Page 48 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Hills. Nothing." He looks up at me. "Helena drew this map."

We look at each other over the peanut butter, both thinking the same thing, which is that Helena knows exactly what's up there. Then he folds the map back up and puts it in his shirt pocket.

Poe finds the house.

I take him up on the roof at dawn, point him north along the line, and tell him what I want out loud, because doing it silently makes me feel kind of stupid. He gives me a look and goes. He's gone for a couple of days, which I spend pretending not to watch the window.

He comes back on a hot grey afternoon, lands on my windowsill, folds his wings, and sits there looking at me with his glass eyes until I get my shoes. He found it. Whatever's up there, he's going to take me to it.

I go alone, because that's just how I do things.

The others would want to come, but the others are a bunch of guys who are supposed to be off somewhere dying, plus Nell, who the school would love to get its hands on, plus Everly, who can't walk across a parking lot without something trying to eat her. I'm just a missing sophomore. No one looks very hard for a missing sophomore in August.

Felix gives me a nickel before I go. He says he loaded it with luck. It comes up heads every time I flip it, which I check on the kitchen table over and over until he takes it away from me and puts it in my pocket himself.

Callum puts a piece of his shadow into mine before I go. He does it with his hand on my shoulder, and afterward my shadow on the kitchen floor is darker than it ought to be. When I call it up around me on the quad, it comes.

It isn't enough, though. Callum's piece covers my head and shoulders and stops at my waist, and halfway to the gate the warden by the dry fountain looks up from his cigarette, straight at my legs.

I don't think about it. I just want more dark, the way you want another blanket on a cold night, and it comes up out of my own shadow on the path and climbs over my knees and my hips until it meets Callum's. The warden frowns at the empty path, then goes back to his cigarette.

I keep walking with my heart going like a rabbit's. I have never once in my life made a shadow. Apparently I just needed someone to scare me.

The bus from town takes most of the afternoon. Poe keeps pace with it the whole way, a black dot flying along the telephone wires, and when he drops off them at a crossroads with a gas station and nothing else, I get off too. He flies up a dirt road no one has kept up in years and waits on a fence post whenever I fall behind. It's hot, there's goldenrod in the ditches, and by the time I see the farmhouse my shirt is stuck to my back.

There's a woman in the yard hanging laundry. She's someone's grandmother, with grey hair cut short and a cardigan worn through at the elbows even in this heat, and when she sees me coming up the road, she stops with a wet sheet in her hands.

"You're one of us," she calls.

I stop at the fence. "One of what?"

"You know." She looks at me a little longer, and then she smiles. She has a kind face, soft and lined. "Come in out of the sun. I just made coffee. I'm Marjorie."

The rest of them are inside: a woman named Dana, who works nights at a gas station and has just woken up, and a pair of sisters from Pennsylvania who finish each other's sentences. Marjorie sits me down with them at a kitchen table covered in oilcloth printed with faded cherries, and we drink coffee out of mismatched mugs. A dead man's calendar from the feed store still hangs by the icebox.

They tell me what they can do. I don't ask; they just want to tell someone.

Marjorie turns on the kitchen light without touching it and goes pink, as if she's done something rude in church. Dana can stop the rain for anyone standing close enough to her now. The sisters have the kind of chaos luck that turns up lost things—anything, anywhere.

"Your mother's ring," the older one tells Dana.

"In the coffee can in the barn," the younger one finishes.

"Under the nails."

"It was right where they said." Dana turns her mug around on the oilcloth. "I'd been looking for it since the funeral."

They don't really know what they are, or where any of it came from, but they're happier than they've ever been in their lives, and it's all over them. They keep touching things—the table, the mugs, each other's arms—as if they're checking it's all there.

I like them, which I wasn't ready for. I came up that road ready to hate whatever I found at the top of it. Then Marjorie put a plate of shortbread in front of me, still warm, and asked if I was eating enough, and I wanted to cry.

"Don't fuss," I tell her.

"I'm not fussing. You're thin, that's all, and you walked up that road in this heat." She pushes the plate closer. "Eat."

I eat. It's really good shortbread.

Helena comes in from the back while I'm reaching for another piece.