Page 56 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

I've known what my family is since Everly found the attendance books in the Reliquary. Until tonight I'd at least gone on hoping that Noah was different.

I came here hoping my brother would stand beside me in front of our mother and tell her no. Watching him write her rune over and over in that neat hand of his, I know I'm not going to get it tonight.

I put my hands in my pockets so he won't see them close.

He doesn't answer that, either. "She's the only one who's ever had a plan that worked," he insists. "The Well, this whole school—it would have fallen apart years ago if she weren't holding it up." He stands. He's still a little taller than I am, and he stands with his weight on his left foot, the way he did when we were boys and he was about to tell me something I wouldn't like. "She hasn't said your name since the gates. She had your room at the house closed up, and no one's allowed in it, not even to dust."

I hate how much I want to know what that means.

My room, with the curtains she kept drawn. She shut it up like a dead boy's room, and part of me wants to go home and sit in it.

"Come home, Cal," he says quietly. "Whatever you have now, whatever was done to you out there, bring it home. She'd take you back." He waits, and when I don't answer, he adds, "I'd make her."

Home. He says it the way our mother says it, meaning the house where my room is shut up and no one speaks at the table until she has. That isn't what the word means to me anymore.

Home is a kitchen with a schedule taped to the fridge and a crown drawn over Felix's name. It's a building no one can see, with Everly asleep upstairs, who will be furious with me in the morning for coming here alone and will tell me so at length, and then forgive me.

I want to be back there so badly that my hands close in my pockets.

I look at my brother. He means it; I can see that much. What I can't see is which way he means it—whether it's an offer from the boy with the plate of toast, or kindness of our mother's sort, where you only find out later what it cost.

I used to know what he was going to say before he'd decided to say it. Tonight I stand within arm's reach of him and can't read him at all, and that frightens me more than even the rune does.

"She didn't come down the steps at the gates," I say, keeping my voice level by force. "You put the stylus in my arm, and she watched from the top of the steps."

"She couldn't be seen to," he says, and for the first time tonight he looks away from me.

"Goodnight, Noah," I say, because there isn't anything else left that I can say to him.

I call my shadows back up around my shoulders. They come reluctantly, the way they do now, and one of them lingers at the leg of his desk chair before it follows the rest. Noah watches it go. I let myself out the way I came, down the worn stone stairs and past the brick in the back door, into the dark and the distant music from the quad.

He doesn't stop me. He didn't stop me at the review board, either.

I walk back to Concordia the long way, around the lake, and go up the stairs without waking anyone. At Everly's door I stop. The thread between us is slow and warm with sleep, and I stand there with my hand flat on the wood, wanting to go in so badly that I make myself go on to my own room instead.

I lie on top of the covers in my clothes and my shoes, which my mother would consider a moral failing, with my shadows spread across the ceiling over me, restless, and I turn his offer over all night. When the window goes grey, I still don't know what my brother meant, and in a few hours I'll have to go downstairs and tell the others where I was, before Everly feels it on me through the bond and asks.

18

EVERLY

Callum comes down to breakfast on enrollment morning grey in the face, holding his coffee in both hands.

"I went to see Noah," he tells us, in his flattest voice. "He's finishing the rune."

Atlas puts his fork down. "And?"

"And the old families' children won't be getting it." Callum looks into his mug. "Every one of the old families gave blood to set up the spell. It won't take on their own children."

"What else did he say?" I ask.

"He knows I'm alive. He saw my shadows, and he knows that we know about the rune." He doesn't look up from the mug. "He hasn't told our mother. He says he hasn't decided whether to."

Atlas stares at him. "And you just left him sitting there?"

"What would you have had me do, tie him to his desk?" Callum's voice stays flat. "Enrollment is this morning, Atlas. It doesn't move because my brother can't make up his mind, and neither do we."

No one argues, because he's right. Then he goes upstairs to change his shirt, and none of us says a word about the fact that he went alone.