16. Everly
EVERLY
Finally. Someone came.
The voice is still settling in the dark when I understand that finally is going to be my job.
Nobody else moves. Atlas has gone stone-still at my shoulder, the charge banked off his skin gone quiet for once.
Callum is staring up at the woman the way you stare at a thing you were raised to believe was a story.
Felix has stopped shuffling—Felix, who shuffles in his sleep—and the deck hangs forgotten in his hand.
Ren is the only one already shifting his weight, easing forward under her without a word, and I love him a little for it, for being the one whose body answers before his mind has finished arguing.
But none of them can touch the circle. That part is mine.
I crouch at the edge of the burned ring and look at what's holding her.
It isn't carved. That's the first thing my hands tell me when I lay my palm flat to the stone an inch outside the line: the sigils aren't cut into the floor, they're fused into it, heat-set, scorched down so deep the rock went liquid once and cooled around them.
However long ago it was, somebody stood where I'm standing and poured enough power into this floor to melt it, and then made it hold.
Above us, the ceiling wears the twin of it, the same ring etched into the vault directly over the platform, so that the woman between them floats in the exact dead center of the working like an insect pinned through both wings.
The penny taste ghosts up the back of my throat before I've decided to reach.
My grimoire knows this. Not the way you know a fact—the way you know a smell from a house you lived in as a child.
It recognizes the binding the way a key recognizes the one lock it was cut for, and it wants, very badly, to turn.
"Everly." Callum's voice is low and even and means stop. "You don't know what undoing it does to her."
"No," I say. "But I know what leaving it does."
A body held in the air with its head wrenched back, its eyes aimed at a ruin in the ceiling, its fingers moving the way they've moved since before my grandmother was born, however long that's actually been. I'm not going to be the next person who looks at her and decides it's easier not to see.
I set both hands to the stone and reach.
It doesn't come out of me like one thing. It comes out braided.
The storm goes first, because the storm is the part of me that wants to hit something, and I've learned to let it lead when I need a door.
It runs down my arms in a current that leaves the hair there standing, into the floor, and finds the iron the sigils are fused into—solid, old, no chisel on earth getting through it—and I don't try to get through it.
I bring the storm down the way Atlas brought it down on a frat-house lawn the night I learned what he was: not as a flicker but as a strike, a single white line driven through the iron at its weakest grain, and the metal splits where nothing should be able to split it.
The sound goes through my teeth, and the sharp smell of ozone floods the dark. The whole floor flinches.
Then the blood, and the blood is the part I hate.
Because this floor is full of it. A century of it, soaked down into the stone the way the cold is soaked into the walls of Callister House, old sacrificial blood, the kind that was given here unwilling, by people who didn't get to keep their names. I don't want to touch it. I touch it anyway.
I call it up out of the floor the way Ren calls a pulse up to the surface of a wrist, and it answers, and it is so much, and for one terrible second I can feel all of them at once—every person who bled into this room to keep her hanging in the air—and then I turn what they gave into the thing it was always going to be turned into, and it comes up through me as power, and I have to swallow against the back of my throat to keep from being sick.
I'm sorry, I think at them, whoever they were. I'm using you to undo it. It's the only kind word I've got.
Third is the shadow, and the shadow is patient.
The storm split the iron; now the cracks are thin and want to close.
So I pour the dark into them the way Callum pours his into a doorframe, and I hold them open—not forcing, just refusing to let them heal—a wedge of nothing keeping the wound from sealing.
And last, under all of it, the chaos. Felix's color.
I don't strike with it and I don't force with it.
I lean. Somewhere out in front of me are a thousand versions of this moment, and in most of them the binding holds and she hangs there for another century, and in a very few of them it gives, and I find the few, the way you find the one loose stitch in a hem, and I push the whole moment toward them, gentle and steady, the smallest pressure in the world laid against the part of chance that can still be moved.
The sigils start to go out.
Not all at once. One at a time, in a slow circle, dying outward from where my palm meets the stone, the nearest first, the light going out of it like a coal stepped on, then the next, then the next, the ring unmaking itself in order, like tumblers giving way inside a lock.
The old metal floods so thick across my tongue I can taste nothing else.
The pull lands low in my belly and stays there, hooked, dragging, good—and that's the part I'm not going to say out loud to anyone, not ever, the part where it feels good.
Where every discipline in me is doing the one thing it was made to do, all four at once, and there is not a single other person alive who could stand in this room and make this floor let go.
I watch it happen. I have to. They're my hands.
Somewhere behind me Atlas says my name, low, a question—Everly—the way you say it when you can see somebody carrying more than they should and you don't have any way to take it off them. I don't answer. I can't spare the breath.
The four strains are running through me at once and the place where they cross, just under my ribs, has started to ache like a muscle worked past where it wanted to go. Sweat at my hairline. My knees on cold stone. The taste so thick now I'm breathing it.
One more, I tell myself, the way I tell myself everything when it's bad. Just the last one. You can do the last one.
The last floor sigil dies under my palm. And in the same breath—the very same one, like the two were never two things—the ruin in the ceiling goes dark, the whole twin ring above us guttering out at once.
The air lets go of her.
She drops.
She falls like a dropped coat, like there's nothing left in her to fall—and Ren is already under her, catching a body that weighs almost nothing now, her head lolling down off the crank her neck has been set in for a century, her bare feet swinging.
She makes no sound at all hitting his chest. No gasp.
No cry. Like her body forgot decades ago that falling is supposed to hurt.
Her palms are dark. I see them go past his arm: the old scars on them split and weeping again, blood smeared across his sleeve where he holds her, and Ren doesn't say a word about the blood on him, just adjusts his grip and takes her weight and lets her be carried.
Her eyes are open.
They drag down off the ruined ceiling—slow, like the muscles forgot the way—and travel across the four of them, and find me.
Up close she is the most wrong thing I've ever seen and the most awake.
Young the way a photograph is young. A hundred and twenty-some years old behind eyes that look maybe twenty-five and have not blinked enough.
She can't stand. She doesn't try. She looks at each of us in turn, taking inventory the way I take inventory, and I recognize the habit and it makes the hair go up on my arms. Then she looks at Callum. Just Callum. And she says his family's name the way you read a verdict off a page.
"Bolingbroke."
It isn't a question. There's a whole century in it.
Callum doesn't look away. The cold comes off him in a wave I can feel from here, his shadow gone deep and still at his feet, and to anyone who didn't spend a summer learning his faces it would look like nothing.
I know it for what it is. The Frost King, holding his ground in front of the thing his family made and left hanging here since before anyone still living was born.
"Yes," he says.
That's all. He doesn't apologize for it. He doesn't explain it. He stands there in his family's name and lets her look at him wearing it.
She holds his eyes a moment longer. Whatever she finds there, she keeps to herself.
Then her gaze moves on, to Atlas, and something behind her face shifts, some recognition I don't have time to read and won't understand until much later.
To Felix, who for once doesn't say the thing.
To Ren last of all, who is still holding her, and her hand comes up off her own ruined palm and presses, just briefly, against his forearm.
Something older than thanks. A gesture with no modern word for it, the kind you'd offer someone who just pulled you out of a grave.
"You caught me," she says to him, wondering, like the catching is the strange part. Like in all this time the strange thing was that anyone would.
"Yes," Ren says, in the voice he keeps for the worst-hurt things. And he doesn't let her go.
***-
We go up the way we came down, only slower, because now we're carrying someone.
Ren takes her shoulders and Felix takes her feet, the two of them threading her between them up the dark stairs, and I go ahead with the light because the light is the one job my hands have left in them. The Deep gives way to the Hollows.
The Hollows give way to the place where the stair-head wears two words cut by a shaking hand—H. GRIMOIRE, 1930. I look at it the way I looked at it three nights ago, before I knew what it was going to cost to find out the rest of it.
Her face turns with mine. She already knows what I'm looking at.
"Helena," she says. Just that, worn thin at the edges, answering a question I never asked out loud. "Nobody's called me the rest of it in ninety-six years. Names are for people who still need one."
Everything behind my ribs goes cold and stays cold for the rest of the climb.
I watch her face as we carry her past the carving, and it does nothing, which is somehow worse than if it had done everything.
The Sepulchre, where Ren went silent on the way in and stays silent now. Then the Reliquary, the Bolingbroke hand recording twelve generations of the dead down the south wall, the script close enough to Callum's that I knew the family before I read the name.
And the bond comes back as we climb.
I didn't notice it leave. That's the thing.
I didn't feel it thin out down at the bottom, because there were four men in arm's reach the whole time and I was busy melting a floor.
It's only now, coming up, that I feel the threads pull tight again in my chest, one by one, four of them filling back in like blood coming back into a foot that's been sat on.
And the cold part of me won't let it go. Down there, at the very bottom, even with all four of them three feet from me, the thread between us had gone almost to nothing. The Deep drinks it. I don't say that out loud either. I just mark it, and tuck it away, and keep climbing.
The iron-banded door. Callum's lockwork.
The buttress passage. And then the glamour, peeling back off the inner wall the way it peeled back going in—like breath wiped off a mirror—and we step through the gap I make into the narrow gap between the buildings, and the night air hits us, ordinary and cold and full of stars, the most normal thing I've felt in hours.
Helena's eyes close at the first open air. Just shut, the way you'd close them stepping out of a dark room into a bright one, except it's the dark she's stepping out of, and she's been in it since 1930.
We get her into Callister House through the kitchen door, and I feel the house notice.
It's a small thing. The cold shifts. The fox in the parlor, which I have stopped really seeing the way you stop seeing your own furniture, swivels its glass eyes off the empty room and onto the thing we're carrying.
Down the corridor the cat does the same, unhurried, the job is the job. Somewhere up on the second floor the raven turns on its brass stand to face the stairwell. Three dead animals, all at once, all aimed at the new warmth in the house.
"Felix." I keep my voice down. "Are they going to know?"
He shifts Helena's weight against his hip and is quiet a second, and the smile comes up crooked, higher on one side than the other, the half that doesn't quite make it flinching at how bad this could get.
"Not tonight," he says. "Not fast. That's the good news.
" He says it light. It isn't quite light.
"Breaking a binding that old leaves a hole, and sooner or later something's going to feel the hole where she used to be.
But it's a working a century deep, buried four floors down, and a thing like that doesn't come up all at once—it leaks.
Slow. We've got weeks before anyone starts to wonder, longer with the campus this empty.
" Whatever's under it stays under. "There's no clock on this one, just weeks of keeping her out of sight of every single thing in this house that reports home, for as long as it takes. "
Weeks, then. Not hours. Slow and mean. It settles into the same place all the rest of it has been settling all term, the pile I've stopped looking at directly, and I close my hand on the cut the map's edge left in my palm three nights ago, the one I keep reopening because the small pain is easier to hold than the big one.
We set Helena in the kitchen chair like she might break.
She doesn't break. She sits there in a dead grad student's borrowed life, ninety-six years lighter and a hundred years out of date, and she looks slowly around the warm bright ordinary kitchen: the kettle with opinions, the third-cabinet good one, the stale snickerdoodles still sitting on the counter where I left them like the world's saddest care package.
And then she looks at the fox.
She looks at it the way I looked at the building next door from the upstairs window, straight on, holding it, the way you look at a thing that thinks it's getting away with something. The fox holds its pose. Committed to the role.
"There's a chimera somewhere in this building," Helena says. Her voice is thin from a century of disuse and entirely, terribly present. "It eats what the animals collect."
Nobody moves.
"Did you know that?" she asks, and turns her not-blinking eyes on me. "All these years they've been watching you. Somebody has to clean the plate."