Page 13 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Felix is flat on his back with his eyes shut and one hand in the dirt. "Ev, if you say the word snickerdoodle one more time, I'm going to die on purpose." A pause. "No, keep going."

So I keep going.

Helena takes the lantern back to the wall and sits there with it, watching us without a word.

The stars wheel over the orchard as it gets later. The cold works its way into the backs of my knees and the ends of my fingers and stays there, my skirt soaked through from the grass, my hair wet with dew. I stopped being able to feel my toes a while ago, but I don't really care, because the threads in my chest are getting heavier as their magic comes back.

The lantern is burning low when Atlas sits up.

He does it slowly, pushing himself up on one hand, then holds the other one out over the grass, palm up. He hasn't had a conductor since the wardens took his at the gates, and he just holds out his bare hand and looks at it.

I feel it in the air first. The pressure drops, my ears pop, and the air over the hill pulls tight, the way it does on a July afternoon right before the sky opens.

It starts to rain.

It's a small, soft rain, falling out of a sky that was clear a minute ago, right over our patch of hill and nowhere else. It patters on the blankets, the stone wall, and Atlas's upturned face, while past the edge of the orchard the stars are still out. It's only raining on us.

He sits with his hand held out and his eyes open, letting it fall on him, and the blood on his upper lip washes down his chin in pink streaks.

Then he laughs. It comes out of him loud and rough, a big surprised bark, and he turns his face to me with the rain running down it.

"Ev. Ev! Look at this!"

"I'm looking!" I yell back, grinning so hard my face hurts. I don't remember deciding to cross the blanket, but I'm on my knees in front of him, and I take his wet face in both hands and kiss him.

His mouth is cold from the night and tastes of rain and a little of blood, and I really don't care. He makes a sound against my lips, and then his free hand is in my wet hair and he's kissing me back hard, grinning into it so that our teeth bump.

The rain comes down on both of us. Through the thread between us I feel his storm, his real storm, rolling up out of the ground and into him, and he's so happy that it makes me dizzy.

"Holy shit," he says against my forehead when we come apart. "I thought I was going to die in a fucking motel bathroom."

"Well, you're not. You're staying right here with me."

He puts his head down on my shoulder and stays like that, his shoulders shaking, the rain falling on his back. I hold on to him. None of the others bother us except Ren, who reaches over to lay a hand on his back and leaves it there.

By the time the sky starts to go grey over the orchard, they all have some of their magic back.

It isn't what they had, though. I can feel that through the threads too, now that their magic is coming back up them.

Callum's shadows don't stay where he puts them. They pool and drift, wandering off across the grass on their own, and more than once they come sliding back to curl around his wrists before he's called them. When he holds his hands up to look at them, I touch one with a fingertip. It's cold, the way his shadows have always been, and it leans into my finger.

Ren gets up on his knees and holds his hand over Atlas's bloody nose. He has no knife, and he doesn't cut himself. He kneels there with his palm hovering and his eyes shut, and through the bond I feel him find Atlas's heartbeat next to his own and hold on to both. It takes him ages, and then the bleeding stops all at once, mid-drip. Atlas touches his upper lip and looks at his clean fingers.

"Huh," he says.

"You're welcome." Ren lies straight back down in the wet grass.

Felix picks up his deck, turns over a card, and goes still. When he turns over another, he puts his hand over his mouth, and his shoulders start to shake.

"What?"

"Everything's sideways. I can see things, but they're not lined up—it's like looking at the odds through a fish tank." He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, leaving a smear of dirt across his cheek. "I don't even care, Ev. I can see."

Their magic doesn't come out the way they mean it to. Sometimes it's bigger, sometimes it's smaller, sometimes it's late, and sometimes it goes before they've decided to do anything at all. Atlas sneezes, and a gust of wind blows Felix's cards off the blanket and halfway down the hill. Callum just looks towards the wall, and a shadow is already there.

It's also easier for them, though, which I can feel most of all. They've spent their whole lives forcing their magic out through a conductor or a knife or a deck of cards, pushing until their hands shook. Now they reach for it and it's just there, in the hill, in the ground under them.

The bond has changed too.