41. Everly #2
"Then anybody with my excellent and underappreciated gifts would.
" The card resumes its walk. The smile stays easy, aimed right at me, but his eyes have already gone somewhere else, three branches down, watching something I'm not allowed to see.
I know that look now. Ten weeks in a car taught me to read where the smile ends.
"I'm not a martyr, Everly. I'm a card counter.
There's a difference and the difference is that I always win. "
"You took a spell for me outside Flagstaff."
"And it was a great time." He finally looks up, and for one whole second there's nothing behind his eyes at all, the way there's nothing behind a window when the lights in the room are off, and then he turns the lights back on for my benefit because he always does.
"Stop looking at me like that. You'll make me tip my hand. "
So I don't say the rest. I cross to his side of the table instead and put my hand over his free one, card and all, the way I wanted to in Catalina's office and couldn't, with the warden there and the mark still settling.
He goes still under my hand. Lets me. For one breath, the outside of him and the inside of him match, and I feel the bond between us go bright and steady and full, no toll being paid, nothing chasing us, no day spent watching me die.
"There," I say. "That's all I wanted."
"Liar," he says fondly. But he turns his hand over and laces his fingers through mine and doesn't pick the card back up, which from Felix is a confession.
And then there's Brittany, who has been losing a war with the stove this entire time and narrating none of it, which is its own kind of heroism.
It catches on the third try. It always catches on the third try.
The flame goes up blue and she sets the dented kettle on it and steps back and surveys the room—all six of us drifting into the kitchen now, drawn by coffee and gray light and the simple animal need to be in the same room as the people who didn't die—and she says, in the flattest voice in the entire western hemisphere:
"This building has roughly four hauntings per square foot, which is honestly under code for gothic revival. The realtor undersold it."
And we laugh. All of us. Real and stupid and too loud for the hour, Atlas's bark and Ren's surprised quiet one and Callum's, which I've heard maybe four times total, and Felix laughing at the under code like it personally delighted him, and me with my hand still in Felix's and my other arm getting hooked by Atlas, and Brittany not laughing at all, just watching us laugh with the faint satisfaction of a woman who built a small fire on purpose and watched it catch.
This is it. This is the whole of what we have.
No standing, no school, no name, no protection—a house that tolerates us and a wall at the bottom of the world we know now is only a wall.
Six people who shouldn't be alive sitting in a crooked stripe of morning, laughing, defiant, exactly where we mean to be.
I think: we made it.
I let myself think it—one unguarded second of joy, and later, when I take this morning apart looking for what I did wrong, that second is all I'm going to find.
Because I know this building's one unbreakable rule.
It's the first thing it ever taught me: Concordia opens its door for no one.
Not the wardens. Not anyone Catalina ever sent.
Only me. It has only ever opened for me.
The glamour on this place is the strongest ward I've ever stood inside.
It doesn't hide the building. It hides the idea of the building—slides you past it, makes your eye skip, makes the address come up wrong in your own memory.
Nothing gets in. Nothing finds us here. It's grimoire ground, older than the wardens and deaf to their working, and there's an irony in it I'll never stop tasting: the place Catalina meant to walk me down in turned out to be the one ground left that keeps the six of us.
And in the middle of the laughter, the concealment thins.
I feel it before I understand it—a give in the air at the front of the house, a loosening, the penny taste ghosting up the back of my tongue, faint, wrong.
The ward thinning the way it only ever thins for me, because I'm the one thing it was built around.
The laughter is still going. Nobody else has felt it yet. I'm already turning toward the hall.
The door that opens for no one opens.
Nell is standing in it.
Nell, who ran. Nell, who went out past the gate the night of the harvest with nothing but a head start, who I told to go, who should be a hundred miles gone by now and getting farther, who has no glamour and no grimoire ground and nothing in the world that should let her stand within sight of this place, let alone cross a threshold the strongest ward I know was holding shut.
She's smiling.
The laughter behind me dies in pieces. I hear Atlas go still. I hear Felix's chair scrape, just an inch, just enough.
"Nell," I say.
And her eyes are wrong.
It's the smallest thing and it's everything.
Her eyes are too deep. The dark in them goes down and down, past where a person ends, a stairwell with no bottom, the pupil opening like a door behind a door behind a door.
She's still smiling Nell's smile with Nell's mouth in Nell's face, and behind it something is looking out at me that has never once been a girl.
I know that dark. I tasted it at the bottom of the world. I left it behind a wall I was told would hold.
"Everly," she says—and the voice isn't only hers.
There's hers, light and a little breathless, the way she always sounded.
And there's another one under it, layered, older, coming up from the place the first voice goes down into, the two of them speaking the same word a half-beat out of true so it doubles in the air.
"It let me find you," she says.
And I understand, all at once, in the cold gray honest light, the way you only ever understand the worst things—too late and all at once—that our one safe ground, the only door in the world that opens for no one, just opened for the thing the Well left inside a girl.
Which means it was never ours at all.