Page 37 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"That's a threat," Felix says, delighted. "Ev, he threatened me. Write that down."

One morning after the lesson, the others go in to argue about lunch, and I stay out to help Ren shake the grass off the blanket. He folds it into neat squares, corner to corner, pleased with himself in the quiet way he'd never admit to.

"You're really good at this," I tell him.

"At folding?"

"At teaching. Brittany's going to have the best-healed fingers in the state."

He smiles, but it doesn't stay. He holds the folded blanket against his chest and looks at the roses instead of me. "I like being useful to you, Ev. It's easy. When I'm holding someone's heart steady, or closing a cut, I know exactly what I'm for." He shrugs. "The rest of the time I'm not sure. You kissed me in that motel for no reason, and I've thought about it every day since, and I still keep waiting for you to need something."

"Ren." I take the blanket out of his arms and drop it on the grass, which makes him wince, because he just folded it. "I don't keep you around to fix me. I like you. I like how bossy you get with a knife in your lap. I like waking up and finding your hand on my ankle."

He looks at me the way he listens for a heartbeat, as if he's trying to hear whether it's true.

So I go up on my toes in the long grass and kiss him, slow, with my hands on his face. He makes a small surprised sound against my mouth, and then he kisses me back, one hand sliding into my hair, and I can feel his heart going hard through the thread between us. When I finally pull away, his eyes are still closed.

"I'm going to keep doing that," I warn him. "For no reason at all. You're going to have to get used to it."

He smiles, a little shakily, picks the blanket up off the grass and starts folding it all over again. I can tell he doesn't believe me yet, not all the way. I can feel that too, a small worried beat under all the happy ones.

Callum teaches death in the afternoons—in a pressed shirt, in this heat, because of course he does. He doesn't teach the shadows, though those come along anyway, nosing around our ankles. He teaches the other part of Mors, the stillness and the listening.

He takes us down the spiral stairs, past the Reliquary and the Down Deep, to the Burial Ground, where we laid Enya to rest in the spring. It's cold enough that I bring a sweatshirt even in July, and the air smells of wet stone and old earth.

He turns the lamps down low and sits us on the floor among the slabs, a little way from hers. Death magic starts with feeling the dead around you, he says, and you can't feel them over your own noise. We're to be quiet, he tells us, until we can hear the dead not talking.

It's the creepiest class I've ever taken, and I go to a school that feeds its students to a well.

"I don't hear anything," Felix whispers, on the first day.

"That's the dead. Not talking." Callum doesn't even open his eyes. "Keep listening."

Atlas teaches control, of all things, and turns out to be really good at it. He's spent his whole life holding a storm in, so he knows every trick there is for keeping that much power inside a body. He teaches us to breathe into it. He teaches us to pick one place, our hands or our feet, put everything there, then let it go slowly into the ground.

Brittany manages to put a whole thunderclap into a flowerpot, and I manage to hold every one of my disciplines at once without knocking over the lamp, which, considering my history with lamps, is a personal best.

Afterward, Atlas looks at the rest of us as if we tricked him into it on purpose. "I'm not a teacher."

"You're a great teacher," Brittany tells him.

"Take it back."

"You're patient and clear and you never make anyone feel stupid."

"I said take it back."

Atlas's class is also where I start trying to catch things.

It's my idea. I've spent all year pulling magic out of places it didn't belong—Helena's cords, the thread in the water, the Well wound up inside Nell—and I want to know if I can do it to magic that's moving. So in the evenings, when it's finally cool enough to breathe, I drag Atlas up on the roof and make him throw sparks at me.

"This is a terrible idea," he tells me every single evening, and then he does it anyway.

He flicks them off his fingertips, small and blue, and I hold my hands up and try to grab them out of the air and pull them into me. Mostly they just sting. I get little burns all over my palms, and Ren fusses over them at breakfast.

I try it on Callum's shadows down in the Burial Ground too, reaching for one when it noses past my ankle, but it slides right through my fingers and goes back to him.

It only works by accident. The first time, Atlas sneezes in the middle of a throw, and a spark much bigger than he meant comes off his hand straight at my face. I throw my hands up, and it goes into my palms instead of my eyebrows. I feel it run up my arms, and with it a jolt of Atlas's panic, and then it comes right back out of me on its own and knocks a chunk of brick off the chimney.