Page 110 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

I look at the steps.

"She wrote to every family with a name in the ledgers," he says. "They've been arriving since yesterday. She's calling it a meeting about the future of the university."

"What is it really?"

"A meeting about the future of the university." He almost smiles. "Hers. Tell my brother. If this goes her way, I'd like him to remember who warned him. And tell him she knows the grimoire kept something. She said so at breakfast this morning, the way she'd tell you it might rain. She says a grimoire can draw magic out of any mage, and out of the Well itself, and that's why the families always wanted them in it. Every mage on this campus is empty, and Miss Grey still has something left." He looks out at the trees. "She's worked out what the second health check cost, too. Every time that sphere put the rune on a child, it cracked the Well a little. She cracked it open for Helena with her own hands, and she didn't know until it was gone."

My hands are tight on the wheel. "How could she possibly know that?"

"I don't know. She's usually right." He looks at me then, really at me, not at the car or at Herbert in his jar, for longer than I like. "She said the same thing about you."

"Me? I don't have anything. I've never had anything."

"I'm only telling you what she said." He straightens up and pats the roof of the car. "Drive, Miss Leigh."

I drive. In the rearview mirror Catalina is still at the top of the steps, shaking hands, and she doesn't look at my car once, and that scares me more than if she had.

The road the county stopped plowing hasn't gotten any better since August, and the 4Runner bottoms out at the washout by the mailbox hard enough to throw Herbert against the side of his jar. He gives me a look about it.

Marjorie is sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee, in a cardigan over her nightgown and a pair of men's slippers, and she doesn't get up. She looks older than she did in August. In August she was a retired pharmacist who could turn on the kitchen light without touching the switch. Now she's just a retired pharmacist, and the kitchen window behind her is dark.

"She's gone, isn't she?" Marjorie says before I can open my mouth. "Helena. I felt the lines tear that night, and she never came home."

"She stayed down there." I sit down on the step below her, the wood cold through my jeans. "Everly saw her. She had someone in her arms at the end."

Marjorie closes her eyes. "Cordelia," she says, and after a while, "Good. That's all she ever wanted."

"Is it gone?" I ask. "What she gave you?"

Marjorie holds her hand out over the porch rail, palm up, the way Atlas does now. The porch light behind her flickers, just a little, in the middle of the morning.

"That's what's left." She lowers her hand into her lap. "Dana stood out in the yard yesterday and let it rain on her and cried. The sisters used to be able to find anything, and now they can't find their car keys." Her smile is sad, but it's a real one. "It's more than I had at sixty, I suppose. I'd just gotten used to it, is all."

I don't tell her about the hole in the lawn where Concordia used to be, or the cars outside the administrative building. I don't tell her about Everly, either, who sits at the kitchen table whenever she isn't asleep, with her hands around a mug she doesn't drink from. I just wanted to see that they were all right. They're not, entirely, but they're all still here.

When I get up to go, Marjorie takes my hand and holds it between both of hers for a moment. "Come back. Any time. You don't need a reason."

"Okay," I say, and I mean it, which surprises me.

On the way back I pull over onto the shoulder halfway down the hill and sit there with the engine running. The shoulder is gravel, and past it the hill drops off into trees that are just starting to go red at the tops. A truck goes by, rocking the 4Runner a little in the wind of it, and Herbert climbs up the side of his jar to sit against the lid.

I keep hearing Noah at my car window. She said the same thing about you.

I hold out my hand.

I don't know what I expect. Everly says hers is all gone, every bit of all four.

My hand is just a hand. Nothing comes off it, no frost and no storm, nothing it isn't supposed to do. I've been failing practicals with this hand since my first week at Nyxhaven. The last real thing it did was rain on the foyer rug while Helena stepped over Loki and walked right past me. For one second I think, well, at least now I'm failing them along with everyone else.

Then I feel it.

It's in the middle of my chest, right under my breastbone: a tiny warm point I can only feel if I hold very still. I'm pretty sure it's been there the whole drive. It's been there longer than that—I just never sat still enough to notice it under everything else.

It's mine. There's no Well anymore, and I was never tied into the lines, so it can't be coming from either of them. It's been there all along, under everything they ever told me I couldn't do. It's what has kept Poe going these last few days, tapping on my window, when every other spell on campus had gone dark. I thought he was just being stubborn.

And Catalina knows. Noah was in that room on the third floor when the lightning came up my arms, so of course she knows.

I sit on the side of the road and feel it while a truck goes by, and then another one.