Page 7 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"You let me pull them into the Well," I say, before I've even stepped inside.

"Yes." She doesn't bother to put down her pencil. "I wondered whether you'd say that first or ask how I'm doing. All winter you came down those stairs with a thermos of soup, asking how I was doing before you'd even sat down."

"You walked me down to the water yourself," I snap. "Then you knelt at the edge and watched the Well take them, and you didn't say a word. You could have told me to let go."

"I could have." She sets the pencil down at last, lining it up with the edge of the notebook. "You'd have held on to those boys if the water had been on fire. I spent a whole winter on that floor with you, little grim. I know what you hold on to, so I saved my breath."

"I liked you." It bursts out of me before I can stop it, and I sound about twelve years old. "I didn't bring you soup because I had to. I brought it because I liked you."

"I liked you too," she says flatly. "It didn't change anything I did."

I stand there in the doorway. I had whole speeches ready on the drive up—I rehearsed one out loud at a red light while everyone else was asleep, and it was really good, with a part about Cordelia in it I was proud of—but I can't find a single word of it now.

I'm so angry my hands are shaking, and she just looks at me with those colorless eyes. She's not sorry, and she won't even pretend to be, and I want her to pretend, so I'd have something to throw back at her.

She nods at the empty chair. "Sit down. You've been driving for days, and you look terrible."

"I'll stand," I tell her stiffly.

"Suit yourself. I hung over that pentagram in the dark for longer than your mother's been alive. I'm done standing." She closes the notebook and folds her hands on top of it. "Your boys are dying."

"You know they are." My voice cracks, and I hate it. "You wrote down exactly how it works, in that notebook you gave me."

"I can feel it from here." She tips her head towards the window, towards the south and the school. "The storm-boy is bleeding. The Bolingbroke boy's hands have gone cold. The one with the cards can't see what's coming, and the one who caught me can't hear a single heartbeat but his own. I've been feeling people through the ground since before your grandmother was born."

I hate that she knows them, and that she has names for them, even stupid ones.

"They have actual names, you know," I point out.

"I know their names." She turns her mug a little on the table. "I like mine better."

I grip the doorframe just to have something to hold on to. "Can you keep them alive?"

"Yes," she says, as if I've asked whether she takes sugar.

"How?" I demand.

"The stylus cut them off from the Well. That can't be fixed—I told you so in the notebook, and it's still true." She opens her hands on the table, palms up. Her fingers are long and thin and very clean. "But the Well was never the only magic in the world. It's just the one the families built a school on top of. There are lines under the ground, ley lines. They run under every hill in this state and most of the others, and they were here long before the Well. I can tie your boys into them, so their magic has somewhere to go."

"Out of the goodness of your heart?" I ask sarcastically.

I'd kind of love to see an X-ray of that heart. I bet it's mostly gristle.

"Because you'll ask me to." She doesn't seem offended. If anything, she seems pleased I asked. "And because I want you to have them. A girl like you should have someone holding on to her. No one held on to the girls the families sent down to the Well before you in their nicest dresses."

I believe her. I just don't think it's the whole reason.

In the Well I repeated everything she told me back to her, the way Felix taught me, and it still nearly killed me. It's the only rule I've got, so I use it again. I come in after all and pull out the other chair, sitting across from her with my hands flat on the table so she can see them shake.

"Tell me how. Every step," I insist. "Then I'm going to say it all back to you, and if you leave anything out, I'll know."

She almost smiles. "You got that from the boy with the cards."

"Well, I got it from Felix, and it's a good rule. It's the only reason I'm sitting here and not lying at the bottom of your Well."

"It was never my Well, little grim," she says sharply. "The families fed it. I only hung over it. When they found it, it was a little spring where the lines cross, enough for maybe a dozen mages. They fought over it for years, and the peace they made was to feed it until it was big enough for all of them." She looks at me a moment longer, then nods and pushes her cold tea to one side. "There's a hill a few miles east of here, past the dairy farm, where two of the lines cross. It has a stone wall on top and an apple orchard that died before I was born. You'll bring the four of them up there after dark. They'll stand where the lines are strongest and give their magic to the ground—all of it, everything that's been trapped inside them since the stylus cut them off. I'll be there to guide them through it. If the earth decides they're worthy, it will give their magic back to them through the lines." She pauses. "It will hurt. I won't lie to you about that. It will hurt them most of the night."

"And if it doesn't find them worthy?"