Page 83 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Your way ends in the same place, only slower," Helena says bluntly. "The Well lives on what that rune drains out of those children. Take it out of all of them, and the Well starves. When it runs dry, every mage at Nyxhaven loses their magic, the same as if I pulled it down tonight. The only difference is how long it takes."

I didn't know that. My stomach drops. It doesn't change my answer, though.

"Then it takes longer," I tell her, and my voice shakes. "If the Well just runs dry, the crossing under it stays in one piece, and so do the lines you tied the guys into. They keep their magic. Your way, they lose it. That's the only difference I care about."

Helena looks at me and doesn't argue. She nods once, slowly, the way she nodded at her table over the hardware store.

"I spent the whole summer waiting on your bond, little grim," she says quietly. "I'm done waiting on it."

Then she turns around and walks out of Concordia, down the front steps and across the grass, and I lose sight of my old coat before she reaches the hedge.

I close the door behind her and stand there in the dark foyer with my hand on the wood, cold and a little damp under my palm. When I turn around, Ren is sitting on the stairs.

He's halfway up in the dark, in his socks and the grey sweater with the hole in the cuff, with his arms around his knees. From the look on his face, he's been there since the knock.

"She told you she was done waiting," he says.

"On the bond. She said she was done waiting on the bond." I climb up and sit on the step below him, with my shoulder against his knee. "That isn't the same thing as tearing the Well down. She just found out she can't get Cordelia out, Ren. She isn't going to march back down there and rip it out with every kid on this campus standing on top of it."

"Why not?" he asks.

"Because she came and asked me first. If she was going to do it anyway, why ask?"

He doesn't answer right away. I can feel him listening to my heart, the warm press of him at the edge of my pulse.

"She told you Cordelia's down there and she can't get her out," he says quietly, "and you told her you were sorry. She told you she's finished waiting, and you're sitting here explaining to me what she really meant. You always believe the best of people, Ev. Even when they tell you not to."

"That isn't fair," I tell him, too fast.

"Maybe not. It's still true." He picks at the hole in his cuff. "And then whatever they do, you decide it's yours. Helena told you the Well was growing in Nell all summer, and you stood there holding on to the newel post as if you'd put it there. You did it with Nell, and with every first-year on Brittany's list, and with Felix going quiet. I hear you at night. You lie there and pick up every bad thing that's happened in this house and hold on to it until morning."

I want to argue, and I can't find a place to start, because he's the one person in this house who can actually hear me do it.

"Believing the best of people is how I got all of you," I say instead. "Callum reported every single thing I did to his mother. Atlas tried to fry me with lightning. Everyone at this school told me exactly what the four of you were. If I'd believed them, I'd have transferred out by Halloween, and none of you would have anyone to hold on to in the water."

He's quiet for a while.

"I know," he says. "I'm glad you didn't believe them." He stands up and touches the top of my head, once. "I'm still telling you. She said it."

He goes back up. I stay on the step in the cold foyer and listen to him climb.

He might be right about me picking up every bad thing in this house and holding on to it. I'll think about that one later. He's wrong about Helena, though. I saw her face when she said Cordelia's name.

She never said she wouldn't do it.

26

EVERLY

Josie comes back on a Thursday night, by herself.

She's sitting on the boathouse steps when Brittany goes down to fetch the night's first-year, and Brittany brings her back instead. When I meet them in the foyer, she's standing just inside the door in her Nyxhaven sweatshirt with her arms wrapped around herself. Her face is grey, and there are dark smudges under her eyes. She looks exactly the way she did the first night, before I'd ever touched her.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't know where else to go. I think it's back."

I put my hand flat on her chest, right there in the foyer, and go looking.

It's back, the same cold, still line pulled just as tight through her, as if I never took it out at all. Left in, it will drain her magic a little at a time for years, until there's almost nothing left and she burns out and dies.