Page 2 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

God knows I've tried. The first night I tried in the car, all of them asleep while the highway went by in the dark. I tried again in the parking lot of a Dunkin' Donuts outside Rutland, sitting in the driver's seat with my eyes shut and my hands on the wheel while Felix went in for donuts. I pushed everything I had down the threads to them, all four disciplines at once, trying to heal them, and it just dissipated. Severed mages can't cast, and no one else's magic can work on them either. Whatever I send falls apart before it reaches them.

"Read me the part again," I tell Ren.

Some of the pages are stuck together, so he turns them carefully until he finds it. Helena wrote it sideways in the margin, squeezed in around a diagram of the pentagram in the Down Deep, and he reads it slowly to get every word right.

"'The stylus drains the mage's magic out of him and cuts him away from the Well. But magic is part of the body, and it grows back. It builds up inside him again, and he cannot cast it, because the road out is gone. A severed mage does not die of losing his magic. He dies of holding it in.'" He tips the notebook towards me so I can see the cramped brown lines.

I know what that means, and so does Atlas. It's how his mother died, in their kitchen when he was seven: too much magic in one body and no way to let it out. Lyra's storm broke out of her and took the kitchen with it. The guys' magic has nowhere to break out to, so it's killing them from the inside.

Ren runs his finger down the margin. "Then there's this, underneath. 'The cut can't be mended. It can be gone around. See the third book.'"

"And we don't have the third book."

"We have two books." Ren runs his thumb along the swollen edge of the page. "She took the third one."

Of course she fucking did. Helena stood at the edge of the Well and watched it nearly drown all five of us without saying a word, and then she walked out of the dark with the one notebook we need tucked under her arm. I have no idea where she went.

In the bathroom, Atlas turns the tap off, while on the bed Felix turns over the jack of hearts, stares at it, then lays it down very gently on top of the others.

"How long?" I ask Ren quietly.

He doesn't pretend not to understand me—he never has. "I don't know. She doesn't say. It's faster in the stronger ones, because their magic builds back up faster." He doesn't look at Atlas when he says it, or down at himself, but Atlas and Ren are the strongest mages in this motel room, and we both know it. "Ev, the only heart I can hear now is mine. I've heard everyone's since I was fifteen, and now there's just mine, and it's so loud. I keep listening to it to make sure it's still going. I can't hear yours or theirs, so I'd just be guessing."

"Then don't guess," I tell him.

"Okay." He says it to the page, and I let him.

He goes back to the notebook while I sit on the bruise-colored carpet with my knees pulled up and make a list in my head, because lists are what I have.

My dad keeps a list on the fridge of every appliance in the house and the date he bought it, held up with a magnet shaped like a lobster. It has saved him from more than one scam warranty and a very persuasive man at Best Buy. When things get bad in my family, we write them down and stick them somewhere we'll see them.

Here's mine.

The guys are dying of the magic stuck inside them, and the only person who knows how to keep them alive is Helena, who has the third notebook and doesn't want to be found.

Nell is still at Nyxhaven, in Concordia, with a piece of the Well inside her, beating under her own heart, and I had to leave her there.

Brittany is there too, with a summons to the review board propped on her desk, and I know what the review board really is: it's where Catalina drains students no one will miss. Enya had one. So did the grad students who stopped knowing what day it was.

I need to find Helena and get her to keep the guys alive. Then I need to get all of us back onto a campus I've been thrown off of—before Brittany's summons comes due, and before the Well finishes taking Nell over.

It isn't great, I know, though I've probably had worse weeks—I'd have to sit down and really think about it. I don't have a plan for most of that. What I have is Brittany's car with a full tank and four men I love who can't do the one thing they were born to do.

Ren closes the older notebook and wraps both of them back up in the oilcloth, because he's Ren and he does things properly.

I pull the road atlas from the gas station out from under the bed and open it on the carpet between us. Every road we've driven this week is crossed off in pen: west towards the state line, south along the coast, every back road around Nyxhaven that has a motel on it. Helena isn't anywhere we've been.

The only roads I haven't crossed off run north.

"North," I say out loud.

Callum looks over from the window. "She could be anywhere up there. There are more back roads north of the school than south of it, and my mother will have someone watching the main ones by now. If we drive every road in the dark, we'll be pulled over by a state trooper with four expelled students in a borrowed car long before we find one old woman."

"You got a better idea," Atlas says from the bathroom, "or are you just going to sit in that chair and narrate?"

"I'm sitting in this chair because I can't feel the arms of it, Knox."

That shuts Atlas up, which almost never happens. It shuts me up too, but only for a second.