Page 92 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"I'll get you some ice," she offers, not moving.

"Don't you dare get up."

"Well, Brittany's going to find a dent in the cabinet."

"I'll tell her it was Atlas. Everyone will believe me."

She doesn't get up. She settles back against me with her face tucked into my neck.

"Say it," she murmurs. "Say you can tell the difference."

"I can tell the difference."

"Good." She kisses the corner of my mouth, soft. "Don't forget it."

I nearly tell her I love her.

It's been right there in my mouth since the amphitheater, since the night the bond came down on all five of us and I looked at her across the stone and saw every way this could go. My throat closes up on it now, sitting here with her warm in my lap and her heart going slow against my chest.

I don't say it, because I still can't see how this ends.

28

EVERLY

We go down the stairs behind the hearth.

We let the fire in the big common room hearth go out after supper so the stones would be cool enough to touch. By the time the last first-year has gone home and the house is quiet, the hearth is cold and full of wet ash. I kneel in it in my leggings and Atlas's old Fulmen sweatshirt.

The panel at the back of the fireplace is right where it was in the spring. When I put my palm on the stones, the glamor fizzes away under my hand like soda going flat, and there's the narrow opening behind it, black as the inside of a closet. Cold air comes pouring out over my knees, wet and old and smelling of stone.

Atlas goes first with the lamp this time.

"I'm just not letting you fall off any more stairs." He ducks his head to get his shoulders through the gap. "Once was plenty."

"I didn't even fall all the way. Helena caught me."

"Then I'm not letting her catch you either," he says, and goes in.

Ren goes after me, then Callum, then Felix. Felix has been quiet all evening, but it's kind of a different quiet from the one he's been carrying around since enrollment—through the bond he's steady and warm. When I look back at him over my shoulder, he winks at me. His deck is in his blazer pocket, and his hand isn't anywhere near it.

Brittany stays at the top.

She's sitting on the bottom step of the main staircase in the foyer in her pajama pants and a cardigan, Herbert's tank balanced on her knees, while Loki the fox sits on her feet and Poe perches on the newel post above her head, glass eyes catching the lamplight.

"I'm guarding the door," she announces, without a flicker of a smile.

We both know no one but us and Helena can find that door. But if this goes wrong, someone should be up here who knows what happened.

When I go to hug her, she lets me do it, stiffly, with the tank between us. "Come back up. I'm not doing the list by myself."

"I'll come back up."

"You're squashing Herbert." She still doesn't hug me back. "He has eight legs, Everly, and he needs all of them."

I let go. She doesn't look at me when I duck into the fireplace. Her knuckles have gone white on the edge of the tank, and she's staring hard at Herbert, which is what Brittany does instead of crying.

The stairs are as awful as I remember. There's no railing—Nyxhaven has more money than God and has never once spent any of it on a railing—only the wall on the right, slick with water and so cold it makes my fingertips ache.