Page 71 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

I hold still inside her. The next part is easier to say into her hair than to her face.

"Sometimes I wonder if I'd be happier without it," I tell her. "The magic. If it had never come, or if it all went out tomorrow and I had some job somewhere and couldn't hear anyone's heart but mine." Mine is going hard now, and she can feel it. "I'm not sure I'd miss it. I've never told anyone that."

I listen for her heart to jump or go cold. It stays right where it was, quick and warm against my chest.

"I wanted the ordinary version too, right up until the sphere cracked," she says. "My parents still think I'm studying communications." She touches my mouth with her thumb. "If it all went away, I'd still be in this bed. You'd just have to ask me when my heart was racing."

"It's racing now."

"See?" She smiles against my mouth. "You'd have had to ask."

I keep it slow, rocking into her, pulling back, rocking into her again, deep. Every time I do it the heat comes back up through the bond into my chest. Her nails are in my back, and she's kissing anywhere she can reach.

When she comes again it's quiet and long. I feel every second of it from inside her body and inside her blood at once. She clenches around me, her heart goes wild, and the heat floods up into me until my vision goes white at the edges.

It takes me over the edge with her. I come with my face in her neck, holding on to her, buried inside her, her heart pounding against my chest and mine pounding back.

We lie there after. She's half asleep against my chest, her hair in my mouth and her leg still over mine. The radiator knocks. I pull the blanket up over her shoulder.

"You know," she mumbles into my chest, "you are so much filthier than you look."

My heart skips when she says it. She feels it go, and presses a smug little kiss to my breastbone.

Then she goes quiet, her breathing slows, and I think maybe she's asleep.

"You stopped saying you're fine," she says.

I don't answer. She's right, though.

I used to say it all the time. I'll be fine. I said it on the tile floor of the motel bathroom in Flagstaff, with my hands still red from putting Felix back together and my head so light I couldn't even stand. I said it in Wheeler's parlor morning after morning with my blood going into the mensura. I said it on the gravel after the gates, when I couldn't hear anything at all.

I haven't said it since Nell went down those steps with Catalina.

I put my hand on her chest, over her heart. It's slowing down towards sleep, heavy and warm under my palm, and I listen to it until it's the only thing in the house I can hear.

23

EVERLY

"Eustace Hodges." Callum reads it in the voice he'd use for a grocery list. "Knew there would be a fight at the north end of the courtyard."

He's going through the black notebook, where he wrote down everyone who knew our plan, one name at a time, and I sit across from him hoping, the whole time, that one of them turns out to be the traitor. We do it at the kitchen table, Callum and Brittany and me, with the window over the sink propped open on a wooden spoon because the latch broke sometime in the summer, and no one's gotten around to fixing it.

Someone made a pot of coffee when we sat down. No one's touched it, and it's gone thick and bitter on the burner, and Brittany's mug has grown a skin.

"Because she started it," Brittany points out.

"Because she started it, and she was in the middle of it the whole time, in front of half the school." He turns the page. "Tamsin. Knew the Chance Dealers would turn the wardens away from the platform."

"And she was up in the benches doing exactly that when everything went to hell. I watched her."

Making a small, neat mark in the margin, Callum turns another page. The Vitae kids knew we'd be on the platform, and the Fulmen president knew we were alive. Then there's the kid from Long Shot, who I've called Twenty Questions in my head ever since the first time he cornered me by the mailboxes.

"He knew we were planning something," Callum says.

"He asked so many questions about it that Atlas wanted to throw him in the lake. But I'm pretty sure that's all he knew." I shrug. "And honestly? The questions weren't even very good."

Callum almost smiles, then doesn't.