Page 73 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

He takes my wrist and turns it over, then puts his mouth to the inside of it, right where the cold always starts. "I can do that."

I bend down and kiss him. He kisses me back slowly and carefully, and his shadows come up off the floor around both of us, thick as a blanket, until I can't see the kitchen anymore. When I finally pull back, his hand is still shaking on the back of my neck.

"I'm frightened for you," he says quietly. "I wanted you to know that. I didn't want you to have to feel it through the bond and guess."

My stomach drops just hearing him say it out loud, as if saying it makes it more likely. "I'm scared too." I rest my forehead against his. "So stay where I can feel you."

The first one is the girl with the ponytail.

Her name is Josie, she's from Ohio, and she's a Sanguis first-year, the first name they called on enrollment day. Term has barely started, and she's already fallen asleep in lectures and cried over her laundry because she couldn't make herself carry it down the stairs. She's decided it's just homesickness.

One of the Vitae kids—the second-year who wants to be a doctor—walks her down to the boathouse after dark and leaves her there with me. When I take her hand, it's cold and a little sweaty, and she's trying so hard not to look nervous that I like her immediately.

Halfway across the lawn towards Callister House, I steer her straight at the gap between two buildings, and she digs in her heels.

"That's a hedge," she says. "You're walking me into a hedge."

"Keep hold of my hand," I tell her. "Don't let go until we're inside."

To her there's nothing there. To me, Concordia is right in front of us, all old stone and arched windows, with the lamp we left on in the old common room glowing yellow through the glass. Then I remember that Nell walked out that front door and never came back, and I have to make myself keep walking.

We go in through the door no one else can see, and Josie gasps out loud when the hedge turns into a foyer around her, squeezing my hand hard enough to hurt. Inside, someone's laid blankets on the floor right on top of the crossing, where the ley lines come up strongest and I can draw on them most easily, and the armchairs are pushed back against the walls exactly where we pushed them the night we did this for Nell.

Josie looks at the blankets, then at the guys, who are all here and all trying to look less alarming than a room full of large men in the middle of the night. It isn't really working.

Ren sits cross-legged at the head of the blankets while Callum takes the armchair by the hearth, his shadows lying quiet around his feet. Atlas leans on the wall with his arms folded, behind the spot where I'll sit, like a bouncer at a very small, very weird club. Felix lounges in the doorway flicking cards, and Brittany has the far end, her notebook open on her knee and a pen behind her ear.

"Sit down," I tell Josie. "Or lie down, actually, if you want. Whatever's comfortable."

Pulling her knees up to her chest, she sits and wraps her arms around them.

"So." I take a breath. "This is going to sound completely insane."

"Everything this month has sounded insane. Go ahead."

I tell her straight out, because I've had it up to here with people at this school not telling girls what's being done to them. "When you put your hand on the sphere on enrollment day, it put a spell on you. It's in your chest right now, wound up tight, and it's the reason you're tired. Every day it takes a little bit of you and sends it somewhere else."

She goes pale. "For how long?"

"For the rest of your life, if we don't get it out," I say, as gently as I can.

In my head I've been calling it the tapeworm. She doesn't need to know that.

Josie swallows. "Okay. Can you get it out? And does it hurt? Because I'm going to let you either way, I'd just like to know if I should be lying down for this or holding on to something."

"Yes, I can get it out, and I don't think it'll hurt," I tell her. "It'll take most of the night, though, so you can talk if it helps." I jerk my chin towards the doorway. "Felix will tell you I have a very soothing presence. Felix lies."

"Constantly," Felix agrees. "Also, I'm the handsome one. Write that down somewhere."

"No one is writing that down," Atlas says from the wall.

Josie looks at me, then at Ren, and lies back on the blankets with her hands folded on her stomach. "Okay. It's not like I had plans."

Ren rests his hands lightly on either side of her face. Kneeling beside her, I put my palms flat on her chest, over her sweatshirt, over her heart, and Atlas's hands come down on my shoulders from behind, warm and heavy.

I close my eyes and go looking.

It's easy to find. I'd know it anywhere now: a line pulled tight through Josie. It has blood work in it, and it's cold and still, like death magic, so faint I have to hold my breath to feel it. Somebody made this. Nothing that grew out of the ground ever felt like it.