Page 1 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

1

EVERLY

Here's something they leave out of the Nyxhaven brochure: severed mages die. Everyone on campus knows it, the same way everyone knows not to lick a battery, and for days now I've been driving four of them around New England in my best friend's car, trying to make it not true.

Tonight it's a motel off Route 7, the kind that takes cash and doesn't ask for names. It has a wall heater that rattles and puts out heat in one narrow stripe, plus a vending machine that just sells the pretzels no one wants, and the ice machine outside groans all night. The bedspreads are a floral pattern I wouldn't put under a blacklight for any amount of money.

Brittany's 4Runner is parked right outside the door where I can see it from the bed through the gap in the curtains, because it's pretty much the only thing we have, and I'm not letting it out of my sight.

Atlas is in the bathroom with the door open, bleeding into the sink.

It started on the hill below the gates and hasn't really stopped since. It slows down, he swears it's done, then an hour later he's tipping his head back, pinching the bridge of his nose while blood runs out between his fingers. His storm magic is still building up inside him, and since he can't cast it anymore, it's coming out of him as blood.

They die in a storm of their own making, Eustace from the Storm Daughters told me in the fall, when I asked her what happens to Tempests. When she said it, I pictured lightning. I definitely didn't picture a big man in his socks standing over a motel sink with the fan rattling overhead, swearing quietly at his face in the mirror.

"It's slowing down," he tells us.

"You said that an hour ago," I call from the bed.

"It slowed down an hour ago too."

He runs the tap and splashes his face, the water in the sink going pink, then clear, before he grabs another wad of toilet paper to hold against his nose and glares at himself over it. Glaring is kind of Atlas's solution to most things.

Callum is in the chair by the window with his hands tucked under his arms, the way he's sat for days. When I touched his fingers in the car this morning they were so cold they hurt—cold all the way through, the cold of something left outside overnight. He won't even wear the gloves I bought him at the gas station.

"I look like I'm about to rob a bank," he told me, handing them back.

It's the first joke Callum Bolingbroke has ever made in my presence, and honestly, it scared me more than the cold did.

Felix is cross-legged on the second bed, dealing cards onto the bedspread, turning one over to look at it and then another, the way he's been doing for days.

Before the gates every card he touched meant something, and he could see what was coming as easily as I read a menu. Now they're just cards. He keeps dealing them onto the ugly floral polyester, though, waiting for one of them to start talking to him again, and every time it doesn't, he gathers them up and starts over.

Ren is on the floor by my bed with Helena's notebooks open in his lap.

He used to know I was about to speak before I did, because he'd hear my heart change. Now he doesn't look up until I've already started talking, because he's hearing my breath instead of my blood. Every time it happens I feel it in my stomach, a little drop, like missing a stair in the dark.

"Anything?" I ask him.

"Some." He holds up the older of the two notebooks. The pages are swollen and stained with the ink gone brown, and they smell like the Down Deep—cold stone, old standing water. Every time he opens one the whole motel room smells of it for a moment, and I'm back under Concordia with the black water up to my thighs. "Her handwriting is awful."

"She did write those hanging in a pit."

"Fair," he says, and turns the page with one fingertip so it won't tear.

I slide off the bed to sit next to him on the carpet, which is the color of a bruise. The oilcloth the notebooks came wrapped in lies folded by his knee, stiff and cracked along the creases.

The wardens severed them at the front gates of Nyxhaven University at dawn, with half the school out on the lawn in pajamas and coats, holding travel mugs like it was homecoming. They put a stylus into Callum's arm, then Atlas's, then Ren's and Felix's, and cut each of them off from the Well.

When they tried it on me, my blood beaded up on the points and slid off my arm onto the gravel, because spells don't hold on a grimoire, so Catalina Bolingbroke lifted one gloved hand and let me walk out whole. It's maybe the nicest thing she's ever done for me. I'm sure she'll send a bill.

My spark is in the middle of my chest where the four threads of the bond meet, one thread for each of them. It's small, hot, and mine, the one part of me the stylus couldn't reach and the only reason I can feel the guys at all.

When I reach down the threads now, none of their magic comes back up them. I just get the four of them, and mostly they're frightened. It comes down the threads sour and tight and settles in my stomach next to my own fear, until I can't tell which part is mine.

Atlas is angry under the fear, a hot red anger he keeps pointing at the bathroom mirror, while Callum is cold to the bone, a sick cold that comes from his death magic piling up inside him with nowhere to go.

I can feel them, but I can't fix them.