The first thing Mira told us was, "You need to wear disguises."

To be completely honest, she was only talking to Cypress and I. I was beaming that she'd chosen us for the quest. I couldn't imagine Jason or Carmela, who was more hyper-active than I was, wearing disguises. I kind of trusted Roman and Matias because they always worked well together, but they had been given detention.

Cypress and I couldn't fix their mistake, but we could find out what happened to the man whose throat had been slit. Roman and Matias wanted to do it, but their detention consisted in Minx telling them to sit around and wait for other people to work on the case, and Mira had chosen us.

"I certainly do," I frowned. "A new guy in town, everybody is probably talking about me. People will recognize there's something wrong with the Blood Drinkers in a matter of seconds if they see me investigating."

"What about me?" Cypress asked drily. "I'm the heir of the Macbeth family, and besides I'm pretty easy to recognize."

"That was why I told you to wear disguises," Mira said, but she winced. I knew where she was coming from. For Cypress, with his distant Silanian heritage, his olive skin, his pale blond hair and violet eyes, blending in was pretty much impossible.

At the end of the day, Minx and Mira settled for the only disguise that could somehow make Cypress look like anyone else -- a huge black hat that had to conceal his hair if he tied it up in a bun, black sunglasses and a black all-over outfit.

"With all due respect," Cypress said. "I think I could look less conspicuouos."

But this was all the Professors could do. When it came to my turn, a lot of things were discussed.

"Too bad we can't change his accent," Cypress commented.

I pouted at him, even though he was probably right. Nothing else was as likely to give me away.

"I know just the thing!" Carmela exclaimed. "It's uncommon for Blood Drinkers to dye our hair since we are known for taking our appareances very seriously... well, some of us. I have bleached hair, but I'm one of the only ones. If you dye Jonathan's hair with one of those non permanent dyes, he won't look like he's one of us."

Mira and Minx debated it, but not for too long. Sadly, it was one of our only options.

Cypress arched an eyebrow. "This is stupid. It's not like people recognize the new kid because of his coffee brown hair. It's the accent. It's the clothes he wears."

"If you're feeling more safe this way, we can give Jonathan new clothes and tell him to change accent," Mira said dubiously, as if she didn't think I could pull it off. "But perhaps Carmela is right. He'll dye his hair too."

When they asked me, I chose red because it was my favourite colour. Little did I know that, in a matter of minutes, my hair looked exactly the colour of blood. A deep, dark red that didn't manage to look any other colour other than that. No hues, no gradience that made it almost fade into brown.

"Weirdly enough, it suits you," Cypress commented when he'd seen the result.

"Just the way to look inconspicuous though," Matias snickered. I had already noticed that, for his naive attitude, the guy had a sharp mind and often put it to good use. I usually admired that about him, but not when it was time to make fun of my disguise.

"I don't care if I look inconspicuous," I said, perhaps too angrily. "I only care that I don't look like Jonathan Loreta, the new kid who studies to be a Blood Drinker, who's asking questions with the heir of the Macbeth family about a body that was drained in our school!"

To that, Matias and Roman exchanged worried glances. "Yeah, I hear you," Matias added quickly, as if to confirm I had every right.

Cypress and I went into town. "Who do you think we should ask?" was my first question. "I was thinking somebody cultured, like a doctor."

"Let me handle this," he replied. "It's usually people like this man who know everything that's happening around here."

I took a glance at the man. He was selling vegetables and fruit at the market. I remembered about the market in West Tallya, about the seafood and all those afternoons I spent trying to count the money and see if they would have gotten me away from there. Strangely, in that moment, I couldn't help but remember the sun, the fresh air, the sea, and feel a little home-sick. Besides having problems like how many shrimps you sold felt so far away. Now my problems were more like: find out why you see a tree before you pass out, and discover who drained this body of all its blood.

"Who are you, boys?" the man asked, eyeing warily both my red hair and Cypress' whole outfit. "Haven't seen you around here."

"I think it's awfully rude to ask for our identities first," I decided to take the lead, even though Cypress had stomped on my foot. "You don't go around asking everyone's names, do you?"

"No........... I don't," the man replied. "But your accent is strange and so is your hair."

I gulped. I had tried to make an effort to speak in an accentless manner. Apparently it was still weird enough.

"Have you heard," Cypress started another conversation. "About anything weird that happened in town recently? Like bodies being drained of all their blood?"

"What kind of question is that?" the man asked. "Blood Drinkers drink from animals, don't they?"

"Of course they do," Cypress snarled. He was so angry, it was almost as if he'd said 'we do'. "In fact, nobody was talking about Blood Drinkers here."

"Oh I see, you suspect demonic activities," the man said.

"We really don't care a lot about demons," I had to say, though maybe the man knew something about a particular brand of demon we needed to know. Still, I couldn't blow our cover.

"We're only interested in who or what could have done this," Cypress tried to save the situation. "Whatever it is."

The man smiled a vicious smile. "Follow me," he said.

I didn't like his tone or how his face looked. I immediately smelt trouble. To take my mind off things, I thought of something relaxing that was usually happening during lunch time at school.

If I was at school and I'd squint to the left from my usual seat, I could hear Roman talking to Matias. The Speaker was knowledgeable in all fun facts, and I hated to admit it, but I could use one to take my mind off things now. Perhaps I could make do with one he'd already told Matias.

It wasn't the best choice. Now, in my mind, there was a Roman saying, 'Do you know that Solomon Ibn Gabirol created the first female golem and that there is ambiguity about whether she was created for sexual purposes?'

I tried to change channel of my brain again, but since I couldn't, I focused on the man again. Cypress was already following him, and tugging on my sleeve.

The man knelt in front of Cypress, because he was so much taller.

"In the past," he said. "When things of this nature happened, two people were usually always blamed. Either people who believed in other cultures or had other traditions, and often it was Blood Drinkers, or people who worshipped Demons. Now, I know those two things are better left in the past and that society has evolved now."

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"So what is your idea?" Cypress asked drily.

"That someone who worships Demons did this," the man whispered.

I smacked my hand on my forehead. Cypress looked terribly close to taking his gun out.

"Maybe there is something that resembles blood magic, or blood sacrifices that people give to demons," I tried to guess.

"Maybe," Cypress echoed me, but he didn't look especially confident.

He then tugged me on the sleeve and took me further away from the man.

"I think," he said. "That I misjudged this man. Whatever is going on, it's far too bizarre for him to take a guess and be right at first try."

"To be honest," I pouted. "I'm the one who came up with the sacrifice."

Cypress winced, as if he wanted to say that he didn't trust my judgement very much either, but he didn't say anything.

"Alright," I said. "Let's ask someone else. This time, follow my lead. We'll ask a man, or why not, a woman, of culture."

We headed to the hospital. I soon saw a doctor leaving the building, and I was happy of my choice. With a steady expression in her eyes, she reminded me of Mira. It made me feel a little more grounded and sure of my actions.

"Good morning ma'am," Cypress started saying in his usual androgynous drawl.

The woman looked at him puzzled, and I had the impression that she was trying to figure out whether my friend was a boy or a girl. Cypress could usually pass for either, especially with all those layers covering his body and his dark eyebrows.

"We would like to ask you a question about something that happened to us, and we thought a doctor could be the right person to ask," I said.

"It's about a drained body," Cypress said, rushing in to explain before I could mess it up in any way.

"Why don't you ask the Blood Drinkers? They're the ones who know about the supernatural events," the doctor said.

Cypress and I exchanged a glance. He finally decided to say the only thing he could to keep our disguises and still say the truth.

"We already have," he said. "But they don't have a clue about why something like this happened, so we thought we'd ask somebody else. You see, it's not something they'd seen before. A body completely drained of blood, as if a parasite of some kind had drank from it. And it's unlikely that a wild animal fed off of it, because animals feed on flesh, not on blood."

The doctor appeared extremely puzzled. A line of worry formed between her eyebrows.

"I suppose I should take a look at the body to confirm my suspicions," she replied.

I looked sideways at Cypress. Mira and Minx didn't want the news to get out. They certainly didn't want outsiders to know the body was found in our school. Otherwise, why ask us to disguise ourselves? But I was sure that if we'd tell them everything, they could reach a compromise that would satisfy the doctor.

"We could... we could come up with a way," Cypress seemed to have had the same idea I had.

Just when we were about to head back to the school with the woman, and I had agreed with Cypress that he went ahead of me to explain everything to Mira, someone stopped us.

"Wait!" it was the merchant we'd talked to before. "Don't leave with those kids, doctor! They're dangerous!"

The woman stopped right in her tracks, and the man grabbed Cypress rudely from his collar. I resisted the urge to fight him then and there.

"Why, might I ask," I got out gritted teeth. "You think we're dangerous, all of a sudden?"

"Two weird looking kids no one's ever seen," the man replied. "One completely covered from head to toe like he doesn't want to be recognized, the other with hair dyed the color of blood."

"But they are probably around twelve..." the doctor tilted her head.

"Thirteen," I corrected her.

"Either way, they came up to my stall and instead of buying vegetables they started asking me weird questions about demonic activities and people being drained of their blood," the man added. "And they were the first people I met to bring that subject up, if they really lived in the city they'd be talking about something we've all seen happening, unless the crime they're talking about happened in their homes, or close."

Cypress looked at me as if the plan was all my fault, while it was difficult to pull off from the start.

"What?" I hissed. "I wasn't counting on the fact that he could be clever!"

"I still don't see where the problem lies," the doctor said. "Just one minute ago, they were about to lead me to the dead body. I don't think it's a trap. I could certainly take on two kids in a fight, and they look smart enough to have that figured out."

I wasn't very happy of her words, but Cypress nodded, so I nodded too.

"Well, then, if they're not suspicious, how do you explain what just happened to me?" the merchant said. "I was heading back home after my day at the market was done. I gathered all the fruit and vegetables, I put them in my rucksack and I went home. I live up that hill. As soon as I started making my way towards the top of the hill, still in town but in a less crowded neighbourhood, I stopped because I heard a sound of people screaming. When I stopped to take a look, the thing I saw on the pavement was a body in the same conditions as those two boys had described it to me! Completely drained of blood, with two punctures on his neck, like those from the legends of vampires or parasites. But we all know creatures don't attack directly, much less drink the blood from necks of people! And Blood Drinkers..."

"Only drink from animals," Cypress completed the sentence very drily, looking like he'd swallowed a fly.

"Well, yes, I was about to say that," the man excused himself. Apparently the Blood Drinkers in Meglenia had a lot of influence on the town's people. Back in West Tallya I had tried to steer clear from the likes of them, so I never knew how they were considered. Still, in West Tallya we were more backwards on a lot of things, but our cities were bigger and more crowded. Meglenia might have been a more sophisticated country, but the towns were little and everybody knew each other.

I wondered if Cypress would have been given another treatment if they could have known who he was. Back at home there was no family like the Macbeths, so I didn't know what to make of their apparent importance.

"So, what do we do now?" I asked.

"Bring us to the body," Cypress asked the merchant. "So we'll confirm if it matches your description, and we'll see whether you're doing all of this to fool us."

"I want to see the body as well," the doctor said. "So I won't have to follow you wherever you were leading me."

We all followed the merchant until we were almost over the hill. I felt sick to my stomach. The narrow road that led to the man's house also led, with a couple of other forks in the road, to the Blood Drinkers' school. Whatever that dangerous thing was, they probably had it out for us.

However, we couldn't show ourselves too concerned. If we'd given away that that thing had been near us, probably looking for us, the merchant would accuse us of draining the bodies ourselves. He had already almost accused us once, and with less proofs.

"Can we talk alone for a moment?" Cypress asked me. I nodded, and followed him.

"We should probably find a way to let Mira and Minx see this," he told me when it was just the two of us alone.

"Well, what's sure is that we won't keep it a secret," I replied cheerfully.

"I don't think now's the right time to joke," he replied. "Besides Roman and Matias had kept the dybbuk a secret, because they thought they could exorcise it. But leaving a dead body a secret is something one should never do. There's no doubt we'll tell them everything we saw."

"Okay," I gulped. "We can come up with something. You go tell Mira and Minx to show up here after their work at school is done today, and arrive here casually as if everything they knew about the body they had heard it in some kind of random conversation at the town."

"Alright," Cypress looked mildly displeased, as if I'd asked him a very important job. I knew he didn't like making mistakes, but there was practically no way he could mess up a simple task such as this. I was more worried Mira or Minx, each one of them goofy in their own way, would mess it up.

"You know," I added before he left. "This was fun. I mean, spending time with you. We haven't been on a quest together since the time I killed the Keteb. And by the way..." I tugged at my red hair. "I think dressing up as someone else makes me feel more confident. I liked being able to pull off this disguise."

I was afraid Cypress would find it silly, or too personal, because I never tried to give the vibe that I didn't like very much being myself. It was an unspoken rule. Back home, I thought I was better off with people like Pablo without showing them my weaknesses, and in Meglenia my insecurity would be a way to take me down for people like Jason. I was the new kid, a little naive at times, but good with a sword. It helped that I liked taking care of my appearance and that I was good at solving problems and following hints as well, but I knew most people thought I had my head in the clouds too much and that I was a little weird. I didn't have the luxury of showing that, at the end of the day, not even I liked myself very much.

But Cypress seemed to understand what I meant.

"You know," he smirked at me. "I've always wanted to be a secret agent growing up. Perhaps we could do something like that again. But let's hope we find no more dead bodies."

It was a little silly on my part, but being on that certain quest and with my best friend, I never stopped to consider how freaky the drained dead body was, but when Cypress said that, and something dark burned in his eyes, I thought about how dreadful the condition of the bodies were.

So I joined merchant and the doctor. My part of the plan consisted in convincing them to keep the dead body out in the open to the public until evening, and this was a part of the plan that I was actually afraid of messing up. Convincing them wouldn't be easy.

I decided to give it my best try.

"I think we need someone else to take a look at those bodies, someone who has never seen them before," I said. "If you keep the body here until evening, more people will show up."

The doctor looked at me as if I was crazy. "We can't treat the body of a dead person like that! They had family. And what if their ghost haunts us because they weren't buried properly?"

"Nobody buries a body on the very first day," I said cautiously. "Besides they might want to you because you had the chance to find out what killed them and you didn't take it."

This seemed to impress the doctor, and especially the merchant, who started begging her to keep the man there for a few hours at least.

"And by the way," I added. "You never know. Maybe Blood Drinkers will show up in the evening."

The doctor and the merchant didn't look convinced.

"I'll wait here with you," I said. "In the meantime, let's kill some time. Who was this person, and was there anyone who might have wanted to kill them?"