Page 26 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

The review board meets in a room on the third floor of the wardens' hall on the last Friday before exams. I've known the date since the summons came, so at least I've had plenty of time to dread it properly.

I wear my red blazer, because it's the only one I own, and my black boots, because I can run in them.

The others wanted to come up the stairs with me. We argued about it in Concordia's kitchen until none of us could keep our eyes open, around a table covered in mugs, Felix's cards and the folders I took out of Wheeler's desk, while Poe watched all of us from the top of the fridge.

"I'll be outside the door." Atlas had his arms folded like that settled it. "Right outside it. If one of them so much as puts a hand on you, I'm coming through it, and I don't give a shit who sees me do it."

"And they'll see you, and that's the whole thing over before it starts."

"They can't see us. We walked right past a warden."

"One warden. On a dark quad. With Callum's shadows on top of you." I had the summons flattened on the table under my hand. "This is a room full of them, in their building, in the daylight. If anyone's standing outside that door, they'll know I didn't come alone, and they'll be ready."

Everly wanted to wait at the bottom of the stairs. "Just the bottom," she said. "I won't even look up."

Ren wanted the lobby. "I'll bring a textbook and sit by the door," he said, which would make him the only expelled student in history to do homework in the wardens' hall. "From there I can hear every heart in that stairwell. If yours goes wrong, I'll know before they do."

Felix swept his cards together into one stack and tapped them on the table.

"I can't see that room. Not one flash of it." He looked personally offended. "I can see the stairwell. I can see the lobby, and a desk with a very bored man at it. I can see a deeply unflattering future for whoever runs the radiators in that building. And then there's the door, and I can't see one single thing on the other side of it. I really hate that, and I want everyone to know it."

Callum didn't say anything for most of it. Then, once the rest of them had run out of ideas, he looked up from his tea. "I can put my shadows in the hall behind you, close enough to reach. No one will feel them unless they're looking."

In the end I won, though only because I'm the one with the summons. If I don't walk in, they come looking for me. If I walk in with no one behind me, the wardens think I'm a scared sophomore who's going to sit down in their chair and let them drain me, and I want them to think that right up until the last second.

So I walk in alone. I want that on the record, mostly so someone can read it out at my funeral.

The wardens' hall is old and narrow, with a stairwell that climbs in tight square turns, its steps worn hollow in the middle. I go up slowly with one hand on the rail, the way a scared sophomore would. My knees aren't totally steady, which helps.

Callum's shadows are somewhere in the stairwell behind me, though I can't see them. Every so often a little cold touches the back of my neck, always in the same spot, and I know he's close.

On the third-floor landing there's a door with a brass plate on it that says REVIEW. I knock, because I'm polite, and then I open it, because no one answers.

The room is small and windowless, and it smells of lemon furniture polish with the faint metal smell from Wheeler's study underneath—the smell of old blood magic. It's also too warm. Someone has the radiator going full blast in May.

The review board sits behind a long table at the front. A single wooden chair faces them from the middle of the floor, and beside it, on a brass stand, is a big round glass bowl over a smaller glass dish, with brass pipes curling around it and a dial with its needle resting at the bottom.

I know that bowl. I've never seen this one, but I know it, because Wheeler had one just like it in the parlor at Callister, and Ren sat in front of it all year while it pulled the magic out of him, and came away from it grey. Ren says it's called a mensura, and that it only holds a little before someone has to empty it into something bigger. I decide to call it the Gravy Boat. It doesn't even deserve a better name.

As soon as I'm through the door, I feel it reach for me.

It's the same pull I felt from the door at the end of Everly's hallway in Callister, the one that wants you to walk through it. My magic starts coming out of me through my chest towards the bowl and the chair beside it, a thread pulled off a sweater. It doesn't hurt. It feels like relief, like I could sit down in that chair and let everything about me that doesn't work right quietly drain away—I'd be so tired, and it would be so nice to be tired.

I dig my fingernails into my palm until it stings, and the pull goes thin. I can still feel it, but I can ignore it now.

This room is where they drain people. You sit in the chair, the bowl pulls your magic out of you, and you don't get it back.

On the left is a warden I don't know, an older woman with her hood down and her grey hair in a bun. Next to her is Professor Dowling, the soft man in a cardigan who taught my first-year Sanguis section, gave me a D, and has never once in my sight looked straight at a cut.

The one in the middle is young, late twenties, with platinum hair cut short and a black robe lined in red, and he looks so much like Callum that I stare.

Callum told us about him the night before, down to the scar across the back of his right hand. I look, and it's there.

"Miss Leigh." Noah Bolingbroke has a polite, tired voice. "Thank you for coming. Please sit down."

"I'd rather stand."

"It's easier if you sit."