Page 11 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

I am her son. I've known how to do this since before I could read.

"Yes," I say.

Everly's eyebrows go up, and Atlas lowers the paper towels.

"I'm changing my vote. Yes." I take my hands out of my pockets so I can look at them. They're white and stiff in the neon, the fingers curled in, refusing to straighten all the way. They're mine, and I can barely feel them. "She's lying about something. We go anyway, and we watch her the whole time."

"Well, look at that," Felix murmurs. "Unanimous."

Everly crosses the gravel, takes both my hands, and holds them between her palms. Hers are warm enough that I can feel it even through the numbness—a little, at the edges, where she presses hardest. She stands there in a diner parking lot in her ruined skirt, warming my hands. Atlas looks away, Ren looks at the pie, and Felix goes on cutting his cards.

I want her. I've wanted her for longer than I've admitted to anyone, and this week it has only gotten worse, as if the cold took everything else out of me and left that. I want to pull her in by the lapels of that creased blazer, here in front of all of them, and kiss her until neither of us can remember Helena's name. I want her beside me in the car and in the bed and in every room I'm ever in again.

I have my mother's bones and her name, and I've spent my whole life afraid that I have her grip as well. If I let Everly see how much I want her, I'm afraid that's what she'll see.

So I stand still and let her hold my hands, and I don't pull her any closer.

Everly knows I just voted her way, nearly in her own words. She doesn't let go.

5

EVERLY

The hill is east of town, past a dairy farm and down a dirt road with ruts deep enough to lose a shoe in. Brittany is going to kill me. If her car survives this, I'm going to let her.

Every rut throws us sideways. Atlas swears whenever his head hits the window, Felix says whee in a flat voice whenever his does, and Callum sits in the passenger seat with his eyes shut, holding on to nothing because he can't feel the handle. Brittany's blankets slide from one side of the back to the other. By the time the road gives out at a rusted gate, I've bitten my tongue more than once, and I'm pretty sure I've lost a filling.

We walk the rest of the way with the blankets in our arms, through grass so long and wet it soaks my shoes before I've gone a few steps.

At the top, a stone wall is slowly falling down into the grass, its grey stones furred with lichen, and behind it stands a dead apple orchard, rows of bare trees gone grey and twisted, their branches knotted together against a sky full of stars. A deep, cold, green smell is coming up from the ground, the smell of a cellar where someone keeps apples, or of a garden turned over in March.

Helena is already there, sitting on the stone wall in my old coat with a lantern beside her, as if we've come up here for a picnic and we're late.

"Spread the blankets there." She points. "Where the grass is flattened. That's where they cross."

I don't see anything special about it. It's a rough circle of flattened stalks in the middle of the hilltop, the size of a big kitchen table, where something heavy lay down and got up again. I carry my armful of wool over and step onto it—and then I stop.

I feel the ley lines come up through the soles of my wet shoes, two of them meeting right under this patch of grass, the way Helena said.

The Well used to pull at my belly, low down, like a hand twisted in my shirt, cold and hungry and wanting me in particular.

This is under me. It's enormous, slow and heavy, moving beneath the hill like a river under ice, and unlike the Well, it doesn't want anything from me. But it knows I'm here. It feels like standing in front of someone very old who's deciding what they think of me. It's been running under this hill since before there were apple trees on it, and it'll keep going by long after they're gone.

"Oh," I breathe.

"Yes," Helena agrees. "That."

We put the blankets down. They're the grey wool ones Brittany packed, and they smell like the back of her car, like sheep, old French fries, and the vanilla air freshener hanging off her mirror.

Helena has the guys stand on them in a ring, facing each other. Atlas's nose has started up again, and he has a paper towel balled in his fist, while Callum has his hands jammed under his arms. Ren is so pale in the lantern light that he's gone grey, with dark hollows under his cheekbones that weren't there before the gates. Felix hasn't stopped shuffling since we got out of the car.

I start to step in among them, and Helena puts her hand on my arm.

"Not you," she says. "The Well is too deep in you now for the ground to take you, and you don't need it to. You're a grimoire. You can already reach the lines."

So I sit down at the edge of the crossing, close enough to touch them. The cold of the ground comes straight through the wool and into the backs of my legs.

Helena climbs down off the wall and brings the lantern with her, setting it at the edge of the blankets so the light throws all our shadows out long across the wet grass.