Page 96 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Who else?"

"Felix," I manage. "Callum. On the stairs."

"Good," Ren says, but his hand has gone hard against my back, and his heart through the bond is going fast now, much faster than mine.

I didn't even notice I'd moved. But the water that was at my waist is at my ribs, and Atlas is hauling me back up a step, grunting with it, his arm locked across my chest.

"No. Hey. No, you don't." His mouth is right against my ear, rough. "You told me you loved me in that kitchen, Grey. You don't get to say that and then walk into a fucking lake. You stay up here with me, you hear me?"

"I'm here," I tell him. I think I'm telling him.

I guess I must have leaned towards it. The note in my ear is so kind, so warm, under all that cold.

There's room. You can put it down.

I pull another thread loose and find the next.

Then the temperature drops so hard the water skims over with ice around my waist.

It crackles out across the surface in a thin white sheet, spreading from the far dark towards us, grinding against my ribs where Atlas is holding me, and my breath comes out in a cloud. This cold cuts straight through the cold I was already in.

That's Mors—a lot of it. It's coming down the other stairs, the families' way down from the Burial Ground, the one I chased Nell down at the end of the summer, and whoever is bringing it isn't in any hurry.

"Ev." Callum's voice comes from behind me, very calm. Through the bond, the thread between us has gone so tight it hums.

"Keep going," he says. "It's my mother."

29

CALLUM

My mother comes down the families' back way alone.

She's never needed anyone else. Her own blood is in that rune, so she would have felt it start to give the moment Everly began pulling it apart, and she would have felt her own power start to slip with it. She has come to save both. She hasn't woken anyone to help her. She has never in her life had to wait for help.

She takes the steps at an even pace in her grey coat, gloves on and no lamp this time—she has never really needed one in the dark—while her shadows come down the steps ahead of her.

The cold arrives before she does. Frost spreads over the wet stone at my feet in a thin white skin and my breath starts to smoke, and behind me I hear the water crackle as ice forms around Everly's waist. These are the coldest shadows I've ever felt. I know every one of them by its shape, because mine used to hold that same shape, before Helena tied us into the ley lines on the hill.

I go down to the foot of the back way and stand there.

My cuffs are soaked from the water running down the walls of the stairs, but I straighten them, the left and then the right. It's a stupid thing to do at the bottom of the world. I do it without even deciding to, because she's coming, and she always checked my cuffs.

Felix comes down beside me with his deck out, and for once he isn't shuffling it.

"I can't see anything that happens after she gets here," he mutters. "Just so you know. Every future I look at, she's standing in the way of it."

"Then stop looking."

"Working on it."

A blank, with Felix, is a warning. It means something terrible is standing in the way: a death, or power big enough to blot out everything behind it.

Behind us the lamp on the top step throws our shadows long across the water. Below us, Everly hasn't even lifted her head. Her lips are blue, her hands under the black surface up to the elbows, and I can feel her through the bond pulling the next thread free, then the next, too deep in it to know who's on the stairs.

"Callum," my mother says.

"Mother."