Chapter 11 Everly
I don't remember walking back to the dorm.
I remember the library stairs, cold stone under my palms. I remember the lobby doors, heavy and groaning. I remember the grey light hitting my face like a slap, and the way the shadows peeled off my skin and dissolved into the morning air, reluctant, like they didn't want to let go.
But the walk from the library to Bellamy Hall is gone. Erased. One second I'm standing in the pale dawn outside the library with my arms full of stolen books and my head full of horror, and the next I'm sitting on the floor of my dorm room surrounded by everything I found.
Printouts. Photocopies. Three books I smuggled past the ancient librarian by shoving them inside my bag under a hoodie, which I'm pretty sure counts as theft, and I don't care.
My notes cover the floor in a jagged semicircle around me, pages and pages of my own cramped handwriting that stopped being legible somewhere around four in the morning.
Grimoire Girls sorority—dissolved 1926.
Concordia Hall—condemned.
Helena Grimoire—vanished.
The matter has been handled.
The matter has been handled. I found that phrase eleven times in eleven different documents, always in the same clinical, final tone, like they were talking about a leaky pipe instead of an entire group of women who ceased to exist.
I'm crying. I don't know when that started either. The tears are just there, running down my face and dripping onto my notes, blurring the ink, and I can't stop them because every time I try to breathe it comes out as this awful, hitching sob that sounds like it's being ripped out of me.
I'm a grimoire.
I'm one of them. One of the women they wiped from history, from the buildings, from every record they could get their hands on. The girls who could hold all four disciplines at once—who were powerful enough that the entire institution decided they needed to disappear.
And I'm sitting on the floor of a room I share with a goth girl and her blood-magic spider, in a university run by the same people who made those women vanish, and I have no idea what to do.
The door opens.
"Jesus Christ."
Brittany stands in the doorway, keys in one hand, a coffee from the campus café in the other. She's wearing an oversized Bauhaus t-shirt and the same black jeans she wore yesterday, and her eyeliner is smudged in a way that could be intentional or could mean she didn't sleep either.
She takes in the scene. Me on the floor, blotchy and disgusting, surrounded by a paper crime scene. The stolen library books. The cracked channeling sphere sitting on my desk, pulsing its four impossible colors in the early light.
"What happened?" She steps inside, closes the door. Doesn't rush to me, doesn't do the concerned-friend thing. Just leans against the doorframe and waits.
I try to say it. The word. Grimoire. But what comes out instead is a fresh wave of sobbing so ugly that Herbert emerges from under Brittany's bed, picks his way across the floor, and climbs onto my knee like he's trying to provide emotional support.
"Okay." Brittany sets her coffee on her desk. Sits on the edge of her bed, across from me, the way she did the night I cried about the notes. Except this time she doesn't bring out gummy worms or whiskey. She just sits there and lets me fall apart.
It takes a while. The crying has to run its course, and it's the kind that comes in waves—every time I think I'm done, I look at my notes and another one hits me.
Brittany doesn't tell me to calm down. Doesn't ask again.
Just waits, with the patience of someone who's familiar with the kind of crying that can't be reasoned with.
Finally, when the sobs have downgraded to hiccups and my face feels like a swollen, salty disaster, I push the printouts toward her.
"Read it."
She picks up the first page. Then the second. I watch her eyes move down the text, watch the crease form between her eyebrows, watch her go very still.
"The Grimoire Girls," she reads. "All four disciplines. Simultaneously." She looks up at me. "This is what you are?"
"I think so." My voice is wrecked. "The sphere that cracked in Warrick's class—it cycled through all four. The shadow spell in the Mors demonstration went into me, Brittany. Callum's shadows. Atlas's lightning. I absorbed them. Like I was—like they were mine."
She's quiet for a long time, reading through the rest of my notes. Herbert settles more firmly onto my knee, his tiny legs tucked underneath him.
"So you're basically a nuclear warhead in a sundress."
A laugh escapes me. Ugly and wet and a little hysterical. "That's one way to put it."
"I'm serious. If you can drain magic from all four disciplines—" She taps one of the pages.
"That's why they're scared. That's why Callum's been reporting to mommy dearest after every single incident, that's why Atlas looks at you like you're going to detonate.
You're not just a mage who doesn't fit the system. You're someone who could break it."
"They destroyed the sorority, Brittany. They condemned the building. Every grimoire after 1926 just—" I swallow hard. "Gone. The records say 'dispersed' or 'handled' and then nothing. No transfers. No deaths on file. Just—nothing."
"Well, that's not ominous at all."
"Are you going to take this seriously?"
"I am taking it seriously. I'm taking it so seriously that my first question is: are you going to explode?"
I blink. "What?"
"Explode. Detonate. Go nuclear. Because if you're sitting here telling me you're some kind of magical sponge who absorbs everyone's power, I need to know if there's a limit. And I need to know what happens when you hit it."
"I don't know."
"Great." She crosses her arms. "If you're going to detonate, at least give me a heads up so I can evacuate first. I have a very nice record collection that I'd prefer not to lose to a magical explosion."
I stare at her. She stares back. Herbert stares at both of us.
The laugh that comes out of me this time is still broken, but it's real. Brittany's mouth twitches.
"So." She holds up the notes. "Two absorptions confirmed. Shadow and storm. You pulled death magic out of a spiraling spell in Ossium Hall and lightning out of the actual sky. Both times it went into you and didn't come back out."
"Yes."
"And both times, the guys responsible looked like they were going to shit themselves."
"Pretty much."
"But you haven't tested blood magic."
Something cold slides through my stomach. "No."
"And you haven't tested chaos magic."
"No."
Brittany looks at me with an expression I can't read. Then she looks at Herbert on my knee. Then she looks under her bed, at the darkness where Herbert lives, where her blood-magic familiar goes when he's not perched on me like a concerned therapist.
"Do you want to?"
My pulse kicks. "Brittany—"
"I'm a failing Sanguis student with a spider familiar and academic probation.
I'm not exactly working with top-tier magic here.
" She holds out her hand, and Herbert crawls off my knee and across the floor toward her.
"If you really are a grimoire, blood magic should react to you the same way shadow and storm did. And if it doesn't—"
"Then I'm not a grimoire and this is all a terrible mistake."
"Either way, at least we'd know."
I think about the shadow spell pouring into me like ice water. The lightning flooding my veins like liquid fire. Both of them terrifying, both of them fitting into me like keys into locks I didn't know I had.
"Okay," I say. "Do it."
* * *
Brittany picks up Herbert and cradles him in her palm. He sits there, calm and patient, eight legs arranged neatly. She closes her eyes and I watch her concentrate, watch the faint furrow between her brows.
Herbert begins to glow.
It's subtle at first—a faint crimson light pulsing from his body, like a heartbeat made visible.
Brittany's blood magic flowing through him, the connection she's maintained since she first made him her familiar.
Her hand trembles slightly, the way it always does when she uses magic, and I wonder again why a discipline that's supposed to be hers makes her look like it's making her sick.
"Touch him," she says.
I hesitate. The crimson glow pulses, warm and alive. Herbert's beady eyes are fixed on me.
I reach out. My hand is shaking.
The tip of my index finger brushes Herbert's back.
The sensation is nothing like shadow, nothing like storm. Those were elemental—cold and heat, darkness and electricity, forces of nature pouring into me. This is different. This is intimate.
Warmth floods through the point of contact and spreads up my arm, through my chest, into the space behind my ribs where the other magics have settled.
But it's not just warmth. It's a pulse. A heartbeat that isn't mine, thrumming against my own in a rhythm that's close but not quite synchronized.
I can feel Brittany in it—not her thoughts, not her emotions, but her life.
The blood moving through her veins, the steady drum of her heart, the quiet hum of every living cell in her body.
It's like pressing my ear to someone's chest and hearing the whole machinery of them, every valve and chamber and rush of blood.
And underneath that, something deeper. The magic itself. Red and warm and alive, sliding into me like honey into a jar, filling spaces I didn't know were empty.
Herbert goes still under my finger. The crimson glow flickers, dims—
I yank my hand back.
Herbert skitters off Brittany's palm and disappears under the bed so fast he's a brown blur. Unharmed, but clearly over it.
Brittany is staring at me. Her face has gone pale under her dark lipstick.
"That," she says, "felt like someone reached into my chest and squeezed."
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. It wasn't—painful, exactly. Just." She flexes her hand, the one Herbert was sitting on. "Weird. Like you were pulling something out of me through a straw."
I look down at my own hands. They look the same as always. No crimson glow, no visible sign that anything happened. But inside me, in that space behind my ribs where the shadows settled cold and the lightning settled electric, something new is humming. Warm. Alive. Beating in time with my heart.
Three disciplines.
Shadow. Storm. Blood.
One left.
"You're a grimoire," Brittany says quietly. Not a question.
"Yeah." The word comes out barely above a whisper. "I'm a grimoire."
Saying it out loud makes it real in a way the research didn't. A way the absorptions didn't, because I could explain those away—adrenaline, coincidence, some weird fluke of being undifferentiated.
But this was deliberate. Controlled. Brittany channeled blood magic through her familiar and I pulled it into myself as easily as breathing.
There's no explaining that away.
"They're scared of me," I say. "That's why they're doing all of this. The bullying, the testing, all of it—they know what I am, or they suspect it, and they're scared."
"Obviously."
"Doesn't make it right."
"No." Her dark eyes hold mine. "It doesn't."
We sit there for a while. Brittany on her bed, me on the floor, the notes spread between us like evidence at a crime scene. The morning light is getting stronger through the window, turning the room gold, and somewhere outside a bird is singing like nothing is wrong.
"Brittany?"
"What."
"You're the first person who knows and didn't run."
She doesn't say anything for a moment. Then she stands, picks up her coffee from the desk, takes a sip, and makes a face. "It's cold."
"Brittany."
"Don't make it weird." She heads for the door. "I'm getting a fresh one. If you want something, text me. And clean up this mess—if anyone sees these notes, you're dead. Like, actually dead, not the regular Nyxhaven kind of social death."
The door clicks shut behind her.
I sit on the floor with the echo of three different magics pulsing inside me and a spider hiding under the bed and a roommate who knows my secret and went to get coffee about it, and I think: okay. One person. That's one more than I had an hour ago.
Then I start gathering the notes, because she's right. If anyone sees these—if Callum sees these, if his mother finds out I know—
I shove everything into my bag. The books go under my mattress. The photocopies go into a folder that I label Magical History 201: Study Notes in case anyone goes through my things.
When Brittany comes back with two coffees—one black, one with so much cream and sugar it's barely coffee, which she hands to me without comment—the floor is clean and my face is washed and the only evidence of my breakdown is the puffiness around my eyes.
"There's something else," I say, wrapping my hands around the warm cup.
"Of course there is."
"Concordia Hall. The old Grimoire Girls headquarters. It's still on campus—condemned, boarded up, but it's there. I saw it on the old maps." I take a sip. The coffee is sweet and perfect and I don't question how she knew how I take it. "If there are answers anywhere, they're in that building."
"You want to break into a condemned building."
"I want to know what happened to the women who were like me."
Brittany looks at me for a long moment. Takes a drink of her black coffee.
"Not tonight," she says finally. "You look like roadkill and you haven't slept. Get some rest. We'll figure it out."
We'll. Not you'll.
I don't point it out. I've learned by now that drawing attention to Brittany's moments of kindness makes them stop.
I crawl into bed with my shoes still on. The shadows, the lightning, the blood magic—they settle inside me like three cats finding their spots, each one distinct, each one taking up space in a way that feels permanent.
I fall asleep with the word grimoire sitting in my chest like a second heartbeat.
The last thing I think before the exhaustion drags me under is: Callum already knows. His mother already knows. They've been watching me absorb their magic and they haven't stopped me.
They're not trying to prevent it.
They're counting on it.
The question isn't what I am. The question is what they're waiting for me to become.