Page 4 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

fine, I type back. campus is weird. summons is still the last friday. don't do anything stupid.

Define stupid.

anything you're about to do.

She sends back a heart. I put my phone face down on my notebook and spend the rest of the hour pretending to take notes on the Schism of 1926 without hearing a word of it. At the end of class I look down and find A is still bleeding written in the margin in my handwriting. I tear the corner off the page and put it in my pocket.

Poe comes to my window after dark and knocks on the glass with his beak.

Technically, he's a raven. He was a raven, a long time ago, until someone at Callister stuffed him and put a rune under the feathers at the back of his skull so he'd spy for the house. Everly managed to turn him to her side a few times, but Wheeler's magic always yanked him back.

Then I turned him to me, with my thumb bleeding into his skull and my ear bleeding afterward, and I'm told that's kind of a big deal. He has glass eyes that shine in the dark, and he smells a little like a cedar closet. He's mine now—I'm not sure he's figured that out yet, but he keeps showing up.

Herbert is on the desk lamp, where he's been since dinner, sitting on the warm shade with all eight legs tucked under him. When Poe knocks, he lifts two of them and holds them up.

"He's allowed," I tell Herbert. "We've talked about this."

Herbert doesn't put his legs down. I open the window anyway, and the cold comes in. Poe hops onto the sill and looks at me with his head tipped too far to one side.

"Fine," I tell him. "Let's go."

I put my coat on over my blazer and go down the back stairs of Bellamy with a raven on my shoulder, past a junior coming up with a laundry basket who looks right at Poe and decides not to ask. That's the good thing about this campus at the moment: everyone has problems of their own.

Callister's front door is unlocked, and inside, the old radiators are ticking, because someone turned them on for the spring cold snap and no one's turned them off. Loki is waiting at the bottom of the stairs in the front hall, the way he always is now. He's a fox—also stuffed, also technically dead. When he sees me he gets up to trot ahead down the hall and out the back door, his tail held low, and I follow him across the strip of dark grass between Callister and the place where everyone's eyes slide off.

That's what happens to everyone but Everly. "Your eyes just slide right off it," she told me once. "You look at the gap next to Callister, and the next thing you know, you're thinking about your laundry, or whether there's any coffee left." I've done it plenty of times myself. A few weeks ago I sat in Wheeler's chair at the third-floor window, looked straight out at it, and saw just lawn.

My eyes don't slide anymore. A new kind of magic has been waking up in me since spring, the same magic that let me turn Poe, and I'm pretty sure it means I'm a grimoire too, like Everly. The first night I walked out here and actually saw it, it nearly knocked me over. Poe rides along on my shoulder anyway, his claws pinching through my coat and blazer into my skin, because he likes the outing.

A building is standing there, old grey stone with tall arched windows full of dark, carved stonework over the door, and the door itself heavy and banded in iron. It's been there the whole time, close enough to Callister that if I'd ever leaned out of a kitchen window I could have touched it with a broom.

I stand on the wet grass with my hands in my pockets and look at it.

Only Everly can see Concordia. At least, that's the rule we all figured out this year: it hides from everyone but grimoires, and Everly is the grimoire. Except here I am, looking at the windows.

I add it to the list I keep in my head with the other things that don't fit. There's the blood magic I did in the fall that my file says I can't even do, and the raven on my shoulder, who bit me to keep me out of the door at the end of the Callister hall. Now there's a building I can see.

I walk up the steps and put my hand on the cold iron of the door, and it swings open for me.

I'd honestly have preferred it locked. A locked door, I know what to do with.

Nell is sitting up in bed in the little study room on the second floor when I come in, a paperback face down in her lap and the heater Atlas charged still glowing orange on the floor. It hums. No one really knows how long it'll keep going now that the person who charged it is in a motel somewhere bleeding into a sink, and I've been afraid to touch it in case I break whatever's keeping it on.

She smiles when she sees me. It's the warmest smile I've ever seen on her, and I hate it.

"You came back."

"I said I would." I drop into the chair by the bed.

"I know. I just like it when people do what they say."

Loki curls up on the rug, nose under his tail, and Poe flaps up to the curtain rod to settle there with a rattle of feathers. The room smells like dust and the heater's hot metal, and under that, very faintly, like the Down Deep: cold water, wet stone, the inside of a well.

"Did you eat?" I ask.

"There's soup." She points at a can on the floor by the bed. It's open, but it's full, the spoon standing straight up in it. "I wasn't hungry."

"Eat it anyway."