Page 38 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Atlas stares at the chimney, then at me. "Do that again."

I can't. I stand up there until it's dark, trying, and nothing happens.

The second time I'm half asleep on the floor of the Burial Ground when one of Callum's shadows slides over my wrist, and I close my hand on it without thinking. It comes into me, cold and heavy, then goes straight back out of me across the floor and shoves Felix off the slab he's napping on.

"I was asleep," Felix complains from the floor.

"In my class," Callum says. "Yes. I noticed."

I can't make it happen when I want it to. It just happens to me, and I hate that more than the burns.

Felix teaches no one anything. In the Burial Ground he falls asleep and snores, which Callum takes as a personal insult to the dead. But at the end of the first week, when he thinks no one's looking, I find him on the back steps with Nell, quietly teaching her how to shuffle.

Nell has never cast a spell in her life.

We've suspected she's a grimoire for months. The Well doesn't walk a girl down the stairs if she's only a Tempest, or only a Sanguis.

She came to Nyxhaven and tested, but the school left her undeclared, and before she could learn a single thing the Well got its hooks in her. She didn't even know how to hold a die until Felix showed her, and she still doesn't hold it right.

She comes out to the garden anyway, sits at the edge of the blanket, and takes in every word. She's eating now, and she grins at Felix's jokes, which only encourages him. She leaves the paperbacks Brittany sneaks out of the library face down all over the house with their spines cracked, which makes Callum visibly suffer. She looks like any girl staying at college for the summer.

I let myself believe that for most of June.

Then one morning in July, Brittany's cut won't close.

It's late in the lesson, she's tired and frustrated, and her hand has started to shake again. She pricks her fingertip and reaches for her magic to close it, but the blood wells up and keeps coming, running down into her palm. Swearing, she shakes her hand out, and drops of blood spatter across the blanket.

"Oh, come on," Brittany tells her finger.

Before any of us can move, Nell leans over and touches it.

The cut closes.

Ren could do that. Brittany could do it, on a good day, with the wind behind her. What scares me is how much magic I feel go through Nell to do it, so much at once that my heart jumps, and through the thread between us I feel Ren's jump with it.

She did all four disciplines at once, with no conductor or knife or die, to close a pinprick, because she doesn't know yet how to use just one. She did it as easily as breathing, and she's almost as strong as I am.

Nell takes her hand back and turns it over, looking at it. "Oh. I didn't know I could do that."

Ren has gone very still, staring at her, the knife forgotten in his lap. Brittany is holding her healed finger up in front of her face, afraid to put it down in case it opens up again.

"Well," Felix says finally, very lightly. "That settles that, then."

It does. We'd all guessed she was a grimoire, like me, like Brittany. None of us guessed she was this strong.

And she gets stronger every day after that. I can feel it. Every time she walks into a room she's a little louder than she was the day before, a little brighter at the edges of my senses, until I can tell she's coming down the stairs before I hear her feet.

One night not long after, I try to make Ma's lemon rice for supper.

I've watched her make it my whole life, but I've never once made it by myself, so I text her for the recipe. She calls me on video before I've even put the phone down.

I prop the phone against the sugar bowl with nothing behind me but Concordia's old striped wallpaper, and the whole kitchen goes dead quiet.

Atlas stops chopping onions with the knife still in the air. Felix was in the middle of telling Callum that he stirs rice the way other people sign treaties, and he shuts his mouth mid-word. Callum goes on stirring. Brittany drops a dish towel over Loki, who is a stuffed fox and couldn't make a sound if he tried, and Nell presses her lips together hard to keep her face straight.

"Show me the pan," Ma says, before she's even said hello.

I tip the phone towards the stove, careful not to catch Callum's sleeve.