Page 99 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

They find her ankles first, then her wrists, winding around her waist and her neck in loose loops, and through them I feel her body go rigid with shock. My shadows have always let me feel whatever they're touching. What I feel through them now is a woman who has never in her life been touched by a shadow she couldn't predict.

I stay on my knees with my hands open and my shadows wrapped around her.

She's my mother, so of course she tears free. "Enough," she says through her teeth, and the cold flares off her so hard that my shadows stiffen. She wrenches one arm loose from the loops and drags the rest of herself after it, but my shadows don't fight to keep her, because I never told them how. She staggers a few steps back up the stairs, catching herself with one hand on the wall. There's blood on her face now too, a thin line of it at her hairline, and the shoulder of her grey coat is torn open to the lining.

She stands there breathing hard and looks down at me, and it's the same look she gave me the morning she expelled us, when I stopped at her door on the way out. I didn't know what it meant then. I don't know now.

Felix's hand closes on my shoulder. Behind me in the water, Atlas is shouting. "Get the fuck away from him, or the next one goes through you!"

He keeps one arm locked around Everly and throws the other hand up, and his lightning cracks into the stairs a few steps above my mother's head, white and enormous. Stone bursts off the wall and comes down around her in chunks. The thunder comes right behind it, so loud my ears ring, and every shadow in the place jumps with the light, then settles back.

A year ago Atlas couldn't stand to be in the same room with me, and now he's standing in freezing water putting lightning between my mother and me. I waited my whole life for Noah to do that once.

My mother looks at the broken stair above her, then at Atlas with his hand still sparking, then at me on my knees with my shadows wound loose around her wrists, and last at Everly, with frost still white on her arm.

She's alone down here, bleeding, with her own cold on the front of her coat, and for once she's the one outnumbered. She goes very still, and I know that stillness from every dinner of my childhood. She's deciding.

She speaks to Everly, over my head. "You can't hold it in your hands forever, Miss Grey. You'll get tired, and I'll still be here."

Everly lifts her head. Her lips are blue and her voice is wrecked, but I hear every word. "Then come back. I'll still be here too."

My mother looks at her a moment longer. Then she looks at me.

"Enjoy your evening, Callum," she says. "I'll come back down in the morning with the wardens."

Then she turns around and goes back up the stairs.

She doesn't hurry, and she doesn't look back. She climbs at the same even pace she came down, one gloved hand trailing the wall, until her footsteps go up into the dark towards the Burial Ground and I can't see her or hear them anymore. The frost on the steps starts to melt.

I kneel on the bottom step with blood running down my face and into my collar. My hands are shaking, but I don't try to stop them.

Everly took her hand out of the Well for me. She was holding every first-year in this school by a thread, and she lifted a hand off them to get my mother off my neck. I want to go down into the water and put my arms around her so badly that it frightens me, and I can't, because she's working.

My mother is alive, climbing a staircase in the dark with her coat torn, and I'm glad she's alive—and sick with how glad I am.

"She'll be back," Felix says quietly.

"Yes."

"Not tonight, though." He crouches beside me and presses the cuff of his sleeve against my cheek, hard enough to make me hiss. "Hold still, damn it. You're ruining a perfectly good shirt."

"It's a terrible shirt."

"There he is." He presses harder. "Your mom's got a mean right hook, by the way. I'd maybe skip Thanksgiving."

Behind us, Everly has both hands back under the water. I can feel her through the bond, cold to the bone and still working, pulling the next thread free.

30

HELENA

They don't know I'm coming down the stairs behind them.

Concordia's front door lets me in, as it always has. I'm one of the few left alive who can find it. I'm wearing the little grim's old coat, which is too short in the sleeves and still smells of her laundry soap, the cheap sweet kind girls buy by the jug now, and I've grown fond of it, though I'd never tell her so.

The cards told me they'd go down tonight. Dana keeps a deck in Marjorie's kitchen drawer for solitaire, and this morning the chaos in it finally showed me something I could use: the panel at the back of the hearth standing open, and a lamp going down the stairs after dark with the little grim and her four boys behind it.

This afternoon I sent Marjorie and the others down into the root cellar and told them to stay there until morning, whatever they felt in the ground, and that it would be all right. They believed me. They've believed everything I've told them.