Page 100 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Dana walked me to the end of the road with her hands jammed in the pockets of her gas station jacket, and behind her Marjorie's kitchen light was on in the window.

"You'll be back for breakfast, won't you?" Dana asked me.

"Of course," I told her.

That part was a lie.

The foyer is dark except for one lamp, and the Leigh girl is sitting under it on the bottom step of the stairs in a cardigan and pajama trousers, with her spider's tank on her knees and that dead fox of hers across her feet. The raven is on the newel post above her head.

She sees me and stands up. She sets the tank down on the step behind her first, carefully, and I like her for that.

"No," she says. "Absolutely not. Turn around."

"Go back to bed, Miss Leigh."

"I'm guarding the door." She plants herself in the archway to the common room with her feet apart and holds her hand out at me, palm first, the way the Tempest boys hold out their conductors. Her hand is shaking. "Everly's down there."

"I know where she is," I tell her.

"She told me what you said to her. That you were done waiting." Her chin comes up. "She thought you meant you were sad about it. Is that what this is? You came all the way here in her coat to be sad?"

I don't answer her, and she's clever enough to take my silence for the yes it is: I've come to tear the Well apart.

Then the storm comes out of her.

It comes out wrong, the way I'm told everything she does comes out wrong. I think she means to put it between us, and instead it goes everywhere at once.

Wind tears through the foyer and slams the front door, and the lamp blows out. Lightning crawls up her own arms instead of out of them and lifts every hair on her head, and rain comes down out of the ceiling onto the rug in a cold sheet. It's a great deal of storm for a girl the school wrote off as having none.

I put up my hand and take hold of her spell, and I send it down through the floorboards into the earth, into the ley lines running under this house, where it can't hurt anyone. The boards jump under our feet as it goes. The last of the wind catches her and knocks her back onto the stairs, where she sits down hard with her elbow against the banister and says a word Marjorie wouldn't let her say at the table.

I listen for her heart. It's going fast and furious and nothing worse. I check because the little grim would never forgive me otherwise, and because I'd never forgive myself, which surprises me.

"It would have come easily to you through the lines," I tell her. "Your magic was always wild, and so are they. You were never going to be good at spells. I offered you that at Marjorie's table."

She glares up at me with rain running off the end of her nose. "I'm still good."

"You're sitting in a puddle."

"I'm still good," she says again, and she doesn't look away from me.

Cordelia would have said that too. "Have it your way, Miss Leigh."

I take off the little grim's coat and hang it on the newel post. She'll want it back, and I won't need it where I'm going. Then I step around the Leigh girl and over the fox and go through into the common room. Behind me I hear her scramble up off the stairs, and then her voice, low and fast, talking to the bird.

The panel at the back of the hearth is standing open, because they've gone down ahead of me and left it. The cold rising out of the dark smells of wet stone and old water and nothing else in the world.

I know these stairs better than anyone alive. I came down them in 1930 behind the last of the girls they walked down, and I've had a long time since to learn every turn of them by feel, so I step over the missing step in the dark without slowing. I don't need a lamp.

Halfway down I can hear them. A man is shouting, his voice echoing off the stone, and then comes thunder, which should be impossible this far under the ground. After that I hear a woman's footsteps going up and away from me on the families' back way, unhurried, until I can't hear them anymore. I know whose footsteps those are. The Bolingbroke woman has always walked as if the ground under her belonged to her, and I've never seen anyone tell her it doesn't.

At the bottom I stop in the mouth of the tunnel, in the dark, where their lamp doesn't reach.

It sits on the top step beside a pair of shoes someone has lined up neatly side by side. Below it, the Bolingbroke boy is kneeling on the last step at the edge of the water with blood all down one side of his face, while the one with the cards crouches beside him pressing a sleeve to it. Neither of them looks up the stairs. They're looking at the water.

The little grim is standing in it up to her waist. The storm-boy is behind her with his arm locked around her ribs to hold her up, and the blood-boy, the one who caught me, has his hand flat on her back, over her heart.

There's ice in the water around them, thin and broken and melting, and her right arm is white with frost to the shoulder. Her lips are blue and she's shaking all over, so hard her teeth knock together, but her hands are under the surface, and she's working.