Page 12 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Give it to the ground," she tells them. "All of it, everything you've been holding since the gates. Don't push and don't fight. Let it go down. It'll hurt most of the night."

"Great." Atlas's voice comes out thick through the paper towel. "Love that."

She starts with him.

She kneels at his feet and puts both her hands flat on the ground beside his shoes. "Let it go," she tells him. "Down. Into the dirt."

Atlas stands there with the paper towel in his fist, and I can feel him down the bond trying, and not knowing how. He's spent his whole life holding his storm in.

Nothing happens.

The lantern hisses. Somewhere down the hill, a cow lows. Atlas stands with his shoulders hunched up around his ears, while I sit with my hands knotted in my lap and wait, the cold seeping up through the blanket into me. Helena keeps her hands on the ground and says it again, low and patient. Let it go.

Then Atlas's back arches, and he makes a noise through his teeth that I'll hear in my sleep.

It comes straight down the bond into my chest, a white-hot wrench, a storm trying to tear its way out of him all at once through a hole the size of a pinprick. I'm halfway across the blanket before I know I've moved, but a hand closes on my arm and stops me, so cold through my sleeve that it burns.

"She said don't fight it." Callum doesn't let go. "That means you too."

We both look down at his hand. He can't feel how hard he's gripping, and it's hard enough to leave marks.

I sit back down, take Callum's cold hand in both of mine, and hold on.

Atlas keeps making that noise until he runs out of breath, then goes down onto his knees and folds forward with both hands flat in the dirt, and breathes in big ragged pulls while the blood from his nose drips onto the grass and soaks in.

Helena gets up, wipes her hands on the front of my old coat, which I'm starting to think I'm just never getting back, and moves on to Callum.

He doesn't wait to be told. I have to let go of his hand so he can stand up straight, and the cold of him leaves my palms. He shuts his eyes, and I feel him let go of everything at once, the way you open a fist you've had clenched for days.

His shadows come.

They've been gone for days, and I didn't know how badly I'd missed them until right now, watching them pour out of the dark grass around him—out of the ground instead of out of him, wrong-shaped and spilling everywhere, over the blankets, over my knees, up the stones of the wall.

The temperature drops so fast that my breath fogs in front of my face, and the dew on the grass goes white and crunches. Callum doesn't make a sound. He kneels with his head bowed and his eyes squeezed shut, his whole body shaking, while down the thread between us I feel the cold in him crack and shift, ice breaking up on a pond.

It hurts him more than he'll ever say. I know, because I can feel it, and right now he can't hide anything from me.

Ren is next. When he lets go, his heartbeat comes down the thread so hard and fast that I lose track of my own, and then it drops away to almost nothing. He folds straight over onto the blanket and curls on his side with both hands pressed flat to his chest, right over his heart, and lies there with his eyes open, staring at nothing, while Helena kneels beside him with her palms on the dirt.

His lips are moving. When I lean down close to hear, he's counting his heartbeats under his breath, the only ones he can hear.

Felix goes last. He sets his deck down on the blanket very carefully, squared up, before he lets go.

His chaos magic pours out of him into the ground, and for a moment I can see it working on the hill around us. The trees are there, then not there, then there again, in leaf and then bare. For a second I see apples on them, red and heavy, before they're gone. Felix laughs out loud, high and awful, and he doesn't stop. His head is thrown back, tears running down into his ears, while Helena holds him by the shoulders so he doesn't fall.

Then it's done, the giving part, and there's nothing for anyone to do but wait and see what the ground gives back.

Helena was right. It takes most of the night.

The guys lie on the blankets in the cold with their hands in the dirt. I sit at the edge of the crossing, holding on to whoever's closest and feeling it happen through the threads. It's so slow, a tide coming in, the kind you can't see move if you watch it—then you look away, look back, and your towel is wet. A little more of each of them comes back up the thread every time I check, and I check constantly.

In between, it hurts them, and I can't do anything about it except just be there.

So I talk. I tell them about the lobster magnet on my dad's fridge and the appliance list it holds up, then about the time my mom tried to make croissants from scratch and set off every smoke detector in the house.

"We ate them anyway," I tell them, "standing out on the back porch in our coats with all the windows open. They were terrible. When we get back to Nyxhaven, I'm going to bake for a week straight. Cinnamon rolls, snickerdoodles, the lemon bars Brittany pretends she doesn't like..."

I don't know if they can even hear me, but Atlas grunts at the lemon bars.