Page 16 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

One morning I'm at the little table by the window with the map spread out, marking the bridge in pencil, when Everly comes out of the bathroom with her hair wet. She stops behind my chair, leans down, and kisses me. It's quick and soft, right at the corner of my mouth, and she smells like the motel's cheap shampoo.

I wait for her to ask for something: a cut, a headache, a look at Callum's hands. She doesn't. She takes the pencil out of my fingers, sets it down on the map, and kisses me again, properly this time, slow, with one hand on the back of my neck, until my heart is going so hard I can hear it over every other heart in the building.

"What was that for?" I ask when she lets me go.

She looks at me as if I've asked her something very strange. "Nothing. You were sitting there, and I wanted to."

Then she goes off to find her shoes, humming, and I sit at the table with the pencil in my hand and no idea what to do with myself. I've been thanked before, and I've been needed plenty. No one has ever kissed me just for sitting at a table.

Brittany calls one night after we've eaten.

We're all in the room with two beds, because that's where the pizza is. Everly sets the phone on the bedspread between us on speaker, and Brittany's voice comes out small and tinny.

"I need to tell you something. Someone tested my room."

Everly leans over the phone. "What happened?" Her heart jumps; I hear it from across the bed.

"A warden came by to do a finding spell. He said it was a routine check because of all the misfiring on campus." Paper rustles on her end; she's reading it off her notes, of course. "He pricked his thumb with his knife and stood in every corner of my room with his eyes shut, feeling for magic. He found the ward on my window. He found the charm on my door lock. He didn't find Poe."

Callum looks up from the window.

"Poe's mine now," Brittany reminds him. "I turned him. He sat on my curtain rod the whole time, staring at the man like he owed him money, and the warden never even looked up. Then the warden left. I've been thinking about why ever since."

I know why before she finishes, but I don't trust it yet.

"Because Poe doesn't run on Wheeler's spell anymore," I say. "He runs on you, on your own magic, and nothing of yours comes out of the Well. The warden's spell was only looking for Well magic."

"That's what I thought." Her voice is flat with relief.

I look down at the map on my knee, at the pencil lines running across the state, and at my hand resting on top of it—the one that stopped a nosebleed on a hill without a drop of my blood.

"Every finding spell the wardens know is looking for Well magic. The ward marks did too. It's how they keep track of everyone." The others are all looking at me now, so I make myself say the rest straight out. "We haven't drawn on the Well since the gates. What we use now comes up out of the ground, and I think when we're done with it, it goes back down into the lines until we call it up again. There's nothing sitting in us for them to feel."

Atlas gets there first. "So they can't see us."

"I don't think they can." I'd like to be surer than I am. "I'd want to test it before anyone trusts their life to it. One warden in one dorm room isn't the whole campus, and I don't know whether any of the others are better at it."

Felix perks up. "How do you test that?"

"Walk past one and see if he notices," I tell him.

"Love that plan. No notes, very safe. Can I be the one who walks in front of it?"

"No," says everyone in the room, including the phone.

Everly picks up the phone and holds it close to her mouth. "Brit. When's the review board?"

"Still the last Friday," Brittany says.

"That's next week." Everly says it quietly, and I hear her heart pick up across the room.

"I know when it is, Ev. It's on my lamp."

"We're coming back," Everly says, and around the room no one argues.

The line goes quiet. Through the speaker I can hear Brittany breathing, quick and shallow, and I don't need any magic to know she's scared, though she'd sooner set herself on fire than say so.

"Don't do anything stupid," she says.