Page 21 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Her heart comes first, quick and light.

Under it beats another one, slow—a long beat, then a long pause, then another long beat, as if something enormous were asleep a long way down.

Fear goes through me cold, all the way down into my stomach, and the noodles turn to paste in my mouth. Swallow it, Everly. Don't let her see your face. I make myself swallow. Nothing I know of is that big and that far down except the Well.

Beside me, Atlas has gone still with his bowl at his chin, while Callum's shadow has stopped climbing the leg of his chair. They can't hear what Ren hears, though they can feel me hearing it, and none of us breathes a word about it in front of her.

Later, when Nell's gone down the hall to brush her teeth, I catch Ren by the sleeve outside the study room door.

"Is it still there?" I whisper.

"Yes. It's still there, and it's the same as it was at supper, before you ask me if it's worse." He rubs his face with both hands. Under the hallway light he looks tired, but at least he isn't grey anymore, and I keep catching myself checking. "I don't really know what it is, Ev, or where it stops and she starts."

"We'll figure it out tomorrow," I promise him.

He nods, then reaches out and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, and his fingertips rest against my neck, right over my pulse, before he lets go.

No one plans to end up in bed together that night.

We end up in the big room at the end of the second-floor hall, the one with the four-poster bed that's too big for any of us to have claimed. Someone's dragged in every blanket in the building and piled them on it. The hangings are moth-eaten velvet, dark red gone brown, and when Felix pulls one aside to make more room, a cloud of dust comes off it and we all sneeze.

Everyone's too tired to sleep and too wound up to stop talking. The magic in this building is so thick I can feel it in my teeth, and I can feel it in all of them through the threads, and every time one of them laughs I feel it land somewhere different in my body: Atlas's as a jolt of heat across my shoulders, Ren's as a warm thump behind my ribs, while Felix's is a giddy drop in my stomach.

Atlas is sitting at the end of the bed with his back against one of the posts, and I'm between his knees with my back to his chest, warm all the way down. Felix is stretched across the bottom of the bed with his head on my thigh, telling the story of the groundskeeper's dog again.

"So the dog looks at Atlas," he's saying, "and Atlas looks at the dog, hanging off a wall by his fingernails, and it's a real moment between them. Two big dumb animals who've never once been told no. I'm the only one who saw it coming, because I'm a genius. The dog was bigger than that, by the way. In my version the dog is enormous."

"It was a Lab," Atlas says.

"It was a Clydesdale of a Lab, and it judged you."

Ren's lying beside us on his side, propped on one elbow, his hand around my ankle—he hasn't let go of some part of me since we got here. Callum has the armchair by the door, his feet up on a footstool, watching us.

He actually looks content. I've never seen that on Callum before, and I'm so glad I could cry.

"Just so everyone's clear," Atlas says over the top of my head, "I got this spot fair and square."

"You body-checked me into the bedpost," Felix tells him from my thigh.

"I called it on the stairs."

"You can't call dibs on a person, Atlas. She isn't the front seat."

"Watch me." Atlas folds both arms around my waist and props his chin on top of my head, very pleased with himself.

Ren doesn't argue. He just slides his hand from my ankle up to my calf, slow, and looks right at Atlas while he does it. Through the thread between us his heartbeat goes smug. I didn't even know a heartbeat could do that.

"Oh, that's cheating," Felix says. "He's doing the quiet thing. Ev, he's doing the quiet thing on purpose, and it's working."

"I'm not doing anything," Ren says, and strokes the back of my knee with his thumb.

"Fine. Then I'm going to have to tell the dog story better. The dog is now the size of a pony, and he can talk."

"Callum," Atlas calls across the room. "You getting in on this, or what?"

"I'm comfortable where I am." Callum doesn't take his feet off the footstool. "Someone has to keep score."

"No one's keeping score," I tell all of them, with a huff of breath that's half a giggle. "No one's winning anything."