Grimoire Girls: Bloodline (Grimoire Girls of Nyxhaven University #2)

Everly

The thing about making a deal with the devil is, the devil always has more up his sleeve than you could expect. Or her sleeve, in Catalina's case.

Callum's hand is palm-down on the table, fingers splayed, his pulse steady though a little fast. The warden stands on the other side of the table with a stylus in his hand, casting magic directly at Callum's skin, carving a deep mark into his flesh.

Ward mark.

I taste it before I see it land: metal coating the back of my tongue, copper as a flat penny, the taste that blood magic leaves behind when it's violating someone or something.

I learned that taste this summer on the run, in the moments when Ren pushed himself until there were shadows beneath his eyes.

The ink forms a shape that burns into Callum's skin: a looping curl, like a half moon, that then swoops around and connects.

It's thin and dark, pulsing like a second heartbeat.

More than that, it tracks him. From now on it'll broadcast his location anywhere he is, log every spell he casts, and feed it back to both the wardens and to Catalina.

And her new lap pet, Wheeler. Felix was right when he saw this summer that the man was compromised, and then some.

The part that I hate, more than anything, is that the ward mark will burn against his skin if he comes within a certain distance of Callister House outside a small sanctioned window.

And given that Callister House is where I'm meant to live from now on, that means he won't be allowed to come near me.

My mouth goes dry around that thought, and I swallow it down where nobody can see it land.

"This isn't a punishment," Catalina says from her spot at the window, the long line of her neck pale in the sunlight.

She doesn't turn around to watch her own son wince and flex his hand as the pain of the blood magic settles in.

"Don't think of it as a punishment at all. Think of it as…accountability."

We're in her office, crowded together, the five of us, Catalina, and a warden from each frat house, each of them with a ready-made spell from the Sanguis warden.

It sounds so innocent on its face—a simple mark to track us, make sure we're keeping to the terms we agreed to—but if I could get us all out of this I would.

Callum takes his hand back and flexes it a little, staring at the mark. His face is neutral, his expression closed off, but through the bond I can feel a trickle of something. Not anxiety or fear, but anger, a furious rage that lives so deep within him it's a wonder I can feel it at all.

That's new. Callum is cold, shut down, closed off. I suppose even the Frost King himself has limits.

I also think, maybe naively, and it wouldn't be the first time I succumbed to naiveté, that the summer changed him.

Those months on the run, the way he tossed his burner phone into the desert sand, how he actually refused to give into his mother for the first time in his life.

He could be different now. Or I could just be too much of an optimist, like usual.

Callum steps back without being told. Atlas is next, the Tempest warden holding his premade ward mark spell loaded into his conductor, a bit of magic that I have to hold my tongue about. Apparently it's not cross-discipline when Catalina and her goons do it, as I'm learning today.

With the way Atlas approaches the desk and slaps his hand down on the surface, you'd almost expect lightning to be called from the sky and strike Catalina dead.

He feels like he's close to doing exactly that.

But he stills as the warden channels the blood magic, a grimace pulling his lips down as the pain hits.

The spell almost seems to spark against his skin, unlike the dark way it settled into Callum's skin.

A muscle in his jaw twitches as the magic carves into his hand and stills, his nostrils flaring.

His thread in my chest jumps as the warden finishes, a snap of heat flaring, gone before I can hold it.

Even after all this time together, I'm still getting used to the bond.

When I first came to Nyxhaven and was introduced to the four fraternity presidents by reputation alone, I never would've imagined that I'd get this close to them, and that goes double for Atlas above all, who was the first to try to strike me down, quite literally, with a bolt of lightning he channeled.

But now I've felt his grief through the bond, have sat up with him as he had nightmares, saw through his eyes how pain has carved him out from the inside.

I've seen him in a whole new light, felt him too—warmth blossoms in my cheeks as I think of how closely—and now the thought of the wardens keeping us apart is a hot stone in my chest.

Atlas looks at his hand, scowling his signature scowl. Then he aims that same scowl at the warden. "Every time I use magic," he says, "this thing reports back?"

"That's correct." The warden says it in the tone of someone who would very much prefer not to be in a room with a furious Atlas Knox.

"And if I come near Callister House outside the session window?"

"It will burn, yes."

Atlas looks at me. Not at the warden, not at the mark. At me. His jaw is tight, as if he's thinking the same thoughts I am: that we spent the whole summer searching for a way to get some distance from each other, only to return to Nyxhaven and wish for nothing more than to be close together again.

"Great," he says, in a tone that suggests he's not saying, I'll fucking burn you alive, you asshole.

He gets it under control after that, pulls back from the edge of his anger.

The stillness costs him. He has to take a deep breath, set his temper aside, let go of the storm that rages within him at all times.

I've seen him do that under worse conditions.

Three AM in a Missouri motel, lightning crackling off his sleeping hands, me on the floor beside the bed saying hey.

You're here. You're here. He's gotten better at control lately.

At the very least, he hasn't set any gas stations on fire. Again.

Ren offers his hand before the warden can take it. Turns it palm-down on the table himself, fingers loose, like he's done it a hundred times. Maybe he has.

The Sanguis warden sets his ritual knife to the back of it, and this close I can finally see what the ward mark does.

It doesn't lay ink onto the skin or carve down into it.

It draws something up to the surface. The warden's magic hooks in and calls Ren's own blood to the surface in a thin dark thread, coaxing it along, guiding it into the shape it wants—that same looping curl, a half moon that swings around and closes on itself, then settles, dark and raised against his brown hand, pulsing once.

The penny taste floods the back of my tongue, sharp enough that I have to swallow.

With Callum, the blood had to be dragged up, slow and unwilling. Ren's rises to meet it. His own discipline recognizes the magic being worked into him and answers—almost eager, almost helpful—and watching his body assist in its own leashing turns my stomach worse than any of Atlas's sparks did.

He doesn't flinch. He never does when he's in pain.

Even when it's well-deserved. He watches the warden the whole time like he's just having another lesson, and in a way I guess he is, we all are, except this time the lesson is in cruelty and punishment.

Nyxhaven University, I'm learning unwillingly, is not just a campus with lecture halls and test scores.

It's a place that demands all you have inside you and then some.

When it's done Ren looks at me, his brown eyes steady, a thread of wariness spiking in the bond.

"It isn't only the spellwork it tracks," he says, his voice low and intimate. "It can feel the bond. When I reach for you, they'll know I did."

The floor tilts a little under me. The leash isn't just on him. It's on the thing between us.

"Okay," I say, because it's all I've got, and because okay is what comes out when the truth is too big to pick up yet.

He nods, once. That's all. But he told me so I'd be careful, not so I'd be afraid, and I tuck it into the drawer with everything else I'm not ready to look at.

Right next to the taste of his lips on mine, the sweep of his tongue in my mouth, our bodies tangled up in the summer heat as this thing between us grew too big too fast.

Felix is last, and Felix being Felix, he makes the whole thing look like the best part of his day.

He has his deck out before the Tumult warden even waves him forward, left hand walking a card knuckle to knuckle while he lays his right flat on the table like he's dealing himself in.

"Morning," he says, bright as anything. "Love what you've done with the hair.

Bold. Not everyone can pull off that kind of haircut, what do they call it? Oh yeah, bad."

The warden's mouth thins, but he doesn't say anything.

Just shakes a die loose into his palm and casts it across the table, and while it's still tumbling something flickers at the edge of my vision, giddy and gone, like a bet about to land, and I brace for the penny taste, and it comes, but nothing is carved and nothing is drawn.

The die tumbles onto the table face up. Reality slides, smooth as a card off the top of the deck, into the version where the mark was on Felix's hand all along—that same looping half moon, dark and raised and pulsing, sitting there like it's been his for years and I just never looked.

Callum's blood had to be dragged to the surface. Ren's rose to meet it. Felix's was never given a choice at all—somewhere in the roll, every future where his hand stayed bare came up losing.

The house, as always, wins.