Chapter 12 Everly
I don't know who talked.
Maybe it was the professors. They've been watching me since the sphere cracked in Warrick's class, writing things down in the margins of their notes, exchanging glances over my head when they think I'm not paying attention.
Maybe one of them said something to a colleague, who said something to a student, who said something to the entire campus.
Maybe it was the students who saw me absorb Callum's shadow spell in Ossium Hall. Or the ones who watched me pull lightning out of the sky when Atlas lost control in the quad. There were witnesses both times—dozens of them—and I was stupid enough to think they'd chalk it up to a fluke.
Or maybe Callum told them. Maybe his mother did. Maybe the word came from the top down, a quiet whisper through the administration that trickled into the fraternities and sororities and dining hall conversations until everyone knew.
However it happened, by Thursday, the entire campus is afraid of me.
It doesn't happen all at once. It starts small—a shift I almost miss because I'm so used to being hated that I don't immediately recognize the difference between contempt and fear.
Monday: the girl who sits behind me in Magical Theory moves to the last row. Normal. People have been avoiding me for weeks. But when I glance back, she's not scrolling on her phone or whispering to a friend. She's watching me. Both hands flat on the desk, spine rigid, like she's ready to bolt.
Tuesday: I reach for a book in the library and the Sanguis student next to me flinches so hard she drops her entire stack. Papers scatter across the floor and she doesn't pick them up. Just backs away with her hands half-raised, palms out, like I'm a dog she isn't sure about.
"Sorry," I say automatically, because what else do you say when someone treats you like a threat. "I was just getting a book."
She doesn't answer. Leaves her papers on the floor and walks away fast, her heels clicking down the aisle like a countdown.
Wednesday: the dining hall goes quiet when I walk in.
Not gradually. Not the normal dip in conversation that happens when anyone enters a room.
This is immediate—a blanket of silence dropping over a hundred people at once, forks pausing midair, heads turning.
I stand in the doorway with my tray and feel every single pair of eyes on me, and for the first time it's not the cold disgust I've been getting since I arrived.
It's fear. Real, animal fear, the kind that makes the hairs on your arms stand up and your body tell you to run.
They're afraid of me.
I sit down at my usual empty table. The conversations resume around me, quieter than before, studded with words I can almost catch. Grimoire. Absorb. Dangerous. The table nearest mine gets up and moves to the other side of the room.
I eat my lukewarm pasta and pretend my hands aren't shaking.
By Thursday, it's not subtle anymore. People press against walls when I walk through hallways, leaving a clear lane around me like I'm radioactive.
No one makes eye contact. No one speaks to me.
The notes under my door have stopped—Go home requires a kind of hostility that's been replaced by something worse.
The notes said we don't want you here. The silence says we're scared of what you'll do if we make you angry.
I didn't know it was possible to miss being bullied. But at least when they were cruel, they acknowledged I existed. At least the cruelty was a relationship—ugly, one-sided, but a relationship. Now I'm something they can't even look at.
"Well," Brittany says on Thursday night, watching me stare at the wall. "At least they stopped leaving notes."
"They won't even sit near me."
"To be fair, they never sat near you."
"It's different and you know it."
She doesn't argue. Herbert crawls onto my pillow and sits there, beady eyes fixed on my face in what I've come to recognize as his version of moral support.
"Do you know how they found out?" I ask.
"Doesn't matter. This place runs on gossip and hierarchy. Once the presidents started losing their shit about you, it was only a matter of time before everyone else caught on." She turns a page of her textbook. "The question isn't how they found out. The question is what happens now."
I don't have an answer for that.
What happens now is the library.
Friday evening. I'm in the restricted history section again, because the restricted history section is the only place on campus where I can pretend things are normal.
The screaming books have gotten used to me by now—they still shriek if I open them wrong, but it's more of a tired wheeze than the full-throated howl they used to give.
Even the ancient librarian has started leaving out reference materials she thinks I might need, stacked on the end of my usual table without comment.
I'm reading about the Schism when I feel them.
Not hear. Feel. The cold prickle of shadow magic and the sharp static of storm energy, mixing together in the air like oil and water—distinct, clashing, unmistakable.
Atlas and Felix are standing at the end of my aisle.
Atlas takes up most of the space, broad shoulders blocking the exit, arms crossed over his midnight-blue jacket.
His expression is the one I've come to know well—hard jaw, flat eyes, thunder barely leashed.
Felix is leaning against the shelf beside him, but the easy slouch is wrong.
Forced. His cards are in his hands but he's not shuffling them.
Just holding them, still, which is how I know this is serious.
"You need to leave," Atlas says.
No preamble. No pretense. Just the words, landing in the quiet library like stones dropped into water.
I close my book. Slowly. "Excuse me?"
"Leave. Nyxhaven. Before you hurt someone."
"I haven't hurt anyone."
"Yet." Felix. His voice is flat in a way I've never heard from him—none of the warmth, none of the teasing. "But you will. It's what grimoires do."
The word hits me in the chest. Grimoires. He says it like it's a diagnosis. Like it's a sentence.
"You don't know what I'll do." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Neither of you do."
"We know what you are," Atlas says. The overhead lights flicker.
Thunder rumbles somewhere outside, low and distant, responding to his mood the way it always does.
"We've seen what you can do. You pulled shadow magic out of a death spell.
You pulled my lightning out of the fucking sky.
" He steps closer and the static in the air intensifies, making the fine hairs on my arms stand up.
"You're a walking bomb. And every day you stay here, the clock ticks closer to zero. "
"That's not—"
"How do you know?" Felix cuts in. He's pushed off the shelf now, standing beside Atlas, and his green eyes are sharp in a way I haven't seen before.
Not calculating—scared. "How do you know what happens when a grimoire absorbs too much?
You don't. Nobody does, because the last ones either lost control or disappeared.
Those are the options, Everly. Explosion or erasure. Pick one."
My throat is tight. I want to argue, to throw back some cutting response that proves I'm not afraid, but the truth is I am afraid. I'm terrified. Because Felix isn't wrong. I don't know what happens at the end of this. I don't know what my limit is or if I even have one.
But I'm not leaving. I'm not running away from the only place that might have answers because two boys who've spent weeks making my life hell have decided I'm too dangerous to tolerate.
"I'm not going anywhere," I say. "If you want me gone, you'll have to—"
"That's enough."
The voice comes from behind them. Cold, precise, and carrying the kind of authority that doesn't need to be loud.
Callum Bolingbroke steps out of the shadows at the end of the aisle like he was born there.
Which, given his discipline, he might have been.
Shadows pool around his feet, darker than the dim library lighting accounts for, spreading across the floor in tendrils that make the air go several degrees colder.
Atlas turns on him. "Stay out of this, Bolingbroke. You said yourself she's dangerous—"
"I said," Callum repeats, and the shadows at his feet climb the bookshelves on either side, "that's enough."
The temperature drops. Not metaphorically—I can see my breath for a second, a thin white puff in the air between us. Felix's cards frost over in his hands and he grimaces, tucking them into his jacket.
Atlas holds Callum's stare for a long moment. Lightning crackles between his knuckles, static answering shadow, two fraternity presidents squaring off in a library aisle over a girl they both apparently want gone.
Then Atlas looks away.
Of course he does. Because Callum is a Bolingbroke, and that name carries a weight at Nyxhaven that even storm magic can't match.
"This isn't over," Atlas says. He's talking to me, not Callum, and the look in his eyes is something I can't read—anger and fear and something else, something that almost looks like grief.
He turns and walks out. Felix follows after a beat, pausing just long enough to look back at me with an expression that's worse than Atlas's fury. It's pity.
"Be careful," he says quietly. "With all of it."
Then he's gone, and it's just me and Callum Bolingbroke in the restricted history section, surrounded by shadows and screaming books.
He doesn't say anything. Just stands there, shadows receding slowly from the shelves, and looks at me with that mask of his—perfect composure, ice-blue eyes revealing nothing.
"Thank you," I say, because my mother raised me with manners even if this place is doing its best to beat them out of me.
"Don't." He turns toward the exit. "Come with me."
It's not a request. But I gather my things anyway—notebook, stolen books shoved back into my bag—and follow him, because the alternative is staying in the library alone waiting for Atlas and Felix to come back with reinforcements.
Callum walks fast. Long strides, perfect posture, hands clasped behind his back like he's taking a stroll through a museum instead of escorting a grimoire through a building full of people who want her gone.
I have to half-jog to keep up, my bag banging against my hip, and he doesn't slow down.
Doesn't look back. Just walks, and the shadows peel away from the walls as he passes, clearing a path that no one is around to see.
Through the stacks. Down the stairs. Past the circulation desk where the ancient librarian watches us go with an expression that might be concern or might just be indigestion.
Out through the heavy front doors and into the late afternoon, where the sky is grey and low and the air smells like cold stone and impending rain.
He stops on the library steps. I stop beside him, breathing harder than I should be from the pace.
"Why did you do that?" I ask.
He stares straight ahead, jaw tight. The shadows at his feet have gone still, barely moving.
"Don't mistake practicality for kindness, Miss Grey."
"Then what was it?"
His jaw works. For a moment I think he's going to walk away—that's his move, the Callum Bolingbroke special, deliver something devastating and leave before you can respond. But he stays. Eyes on the quad, where students are crossing in clusters, giving us a wide berth.
"Mob violence is messy," he says. "It draws attention. Creates problems that are difficult to manage afterward." His voice is clipped, clinical. "There are better ways to handle situations."
"Handle." The word lands wrong and we both feel it. The matter has been handled. Eleven documents. One phrase. An entire bloodline, gone. "Interesting word choice."
Something shifts in his face. Not much—the crack is small, barely visible, like a hairline fracture in marble. But I see it.
"Go back to your room, Miss Grey. Lock your door. Stay there until this settles."
"And if it doesn't settle?"
He looks at me then. Really looks, not through me or past me or at me like I'm a problem to be catalogued and filed. For half a second, something flickers behind the ice—not warmth, exactly, but a recognition. Like he's seeing me as a person for the first time and it's costing him something.
"Then we'll deal with it," he says.
We'll.
Before I can ask what that means—before I can ask who we includes, or whether I'm part of it, or whether this is another move in whatever game he's playing with his mother and the Administration—he's gone.
Down the steps, across the quad, swallowed by the grey afternoon like the shadows swallowed the library shelves.
I stand on the library steps with my bag full of stolen books and three different magics humming behind my ribs and try to figure out what just happened.
Protection? Control? Strategy?
With Callum Bolingbroke, it could be all three. It could be none. It could be something he doesn't have a word for yet, something that cracks the mask without his permission and makes him say we when he means I.
I go back to my room. I lock the door.
But I don't stop thinking about the way his face cracked when I said handle.
I don't stop thinking about it for a long time.