He lifts his head just enough to speak, mouth wet, breathing hard. "Say it. Out loud. I want to hear you ask me for it."
"There," I tell him, my voice cracking on it. "Fuck—like that. Don't stop."
"Yes." Like the word costs him something. Then his mouth is back on me and he gives me exactly that. My voice stays mine through all of it, wrecked and present, leading him by it, and he follows. He follows like following is the prayer.
His fingers curl. His tongue doesn't let up. The shadow at my thighs pulls tighter, holding me open right at the edge of too much. The coil low in my belly draws impossibly tight, every muscle in my thighs shaking with how close I am.
I break apart around all three at once—his fingers, his mouth, the cold that closes on me like it means to keep the pleasure in rather than let it go. Heat floods every nerve I own. My spine bows off the mattress. I clench around his fingers in waves that don't want to stop. I come with his name in my mouth and my hand locked in his hair. Every thought goes out of me but the pleasure.
And when I reach for him—when I come back to myself enough to want to give it back, my hand going for his belt and my grimoire reaching with it, shadow rising in me to meet his owndiscipline, my blood-sense catching on the hammer of his pulse—he closes his fingers around my wrist and holds it still.
"No," he says. Rough. "Not—not yet."
I can feel how much it costs him to say it. That's the thing. Through the bond and through my hand on his wrist both, I can feel exactly how much he wants, the want of a man standing at the edge of a long fall and choosing the ledge.
"Callum."
"If you touch me I break all the way." He presses his forehead to mine, breathing like he ran here. "And I haven't chosen yet. Not out loud. Not the thing you all keep not asking me." The Well, or his mother. The question that lives in every room he's in now. "I won't take that from you until I've earned the right to give it back. So let me—" his thumb strokes once over the pulse in the wrist he's holding, "—just let me give you this. And nothing back. Tonight that's the most I have that's clean."
It's the most Callum thing he has ever done, giving everything and refusing to be repaid for it, and I let him, because refusing him the refusal would be its own kind of cruelty.
He holds me after, fully clothed against my bare back, the burn on his hand a hot point I can feel without seeing.
"You can talk about it," I say into the dark. "Whatever it costs. I'll hold it for you."
For a long time he doesn't answer. His arm tightens across me, just once. I feel his breath move my hair.
"I know," he says finally. "That's why I came here. Not anywhere else." And then nothing—nothing at all, not her name, not what his shadow did, not the sound she made before she stopped. He gives me everything tonight except the one thing he's carrying, and I don't reach for it, because some things you have to be allowed to set down, and he isn't ready to be allowed.
Neither of us says the word the night is about.
***-
I still can't get used to her.
Helena Grimoire is past a hundred and twenty years old and she looks twenty-five. The binding kept her the way amber keeps a fly—whole, exact, every eyelash in place, and wrong with it, young like a photograph is young, nothing to do with being alive. I keep catching myself staring, trying to make the smooth, unlined skin agree with the hundred and twenty years underneath it, and it never does.
She doesn't sleep. She stops. I've found her at three in the morning sitting upright in the dark of the box room she's claimed for herself, eyes open, hands folded, somewhere else entirely—down in the Deep, I think, where ninety-six years of her is still standing over Cordelia and always will be. When I say her name she comes back from a long way off and it takes a second for her to land behind her own eyes.
She wears what the house gives her. Tonight it's a dead graduate student's sweater, gray wool, the sleeves shoved up past her forearms so the old scars on her palms catch the kitchen light, the ones that never closed, ninety-six years and still raw at the edges like the working only just let her go. She eats almost nothing. She watches the rest of us eat the way you'd watch a custom you used to keep and have forgotten the steps of.
And she talks in a register a hundred years out of date, dry and exact and, every so often, devastating. She'll drop a name from 1931 like it happened over breakfast, because to the part of her still down in the dark with Cordelia, it did.Margaret used to do that,she'll say, of a gesture, and Margaret has been dead since before the war, and Helena says it in the present tense and doesn't notice she's done it.
She is the most damaged person I have ever sat across a table from, and the most certain, and I cannot always tell where the wisdom stops and the wound starts. I'm not sure she can either.
***-
When we plan it, she won't be left behind, and she says so before anyone can be kind enough to suggest it.
"You're not keeping me safe." She says it flat, to the table, to all of us. "You're keeping me useless. I have been useless under that building for ninety-six years. I would rather die on my feet tomorrow than spend one more night being protected from the only thing I'm for."
Nobody argues. You don't, with that.
So she walks us through it, the Well laid out in her century-old hand on the back of Brittany's discarded sheet music: a living thing that breathes on death, that will know us the moment we cross the Hollows, that has known every footstep above it for a hundred years and is only patient because patience has always paid. "The question," she says, tapping the deepest line, "isn't whether it wakes. It wakes. The question is whether you move before it can answer."
And here is the thing we decide, the thing that turns my stomach and steadies it in the same breath: we take the trap on purpose.
We were always going to have to reach the Deep. We were always going to have to break Catalina's working before she binds herself into the Well past any undoing, and pull Nell Fortuna's name off the list before the next mark comes due. The only thing we lacked was a way in that didn't light up every tether on campus—and Catalina has just handed me one. A sanctioned reason to descend. An honor with a flourish on it. Anight when the whole school is in motion for the review, bodies and noise everywhere, nobody watching the one girl who's beentoldto go underground.
