Page 77 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Everly puts her mug down. "Then I'm going with you."

"The note says alone," I remind her.

"The note says you, alone. She didn't write anything to me." Her voice is steady, and her hands on the table aren't. "The last time I saw your mother, she was standing at the bottom of the Well with a lamp, watching Nell go under, and she told you to take me home as if I were something she'd spilled on her floor. She's been deciding things about me in rooms I'm not in since the day I got here. I'm done with that. If she has something to say about what I'm doing to her rune, she can say it to my face."

"She'll have wardens," I tell her.

"Then they'll be there whether I go or not," she says.

"She'll say things to you," I tell her. "She's had years to get good at it. She'll find the thing you're most afraid of and set it down on the desk in front of you, very politely, and watch you look at it."

"Let her," Everly says.

"Absolutely fucking not." Atlas has both hands flat on the end of the table now, and the light over it flickers. "Ev, you are not walking into that woman's office."

"Callum is." She doesn't look away from me. "Did you tell him no?"

"I did tell him no!"

"And he's going anyway. So am I."

I look for the argument that will keep her in this house. I have plenty of them. She's the one my mother wants. She can't feel her fingers. She's the only one who can take the rune out, and if she doesn't come back, no one can. Every one of them is true, and every one of them is a reason we gave for keeping Nell at home.

I also know exactly how to make someone stay where I've put them. I learned it at my mother's knee: the flat voice, the decision already made, the silence that waits until the other person gives in. I could do it to Everly right now, across this table, and I'd sound just like her. I think it would even work.

I won't ever use it on her.

"All right," I say.

Atlas swears at the ceiling and goes out the back door into the garden, and a moment later I hear thunder over the roof, short and very local.

"For the record," Felix says to his card, "I couldn't find one where she stays home. I looked."

I go out after Atlas. He's standing by the dry fountain in the dark with his hands shoved in his pockets, and the roses around him are dripping from a rain that only fell in this garden.

"I'm coming too," he says, before I've even reached him.

"No."

"Why the fuck not?" He swings round to face me.

"Because she'll say something about Everly the moment we sit down, and you'll put lightning through her window. By morning she'll have every warden on campus at this door, and she'll be able to say you gave her the reason." I stop beside him. "She would like nothing better. You know she would."

"You'd know." He's looking straight at me when he says it. "You spent your whole life finding out what she'd like and fetching it for her."

It lands exactly where he meant it to. I let it, because it's true, and because he's standing out here in the dark with sparks on his knuckles instead of in my mother's office, which is the point.

"Yes," I say. "So believe me when I tell you what she'd do with you."

He doesn't argue with that, which means he does know. Static runs off his knuckles and crackles into the empty basin.

"Fine," he says. "Then here's what happens. If you're not back on those front steps by midnight, I'm coming over there. I'll go in through the window if I have to. And if she's got you locked up somewhere in that building, I'll pull it down on top of her and dig you out myself."

There was a time Atlas Knox would have held the door for the wardens while they took me. He isn't joking now. I believe every word.

"Midnight," I say. "I'll try not to put you to the trouble."

He snorts, and the next roll of thunder over the roof is a smaller one.