Page 60 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Miss Grey." Catalina doesn't raise her voice. She doesn't have to; the courtyard is stone on every side, and it carries. "I did wonder which of the two you'd pick, the sphere or the girl."

So she knew. She knew we'd come for the rune, and she knew the house would be empty while we did.

"Let her go," I tell her.

"I'm not holding her." Catalina lifts her gloved hands an inch, to show me they're empty. "I never have. She's been walking towards me all summer. You only kept her company on the way."

Nell takes a step towards the walkway, and I run at her.

The wardens move before I get halfway. They're a mix, the way they were in the amphitheater, but the Mors ones move first, raising their styluses, and the cold comes off them in a wave so hard that my breath goes white and the stone under my sneakers grows a skin of frost. It's the same cold that cut the guys off at the gates. One of them steps out from the columns and swings his stylus at me, and a line of frozen grey comes off the end of it straight at my chest.

I don't think. I grab it.

All summer on the roof I tried to catch Atlas's sparks out of the air and pull them into me, and it only ever worked by accident. This time I do it on purpose. I take hold of his spell the way I'd take hold of a rope someone threw at me, and I pull.

The cold comes into me through my palms and down into my belly, freezing, so heavy I almost sit down on the stones, and the end of his stylus goes dark in his hand. He looks down at it, then at me, and I throw it back at him.

All of it goes out of me at once, every bit of his own cold, and it hits him in the chest. He goes over backward onto the flagstones with frost spreading across the front of his robe, and he stays down.

For a second the whole courtyard is completely still. A couple of the other wardens actually take a step back.

So that's what a grimoire can do. I can take their magic right out of their hands.

"Again," Catalina says to the wardens, sounding bored.

They don't come all together, not at first. They come one after another, as if she wants to see what I'll do with each of them.

The Fulmen warden is next. He flicks his conductor at me and snaps out a word I don't catch, and a crackling white line jumps off the tip of it straight at my face.

I get my hand up and catch it the way I caught the cold, and it bites, a hot sting all through my palm, but it's Atlas's kind of magic and I know how it moves. I throw it at the column beside the warden. It takes a chunk out of the stone the size of my fist, and he ducks, swearing, with grit raining into his hair.

The Sanguis warden doesn't aim at me at all. She draws her ritual knife across the pad of her own thumb to cast, and she turns towards Ren. He gets to her heart before I can even shout. He doesn't try to slow it this time; he slams it, one hard beat like a door kicked in, and she folds over and throws up on the stone, and her knife goes skittering away across the frost.

"Ren, behind you!"

A Tumult warden is already rolling his dice across the flagstones to turn Ren's luck bad. I see it a second before it happens, the frost under Ren's sneakers going slick in one spot, and then it does, and he goes down hard on one knee.

Then a Mors woman steps out from between the columns. She's older than the others, grey-haired, with her stylus held low, and she points it at me and says one word, very quietly. The cold that comes off her is slow and heavy, a weight where the others were lines.

I grab it the way I grabbed the first one, because it's coming at me and I don't have time to think of anything else, and it pours in through my palms and drops into my belly.

The old woman's feelings come in with it. For one second I feel what she feels when she casts, and it's tired and bored, and under that there's a mean little pleasure at putting a girl on her knees. My stomach turns over, and I double up and gag on the frost.

Throw it back at her. Come on, Everly, throw it.

I can't get my breath. While I'm bent over gagging, hands land on me, real hands, grabbing my arms and my hair and the back of my sweatshirt, and the wardens drag me down onto my knees on the frost. One of them twists my right arm up behind my back until something in my shoulder screams.

"Nell! Nell, look at me!"

She's at the walkway now. Catalina steps aside to let her pass.

Nell looks back at me over her shoulder.

"It's okay, Ev," she says. "It doesn't even hurt."

She walks past Catalina to the last arch.

Brittany is screaming her name. The sky over the courtyard goes dark all at once, which is Atlas coming around the corner of the building with his hands up and his whole body throwing sparks. "Get your fucking hands off her!" Lightning comes down into the courtyard and blows a bench into gravel, and the wardens holding me let go to cover their heads.