Page 34 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Someone heard that," she mumbles into my neck.

"Felix."

"Felix," she agrees. "He's going to be unbearable at breakfast."

"He's unbearable at every breakfast." I can already hear him.

She huffs a breath into my neck, and I feel it where we're joined, and I have to close my eyes.

I run a hand down her back. "They answered you."

"I noticed," she says, sounding very pleased with herself about it.

"They went to you at the four-poster, too. I told myself that was a fluke. They've never answered anyone but me."

She lifts her head. Her face is flushed, her hair is a disaster, and she's smiling at me, sleepy and soft.

"Is that bad?"

I think about it before I answer, because she asked, and because she can always tell when I give her the answer I was raised to give. I learned every one of my mother's lessons perfectly. I can't think of one that has done me any good this year.

"No," I say. "I don't think it is."

Then, because she'll find out anyway: "My mother will know. The first time she's close enough to feel them, she'll know they don't answer only to me anymore, and that she had nothing to do with it."

"Good," Everly mumbles. "Let her."

I should leave it there. I don't. "I want you so much it frightens me, Everly. That's how my mother wants people. She gets hold of them and never lets go, and I'm afraid I'm more like her than I want to be."

She pushes herself up on my chest so she can see my face, and she isn't sleepy anymore. "Callum. Your mother sat a little boy on the floor in the dark and made him lay his shadows out in straight lines. You stopped in the middle of sex to ask if I was okay." She puts her hand flat over my heart. "I want all of it. I want the shadows that sneak into my room at night—yes, I know about those, I wave at them—and the ironed trousers. I want you sweaty and ruined in a desk chair. If it's ever too much, I'll tell you."

I can't answer that. I hold her hand against my chest instead, and she lets me.

She doesn't ask me to be anyone else. She never has, not since the day she walked onto this campus with her pink shoes and her cookies. She puts her head back down on my shoulder, still holding on to my hand, and before long her breathing slows.

I'm supposed to call the shadows back now. I always do. I draw them in and put them away, and I leave nothing lying around for anyone to find.

I sit in the chair with her asleep on me and let the shadows do whatever they want.

12

HELENA

They found the house for me, the women. I didn't ask them to.

Tonight it's the sisters' turn in the root cellar. It has to be dark, and it has to be where the lines run strongest, so I've switched off the bulb, and they stand barefoot on the dirt floor where the lines cross, holding hands, looking at each other instead of at the ground.

It's the coolest place in the house and smells of dirt, old potatoes, and the shelf of preserves the old man's wife put up years ago. The jars are furred with dust, and the peaches inside them have gone brown, but I don't let anyone throw them out. I like having them there.

"Give it to the ground," I tell them. "All of it. Then don't reach for it. If it's coming back, it'll come."

The older one wrinkles her nose. "It's pins and needles."

"Up my arms," the younger one agrees. "Like when your foot falls asleep in church."

"That's it. That's what it feels like."

It comes up into them slowly, which means the earth has decided they're worthy. If it hadn't, it would have kept their magic and given nothing back. I can feel it from where I'm sitting on the bottom step, the lines under the floor giving a little of themselves up into two women who have never in their lives been handed anything they didn't have to work double for.