Page 27 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"I know." I stay standing.

He has Callum's eyes, the same ice blue, but with dark circles under them that Callum doesn't have. His face doesn't change when he looks at me. Then he looks down at the folder open in front of him and turns a page.

"Your file says your magic doesn't respond to testing. You've failed every practical you've taken. You were seen in the records room after hours, more than once, and you were close with the students who were expelled last month." He folds his hands on the folder. "We'd like to understand what's going on with your magic, Miss Leigh. That's all this is. Then you can go."

The Gravy Boat pulls at me while the radiator ticks. I think about Enya, who Everly says used to sing under her breath in the Callister kitchen while her frozen waffles toasted, and who I hardly even knew.

"No one walks out of here fine." My voice comes out steadier than my knees. "Enya didn't. Gregory didn't. I read their folders."

The professor from Sanguis goes white to the lips, and the older warden stands up so fast her chair scrapes.

Noah doesn't move. He looks at me, tired and sad, and I hate that, because it would be so much easier if he just looked pleased. Then he nods at the warden, who comes around the table towards me with her palms out, as if I'm a dog she isn't sure about.

I don't know what I was planning to do. I thought about it all week, and none of the plans were any good, and in the end I don't plan anything. Storm magic is already coming up my spine and into my hands—the one I thought for most of the year was my blood magic going bad, and that I've been letting out my window at night in little gusts ever since I figured out what it was.

The warden reaches for my arm.

I let it go.

The air turns into a storm, and the warden flies backward into the table. Papers go up in a white blizzard. The Gravy Boat tips off its stand, hits the floor and rolls, ringing, and the glass lid shatters. My hair stands straight up off my head while the bulb over the table pops. In the dark, lightning crawls up my arms, white and branching, and my ears pop.

I don't know how to stop it, and I don't even want to.

Then the door bangs open behind me, and the dark comes in.

It's Callum's shadow, pouring through the doorway, over the floor and up the walls, swallowing the last of the light. It spills in every direction at once, the way no shadow in a Mors practical ever moves, as if no one is holding the other end. Then a big, hot hand grabs my arm, and I know it's Atlas even though I can't see a thing.

"Out." His mouth is right by my ear. "Now. Let go."

"I don't know how."

"Yeah, you do. Breathe out."

I breathe out, and the storm goes out of me with my knees right behind it. He catches me under the arms and hauls me backward through the door.

The last thing I see before the shadow closes over everything is Noah Bolingbroke on his feet behind the table, in the blue flicker of the last of my lightning. He's looking past me at the shadow in the doorway, and I can see on his face that he knows whose it is.

He's looking straight at the place where his brother is standing, and he lets us go.

The stairwell is black under Callum's shadow, and Atlas takes the steps as if he can see them. I can't. My legs went out of me with the storm, and on the first turn my boot finds the hollow in the middle of a step and slides, and I go down hard on one knee on the stone. The pain goes straight up into my teeth.

"Up." Atlas hauls me by the back of my blazer. "Come on, Leigh. Up."

"I'm trying. My legs aren't doing the thing."

Above us the door bangs open again, and a woman's voice yells, "Stairwell!" Light comes down after it, hard and white. The older warden is on the landing with a silver conductor in her fist, and she flicks it at the dark the way you'd shake out a match and says one short word I don't catch. Everywhere her light lands, Callum's shadow peels back off the walls in long dark strips.

"She's burning it off." Callum's voice comes up from somewhere below us, still perfectly polite. "I can't hold the top flight."

"Then don't," Atlas says. "Hold the bottom."

He lets go of me with one hand and throws the other up the stairwell. I expect lightning, because it's Atlas. What comes out of him is wind, a fist of it so hard my ears pop, and it goes howling up the square turns of the stairwell, catches the door, and slams it shut on the light and the warden both. Something heavy hits the floor on the other side. The dark comes back.

"Shit," Atlas says, sounding surprised. "Didn't mean it that big."

"Do it again!"

"Not with you hanging off me, I won't." He gets his shoulder under my arm, and we go down the rest of the way like that, me hopping on my good leg and my bad knee screaming every time I forget and put it down, while Callum's shadow folds up behind us one turn at a time.