Page 5 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

She picks it up and eats it cold, straight from the can, watching me while she does it, and I sit there trying to work out what's wrong with her.

She's got color in her cheeks, the birthmark high on her cheek dark and clear against her skin. She looks healthier than she did all spring, when Wheeler was draining her a little at a time and no one even noticed the freshman in the dining hall getting smaller every week. Her hair is clean, and she's been brushing it. She looks good, and no one leaves the Down Deep looking good. I don't trust it at all.

Now and then, though, she stops in the middle of a bite and goes still with the spoon halfway to her mouth, looking at the floor, listening to something under it. Then she blinks and takes the bite.

"What do you hear?" I ask her.

"Nothing." She smiles. "It's just quiet."

"Nell," I say, in the voice my mom used when I lied about brushing my teeth.

"It's quiet down there. It's so quiet..." She sighs. "I like it."

I don't ask what's down there. We both know the Well is down there, and I know she walked down to it.

"Do you remember it?" I ask instead. "Going down the stairs?"

"Some of it." She turns the spoon over in the can. "I remember my feet were cold, and I remember I wasn't scared. I was frightened all spring, Brittany. I was frightened of Wheeler and of the stairs and of my own room, and then I just wasn't." She looks up at me, puzzled. "I'm still not. Isn't that funny?"

That's the worst thing she's said to me yet, and she says it smiling.

"Eat your soup," I tell her, because I can't think of anything else.

I stay until she finishes the soup, because I said I would, then take the can and the spoon so she doesn't have to look at them. She lies back against the pillows and holds the paperback up so I can see the cover.

"It's about a woman who inherits a lighthouse," she tells me. "And she has the most terrible cat. It hates her. It sits on the stairs in the dark so she'll trip over it."

"Sounds like a pretty good cat."

She laughs, and she sounds happy. Under it, if I sit still, I can feel the floor humming against the soles of my shoes, a long low note that I'm pretty sure is the Well, the thing she keeps stopping to listen to. I keep smiling at her anyway. Smiling at things that scare me is how I got through high school, and it's the only extracurricular I ever finished.

"Goodnight, Brittany," she calls when I get up.

"Lock the door," I tell her.

"No one can see the door." She waves the paperback at me.

"Lock it anyway. Humor me."

She's still smiling at me when I go.

I check every door on the way out, though, then walk back across the dark grass towards Bellamy with Poe on my shoulder and Loki trotting at my heels as far as the edge of the Callister lawn, where he sits down to watch me go.

The whole way back, my hands won't keep still.

It starts in my fingertips and runs up to my wrists, a jumpy, buzzing feeling under the skin. By the time I'm on the path, the air around me has gone heavy and tight, the way it does right before a summer thunderstorm. It isn't raining, either; the sky over the quad is clear and full of stars.

Shoving my hands into my coat pockets, I make fists and walk faster without looking at anyone I pass, and I hold it in. I hold it all the way up to my room. Then I lock the door, lean my hands on the open windowsill, and let it out.

It isn't much—just a little gust of storm, a hard cold shove of wind out of nowhere that knocks the curtains straight back against the wall and rattles the desk lamp on its base. Herbert holds on to the lampshade with every leg he's got, while Poe takes off from my shoulder and lands on top of the wardrobe, offended.

My summons slides off the desk and onto the floor.

I stand there with my hands on the windowsill, my heart going hard, breathing in cold air until my fingers go still and the air in the room loosens.

All year I thought that jumpy, wrong feeling was my blood magic going bad, and it was storm the whole time. I'm a Sanguis sophomore who can't pass a practical, and I just made weather. If the review board wants to discuss my academic standing, I'd really rather they didn't find out about this part. Then I close the window. One leg at a time, Herbert lets go of the lampshade and looks at me.

"Don't make it weird," I tell him.