Page 63 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

My palm is already flat on the boards beside the mattress, and my blood sense is already sinking down through the wood, the joists, and the old stone foundation to the crossing under Concordia, where the ley lines meet. The magic down there is slow and huge, and once I've drawn a little of it up, I can hear every heart in the house.

I go down the hall to her room the way I'd roll over to see whether it's light out yet, looking for one heartbeat, a little quick if she's dreaming, and only hers. I've woken up like this since the night we got the Well out of her. It stopped feeling like magic weeks ago.

The room down the hall is empty.

I knew it would be. I stood in that doorway last night behind Everly and saw the blankets thrown back, the paperback lying on its face on the floor. I go looking anyway—through the boards, along the hall, into her room—and find a cold floor and cold sheets, with nothing warm in any of it.

I take my hand back and lie there looking at the brown water stain on the ceiling over the window. The light on it goes from grey to yellow, and I don't get up until it reaches the corner.

The house is wrong all morning.

Everly doesn't come out of her room, so I stop outside her door on my way to the stairs and listen. Her heart is going slow and heavy, the beat of a person lying on her side with her eyes open, not sleeping and not trying to. I put my hand on the wood and leave it there.

The bond between us has gone so quiet that I have to search for it, and when I find it, all that comes back is grief, cold and heavy at the bottom of my chest, right where her warmth usually sits. I don't knock, because I wouldn't even know what to say if she opened the door.

I've never heard her heart sound like this, and my own goes fast and cold against my ribs while I listen to it. What if she broke in that water yesterday, in a way I can't close with my hands? I stand there with my palm on her door and want to go in and lie down behind her and hold her, and I don't, because I don't know if she wants me in there or if she'd only be letting me in because I'm the one who's good at taking care of people.

On the landing there's rain hitting the slate over the third floor, steady and hard, even though out the window the sky over the quad is clear and blue all the way to the trees. It's only raining on Concordia, and it's Atlas doing it.

Atlas's heart is up there over my head, running hot and fast, which with Atlas means the lightning isn't far behind. He's holding it in, and I can hear how hard that is for him all the way down on the second floor.

Nell's door is open at the end of the hall, and Brittany is on her bed. I stop in the doorway. She's sitting with her back against the wall and her legs straight out in front of her, Loki curled across her ankles with his glass eyes open. The paperback is in her lap now, closed on one finger to hold the page Nell was on. Her heart is fast and very even, the pulse of someone who has decided she isn't going to cry in front of anyone.

"Felix tried to put it back on the shelf." She doesn't look up.

"I won't touch it."

"Good. If I let go of it I'll lose her page, and then I'll have to start the whole thing over, and it's a really bad book." She looks down at the cover. "She was only halfway through."

I don't have anything to say to that, so I stand in the doorway until she turns a page she isn't reading, and then I go down to the kitchen.

Callum is at the table with his black notebook open in front of him and a pen in his hand, but he isn't writing. This morning his shadows lie flat around his chair and won't leave him. Through the back door I can hear Felix on the step, riffling his deck together and apart, never dealing a card.

I can't stay in this house. Every heart in it is beating heavy, and I keep listening for the one that isn't there. Besides, someone needs to see what the magic that came back yesterday is doing out there, and I'm the one who can listen.

"I'm going across campus," I tell Callum.

He doesn't ask why. Without looking, he reaches over and puts his hand on my arm, and a piece of his shadow slides off him and into mine. My shadow on the floor goes darker, and the cold of it settles around my ankles.

"Come back before lunch, or I'm coming to get you."

Every warden on campus saw Atlas's wind come down the amphitheater at the testing yesterday, so they know we aren't severed, and they're looking for us. I go out the front door into the morning wrapped in Callum's shadow, and the wardens at the fountain look right through me.

The quad is full of first-years on their first morning of classes. They're everywhere, in clumps and pairs or on their own, with new notebooks under their arms, campus maps open in their hands, and blazers that don't fit them yet—someone's mother left a price sticker on the sleeve of one.

A boy walks backward across the grass trying to read the name off the front of a building. The grass is wet from the sprinklers, and the whole quad smells of it and of coffee from the dining hall. A Tempest kid by the fountain can't keep his magic in, and his hair is standing straight up.

The magic is everywhere.

I felt it yesterday when it came up out of the Well, and I thought I understood it, but I didn't, really. It's in the grass under my shoes, the stone of every path, the air going in and out of my lungs. It's enormous and steady, and every Sanguis kid on this lawn is going to have the best day of their life in class this morning because of it. It tastes like her. I sat beside Nell at breakfast all summer listening to her heart, and I would know the taste of her blood in any crowd.

I stop in the middle of the quad and listen.

When I stand still I get the whole crowd, every heart on the lawn going together—nervous ones, sleepy ones, a girl by the fountain whose pulse jumps every time the boy beside her says her name.

Under the first-years' hearts, in every one of them, the rune is pulling.

It's a line, strong and taut, running out of each of them and down into the ground, the way the bond runs out of Ev's chest to each of us. It tugs at their blood, slow and steady, and none of them can even feel it.