Page 103 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Helena," I tell him, and she's still pulling.

He makes a sound behind me, low and awful, and he doesn't let go again.

Callum is on his feet at last at the water's edge, swaying, with blood down the side of his face and into his collar. His shadows come off the steps the way they came for his mother, wild and loose, more of them than he could ever steer, and they go across the water and wind around Helena's wrists and up her arms. Her storm crackles up her skin to meet them, and they come apart.

"I cannot hold her." His voice is wrecked from his mother's hands. "Everly, she isn't fighting them. She doesn't care what they do to her. Whatever you're going to do, you have to do it yourself."

Fine. If I can't out-hold her, I'll do to her what I did to Catalina.

I stop pulling on the Well and reach past it instead, for Helena's spell, her grip on it, and I drain it into me the way I pulled the cold off Callum's throat. For one second it comes, and Helena comes with it: all those years waiting in the dark, a girl with her hair pinned up, and a grief so big that I nearly throw up in the water.

Then Helena looks across the water at me, and I feel her take it back.

She's a grimoire too. She drains it out of me the same way I drained it out of her, and she takes more than her spell. She takes some of my magic with it, straight down into the Well, which is in her hands.

I've just given her more.

Helena's palms are bleeding now. I can see it from here, dark threads of it running out of her hands into the white water. She plants her feet on the step, and she pulls with everything she's been saving since 1930. The Well slides towards her, and I slide with it.

Atlas's feet slip.

I feel it through his arm and through the thread between us at the same time, his heels skidding off the edge of the step. He goes down into the water up to his chest, and his arm doesn't loosen around me even a little. He isn't going to let go of me. If I keep holding on to the Well, it takes me under, and it takes Atlas with me.

I can't beat her. I'm half frozen and so tired, and I'm trying to keep every piece of it whole, and she doesn't care what's left at the end. I'm so terrified that my legs go out from under me in the water, and the only thing holding me up is Atlas, who's going under. You're going to drown him, I think. You're going to stand here and be stubborn and drown him.

So I let go.

I open my hands and let the Well go, all of it at once. I don't have anything left to hold with, so I reach under that, for whatever is still warm in the middle of my chest, and I grab the four threads there, one to each of them, and hold on to them as hard as I can.

The Well rushes into the space where my grip was and pulls everything I have into itself, every discipline at once. For one second it's wide open around me, busy swallowing me, and that's the second Helena has been waiting for.

She tears it.

I see it go. A crack of white runs across the bottom of the water from Helena's hands towards mine, and every thread in the knot lights up along its whole length at once, all the way up through the stone towards the campus, and then they snap, and the light runs up them and out.

Low in my belly, where the Well has always pulled at me, the long low note it sings climbs and climbs until it's a scream, and the scream isn't mine. Then it cuts off, and the water drains out from under me. It goes all at once, sucked down into the dark with a noise like a bath emptying, and one second I'm standing in it up to my waist and the next there's nothing under my feet and I'm falling.

Atlas has me. His arm locks around my ribs so hard it knocks the last of the air out of me, and he hauls me backward out of the hole. We hit the steps and go down hard on the wet stone with Atlas underneath, my elbow cracking against the edge of a step.

Then the roaring starts. It's in the stone under us and the air over us and inside my head, and the steps buck under us as if the whole hill is trying to throw us off. A piece of the cavern roof comes down into the empty hole where the water was. I don't even hear it land.

"Up!" Callum is on his feet, with Felix's sleeve still pressed to his face. "Get up, all of you. It's coming down!"

Atlas hauls me up. I can't feel my legs, so he half carries me.

I look back once.

Gold light is coming up out of the hole where the water was, the way it came up in the spring, and there are girls in it. They rise out of the dark one after another, faint as breath on a window, girls in old-fashioned dresses and girls in jeans, and they go up through the stone and don't come back. One of them has a wine-colored birthmark high on her cheek. It's Nell, and she's smiling.

At the far end of the steps, Helena is sitting with someone in her arms.

It's an old woman in a slip, with long white hair like Helena's and bare feet, and Helena is holding her the way you'd hold someone you were scared to wake. The woman lifts her hand and touches Helena's face. Then she comes apart. She goes to gold dust in Helena's arms, a little at a time, from her feet up, until Helena is holding nothing but light, and then not even that.

Helena doesn't get up.

"Helena!" I scream it. "Helena, come on!"

She looks across the empty hole at me. Then she shakes her head once, folds her hands in her lap, and turns back to the place where Cordelia was.