31. Everly #2
The air goes flat. It happens in less than a second, the brightness drops out and the room feels like a room again, heavy and close and exactly as bad as it is.
It's only now, watching his hand go still, that I actually see what's in it.
His deck hasn't been only tarot in months, not since the cards themselves started running thin on him, dry of the shapes he needed.
He folded in an ordinary playing deck to fill the gaps.
Then, when even that ran short, he started inking cards of his own, plain black stock, his own cramped white symbols standing in for whatever the other two couldn't say.
I don't know when he started. I never asked.
I never looked closely enough to notice until right now, in the worst possible second, that what's fanned across his palm is three different kinds of card.
He's dealt from all three tonight. Every time before this, somewhere in that fan has been the card he wanted.
Not this time. The light goes out of his eyes—not the spark, the spark stays, the spark is for the rest of us—but underneath, there's nothing. His hand stills on the cards.
"Huh," he says, soft, conversational, to no one. "Long odds." His smile climbs to its usual height and stops. "Worse than I told you."
He never told me anything. He never does.
He just exhales and lets them take his wrists, and the cards spill out of his fingers across the stone: a tarot card facedown in the mess, a playing card beside it faceup on some black-suited king, one of his own inked cards skidding to a stop against my boot with a symbol on it I never learned to read.
Three decks. Not one right answer between them.
And Callum.
Callum doesn't gutter and doesn't bleed and doesn't run out of doors.
Callum gets held. The constructs come up out of the floor—the dark, the binding shapes—and I understand with a lurch in my gut that I'm watching his own family's work close around him.
The Bolingbroke legacy. The magic his bloodline made.
The great cold inheritance his mother spent his whole childhood teaching him to serve. It knows him. It was built to know him.
I reach for shadow last, the only discipline I haven't tried, some sliver of Mors cold enough to buy him the half-second I bought Nell.
I get as far as a chill at my own fingertips, one small cold thing with nowhere to go, before the constructs close around him whole.
A sliver was never going to out-cold a hundred years of purpose-built dark.
I know that even as I try. I try anyway.
He fights it. For one second he fights it, jaw set, shadow lashing out of him in a black arc—and the dark folds around him like it's glad to have him home, the whole chamber a few degrees colder for it, and holds. His face, when it locks down, is the coldest thing in a cold room.
He turns it toward the stairs, toward the woman he knows is coming, and says one word like a verdict.
"Mother."
Four times. Four times I found the door to something in myself and pushed, and four times it wasn't enough, and I don't have a fifth reach left in me for whatever's coming for me next.
That's the part that will sit in me longest, longer than the fear does: not that I couldn't save them, but that I tried, in full view of all of it, and failed each one of them one at a time where I could watch it happen.
She isn't there to hear it yet. That's almost the worst part.
Five of us came down. I count us the way I count everything when the truth is too big to pick up.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Helena.
Helena is not among the taken.
I find her in the half-second I have to find anything—Helena Grimoire at the edge of the red light, not fighting, not caught, not running for the stair the way I sent Nell.
She's going the wrong way. She's turned toward the dark at the very bottom of the Deep, where the Well throats down into something even the men never mapped, and a cold that has nothing to do with the fight crawls up the back of my neck.
Why isn't she running with us? Why is she going down?
Her eyes find mine across the chamber. One look, the way Nell looked at me—except Nell's was terror, and this is the opposite of terror.
This is a woman who already knows how the night ends and made her peace with it years ago.
She doesn't look afraid. She doesn't look caught.
She looks sorry, and that's so much worse, and I will spend a long time learning why.
"Helena—" I don't even know what I'm asking.
She doesn't answer. The dark at the bottom of the Deep takes her—not Catalina's dark, her own, a step she chose—sideways into the black where the Well drops past where anyone has gone.
One breath she's there. The next there's only the place she was standing, and the red light folding into it like she was never standing in it at all.
Then hands close on my arms.
I've got nothing left to fight with. I reach for a fifth thing anyway, out of nothing but stubbornness, some last scraped-out corner of any discipline at all—and there isn't one.
The grimoire slams shut against my chest—not by my hand, by theirs—and what's left of the chord whips out of me all at once, and I go down between two wardens with my legs gone to water and my own blood in my mouth.
The cold rushes in to fill every place the magic was.
I want to cry and I can't. There isn't water enough left in me for it. My eyes just burn, dry and open, while everything else in me finally, finally stops.
I have never been this empty. I didn't know I could be.
They have us. All of us. They have me.
And here is the thing we feared all year.
We braced for it from the morning the wardens carved the marks into the men's hands, from the first burn of blood magic, from Catalina at her window saying don't think of it as punishment, think of it as accountability.
We knew what accountability meant. It meant this.
It meant getting caught. And getting caught meant separation.
That's the punishment we imagined. I imagined it so many nights I could draw it: expulsion papers, the marks drawn tight, the four of them scattered to the far ends of campus and me alone at Callister House with the thread between us stretched to agony across the distance.
After a year of stealing hours against the marks, of counting the sanctioned minutes, of Ren telling me they'll know when I reach for you—after all of it, the worst we let ourselves picture was being pulled apart.
They march us up out of the Deep. Through the Hollows, where the cold draw of the Well finally slackens low in my belly and the air starts tasting like wet stone and old candle smoke, where the dead light of the wardens' lanterns crawls over carvings I'm too drained to read.
Up past the Sepulchre. Past the long shelves of the Reliquary, where the founders kept whatever the founders thought worth keeping behind glass gone green at the seams.
The house lets us pass. That's the wrongness I keep coming back to.
Concordia Hall has fought us for the secret of itself all year, and tonight it simply opens, level after level, like it's been waiting to be walked through in exactly this direction by exactly these people.
It swallows us up its own throat the same unhurried way it's swallowed everyone who ever came down these stairs before us.
It has all the patience a hundred years of hunger buys.
The men don't speak now. Atlas's jaw is a clenched line. Ren can barely keep his feet, and every time he stumbles the thread between us goes thin and cold and I want to put my hands on him and can't. Felix is grinning at the ceiling like it owes him money. Callum walks like he's escorting them.
And I think: separation. I think: they'll send them away from me.
And underneath the terror there's something almost like bracing for a pain I understand, because separation still lets you feel each other across the distance.
Separation is the thread pulled thin, but the thread holding.
I've lived inside that thread all year. Even stretched to screaming, it would still be there.
It would have been mercy.
I know that now. I didn't know it on the stairs.
We come up into the gray light before dawn, into a hallway I half recognize, and they don't take the men one way and me the other.
They don't pull us apart at all. They keep us together, the five of us, herded down a corridor I know, toward a door I know, and the wrongness of it goes cold in my chest like a stone dropped down a well, because being kept together is not the plan. Being kept together was never the plan.
Catalina is waiting.
She doesn't look at her son, who her own legacy dragged down. She doesn't look at the others. She looks at me, the way you look at the one thing in a room that matters, and her face does something almost gentle, which is the most frightening thing it has done all year.
"You're wondering," she says, "why I haven't separated you."
I don't give her my face. I learned that this year. I keep my chin up and my mouth shut and I make her say it.
"Because I don't need you apart, Everly.
" She says my name like she owns the vowels.
"I need you whole. And then I need you willing.
Pull these four away from you, and all I'd have is a girl who fights me—and a thing that fights doesn't walk down to the Well on its own two feet.
" Her smile is the worst kind. Patient. "I need you to want to.
And I happen to know exactly how that's made. "
The cold reaches all the way down.
She turns to the warden at the door, and she doesn't raise her voice. She never has to.
"Give them to Wheeler."