Page 3 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Then we drive every road north of the school until we find her." I'm already up and grabbing my keys off the nightstand, the 4Runner's plastic key fob warm from sitting next to the lamp. "She has to sleep somewhere. She has to buy groceries. She's a woman from 1930 with white hair down to her waist, Callum. Someone's going to remember her."

Atlas comes out of the bathroom with a fresh wad of toilet paper pressed to his nose and looks at me over the top of it. His eyes are red-rimmed, and his T-shirt has a brown stain down the collar that is never coming out. "You actually want to drive to the woman who almost killed us... so she can save us."

"Well, yes. It sounds worse when you say it."

He thinks about it while blood soaks through the paper. "Okay. I call shotgun."

"You can't call shotgun, you're bleeding." Felix doesn't look up from his cards. "Bleeding people go in the back. It's the rule."

"Whose rule?" Atlas demands.

"Mine. I just made it." He scoops the cards together off the bedspread. His hands are shaking a little, so he hides it by shuffling, fast and loud, the cards slapping together while he gives all of us his usual smile, and I can tell he's working to hold it there. "Let's go find the scary lady. I hope wherever she is has snacks."

Getting out of the chair takes Callum longer than it should, and he keeps his hands under his arms the whole way to the door. Then he stands there waiting for me to open it, because he can't feel the knob.

I open it, and the night air comes in cold. Down the walkway the ice machine groans. The 4Runner is sitting under the one working light with dew all over the windshield.

I hold the door while they go past me, Callum first, then Ren with the notebooks under his arm, then Felix still shuffling, then Atlas with his head tipped back. Then I go start the car and drive north, towards the woman who almost killed us, because she's the only one who can keep them alive.

2

BRITTANY

Nyxhaven is falling apart, and no one will say so out loud.

In Fundamentals of Sanguis, the second-year at the bench in front of mine cuts her thumb to start the warm-up and can't make it stop bleeding. She says the closing charm, then says it again with her voice going higher, while the blood runs down her wrist and patters onto the worktable.

"Professor?" She holds her hand up like she's asking to go to the bathroom. "Professor Dowling, it won't close."

Dowling comes down the aisle with his sleeves rolled up and his ritual knife already out, looking at the ceiling the whole way, because he's a Sanguis professor who can't stand the sight of blood. He gave me a D last year. He sets the flat of the blade against the heel of her hand without looking at it and says, "Siste," in his calm lecture voice. Nothing happens. He says it again, louder, and the blood keeps coming, and the whole room smells like pennies.

"Infirmary," he says finally, and hands her a dish towel.

When she's gone he stands at the front wiping his knife on his handkerchief for a long time. "Carry on," he tells the rest of us, in a voice that suggests he'd rather we didn't.

It isn't only Sanguis. Yesterday someone's conductor went off inside his bag in the dining hall and blew the zipper into the ceiling, and the library lamps dim now whenever a Tumult student walks under them, so the Tumult kids do their reading on the steps outside in their coats. All of it started the afternoon Everly put her hands in the Well and pushed its magic back down, and spells all over campus have been misfiring ever since.

I keep my head down, which I'm actually good at. If they graded it, it would be the one A on my transcript. They don't—I asked, and I'd like that on the record. I go to my classes, sit in the back row, and get the same failing marks I always get on practicals. Blood magic has fought me all year. Lately there's a new feeling in me too, jumpy and wrong, and I figure it's just my blood magic going bad in a new way.

My summons is propped against the lamp on my desk in Bellamy, where I can see it from the bed. It's thin cream paper with black ink, and the ink is very even, the work of someone who never wondered how it would feel to get it. It's the nicest stationery anyone has ever wasted on me.

Brittany Leigh, sophomore, is requested to appear before the review board at the end of term to discuss her academic standing. There's a date at the bottom: the last Friday before exams.

I know what the review board is. It's how Catalina picks which students get drained, their magic pulled out of them until there's nothing left, and Enya was one of them—I've seen her folder, because I stole it out of Wheeler's desk.

The four frat houses lost their presidents at the gates on the same morning, and you can tell. Fulmen elected a junior who looks terrified every time someone says his name in the dining hall, so naturally people say his name a lot, mostly to watch him flinch.

Ossium hasn't elected anyone at all, and the Mors kids just drift around the quad in black, a funeral that can't find the cemetery. Long Shot is running a tournament to pick its president, which is very Tumult and is going to take all term.

Vitae picked a girl who mostly seems kind of upset that it's her. I passed her on the path yesterday, holding her ritual knife in both hands and looking at it as if someone had handed it to her by mistake.

No one even says our names—Everly's or the guys'. Everyone gets very interested in their shoes whenever the gates come up.

In History of the Disciplines I check my phone under the desk, and there's a text from a number I don't have saved.

Found a motel. Everyone alive. A is still bleeding. Going north. Are you ok? —E

I read it again, slower, in case it says something different the second time. It doesn't.