Page 35 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

The younger one starts to laugh. The older one tells her to hush, and then she can't keep her own mouth straight either. The jars on the shelf rattle against each other, and the bulb hanging over our heads flickers on by itself, steadies, then burns brighter than it ever did on the switch.

I stay with them while they do it, the same as I did with the boys on the hill. It's easy, the easiest thing I've done since I came back from the dark. Those boys screamed, because they had days of magic shut up inside them with nowhere to go, and it all went down at once. These women have only ever had a teaspoon of each kind, and it goes down gently and comes back up the same way.

The house is a farmhouse in the hills north of the school, at the end of a road the county stopped plowing years ago, and no one has lived in it since the old man who owned it died. His boots are still by the back door, and his calendar from the feed store is nailed up beside the icebox.

The pantry smelled of mice until Marjorie went through it with a bucket of bleach—Marjorie believes in bleach the way the families believe in blood. The roof leaks in the back bedroom, and the well water tastes of iron and comes out of the tap cold enough to make your teeth hurt, even in summer.

There are lines under it, too, crossing beneath the root cellar. I felt them from the road the first time Dana drove me up here, before the car had even stopped, and I got out and walked the rest of the way with my hand held out in front of me, as if I were walking towards a stove.

The women live here with me now. Marjorie came first. She was a pharmacist her whole working life, in a town south of here, and every prescription she filled went a little better than it should have: her customers' fevers broke a little faster, their cuts healed a little cleaner. She never knew why. She never asked, either, because no one in her life had ever given her a reason to think the answer might be her.

Dana works nights at a gas station on the county road, and she has never been rained on in her life.

"Not once," she told me the first night, grinning about it. "It can be pouring on the whole street, and I just walk right down the middle of it dry as a bone. Isn't that the stupidest thing you ever heard?"

She sleeps all day in the front bedroom with a towel pinned over the window and comes down at dusk hungry and cheerful, which I'm still learning to forgive.

The sisters came last. They drove up from Pennsylvania together with everything they owned in garbage bags on the back seat, because both of them had dreamed about this road on the same night, and neither of them could stand to wait and see if the dream went away.

I felt every one of them through the lines while I hung over the pentagram, each a little bright spot in the dark. They're grimoires, all of them—the kind the families never troubled themselves with, too weak to be worth sacrificing to the Well but too strong to pass for ordinary people.

No one came for them, and no one taught them a thing. They lived their whole lives with all four kinds of magic in them, a teaspoon of each, and decided they were lucky, or strange, or sick.

I'm teaching them now, in the evenings, after Dana wakes up and before she leaves for her shift.

Yesterday Marjorie made the kitchen light come on without touching the switch.

She was standing at the sink with her hands in the dishwater, and it was getting dark, and she wanted the light. That was all. She didn't even reach for it or think about it—she wanted it, and it came on. She stood there looking up at it with soap running down her wrists, then sat down at the kitchen table in her wet apron and cried.

I didn't know what to say to her. I've lost the knack of comforting people, if I ever had it, so I filled the kettle and made her a cup of tea the way she likes it, with far too much milk, and set it in front of her. She held it in both hands and cried into it until it went cold.

This is what I wanted for us, before. For Cordelia and me. Somewhere to be what we are, with women around us who are the same, and no family waiting to walk one of us down the stairs to the Well.

There's another reason I'm tying them in, one I haven't told them yet. A grimoire tied into the lines can draw the magic out of a mage and give it back to the ground, and the ground will take it, because the earth accepts a sacrifice that sets a wrong back to right. It won't let anyone use its magic for cruelty, but it will let these women take back what the families stole.

I can feel the little grim's bond from here.

It's a long way, but the lines carry it to me. Every line in this part of the world runs down into the crossing under Concordia, and she's living right on top of it with her four men tied to her. When I sit still in the root cellar with my hands on the floor, I can feel them all down there: four threads running into her, the girl herself at the place where they meet, and all of it humming.

Every day it's a little louder and the threads a little thicker. It's like listening to someone practice the piano in another house, getting better.

She isn't strong enough yet to open the Well. She will be.

Marjorie asked me last night who Cordelia was.

We were sitting on the back step with the porch light off so the moths would leave us alone. Marjorie had brought out two mugs of coffee, though it was late for it. The night was warm and smelled of cut hay from the field next door, and the crickets were loud enough that I could have pretended not to hear her.

"You said a name in your sleep," she told me. "I was up for a glass of water, and I heard you through the door. Dana heard it too, coming in from her shift. Cordelia."

"She was a girl I knew a long time ago."

Marjorie turned her mug around in her hands. "You say it like she's somewhere you could still go and visit."

I didn't answer that. Marjorie nodded and didn't push. She's good at that; a whole life behind a pharmacy counter teaches you when people don't want to say what's wrong with them.

I didn't tell her the rest.

Cordelia did her hair the morning they took her. She pinned it up in the style the older girls were wearing that year, rolled at the back, but she couldn't get it to lie flat. She stood at my mirror with her arms over her head until they ached, and the pins kept sliding out.