Page 65 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

I can feel him through the thread between us, hot and crackling, and every so often a wave of hate comes down it that isn't for anyone but himself. Each time, my chest locks up and I have to press my face into the pillow until it passes.

I've been lying on my side looking at the wall since we came back from the Well, and my shoulder throbs where the warden wrenched it. I let it. It's the only part of me that hurts for a reason I understand.

When I close my eyes, I'm back in that water with Nell prying my fingers open. Go home, Ev.

Ren has been sitting outside my door since lunch, listening to my heart and trying very hard not to be in the way. I love him for it. I still can't open the door, because if he looks at me with that much kindness, I'll come apart in the hallway, and I don't want anyone to have to pick me up off the floor today.

Then the charge from his storm comes down through the roof again, bigger this time. The hair on my arms stands up all at once, and the bulb in my bedside lamp starts to buzz.

I sit up.

Get up. He's been holding that in all day so it won't come down through the house on top of you, and you've been lying here letting him.

My legs are shaky. I don't bother with shoes or a coat, just leggings and the T-shirt I pulled on after I peeled off my wet clothes yesterday, and I open the door before I can talk myself out of it.

Ren nearly falls into my room. He catches himself on the frame and looks up at me from the floor. He doesn't ask if I'm okay. He can hear exactly how not okay I am.

"I'm going up," I tell him.

"Good." He gets to his feet, and his hand finds my good shoulder without his having to ask which. "I almost went up earlier. I stood at the bottom of the attic stairs and couldn't think of a thing to say that wouldn't make it worse, so I came back here. His heart's been running too fast all day, Ev. It's how it goes right before he loses it."

"I don't know what to say to him either."

"Then don't say anything. Just go up there."

The attic stairs are steep and narrow, and the rain gets louder with every step. I'm halfway up when someone comes down towards me.

It's Callum, soaked, his white shirt see-through and stuck to him and water dripping off his cuffs. He's wearing one black dress shoe. The other foot is in a wet black sock.

I have never once seen Callum Bolingbroke with a hair out of place, never mind a shoe.

"He's up there," he says, before I can ask. "By the bigger chimney. He hasn't moved since we came back."

"Callum, where's your shoe?"

"Holding the hatch open." He glances down at his sock as if it belongs to someone else. "It kept swinging shut, and I didn't want him to have to get up to open it. He told me I was wrecking my shoes. Then he called me a useless rich prick and told me to go downstairs and cry into my trust fund."

"And you stayed."

"I have other shoes." He shifts his weight off the socked foot. "I've been at the kitchen window all day. A cloud sitting over an empty lawn isn't subtle, and no warden has looked up yet. He's been keeping watch on the quad from up there, waiting for someone by the fountain to notice. I went up to tell him he could stop, because I'm doing it."

Today he sat in Atlas's rain until his shirt went see-through so Atlas wouldn't have to keep watch alone.

"He won't let me take any of it," Callum says. "He thinks he made her strong for the Well. You'll tell him he didn't."

"It won't work. It never works on him."

"No," he agrees. "Go anyway."

He goes past me down the stairs, a dry clap and a wet slap all the way down, and I climb up into the rain.

The hatch is propped open on Callum's shoe, with rain pouring in through the gap. When I climb out, it soaks me before I'm two steps onto the roof, so cold it takes my breath away. Out past the gutters, the stars are out over Fulmen.

The air is heavy and tight, the way it gets right before lightning, and the slate is slick under my bare feet.

Atlas is sitting with his back against the bigger chimney and his legs out on the slate. His hands are flat on the roof on either side of him, and under them thin blue sparks crawl between his fingers and the slate. He's holding all of it under his palms so it won't go down through the old wood and wiring into the room where I was lying.

I stop in front of him. I gave up trying to make him feel better a long time ago, once I worked out that it only makes him meaner, so I stand in the rain he's making and wait.