The Blood Tasks had gone surprisingly well.

I found the First Task really easy, even if Bertha had written with a red pen that it was preposterous to want to be a Blood Drinker because I thought it was the only useful job to do. When I had asked her about it, she had told me when have to be humble and aware of our possible shortcomings, that, in short, it is already established in our nature to help out the community, but we shouldn't dwell on it and think ourselves heroes because we were given the chance to do that.

To which I replied that what I meant was that I was so grateful I had been given the chance to do it, that I wouldn't pass up the opportunity to become a real Blood Drinker.

To which she said that should have been written in my essay in the first place.

But, apart from that, I did really well. The Second Task went great too, even though I'll never know if I would have chosen the right animal without Matias' priceless advice. I tried to think about myself in that situation, and I just couldn't come up with any idea, which I found a bit disappointing. A vague sense of cheating spoiled my achievement.

The Third Task was supposed to be the hardest one, and I had heard the Court complain that Jonathan's mind wasn't reacting to the Blood well. It gave me troubled thoughts, which I normally wouldn't have had, because my own mind had attached itself to the Blood immediately.

They gave me a day to rest. Matias also got a day, while for Jonathan, they said it depended on his progress -- or lack of. Jason had already finished resting after half an hour. Everybody looked so proud of him, but I bet it was because his Mind didn't work hard enough to notice the difference between being a human or something else.

Plus, he got the lowest score on the First Task. I heard him whining that he already knew he should have drank from the salamander (bad move), but had completely forgotten about it.

The older students and the Speaker were restless because they couldn't visit us while we were resting. I knew for a fact Atticus had asked Mira to stay with Jonathan, but was refused, and Roman kept hanging outside Matias' door, as if some magic could let him in.

After a while, my own door opened.

My first reaction was panic. They told me I could hallucinate things, but I had experienced no other side effects, so I thought I would be safe from that one, too.

My mother was standing right outside the door.

She looked real enough, but it was impossible -- first of all, they wouldn't have let her in. And secondly, she wouldn't drop by the school for any reason whatsoever. As Minx had said, I was the first Macbeth not to be homeschooled, and she hadn't exactly enjoyed the idea, which had been mine.

"Go away, hallucination," I said softly because, despite all of my other abilities, I didn't know what to do when faced with scary situations.

Which, given the life I had chosen, was ironic.

"Hallucination?" my mother repeated, puzzled. Then she understood.

"They just gave you the Blood for the first time, haven't they? Oh, you poor thing. I wish I could have come to your rescue sooner. You must be in so much pain."

One of the side effects of the Task was an awful headache, but I had managed to skip that one, too. My mother had it in her youth, and had assumed I would have it as well.

Well, my head was starting hurting a bit now, but I had reasons to think it wasn't involved with the Blood.

"Rescue me?" I asked, deciding that she wasn't an hallucination. "Is there danger in the school?"

"Not yet," she said. "Despite our attemps. That Mira Abas is way too good at her job. Much more than you all give her credit for. And her Skill is Timing, so, even when she's not using it, she can sense the right time to do something. But not all is lost. Alas, nothing is lost yet! Other members of the family, some of my cousins, are around the school right now, spreading the fire. And we have someone on the inside, somebody nobody could ever suspect."

"Somebody on the inside?" I said. I really felt feverish. Even though my Mind was adjusting well, it was still weak, and so was my body.

"It makes no sense," I said. "You are mistaken. Whatever message you sent me to get me to comply with you has been lost, or intercepted. I never received word from any member of the family, and if I did, I would have told you I have no interest whatsoever in burning down the school!"

I had to let somebody know before the damage was too great. Fire was one of the few things that could kill even adult, powerful, Blood Drinkers.

Except those who drank from the salamander, I connected the dots. Those people would be fireproof.

My mother laughed.

"You are not our man on the inside, Cypress. You have always been a rotten fruit of our tree. But don't you worry, it's entirely my own fault. I should have never mixed my powerful blood with your father's frail one. I knew you would either oppose the plan or not carry it out entirely."

I forced myself to think. If it was connected to the salamanders, the man on the inside could be the person who knew about them.

"Matias?" I asked.

But my mother simply stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

"Is he one of your playmates?" she asked mockingly. "We would have never employed anyone under the age of nineteen, so you can be assured that none of your friends is involved in this."

"Athanasios," I decided.

"We're not playing a game here," my mother scolded me. "I will not throw away all the attempts this person has done to remain anonymous just to tell you if you're guessing right or wrong. If you wanted a nice word from mommy, you should not have left us for those people."

"These people are our people," I couldn't help but say.

"Fine, dig your own grave," my mother said. "I won't mourn you when the fire catches up to you. And, about that, I should probably go help out my cousins. Why is this place not ashes yet?"

I shuddered. I had to tell somebody.

Just when I thought of it, my door opened again. This time, a man I didn't know came in. He was tall, but not too much above-average. He had blond hair and brown eyes. He struck me as not very remarkable in his features.

Then his features began to change.

This time I was sure I was losing my mind. Perhaps the Blood had just kicked in a little later, and now these strong hallucinations were going to kill me.

I started screaming, but was immediately silenced by thin, long, fingers that covered my mouth gently.

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"I wouldn't scream if I were you," Minx Morris told me.

"You see," he continued, his voice every bit as gentle as the one I was so used to hear. "Your mother made a mistake, telling you of her plans, and then leaving you here alive. How do they say? Dead men tell no tales?"

I tried to fight the pressure of his hand. He let go of my face, almost ashamed of restraining me.

"You just heard me talking to my mother, didn't you, Professor?" I said. "If it's so, I'm sure you've heard the part where she said I wasn't her insider. So please, believe me when I tell you one last time that I didn't know of her plans."

"Oh, but I believe you," Minx assured me. "You think yourself so clever, but you still can't understand?"

His smile was sweet, but there was something wrong with it.

"I am the person on the inside," he said. "And I'm only telling you because you won't survive long enough to tell anybody else. Not that it matters. In a few hours, everyone will know. Mira has been suspecting me for a while, but she only found out the truth about ten minutes ago. I proposed to her, and she used her Skill before responding."

For a split second, his face looked really hurt.

"Can you imagine that? It's really humiliating. Especially, when she found out that her Skill advised her otherwise. Shouldn't people marry for love?"

I didn't know what to answer, but I understood he didn't want me to. The teacher had always loved playing, talking like he was mesmerising the audience at a performance. It was simply what he was doing now.

"Why would you marry her at a time like this?" I asked.

I doubted love could be the answer.

"Do you remember the lesson about soulmates? They keep each other grounded. So much, that, the sum of their qualities prevents one of them from going crazy. The marriage ritual makes the grounding even more powerful."

"But you're not soulmates..." I couldn't help but say.

"I still hoped some of it could work between two powerful Blood Drinkers who were in a relationship. Because I'm going crazy, and there's nothing I can do to stop it."

I had enough. I decided I was the one who was going crazy. This looked like a textbook hallucination from the Blood Tasks to me.

"I don't believe you," I said. I shut my eyes and went back to sleep.

"You have to believe me, Cypress," Minx almost pleaded. "This is real."

His appearance started to change again. This time, he was starting to look like a woman.

"Ugh, stop doing that," I flinched, as if the hallucination was disgusting. But it was giving me a major headache.

"Why?" he said. "That's the first thing they teach us at school, isn't it? When the damned Speaker shuffles his Deck. That everybody should be proud of their Skills, no matter how common or useless they are. Well, God knows I would have rather have Force or Goodness rather than this! One of the rarest, and for what? I was labeled a freak all my life..."

Wait... that shapeshifting thing he was doing... was his Skill?

"Yes, you finally guessed something right," he said. "I can be whomever I want. There's no limit. No restrictions. The people can come right from my imagination, or even be real people. If I were to imitate a real person, nobody could tell the difference. Spooky, right?"

"Is your usual appearance the one you were born with?" I couldn't help but ask. It was an odd question. I didn't think nobody would have chosen to walk around with extremely long and thin limbs and fiery red hair if they had a say in how they looked.

"Of course," he seemed taken aback. "Just like any other Blood Drinker, it is extremely draining to use one's power. I wouldn't waste my energy to give myself a make-over for my whole life."

"Why are you going crazy?" I decided to ask.

"It's called Becoming, the Skill," Minx said. He recited like he was reading from the back of the card from the Deck.

"You can be anything and anyone you desire," his voice was sad. "Skills are our downfall, at the end," he went on. "Growing up and using it to save my team mates from Creatures, at some point I lost connection with whom I really was. Why was my power so low, so deceiving? Why did it push people away? I began to keep it hidden. No student of mine knows it, not even our own Speaker. I let him believe that I had something like Agility."

"But you asked something else, right?" he changed topic. "You asked me why I was going crazy. Good, Spaulding-Macbeth. You always go straight to the point. I'll miss being your Teacher when you'll be dead. Unfortunately, I'll just have to say your mind rejected the Blood. Sometimes it happens."

"Anyway," he seemed unstoppable, now, and I suddenly remembered I had seen him looking bewildered for some time now. He really was getting crazy.

"I decided I would start drinking human blood," he said. "It makes me extremely powerful. It enhances my Skill in ways I could have never imagined. And it tastes like a wonderful drug. You can't get enough of it, once you begin. Quite literally. It's addicting. But it's worth every drop."

I realized something.

"You killed all those people! You are the one the dybbuk warned us about! But who did you force to do your bidding?"

"Do you mean the different Blood Drinkers on the scene of the crime?" he asked. "Why? You're really slow, it was always me. Each time I wore a new, let's say, disguise."

"This is way you looked so proved when they studied the body, and then had to come up with a plan to investigate my family," I said. "You were afraid they were onto you!"

"Your family is really planning to do something awful," he corrected me. "I just have no real intention to stop it."

"No one is going to die today!" I said.

"You're wrong," Minx said. "Mira and you absolutely have to die because you already know too much. Jonathan Loreta will be spared, if he survives the Tasks that is, because I sought him for a special purpose and he still needs to fulfill it. As for the other students, I guess I don't really care much who stays and who goes, but I'm afraid Matias and the Speaker will have to go."

"Why?" I was outraged. "And stop calling Roman The Speaker as if it was a derogatory term just because you don't like your Skill! You basically raised him! He worships you!"

"Nice, that might count for something. Maybe he'll decide to join my side, then. Well, the two of them already knew too much when they found the dybbuk. The very same night they encountered it for the first time, Roman and I bumped into each other. His eyes had been bleeding black from the possession, and he hadn't washed them properly. I was able to retain a trace of blood from his cheek. It was the blood of the man mixed with mine, turned sour after I fed from him. If they had investigated on it, I could be in big trouble. You know, the things like DNA or blood, or fingerprints, don't change when I Become something or someone else."

I couldn't believe Minx Morris, the beloved, if a little manic, teacher was telling me all of this. All the students loved him and looked up to him. Judging by the harsh and bitter words he was using, he didn't even care for any of them.

And Mira? No wonder they couldn't be real soulmates. I was beginning to think my mother was right about something -- she was a much better and skilled person than we all gave her credit for.

"I need to help the Macbeths spread the fire, I'll probably take the features of one of your cousins, no hard feelings, but I would rather my secret remaining a secret for a little bit longer. I could kill you right now, but I'd rather do it in front of your family for refusing to partake in my plans to overthrow humanity and keep them as food supply."

A small part of me was relieved my family wasn't as twisted as that.

But I could barely believe the words I just heard. Of course I would use the little time given to me to try to convince someone else who could be on my side, and Mira's, but who?

Jonathan was too weak and still fighting his own demons.

The older students had been chased away and I probably wouldn't find them in the Sanatorium.

Roman loved Minx so much he would either not believe me, or have a nervous break-down I had no time to deal with.

The only choice left was Matias, but it sounded perfect. He was clever, quick to think, good at fighting. Besides, I still had to find a way to pay him back for the tip about the salamander, and, like me, he was still fire-proof.

What's more, unlike many other students, he had never warmed too much to Minx Morris. I always wondered why, but now I didn't exactly care. I was just grateful it was that way.

When I found him, he was already awake and standing up straight. I told him the stories of both my mother and Minx Morris as fast and precisely as I could, and, to my relief, he never showed disbelief nor interrupted me once, if not to make connections that made my story telling quicker.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked me then.

"We both need to find as many people as possible and convince them to side with us, should a fight be going down. At the very least, we need to prevent the school from burning up. Don't worry, while we need to be fast, I don't think the attack will be immediate. Judging by the way both my mother and Minx were taking their sweet time with me, it has to be some hours from now."

"I will do whatever I can," Matias pledged. Then he added, more shyly. "Cypress, did you decide to ask me because of my Skill? Because, if it's needed, I can use it."

"No," I replied truthfully. "I hadn't thought about that. But use it only if you feel safe doing so. I asked you because you are a friend of mine."

That seemed to make him really happy, and each of us went their own way. I had no doubt he would try to convince Roman. I needed to find Mira and plan something more concrete with her before I could get other people involved.

Besides, the only person I wanted to have by my side, still hadn't woken up, and I forced myself not to think about what would happen if he never did, because I realized it would have destroyed me more than anything else in the world.

On my path to Mira's office, I stopped in the courtyard where we had performed the Tasks and got a bunch of salamander. We needed as many fire-proof Blood Drinkers as we could.