Page 30 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

I find a loose end, work it free and wind it around my fingers, cold as creek water running up my arms, but the moment I let go, the next turn tries to wind itself back. I pull another, and it pulls back.

Under my hands I can feel Ren holding Nell's heart steady, the real one, quick and light. He lets the magic coming up through the floor do the work, the way he's learned to, so his heartbeat stays even through the thread between us. The magic under the floorboards comes up into me through my knees, the way it came up into them on the hill, and I spend it on the knot as fast as it comes.

Every time my fingers go too stiff to move, I stop, and Callum takes my hands between both of his and rubs them until I can feel them again.

The hours go by. I stop being able to feel my knees, then start feeling them again, worse. Someone puts a cup of water to my mouth, and I drink without opening my eyes. When the lamp burns down, Brittany gets up to refill it, and the smell of the kerosene drifts over me and goes.

Sometime in the darkest part of the night, Felix gets out of the armchair and sits down on the floor by the door with his back against the wall, because his legs won't hold him anymore. I feel him go down, then feel the cards go still in his hands.

Atlas never moves. The whole time he's behind me, his hands warm on my shoulders and his chest rising and falling against my back. When my hands start to shake, he says it low in my ear—"You've got it, Ev"—and nothing else.

The yarn gets smaller as the singing gets quieter, until I'm down to the last of it, the tight knot in the middle, and it won't come. I pull, and it holds. I pull again, and the voice says put it down, quieter now and sad. Under Ren's hands, Nell's heart flutters, and Ren goes very still.

"Her heart's slipping," he says.

"I've got her."

I don't pull this time. I take hold of the knot and wait, letting the magic from the crossing rise into me until I'm holding more of it than there is of the Well in her.

It comes out all at once, the way the thread did in the water.

The last of it lets go and slides out of my hands, heavy as a wet rope, then drops through the floor, past the crossing under Concordia, towards the water. I feel it sink until it's gone, and the singing stops so suddenly that my ears ring.

Nell gasps, her whole body jerking on the blankets, and her eyes fly open. She's scared, and she's just herself.

"Oh." Her face crumples. "Oh, it's loud. My head's so loud." She starts to cry. "It was so quiet, and now it's so loud."

Ren bends over her with his hands on her face, listening with his eyes shut, and I don't dare breathe. Behind me, Atlas has stopped breathing too, and across the room Felix's cards rasp softly against each other as his hands start to move again.

"It's gone." Ren finally sits back on his heels. "There's one heartbeat. Just hers."

Atlas lets out a breath so big I feel it in my hair. Over by the door, Felix starts laughing helplessly with his head tipped back against the wall, and Brittany, who's on her feet with the lamp oil, says "Okay" to no one and sits down hard on the floor.

Callum lets go of my hands. One of his shadows curls around his wrist, and he looks down at it and lets it stay there.

Nell cries until she's hiccuping, then sits up and wipes her face. "I'm starving."

Brittany goes up to the kitchen and comes back with every box of cereal we own, plus half a bag of marshmallows someone's been hiding. Nell sits in her nest of blankets and eats Cheerios out of the box by the handful, then out of a mug with milk, then out of the box again, while the rest of us sit around her on the floor and watch her eat.

She's alive and starving and herself. I believe that, sitting on the floor of the common room with my knees aching and my hands still cold to the wrists, while dawn comes up grey through the high windows and the first birds start on the roof.

We're pretty sure we got all of it.

Nell stops with a handful of Cheerios halfway to her mouth and looks at the floor. Then she blinks and eats them. She did exactly that over the soup, the night we came back, and all at once I'm scared again, the cold creeping back into my fingers.

What if we didn't get all of it?

11

CALLUM

My shadows won't stay where I put them.

Tonight I'm in the upstairs study, long after the rest of the house has gone to bed, trying to make one of them hold the shape of a square. I lay it flat on the blotter and draw it out into four sides. It holds while I look straight at it, but the moment I glance at the lamp, the corners go soft, and the whole thing slumps into a puddle and starts edging towards the window.

I learned to hold them before I could read, and I was good at it. For most of my life the shadows went where I sent them and stayed there, and I never even wondered whether they'd rather be somewhere else.

Then Helena tied us into the ley lines on the hill. Ley magic doesn't take orders the way the Well's magic did, and now they wander wherever they like. I've had to stand in Everly's doorway in the dark and call them down off her ceiling very quietly so I wouldn't wake her and have to explain. There is no dignified way to explain that your magic has been watching a girl sleep. I've checked.