Page 76 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"It's not getting shorter fast enough," Brittany says.

"Then I'll go faster." I put my finger on Josie's name, with its neat line through it. "Every name you cross off is one Catalina doesn't get."

"Ev—" Brittany starts.

"I'll go faster." I put my head down on the table. The wood is cool against my forehead and smells like old coffee and lemon cleaner. "I'll take more of them every night. I can do it."

"You can't go faster." She taps the table next to my hand with her pen. "You already can't even feel your hands."

"Well, then I'll go faster without feeling my hands."

Brittany doesn't argue. After a minute I hear her chair scrape back as she comes around the table, and then her hand settles on the back of my head, warm and heavy.

"This isn't a hug," she says, and leaves it there. "It's a hand. If Herbert asks, I was checking you for a fever."

24

CALLUM

My mother sends for me, and I go.

Atlas finds the note on the boathouse steps after walking the last pair of first-years down to the water's edge and back. It's folded once and weighted with a flat grey stone, and he carries it home to Concordia pinched between two fingers, held away from his body the whole way across the dark grass, before he drops it on the kitchen table between the coffee mugs.

I know the paper before I touch it. It's her stationery, cream and heavy, with the Bolingbroke crest pressed into the top in blind relief so you can only see it when the light comes in sideways, and her handwriting slants exactly as far as it did on every report card she ever signed for me.

Callum. My office, tomorrow evening. Come alone.

No signature. She's never needed one.

So she knows where we meet. She's let us go on bringing frightened children down to the boathouse in the dark, and tonight she's decided to tell me so. There's no please, either—my mother has never written please to me in my life, and if she ever did, I'd trust it even less.

"No." Everly is reading it over my shoulder, close enough that her hair brushes my ear.

"She isn't asking," I say.

"It's a trap, is what it is." Atlas hasn't sat down. He's at the end of the table with his arms crossed, and the air around him has gone dry and tight the way it does before a storm, lifting the hair on my forearms. "You walk into that office, there's a warden behind the door, and we never see you again."

"She could have had me taken any night since enrollment. She's known where we meet for weeks." I fold the note back along its crease. "If she wanted me in a cell, I'd be in one."

"Then what the hell does she want?" Atlas demands.

"I don't know. That's why I'm going."

Everly sits down across from me with her hands wrapped around her mug. Her fingers are still red and stiff from last night, when she was on the common room floor until dawn with a Tempest girl from Vermont, unwinding the rune one turn at a time, and the feeling hasn't come all the way back into them since.

Her fear for me comes down the bond quick and cold, and she isn't even trying to hide it. She keeps turning the mug around in her stiff hands without drinking from it.

"Felix." She twists around in her chair. "Tell him not to go."

Felix is sitting on the counter by the stove, walking a card over the backs of his knuckles. The card stops, and he looks at me, then past me, at nothing I can see.

"I see him coming back," he says. "It's sideways, and it's through a fish tank, and I couldn't really tell you what time it is in it. But he's walking up the front steps."

Since we were tied into the lines, Felix's sight comes when it likes and shows him what it likes, so that's the best anyone is going to get. It will have to be good enough.

"Is he by himself?" Everly asks.

Felix looks at her for a long moment. Then the card starts walking over his knuckles again. "No," he says. "He isn't."