The Bloodless Tutor

Wrenmoor Hill teaches thirty pupils a year and employs eight tutors who never eat in public. Every admission includes a signed consent form. Every consent form includes a blood clause. Every clause has been honoured for a hundred and sixty years. Matthias Vey is hired to teach mathematics there and is the only person on staff with a pulse. He is also a former police researcher, and he has been looking for his brother since a night nobody will describe to him. Adelaide Cleave, the headmistress, has been looking too. She has been looking inside her own institution for thirty years and finding nothing but perfect paperwork. Then Matthias does the arithmetic. One donor a year has never come home. A school. A ledger. A basement nobody has keys to. And two people who have been blaming themselves for the wrong crime.