Page 54 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Nothing about Nell." He turns his head, and he's so close under the blanket that I can feel his breath on my cheek. His hair is falling in his eyes, and his mouth is right there, and I'm thinking about it a lot more than anyone should the night before a thing like tomorrow. "Ev, there's something I keep wanting to⁠—"

He stops. His thumb presses down on the queen so hard the card bends. I wait, and I can feel it in the bond, big and warm and right there behind his teeth. It's love. He loves me, and I feel him swallow it.

"I'll tell you after," he says. "When I can see how tomorrow ends."

"That's not how it works for the rest of us. We just say things."

"Yeah, well. The rest of you don't have to watch them come true." He says it lightly, but his thumb is still pressing the card flat.

So I kiss him. I put my hand on his jaw, turn his face to me, and kiss him, because if he can't say it, he can at least have this.

He makes a surprised sound against my mouth. The rest of the deck slides off his knee and scatters across the warm slate, and he doesn't even look. He kisses me back slowly, with his free hand in my hair, and he tastes like the beer from the Stag. When we finally break apart, he rests his forehead on mine and lets out a long, unsteady breath.

"If any of those go down the gutter, you owe me a deck."

"They're not going down the gutter."

"You don't know that." He's grinning now, for real. "I'm the one who knows that."

But it's late, enrollment is in the morning, and down on the quad a whole class of kids is singing along under the string lights with no idea what's waiting for them on that platform. I lean my head on his shoulder while he slides the queen back into the deck. I want his flash to be good news so badly that I let myself believe it is.

17

CALLUM

Igo to see my brother the night before enrollment, and I don't tell anyone where I'm going.

Everly would want to come. Atlas would want to stand behind me with his hands sparking, and I'd let him, which a year ago I would never have believed of either of us. Felix would look at the odds and tell me, in that bright voice of his, exactly how badly it could go. Ren wouldn't say anything, though, and that would be the worst of it.

So I wait until the house is asleep, or near enough, then let myself out the front door of Concordia and pull my shadows up over my shoulders.

They come up slow, like something waking. Halfway across the quad, one of them slides off my shoulder and wanders towards the music of the first-years' party under the trees, as if it would like to go and see. I pull it back. It comes—slowly.

The wardens' hall is a long stone building on the south side of campus, behind the administrative offices, with narrow windows and a slate roof gone green at the edges. Noah has rooms on the top floor. I know that because I asked Eustace to find out, and she asked her mother, who works in records and believes her daughter is writing a paper on the history of campus housing.

Someone has propped the back door open with a brick for the warden who smokes, and I go up the back stairs in my shadows. The steps are stone, worn into shallow bowls in the middle, and I keep to the edges, where they don't creak.

On the second landing a door opens above me, and a warden comes down.

I stop against the wall and hold still. He's an older man with his hood down and his robe unbuttoned over a sweater, carrying a mug and humming under his breath. A year ago I could have stood in front of him in full lamplight, and he'd have walked straight through the dark where I was without a flicker.

Tonight I'm sure of nothing. My shadows are thick around me, and the one at my left hand has already begun to stretch across the step towards his shoes, as curious as a dog going to sniff a stranger. I close my fist on it, and it stops.

He passes close enough that I smell the coffee in his mug, but he doesn't look at me. Then he's gone around the turn below, still humming, and I go on up.

Noah's door, at the end of the top corridor, isn't locked. Either he's expecting me, or he no longer cares who walks in.

The room is plain: a narrow bed made up tight, a bookshelf with nothing on it but ledgers, and his robe on a hook on the back of the door, black outside, the red lining showing at the hem. He sits at a desk by the window with the lamp on, working in his shirtsleeves with the cuffs turned back, papers spread across the desk in front of him.

I see the rune before he says a word. It's drawn over and over, down one page and onto the next, each version a little tighter than the last, in his neat, upright hand. His handwriting was always better than mine. It's even better than Wheeler's ever was.

"Hello, Cal." He doesn't turn around.

I let the shadows go. They slide off me and pool on the floorboards around my feet, and then, without my asking, they begin to spread across the floor towards his chair. He turns and looks at them, then up at me, and his face doesn't change at all.

"They wander," he says. "Your shadows never used to wander."

"They do now," I say.