Page 97 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Step aside."

"No."

She stops on the last stair, close enough that I can smell the wool of her coat and the cold coming off her. Her gaze goes past me to the water: to Everly in it up to her waist with her hands under the surface, to Atlas behind her with his arm locked around her ribs, to Ren with his palm flat on her back. Then she looks at Felix on the step beside me, white to the lips, his deck clenched in his fist.

"She'll empty it." She doesn't raise her voice. She never has to. "Do you understand that? If she pulls every one of those threads, the Well starves, and every mage on this campus loses their magic. Is that what you want?"

"I want the rune out of the kids you put it on."

"They'd have lived for years."

"And then they'd have burned out and died, and you'd have lived off them the whole time."

"Yes."

Felix huffs beside me, with no fun in it at all. "Wow. Just yes. Not even a little speech about tradition? I've had more remorse out of Brittany's spider."

My mother doesn't look at him. She has never once in her life looked at Felix when he wanted her to.

Then she comes for me.

I learned to fight in the nursery at the house, with the curtains drawn against the afternoon and my mother on a footstool across from me in her stockinged feet, saying again every time my shadows came apart in her hands. I was small, then I was grown and the best Mors student Nyxhaven had seen in a generation, and in all that time I have never once beaten her.

Everyone else I've fought tries to win the next exchange. My mother tries to end the fight, and she was better at it before I was born than I am now.

She slides her stylus out of her coat pocket and touches its point to the air in front of her, as if she's signing a letter, and her shadows come down the last stair in a wall, anchored at the corners first and then pulled tight through the middle, built exactly the way she taught me so that anything pushing on it has to push on every corner at once. I put mine up to meet it the same way, the only way I've ever been taught.

Mine won't take the shape. They come off the stone loose and wild, the way all our magic comes now. When I try to pin their corners, they slump and slide off each other like wet sand. I hold them square by force.

It's the same fight I have at my desk in the study whenever I try to square them off, the shape giving way the moment my attention moves—only this time my mother is on the other side of it.

Her wall cuts straight through mine.

One edge gets past me and opens my cheek from the corner of my mouth to the bone below my eye. For a moment it doesn't hurt. Then it hurts a great deal, and I taste blood.

"Callum!" Atlas bellows from the water behind me, and then, at my mother, "You fucking witch, that's your son!"

"I'm aware." She doesn't come off the stair. "You've gotten sloppy, Callum."

So I go over her. When the wall won't break, go over it—that was the second thing she ever taught me. I send what's left of my shadows up the cavern wall behind her and along the underside of the stairs, to drop on her from above while she's busy looking at me.

She doesn't turn her head, only lets out one slow breath, and the cold drops again so hard my fingers go numb. My shadows freeze stiff on the rock above her. They flake off it and fall onto the stairs around her, breaking apart like slate.

"Over." She brushes a flake of my shadow off her sleeve. "I taught you that before you could tie your shoes."

"Okay," Felix says under his breath. "Okay, that's bad. Callum, buddy, I'm going to need you to have a third thing. Please tell me she taught you a third thing."

"She taught me all of them." I spit blood onto the stair. The cut pulls every time I open my mouth, and blood keeps running into the corner of it.

Felix shifts beside me, a die between his knuckles, but he doesn't throw it. Whatever futures he's seeing, none of them give him anything he can use, and he knows well enough not to step in front of her for nothing.

Then he tucks the die away, turns up the top card of his deck, looks at it, and sucks air through his teeth.

"Oh, no," he tells my mother. He sounds sorry for her. "You're not going to like this one."

He told me just now that he can't see a thing past her. But he also taught a class at our kitchen table over the summer, the one Brittany listed on the fridge as not a real class, and the first rule of it was that when you're holding nothing, you look at your cards as if they've ruined your night. My mother knows what Felix Ferrix used to be able to see.

Her eyes go to the card in his hand, only for a moment.