Mercy

Cahgnban boasts of its perfect students, all in perfect order, all performing perfect magic. The teachers are all highly educated and have many credentials, and to get in to the school you had to pass a rigorous exam, as well as a mental and physical examination.

Students must be hardworking, independent, and self-motivated. A graduate of Cahgnban will go on to be regarded as an expert in magic, as well as one of the world's most intelligent and capable women.

When a student deters from their path of perfection and dedication to her studies, she is almost always dismissed from the school, as there is no room for error at Cahgnban. Cahgnban is a haven for strong and clever girls. The outside world sees it as a perfectly wound clock, every single gear in place.

This is why, when the first girl was murdered, it was kept quiet.

~~~

My first year at Cahgnban I didn't really make friends. My goal was not to be buddy-buddy with these people, but to strive for greatness, and perhaps have a few cordial interactions with future coworkers or underlings.

But I knew the first murdered girl.

Her name was Molly, and she shared a room with me.

She had dark hair and wasn't particularly tall, like the rest of us, but she also wore round glasses and had a rather flat nose. Her glasses always fell down, then she'd push them up, then they would just slip down again.

Molly was found in the gardens, face down in a tomato planter. They suspected her body wouldn't have been discovered for some time had it not been the day before a pasta feast. Tomatoes had to be picked for the sauce, or else she would've probably fed the plants.

An examination revealed her body had been paralyzed, then slowly drained of most blood.

Their only problem was, they couldn't find any puncture marks. Where had the blood left the body? It was like magic, except there was no known magical method of removing blood from a body.

Molly's killing was advertised to the parents and public as a tragic accident due to a medical emergency, but that didn't stop the rumors spreading around the students.

~~~

We don't have many mythical creatures living around here anymore. Sometimes you can see the occasional faerie in a field of flowers, but they're just about as dumb as a regular butterfly. Ghosts are elusive, dragons are extinct, and unicorns and centaurs hate humans, so they stay away, even from magical humans.

The only non-human that ever came up in fairly regular conversation was the vampire. Every teenage girl either wanted a vampire boyfriend, or wanted to study them for her senior project.

Vampires are not actually pale, sparkly creatures with fangs like in fiction. Vampires look and act like humans most of their life, just like any other humanoid. Up until they eat you, or kill you. But I suppose in that sense they still look like humans, and could just be another race of humans, but cannibalistic humans.

Even still, no one knows if vampires steal blood to drink it, or for their own purposes. A vampire is the only creature that has been known to take blood without leaving visible signs such as wounds or scars. Only a few have ever been caught, and they all simply spent the rest of their lives in prison like any other murderer. They were only officially identified as vampires many years later, since they didn't ever appear to age, and only died when they killed themselves.

Every girl was sure a vampire had killed Molly, despite no vampire having been reported in the country for years.

I myself wasn't sure if the killer was a vampire or not. Every book in the library I checked out on vampires was mainly full of theories, folk lore, and speculation, no real facts. The only things I knew for certain were: