Page 14 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

The four threads in my chest are louder than they've ever been; they hum. When Ren reaches over to touch my wrist, his heartbeat lands in me, steady and slow, while mine goes back into him, until for a moment I can't tell whose is whose. When Atlas grins at his clean fingers, I feel how pleased he is from across the blanket. The hum low in my chest makes me want to lie down in the wet grass and grin at the sky like an idiot.

I look over at Helena.

She's back on the stone wall with the lantern burned down to nothing beside her, watching me—or watching the threads, I think, since she can feel them through the ground too. She looks satisfied in a hungry, careful way I've never seen on her before, a woman watching bread rise.

I know that look. I've seen it on my face in the oven door.

At the water, the bond was strong enough to drag me back out of the Well, and that's all it did. Helena was waiting for something more, and it never came. I felt the gold go out of the water when I pushed the Well back, and she just knelt there and watched it go. Whatever she wants down there—Cordelia, probably, or whatever is left of her—the bond wasn't strong enough to get it for her.

So she needed it stronger, and now here she is, sitting on a stone wall on a hill in the middle of nowhere, watching it grow.

I get up and walk over to her on legs gone stiff from sitting all night, my knees cracking and my shoes squelching in the soaked grass.

"That's what you get." I stop in front of her. "That's your nothing. You made the bond stronger, you sneaky old bitch."

Helena looks up at me, and she doesn't bother to deny it.

"It needed to grow, so I watered it." She nods at the four of them on the blankets. "The bond is wild magic, little grim. It always was. The lines gave those boys wild magic, and that makes the bond stronger."

"I said it all back to you," I tell her, and my voice shakes with how angry I am. "Every step. The hill, the ground, the whole night. You said that was all of it."

"It was everything I was going to do to them." She shrugs. "You never asked what it would do to the bond."

I open my mouth and shut it again. She's right, and that makes it even worse.

"You could have told me."

"You'd have said no, and then you'd have said yes, and the storm-boy would have bled for another day while you made up your mind." She looks past me at the guys sprawled on the blankets in the grey light. "Would you rather they'd died?"

"No," I admit, and I hate her a little for making me say it.

"Then we both got what we wanted, little grim." She picks up the dead lantern and climbs down off the wall. On her way past, she pulls a road map out of the pocket of my old coat and puts it in my hand, soft as cloth from folding and covered in pencil lines. "Where the lines run. Your blood boy will want it. Take them home and let them sleep. They'll be hungry when they wake up."

She walks away down the hill in my old coat, through the dead orchard, between the grey trees, until she's behind them and I can't see the coat anymore.

Then I go back to the blankets, where the men I love are alive and soaking wet and arguing about whether the diner does pancakes this early.

"It opens before the farmers are up," Atlas insists. "Every diner in this state opens before the farmers. It's the law. Pancakes and that shitty coffee in the brown pot, and I'm eating all of it."

"I've seen it." Felix waves a hand at the sky. "Sort of. There's syrup involved."

Ren doesn't open his eyes. "I'm not sure I can stand."

Callum's shadows have wandered over to the place where I was sitting and are lying there on the flattened grass, waiting for me to come back.

6

REN

Ican hear the whole diner.

That's the first thing I know when I wake up in the back seat of the 4Runner, with my head on Felix's shoulder and a wool blanket over both of us that smells of sheep and wet grass.

We're parked in the gravel lot behind the Linden Falls Diner. Between me and the kitchen there's a fogged window, a brick wall, the hiss of a flat-top grill and a radio playing country music. Through all of it, I can hear every heart in the building.

It's the same as it was before the gates. I can pick out a single heartbeat as easily as picking one voice out of a crowded party, and the rest fall back into the low noise I spent years learning to ignore.

The cook is loudest, because he's working hardest, while the waitress's pulse runs quick and jittery from the coffee she keeps drinking to stay upright. An old man at the counter has a heart that stumbles now and then, a missed step on a staircase. He really should see someone about it before winter.