

Setting her sights upon the deserted grand staircase, Lydia began to creep up its steps, keeping her left hand close to the bandages of her right arm in case she suddenly had to leap away from her current location. Reaching the top, she glanced around the darkness before taking the hallway to her right. Sporadic lamps lit the path, and she was tempted to take one with her, but she worried that the moving light would attract the attention of anyone on patrol. Even with her black school robe wrapped around her body and the hood tucked about her face, she felt cold. She tried to keep her fear in the back of her mind while little shivers ran up and down her spine. Most of all, she tried not to think about what Sebastian had said. What if whatever it was that attempted to get through your door in the tower finds you? Bother Sebastian. Why did he have to say that, the unhelpful demon? She reminded herself that she had not come here tonight to look for Derrick Arden- she was only out to get his room assignment. But suppose- just suppose- she did meet up with him in these strange, shadowed hallways? Which Derrick Arden would he be? The handsome, smiling boy from the file photograph, or the uncanny, fearsome ghoul from the dream she had thus far managed to avoid since leaving the tower? And what on earth would she do if he was the latter?

To the relief of her battered heart, Lydia met no one as she wandered about the hallways in search of her destination. The students of Weston had many different abilities, but the one thing they all seemed to be good at was following the rules. As expected of a group of wealthy, high-class young elites. Even so, it was a shame that she had to spend so much of her time hiding from them, Lydia thought as she ghosted through hallways of inspired artwork. Some of them seemed like truly interesting individuals. She could detect several paintings and murals which looked like they had come from the hand of the boy whose room she was searching for.

She knew right away when she had found it. Not only was it larger and made of different wood than the other doors, it had the house crest stenciled onto it in dexterous, intricate patterning. Lydia backed down the hallway, digging her hand into the pocket of her robes. Ducking into an alcove, she peered out at the silhouette of the purple wolf. From underneath the crack in the door, she could see flickering candlelight. He was in there, and he was still awake. Now she just needed to get him to come out.

From deep within her pocket, Lydia pulled out two large cricket balls which she had nicked from the practice fields near Green House. Leaning warily past the alcove's corner, she gripped one of them in her bandaged fingers, aimed for the corner of the doorway, and let it fly. She had never lobbed a cricket ball before, but her aim was true and the sound it made was heavy enough to rouse him even if he had been sleeping. Lydia ducked back behind the alcove, watching with the narrowest slit of her eye as the door peeled open and a tousled head poked out. The hooded prefect spotted the ball lying at his feet and bent to pick it up. "What in the world….?"

Lydia turned her gaze toward the other end of the hallway, hefted the second ball, and tossed it into the furthest wall. It cracked against the wood and rattled the paintings. She heard the prefect exclaim in surprise as he began to stride down the hallway, closing his door behind him. "Who is out there? Come out so I can see you. Playing games at night is not acceptable."

Lydia reached for the bandages on her arm and quieted her mind, focusing solely on the empty space beyond his door. A second later, she was there. She blinked her eyes, then did a double take as she found herself within the most disordered room she had ever seen. Easels and canvasses and paint supplies were everywhere. Stacks of books lay here and there among scattered teacups and flowers and and dark clothes and strange cosmetics. The windowsills were lined with painted glass bottles, and the walls were full of color. It was dark, like a cave, with only a single lamp to illuminate the shadows. Dismayed, Lydia lifted the lamp and began to search, although she had serious doubts about her likelihood of finding anything in this creatively melded disaster. Where on earth would such a strange boy keep a house roster within this jumble of oddities? Somewhere accessible, perhaps, atop his dresser….? Rifling quickly through piles of sketches and notebooks, Lydia desperately searched for anything resembling a list. She kept her ear tuned to the outside, knowing she only had a little time before the prefect, unable to find the cricket-playing miscreants, would come back here. She raced through the dresser, a bookshelf, several piles of papers on his chair, and a half-finished filing drawer, all without finding the list. Raking her fingers through her hair in frustration, Lydia arched her neck back and momentarily forgot about her quest. The space above her head was full of stars. Heaven knew how he had gotten up there, but he had painted a vision of the cosmos over the mundane plaster, as though the ceiling had never existed at all. The sight of the stars stirred a begrudging appreciation for his genius, and Lydia turned all about, admiring the horizon from every angle. Then she lowered her head and found herself inches away from the smiling face of Derrick Arden.

She had no ability to stifle the shriek that flew from her parted lips. Lydia threw out her arms and scrambled desperately backward. Her legs collided with the bed and she fell head over heels onto the mattress. Tangled in her robe, she swam terrified through the black fabric until she clawed her way to the surface and gasped in disbelief as she saw it again. He was there-! A moment later, the trembling girl noticed the colored border around the lifelike image of the boy, and she gaped in shock. It was a painting. Good God, it was only a painting. The figure of Derrick Arden stood before her, made of powdered color and tightened canvas. His smile was like that of his photograph in the file, blithe and proper. Painted around him was a regular outdoor scene; he seemed to be standing beside the swan gazebo. However, there was something odd upon the ground at his feet. The shadow he cast was not a natural shadow. It was thick and pitch black; it showed nothing within it, but consumed the land upon which it fell. Beside this canvas was another, its paint gleaming as though it was freshly applied. There were no discernible shapes or figures within this painting, and there was only one color. Red. For some reason, the entire painting was a consuming mass of deep, dark red.

Lydia had no time to ponder what on earth this might mean. She heard hurried footsteps returning from down the hall, and realized she was out of time. Gasping, she vaulted off the bed and hunched down, reaching for the bandages on her arm and casting her eyes about in desperation, a last-ditch effort to seize anything that looked like a list. She heard the knob rattle and a body shove its shoulder into the door. "Who's in there?!" the prefect called in a sudden, panicked voice. "What are you doing in my room? Don't you dare look through my things! Open this door!"

Lydia's lips thinned in surprise as she stood up on shaky legs. What did he mean, open the door? She had not barred the door with anything, nor had she locked it, so why-

The light of her lamp touched the far wall, and in that moment Lydia's heart dropped through her body and plunged through the floor below. Standing against the inside of the door was the same pitch black, featureless, towering specter she had last seen staring at her from the height of the clock tower. Now it was here, only feet away from her, and Lydia could feel it in a way she could not explain. It made the room cold. It did not breathe, but still there was a panting sensation about it, a hunger. Her knees gave out and Lydia buckled to the floor, knocking the two easels down with her, staring up at the menacing figure in heartless terror. A word came, unasked for and unbidden into her mind. Sebastian….

The specter moved and Lydia watched, too frightened to scream. It did not fly at her as she had imagined it would do. Instead, it shifted the side of its form and slowly, slowly, lifted an arm-like appendage. A pale, pristine hand materialized at the end of the arm, and from that, a protruding finger. The specter pointed.

For several minutes, Lydia was far too terrified to even think about what it might be pointing at. The figure pointed, she stared, and the pounding on the other side of the door continued as the prefect desperately tried to get inside. If he knew what dark thing was waiting on the other side of the door, Lydia mused detachedly, he might not be so eager. Finally, gasping little sips of air, the young girl pushed herself to her feet and stood trembling before the much taller shadow. The face of Derrick Arden smiled blithely up at her from the floor where she had knocked his canvas. Slowly, terrifyingly, his face was obscured by the wet red paint from the easel of the other fallen canvas. The red ran like blood into his eyes and nose and mouth. It enveloped his whole head as the specter pointed. Trembling like a withered leaf, Lydia followed its finger to the dresser she had looked through earlier. Not knowing what else to do, she pointed as well. "What….this?"

The specter uttered not a word as she carefully inched toward the area it was pointing at. No matter how high she raised her lamp, the looming figure showed no signs of having a face. The light did not seem to illuminate it at all, as if it were formed of pure shadow. Outside, the prefect slammed both fists against the door in frustration. "I mean it! Get out of my room! I swear, I will give you so many Y's, you'll be writing in Latin until graduation! Open this door, dammit!"

"Violet, was the hell is going on?" A different voice called down the hall.

"Cheslock, help me! Someone snuck into my room and barred the door! We have to get them out!"

Another body joined the first in straining to shove the door inward. Lydia could hear the handle turning, but the piece of wood did not budge. Trying to control her shaking hands, she traced the trajectory of the specter's finger to a stack of two books sitting atop the dresser's edge. Her heart had returned to her chest, and now it was pounding like mad. She tapped the books with a fleeting touch. "….These? Are these what you want me to take?"

The specter dipped the rounded form of its head in a nod.

Outside the door, she heard a frightened shriek. "Stop it! Whatever you're doing, stop it, please! Don't take my things! You can't be in my room! Get out of my room!"

Inhaling shallow breaths, Lydia hitched her fingers underneath the hard-backed volumes and tucked them into her robe. She looked at the specter in wild uncertainty. It lowered its arm. She bit her lip and tasted blood. "All right. All right. All right, I've got them. I've got them. So I'll….I'll be going now."

The specter folded itself in and bent forward. In the moment before it vanished, she could have sworn it bowed to her. Then Lydia only had a second of time to drop the lantern and seize her bandaged limb as the door slammed open and the startled bodies of a hooded boy and another with a wild Mohawk fell face-first at her feet.

Lydia breezed out of the room in a swirl of light and reappeared in the alcove, her back pressed against the wall, trembling taking over once again. She heard unwieldy scrambling as her two pursuers stood up. "All right, goddammit, now you've pissed me off! Where are you? Come on, Violet, you look under the bed, I'll get the closet."

"But where did they go? They were right here! I saw the silhouette as the door opened! There was a person holding my lantern. See, right here! Here's the lantern, so where is-?"

A door slammed. "Not in the closet. Come on, Violet, give me a hand!"

"They were touching my things! They were trying to take something!" The frightened prefect continued to monologue as Lydia listened to the sounds of two bodies moving about the room. "Who would do that? Everybody knows that no one is allowed in my room! This is-"

"Goddammit, where the hell are they? They couldn't have left! They woulda had to step on us to get out the door! We need more light! Hey, the moon's almost full, let's open the curtains."

From down below, Lydia heard the sounds of other doors opening and curious voices floating up the stairwell. She adjusted her body and prepared to leave. The shifting and scuffing from inside the prefect's room became more intense. Finally, a baffled voice declared, "I don't believe it. There's really no one here."

"There has to be, Cheslock! Someone was holding the door closed! And I heard a voice! It sounded like it was talking to someone else, so there could have been more than one of them in here!"

"Well then, where the hell are they? Nobody left this room after we came in. All the windows are locked from the inside. Nobody under the bed, or in the closet, or behind the curtains. Nobody under the blankets or hiding behind the furniture. This is fucking weird. I heard a voice too, and look-" A scraping sound rang out. "Somebody knocked over your paintings! Aw dammit, they went and ruined this one, too. Red splattered all over this guy's face. You can't even tell what he looked like anym- Violet? Violet?!"

Lydia knew she ought to leap away, but she could not stop herself from listening, paralyzed with surprise, as a soft choking sound stirred within the room. There was a heavy noise like a body collapsing, and then frantic, hyperventilated breaths. The other boy's voice rose several octaves. "Violet! Violet! What's wrong? What's the matter, Violet, hey- Are you crying? Why are you crying? Come on Violet, talk to me! Violet-! All right, fine, don't talk to me, but calm down. Calm down, just breathe. Breathe. I'm here for you. I'm right here. Take it easy."

Lights were flaring down the hall, footsteps thudding up the stairs.

"Come on, Violet, ease up. Pull yourself together. The students are coming out now. What do you want me to do?"

She heard a several ragged gasps as the hooded prefect tried to regain control of his breathing. An unsteady, pained voice whispered, "Keep them out. Don't let them in…."

Lydia closed her eyes.

She felt the wind cut through her clothes again as her feet touched down upon the dark-topped lawn. She was a good distance away from Violet Wolf House, and she turned around and watched the lights winking on inside its many windows. Damn it all. She had meant to be discreet, and she had ended up waking the entire dormitory. At least no one had seen her face. But she had come face-to-face with that- that thing-

Lydia laid a hand over her robes, feeling the weight of the books which the specter had bade her take. She turned and glanced around in every direction, scanning the surrounding campus for students, ghosts, Sebastian, anyone…. It seemed to her eyes that she was alone. However, Lydia knew she could no longer take it for granted that she was ever alone. That thing was probably watching now. It could appear and disappear, just like she could….

Hiding her face within the midnight darkness of her hood, Lydia turned and fled the scene of her most recent terror, flying over the dew-soaked lawns on her way back to Blue Owl House.

Author's note: So I just realized that I have massively freaked out almost every character involved with this chapter. Oh dear... In some ways, I suppose that makes me a bad author. Bad author! *hides below computer screen*

Final exams are coming up soon, so for the next few weeks I don't know if I'll be able to write as much as I would like to. But rest assured, the plot is building itself in my head every time I think about this story! :)