Page 9 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

We hold the vote in the parking lot of the Linden Falls Diner, because it's the only place in town still open after dark, and because my mother taught me that you don't decide anything important indoors, where someone can listen at a wall. She also taught me never to eat anywhere with a laminated menu. I've broken one of her rules tonight already.

The lot is gravel and potholes, lit pink by the sign over the door. The cold is coming down off the hills, the damp, early-spring cold that gets into a coat and stays there, while out back by the dumpsters a radio plays country music to no one.

Everly bought all of us dinner with cash from the envelope Brittany left in the glovebox. No one has ever bought me a patty melt before, and I didn't know the etiquette, so I thanked her more than once, until she told me that if I said it again she'd make me pay for my own patty melt.

We ate in a booth by the window without saying much, and now we're out here in the dark with what's left of it in foam boxes on the hood of the 4Runner.

It isn't really a vote, since Everly has already decided. I know her well enough by now to tell when she's made up her mind, and she made it up on the stairs above the hardware store, before the rest of us had reached the top of them.

She's asking all the same, because she thinks we ought to have a say in what happens to our bodies. Of everything she's ever done, that surprises me most. No one in my family has ever asked what I wanted done to mine.

She turns to me. "Callum. You first."

"No," I tell her.

"No, you won't go first, or no to Helena?"

"No to Helena." I say it plainly, so she can't mistake it.

My hands stay in my coat pockets. They're numb past the wrists now; the cold started in my fingertips on the hill below the gates and has climbed a little higher every day since, until there's nothing left in my palms at all. It's my own death magic doing it, building up in me with no way out. When Everly hands me the car keys, I have to look down just to check that I'm holding them. I spent all of dinner doing the same thing with my fork.

"She watched the Well pull on you—and on the rest of us, through you." I keep my voice level. "She hasn't apologized for any of it. I was in the Down Deep, and I felt it come down the thread between us when it reached for you."

"I know." Of course she does. She's the one who was in the water.

"So no."

Atlas sits on the hood beside the foam boxes with a roll of paper towels from the diner bathroom in his lap, half of it already gone. His face has gone grey, and his collar is stiff and brown with dried blood. When he takes the wad of towel away from his nose to speak, a fresh line of red starts towards his lip before he's finished the word.

"Yes."

"Atlas—"

"I'm dying, Bolingbroke." He says it as flatly as he'd tell you it's raining, and I would give a great deal to see him make it rain right now. "I'm happy to hate her later. I'd just like there to be a later."

He puts the towel back under his nose and looks at me over it, daring me to argue, but I find I have nothing to say. He's right.

When Everly first came to Nyxhaven, I reported everything she did to my mother, and I set Atlas on her until he nearly killed her with lightning. We've never talked about any of that, and I don't expect we ever will.

This morning, at the gas station on the way into town, my fingers couldn't find the zipper on my coat. I stood beside the pump trying while Everly paid inside, and I missed the tab, and missed it again, until Atlas came around the back of the car with a strip of jerky in his teeth and stopped to watch.

"Christ, Bolingbroke." He took the jerky out of his mouth and shoved it in his pocket. "Hold still."

"I can do it," I said, and missed again.

"You can't do it. You've been doing it since she went in for the gas." He took both sides of my coat in his fists, fitted the zipper together, and yanked it up to my chin hard enough to knock my teeth together. "All those years you walked around campus like you owned the lawn, and it turns out you can't dress yourself. You useless rich prick."

"Thank you, Knox."

"Don't fucking thank me." He gave the collar a last tug, rougher than it needed to be, and went back around the car. "Get in. Your nose is running."

I let him do it, and then I got in the car, and I don't know what that makes us now. Once, I'd sooner have frozen at that pump.

Ren leans against the car beside Atlas with his arms folded. He's lost weight, which I wouldn't have thought possible; he had none to spare. Under the pink light, the skin beneath his eyes looks bruised. Every so often he turns his head towards a sound—a truck on the main road, the diner's screen door banging shut—and his face goes still while he waits for a heartbeat to come with it. None does.

"Yes." He frowns. "But I'd take pretty much any offer right now. If a stranger in a van told me I'd hear a heartbeat again, I'd let him have a kidney. You should maybe count my vote for less than everyone else's."

"That's the most Ren sentence I've ever heard," Felix calls over.