Page 6 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

The summons is lying face up on the rug by my foot, cream paper, black ink, the last Friday before exams.

I leave it there. I have until then to figure out how not to get drained, and so far my best idea is not going.

3

EVERLY

The woman who almost drowned all five of us lives over a hardware store in Linden Falls, a town with one stoplight. We'd never have found her if she hadn't hung my old coat in the window.

Felix reads the road signs out loud in a game-show voice the whole last stretch, through hills still brown from winter, while Atlas sleeps against the back window with a roll of paper towels in his lap. The town is one main street. There's a diner with a pink neon sign that's supposed to say OPEN, except the N is burned out, so it says OPE—which is about how I feel.

Past it are a Dollar General, a church with a white steeple, and a hardware store called Pruett's with a sun-faded cardboard hammer propped in the front window. Next to the store there's a narrow door with a mail slot and a buzzer, and through its glass I can see stairs going up.

I almost drive straight past. Then, in the second-floor window right over the shop, I see a coat hung over the radiator to dry, threadbare at the cuffs. I recognize it because it used to be mine—I gave it to her this winter in the Down Deep. I pull into the gravel lot beside the store so fast that Atlas wakes up, and I park facing the building.

I turn the engine off and sit with my hands on the wheel while it ticks as it cools. My palms are sweating on the plastic, which is kind of gross, so I wipe them on my skirt.

"I'm going up alone."

Callum doesn't even let me take a breath after it. "No."

"Absolutely not." Atlas's voice comes out muffled through a fresh wad of napkins.

"She won't talk to all of us." I twist around in my seat so I can see them. "If all five of us go clomping up those stairs, she'll sit there drinking her tea and say nothing, and we'll have driven all this way for a staring contest. And if she really wanted to hurt me, she had plenty of chances in the Well. She needs me alive—you know she does."

"I know." Callum's voice is very even. "That's my problem. She needs you alive, and she'll keep you that way for exactly as long as it suits her. None of us will be on those stairs to see the moment it stops suiting her."

He's sitting behind me with his hands jammed under his arms, his face gone the greyish white of old snow. I want to reach back and put my hands over his, but I don't, because then I'd have to watch him not feel it.

There's a parking meter at the end of the row, the old kind with a crank. I dig a quarter out of the cup holder, get out, wind it in, and get back in. The little red flag pops up.

"If I'm not down before that runs out, come up."

I look back at Felix in the middle seat. He still has his cards in his hands, holding the deck together with both thumbs so it won't spill.

"I can't tell you the odds."

"I know," I tell him.

"I just want it on record that I would like to tell you the odds."

"Noted," I tell him, and I get out of the car before any of them can grab me.

The buzzer doesn't work, but the door isn't locked. The stairwell is colder than it is outside, and I don't think it's ever had heat. The steps are steep and narrow, covered in rubber treads worn shiny in the middle. Halfway up, a radiator somewhere in the walls bangs as loud as someone hitting a pipe with a wrench, and I nearly fall back down them and save Helena the trouble.

The door at the top is open a crack. I knock anyway, because my mother raised me right.

"Come in, little grim."

I push the door open.

Helena is sitting at a table by the window with a notebook open in front of her and a mug of tea that stopped steaming a while ago. She's in a grey cardigan I don't recognize, buttoned wrong, her white hair braided down her back in a thick rope that reaches her waist. She looks better than she did in the Well—there's some color in her lips, she's put on a little weight, and her hands are steady on the table. She looks like someone's great-aunt, which she probably is, technically, to someone.

The room is small and warm, too warm, the radiator under the window pumping out heat. There's a bed with a green wool blanket pulled tight, a hot plate, a sink with a single cup upside down beside it, and the table with its two chairs.

A paper calendar from the hardware store downstairs is tacked to the wall, still on March, with a picture of a cordless drill. A bag of oranges sits on the windowsill, with a little pile of peel on a saucer at her elbow, so the whole room smells of oranges.

She's been sitting up here eating oranges, drinking tea, and just waiting for me. That makes me angrier than anything she did at the water.