By the time they reached the Richter Building Jacob was almost dead. His legs felt like jelly from the training session. Tanaka was breathing heavily through his nose. Several dozen people were already there, crammed into the same hallway they'd found Emma Jackson's body in.

"Stay back!" Professor Alhammadi waved his hands, corralling the crowd.

An older woman Jacob had never seen before knelt over a body lying on the floor. Jacob craned his neck to see who it was. It was a boy, but that was all he could tell. If only Blake were here.

"Out of the way!" Two emergency response personnel, dressed in hospital scrubs, pushed their way forward. They carried a stretcher between them. The crowd parted.

They hustled over to the body and put the stretcher down on the floor next to it, said something to Professor Alhammadi and the woman, then gently picked up the body and lay it on the stretcher.

The skin's sickly pallor almost prevented Jacob from recognizing who it was, but he got a closer look as the emergency response personnel hurried the body back through the crowd and down the hall. It was the anxious young man who'd handed out the brackets for the Tisdale Tournament. The one Camilla had almost attacked.

"Jesus," Jacob muttered.

"You know him?" Tanaka asked.

"Not really," Jacob clenched his fists. Suddenly there was that blade, hanging above his head again. Not a vampire.

What had he been thinking, worrying about his match in three weeks? Archie could go fuck himself. This was what mattered.

The crowd was dispersing.

"I'm gonna go do some research," Jacob said to Tanaka. "See if I can't narrow this thing down."

"I'll come do some too," Tanaka said.

"Thanks," Jacob said. "Let's go."

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Tanaka took out a second copy of the Compendium and started from the end and worked backwards. Jacob was almost halfway through it already and had written down a couple magics it could be.

"Neuromancy?" Jacob asked. "I noted it down because you get into the other person's mind and maybe could warp their magic from there."

The library was empty. Most students had probably been shocked back into their dorm rooms by the new vampire strike. Tanaka and him sat across from each other. Despite their empty environs, they talked in hushed whispers.

Tanaka shook his head. "No, it's not Neuromancy. I've seen it. It doesn't work like that. It's something directly targeting their magic."

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Jacob looked down the frustratingly short list of potential options he'd found. "Okay, what about this one: mageiatomancy?"

"What's that?"

"It says here it's a Decomp magic that targets other magic. The example they give is being able to change a magical structure, like a building made of magic."

"Oh yeah, that. That's what they call it?" Tanaka frowned. "No, that can't be it either because you can't directly target someone else's magic with Decomp magic."

Jacob looked at the third and final item on the list. "Well, that's pretty much it because the other one I have on here is psychomancy, which is similar to neuromancy."

"It's a subset of neuromancy," Tanaka said. "And yeah, it's not right. Let's keep looking."

Jacob shook his head but flipped the page of the Compendium.

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"This might be it," Tanaka said out of the blue.

They'd been pouring over the Compendium for several hours now. Twice they had found potential suitors only to fairly quickly dismiss them. Jacob was giving up hope.

"Tell me," Jacob said.

Tanaka recited. "'Ritual Magic. A Production magic involving the blood and magic of other mages that allows for the summoning of creatures from deep parts of the magical realm.'"

"Ritual Magic?" Jacob blinked.

"Yeah. I'm not sure, though because it doesn't say anything about warping, and the blurb on it is super short."

"Wait!" Jacob's eyes went wide. He pulled out his phone and brought up the text message Camilla's father had sent him. "Camilla's father mentioned that!"

"He did? When did you text him? I thought he was away?"

"This was a while ago," Jacob said. "I was asking him about mageiatophagy and vampirism after that day at the Menagerie, but he said there was another type of magic draining spells called Ritual Magic. He said they used blood from slain mages," he handed the phone to Camilla, who read the message and then handed it to Tanaka.

The transfer student's eyes widened. "Oh, shit. 'a section of it covers human-human Production siphoning. This is, as I am sure you can guess, a human draining 'power' from other humans by slaying them. This is colloquially called Ritual Magic and has two applications that make it a banned magic. The first being it allows mages to store magical power by using the blood of other slain mages, drastically increasing the power they can draw on, like plugging a sink and filling it up. The second being it facilitates rituals that can summon powerful magical entities from the deepest regions of the magical realm.' That's gotta be what the void was. If that girl had her magic drained from her by this spell, maybe that's why nothing was there. Is there any more information on this?"

Jacob shook his head. "That's it."

"And the book that talks about it is in the restricted section?"

"Yeah, it's a banned magic."

They mulled this over.

"Would Camilla know anything more?" Tanaka asked.

"Maybe. I'll text her."

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"Ritual Magic?" Camilla frowned.

Jacob and Tanaka had left the library and had met Camilla at Jacob's dorm, which was quickly turning out to be their designated meeting spot.

"I've heard my father mention that before, and it certainly sounds like something that could leave a mark of some sort on the victim's magic. But I think it requires big circles and symbols. Have they found any of those?"

Jacob shook his head. "Not that I know of."

"It could be Ritual Magic," Camilla said. "I can't think of any other magic that uses blood. Nor of any other reason why the killer would drain the bodies of blood, except maybe as a mimic, which we've ruled out because of the shade, right?"

"Right. I think I was getting tripped up, thinking that the drained blood was for the mimicry, instead of being a part of the magic as well." Jacob said.

Camilla turned to Tanaka. "You don't know anything else this could be? You're sure?"

The transfer student shook his head. "No. We already looked through most of the Compendium and ruled a bunch of stuff out."

"Then Ritual Magic is our best guess. But there's no way to know for sure unless we have more information on it."

The three of them fell into silence.

"We need that book," Jacob said. That impulsiveness was building up in him again.

"But it's in the restricted section."

"Then we'll have to break in."