Page 98 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

It's enough of an opening. "Felix, down!" I shout, and as he drops flat on the stairs, I tear every shadow off the cavern walls and the steps and drive them at her in a single spear.

My mother lifts the stylus and says one word—"No"—the way she used to say it to me in the nursery, and the spear turns aside into the dark and breaks up over the water.

She steps down off the back way onto the broad steps that run into the water, and I give ground. She steps again and I give again, until my heel comes down on the bottom step with the water lapping at it, and there's nowhere left for me to go that isn't through Everly.

"Bolingbroke, you're out of stairs!" Atlas shouts. "Don't you fucking back into her!"

"I know where I am," I snap, and I don't move.

Her shadows close around my neck.

They're so cold they burn, and they tighten in a slow, even pull, the way she used to tighten the ribbon on a gift. I get my fingers under them, but there's nothing to hold. The air stops, and my ears fill up with my pulse.

"Step aside, Callum. I won't ask a third time."

The cavern goes grey at the edges. Behind me in the water, Everly is still working—I can feel each small, careful pull in my chest. If I move, my mother walks down into the water and puts her hands on Everly. If I don't, I pass out on this step, and she walks down anyway.

"His heart's dropping!" Ren shouts from the water. "Felix, his heart—do something!"

"I'm doing something!" Felix is back on his feet with the die out again, and this time he throws it. It skitters down the steps towards my mother's heel, and the frost cracks in a long white split the way he means it to, only the split runs the wrong way, back under my own shoe. My heel slides off the edge of the bottom step into the water, and the loops around my neck pull tighter with my weight. My mother doesn't so much as wobble.

"Fuck," Felix says. "Fuck, that was supposed to be her."

Then the pulling in my chest stops.

The thread between us goes tight, hard enough to hurt. Everly's felt it. She's felt my air stop, the same way I've felt every thread she's pulled tonight.

"Ev, don't!" That's Ren. "Ev, your hand!"

I can't turn my head, and I don't need to. Through the thread between us I feel her lift one hand out of the Well, streaming black water, and reach it out across the steps towards me with her fingers spread.

Then she pulls.

My mother's spell comes off my throat all at once. I feel every cold loop of it unwind from my neck and go across the water into Everly's open hand. She makes a sound I've never heard from her, hurt and furious at once, and frost runs up her right arm from her fingertips to her shoulder.

"Jesus Christ, Ev!" Atlas shouts behind me.

She throws it back.

It hits my mother square in the chest, her own cold, all of it. Frost spreads across the front of her grey coat, her breath comes out of her in one white burst, and she goes back a step up the stairs. In my whole life I have never seen anyone move my mother back a step.

Air comes back into me so fast it hurts. I fall to my knees on the bottom step, gasping, the water soaking through my trousers and its cold climbing my legs.

"He's breathing!" Ren's voice cracks on it. "Everly, put your hand back in the water. Put it back and keep going!"

My mother looks past me at Everly, and for the first time tonight she looks surprised. Then her shadows gather again on the stair around her, and I know I have one moment before they come back for me.

I stop trying to make my shadows hold a shape.

So stop making it hold. Everly said that to me in the study over the summer.

I've let them wander ever since, everywhere but my desk, and I have never once let them loose in a fight. In a fight, the only voice I can hear is my mother's, telling me to be cold and exact.

I let go.

My shadows come the way they want to come. They rise through every crack in the steps, out of the black water, off the walls of the cavern and the underside of the stairs, from every direction at once, wild and loose, more of them than I could ever steer.

My mother cuts at them. Her shadows slash through the nearest ones, clean and fast, but there are too many of them, coming from too many directions, and she can't cut them all. She has spent her whole life fighting shadows that hold a shape, and these don't hold anything at all.