Page 81 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"I'll send you a picture," I promise.

He's so happy about it that I have to press the back of my hand over my mouth. I can't feel much with it. Both my hands are stiff and cold from last night, and I'm holding the phone with both of them so I don't drop it on my face.

Then I try. I don't decide to; it just comes out of me.

"Ma. Dad. There's stuff happening here that I can't—it's about magic. The school is doing⁠—"

The onions keep sizzling. For a moment no one says anything, and when Ma talks again her voice is perfectly pleasant, as if I hadn't said a word.

"So if not next weekend, then Thanksgiving," she says. "You'll come home for Thanksgiving, and I'll make the lemon rice then."

It's always like this. No matter how many times I try to tell them about magic, they don’t understand or remember. They never will. I could tell them that a woman in grey gloves is draining eighteen-year-olds through a hole under the lawn, and Ma would ask me if I'm eating vegetables.

"Maybe," I say. "I'll try, Ma."

"Try hard," she says. "We love you. Go back to sleep."

After they hang up, I lie there with the phone on my chest. Then I dig my notebook out of my bag, turn to the back page, and write it down under all the others: Studying late. Weekend shifts at the archives. Thanksgiving, maybe. The list has filled the back page and started up the inside of the cover.

I want to tell them so badly that my throat hurts. I want to tell Ma about Josie and her mother's beagle, and Dad about Helena, who was alive in 1930 and would probably let him ask her questions all night. Instead I put the notebook away, and I don't go back to sleep.

Helena comes to Concordia a couple of nights later.

I don't know how she gets onto campus, and I don't ask. There's just a knock on the front door one night—a slow, patient knock on a door no one else on campus can see, much less find in the dark and knock on, so that narrows it down. Brittany looks up from her notebook at the kitchen table, and Herbert freezes in his tank.

"I'm not getting that," she announces, and looks back down.

I know who it is before I get there.

When I open the door, she's standing on the front step in my old coat, her white hair pulled into a braid over one shoulder.

She looks older. I don't know how that's possible in just a few months, but she does: there are hollows under her cheekbones that weren't there in Linden Falls, and her skin has gone thin and grey at the temples. She looks like the woman who hung above the pentagram in the dark, and nothing like the one who sat at her kitchen table over the hardware store eating oranges and telling me I'd come around.

"What happened to you?" I blurt out.

"I went looking for someone." She steps past me into the foyer without waiting to be asked. "You know about the Fortuna girl."

"Her name is Nell," I snap. "And yes. I was there. I had hold of her sweater when she went under."

It's kind of chilly in here tonight with the front door open and most of the fireplaces cold. Helena stops in the middle of the foyer and looks through the archway at the old common room: the blankets on the floor, the lamps, the stack of mugs on the mantel.

"I felt her go." Her voice is quieter than I've ever heard it. "I was in Marjorie's root cellar, where the lines cross under her house. Every line from the hills to the coast jumped at once, and the jars rattled on the shelves."

"That was the Well filling up," I say. "With her."

"Yes." She looks down at the floorboards of the foyer. "I felt it go out of her into the water, and I knew what it was. The Well kept a piece of her in the spring, when you pulled her out. It's been inside her ever since, growing. By the end of the summer she was strong enough to be worth something to the families, little grim. Then they came and took her."

She's quiet for a moment.

"I could have pulled her out of that water myself in the spring," she says. "I was right there in the dark. I didn't, because I was waiting for you. I needed you to be the one who went in. And all summer I sat in that cellar waiting for your bond to be strong enough to get Cordelia out, when I should have been using every day of it to get the Well broken. If I'd broken it in time, there'd have been nothing down there to give her to."

I have to put my hand on the newel post.

I had her in my house all summer. She slept down the hall from me with a paperback on her chest, and it was growing in her the whole time, and I never felt a thing. Ren listened for that second heartbeat every night and couldn't find it. Atlas taught her to hold more and more, and we all clapped.

I feel sick, and so angry at myself that I'm shaking. Don't, I tell myself. Don't you dare start.

I don't invite her any farther in. I don't think she's a vampire, but honestly, I've stopped ruling things out. We stand there in the foyer with the front door still open behind her, letting the night air in, wet and cold. She doesn't ask me to close it.