Page 59 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

I let Ren start pulling me, and that's when the Well moves.

The rune is going down into the boy on the platform right now, but what moves is the pull in my belly, the Well's pull on me, the one that's been in me since my first morning at Callister, and all at once it swings away from the sphere, hard, the way a compass needle swings when you walk past it with a magnet. It swings east.

I felt that same pull under Nell's skin the night we pulled the piece of the Well out of her in the common room, and I thought we got all of it.

Then I feel her heart. I can't hear hearts across a campus the way Ren can, but the blood magic in me catches hers now, racing, somewhere east of here, and then the chaos magic gives me one second of seeing her: Nell walking alone under a stone archway, towards something set into the flagstones.

Felix's flash comes back to me from the roof last night: stone, and a roof along one side held up on columns. There's only one courtyard at Nyxhaven with a covered walkway like that. It's the Eastern Courtyard behind the administrative building, and today it's empty, because the whole school is sitting here watching first-years touch a ball.

Nell is supposed to be home with Brittany. I made sure of it.

"Ren." My voice comes out high and strange. "It's Nell. She's in the Eastern Courtyard."

He doesn't ask me how I know. He looks east, then down at the wardens climbing the aisles towards us, then back at me. "Ev, they're right behind us⁠—"

"Then keep up."

I let go of his hand and run.

19

EVERLY

Irun the whole way, and Ren keeps up.

We go out the back of the amphitheater, through the gap in the hedge that rakes my arms, across the lawn behind the library, where a groundskeeper on a riding mower turns his whole head to watch two expelled students sprint past him. I can hear wardens shouting behind us, but I don't look back.

The pull in my belly is so strong now that I don't need to think about where I'm going. I just follow it, the way you'd follow someone yanking on your sleeve.

Through the bond I can feel the others coming. Atlas is a hot crackle somewhere behind me, running flat out. Felix is panicking. I can feel it come down the thread in jolts, and somewhere behind me he's yelling what he sees as he runs—"Stone! Columns! A grey coat!"—until I want to scream at him to stop. Callum is still back at the amphitheater, holding the east aisle with shadows that won't keep their shape, so the wardens can't follow us.

My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my teeth, and my legs keep wanting to go loose under me, the way they do in dreams where you can't run fast enough. Come on, Everly. You don't get to fall down now. In the spring I didn't know what the Well wanted. Now I do: it wants Nell in the water, so it can drink her magic and her life and fill itself back up.

We come around the corner of the administrative building, and there's the Eastern Courtyard.

It's exactly what Felix saw. It's flat grey stone, with the covered walkway down one side on its row of columns, and stone benches no one ever sits on.

Nell is standing right in the middle of it.

She's wearing her big grey sweater with the sleeves pulled down over her hands, in August, and her arms hang straight down at her sides. Her head is tipped a little, the way it was over the soup the night we came back, as if someone downstairs is calling her name.

Under the walkway, in the shade, Catalina is waiting in her grey coat, gloved hands folded in front of her. There are wardens behind her, a whole line of black robes.

"Nell!"

She turns around, and she smiles at me. It's her real smile, sweet and a little shy, and it makes me want to throw up.

"Ev. You're here." She sounds so glad. "Can you hear it? It's so loud today."

"Come here." I'm walking towards her slowly, with my hands out, the way you'd walk up to a dog that's gotten loose on a highway. "Come over here to me, okay? We're going home."

"I can't." She says it kindly, as if she's sorry for me. "It wants me to go."

Behind me, someone else comes skidding around the corner of the building, breathing hard. It's Brittany, barefoot, in her pajama pants, with Poe flapping along over her head.

"I went down to boil the kettle." Her voice cracks right down the middle. "I went down to the kitchen for one kettle, Ev, and when I came up she was gone and the front door was open, and Poe went straight out after her, so I followed Poe⁠—"

"I know. It's okay." It isn't. "Stay back."