Page 111 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Don't make it weird," I tell Herbert.

He doesn't move. He doesn't have to.

I'll tell Callum about the cars tonight, and I'll tell all of them what Noah said about Everly. I haven't decided whether I'll tell them the last part.

Then I get the notebook out of my bag, the one with everything I can do written in it, and turn to the back. The sentence is there on a page by itself in my handwriting—the one Dana said to me at the end of this same road in August, with her hands in the pockets of her gas station jacket.

The world won't stop eating grimoires until grimoires are the ones holding the door.

I read it again, then close the notebook and put it back in my bag.

I still don't show it to anyone.

34

EVERLY

The spark is still there.

I find it the morning after Brittany comes back from the farmhouse, lying in the big four-poster at the end of the second-floor hall with all of them piled around me. Someone dragged every blanket in Callister in here sometime in the night, and the room is warm for the first time since the Well went, warm with bodies and breath, the sun slanting in through the old glass.

Ren's hand is flat on my chest, and Atlas's arm is heavy across my stomach while he snores into my hair. I lie there half awake and feel for the threads. It's the first thing I do now when I wake up, the way my mom pats her purse for her keys before she locks the car.

They're there. I almost stop at that. Then I do what Callum taught us in the Burial Ground over the summer. I hold still and keep listening, past the threads and past my own heartbeat, until everything inside me goes quiet. Under that quiet, right in the middle of my chest, where all of them meet, there's a small hot point.

I know it as soon as I touch it. It's the same spark that kept the bond alive on the gravel outside the gates last spring, when the stylus slid off my skin and I held on to every one of them with nothing but this.

I'd kind of forgotten it was its own thing—I thought it was the bond, or the Well, or just me being stubborn. But when everything went out of me on the steps, it didn't go. It's mine, the part no stylus and no Well could touch.

It's what I held the threads with. When I let go of the Well, I grabbed the four of them with this, and they're still here because I did. I didn't know that was what I was doing at the time. I just knew I wasn't letting go of them.

It's small, the warmth of a pilot light in an old stove, that little blue flame you have to crouch down and squint at while the landlord swears it's working. But it's mine.

Poe is asleep on the bedpost by my feet with his head tucked under his wing, and my old coat hangs on the post under him. Helena hung it on the newel post before she went down, and Brittany grabbed it on her way out of Concordia. She washed it and threw it at my head last night without a word. It smells like laundry soap now instead of Helena, and I don't know yet how I feel about that, but it's mine again too.

Beside it, I can feel the guys.

What they have left really isn't much—a trickle out of the torn lines. Atlas showed me his breeze again last night on the stairs with the solemn pride of a little boy holding up a frog.

Between their trickle and my spark, the bond is still here, but it doesn't feel the way it used to. It used to pull at me all day, loud and hungry. Now it's quieter, and it doesn't pull. It just sits in my chest and keeps them close, and some mornings, lying here, it feels almost peaceful.

And yesterday Felix came down to breakfast and announced, "I had a flash of the future before I even got my eyes open."

"Of what?" Atlas demanded.

"Not telling." He grinned about it all through his toast, right up until Atlas threatened to hold him upside down off the roof.

"Sure," Felix said, buttering another slice. "That's a great way to never find out."

The little that's left is wild. It comes up from the ground on its own and goes where it wants, and no one had to walk a girl down a staircase with her hair pinned up and leave her in the Well to keep it running.

I lie there under Atlas's arm and think about Ren's map, the pencil lines running down from the hills to the north, and how the lines don't stop at the edge of the paper.

They run under every hill in New England. Maybe they run under my parents' house, too, and under the Honda dealership where my dad bought the Civic and haggled all afternoon over the floor mats. No one owns them. No one ever bothered to, because the families had the Well and didn't need them.

Yesterday afternoon I walked across the quad for the first time since the Well went. I didn't have a reason. I just wanted to see it.

Half the school is going home. Parents' cars are lined up at the gates the way they were on enrollment day, and the same mini fridges are going back down the frat house steps. People know who I am. A Mors girl loading a trunk stops talking when I pass, and the boy beside her says "grimoire" just loud enough for me to hear. I kept walking, because that's what I've always done here.