Chapter 14 Everly
The sphere won't cooperate.
I've been sitting on my bed for forty minutes, holding it in both hands, trying to do what Warrick taught us in the first week of Magical Theory: focus your intention, feel for the channel, let the magic find its shape. Easy, she'd said. Natural. Like breathing.
My breathing is fine. The sphere is not.
It pulses in my palms—all four colors cycling through the cracked glass in a slow, restless rotation.
Shadow-dark, storm-blue, blood-red, chaos-purple.
Round and round, never settling, never choosing.
The crack that appeared during my first demonstration has gotten wider since the absorptions started.
I can feel it under my thumb, a jagged seam running from pole to pole, and sometimes when the colors shift I swear the glass flexes, like something inside is pressing outward.
I try to push the shadow magic first. It's the oldest—the one that's been inside me longest, settled behind my ribs like a cold stone since the Mors demonstration. I close my eyes, reach for it, try to guide it into the sphere the way Warrick showed us.
The shadow moves. I feel it shift inside me, liquid and dark, sliding toward my hands. The sphere goes black for a second—pure, deep, lightless black—and then the crack widens with a sound like ice breaking and the shadow snaps back into my chest so hard I gasp.
"Shit."
I open my eyes. The crack is wider now. Not by much, but enough that I can see it without squinting. The colors resume their rotation, unbothered by my failed attempt, and the sphere hums in my hands with a vibration that feels almost smug.
"You're a useless piece of glass, you know that?"
The sphere pulses purple, then gold, which is a color it's never shown before. I stare at it. The gold fades. Back to the usual four.
"Great. Now you're showing off."
I set it on my desk and lean back against the wall.
Brittany is at the library—she's been spending more time there since I told her about Concordia Hall, pulling old campus maps and maintenance records that she thinks might show us how to get inside.
Herbert is with her, tucked into the front pocket of her jacket, because apparently blood-magic spiders make excellent research assistants.
Which leaves me alone in the room with a broken sphere and a growing list of things I can't control.
I pull out my notebook and flip to the section I've been adding to all week.
It started as research notes—fragments from the restricted section, names and dates and the phrase the matter has been handled written so many times it's lost all meaning.
But it's become something else. A map of everything I know and everything I don't, organized in the obsessive, color-coded way my brain works when it's trying not to panic.
What I know:
I'm a grimoire. I can absorb all four disciplines.
Shadow, storm, and blood confirmed—chaos untested.
The Grimoire Girls sorority was destroyed after the Schism of 1926.
Concordia Hall is condemned. Helena Grimoire vanished.
Cordelia "disappeared" in 1930. Every grimoire since has been "handled.
" Catalina Bolingbroke has been watching me since before I arrived.
Callum reports to her. The four presidents have been testing me on what might be her orders.
What I don't know:
What "handled" means. What Catalina wants. Why the grimoires disappeared. What happened to Helena and Cordelia. What happens to me if I absorb all four disciplines. Whether there's a limit. Whether I'll explode.
I stare at the second list for a long time. It's longer than the first. That's the problem.
I need air.
The campus at dusk is beautiful in the way that a graveyard is beautiful—all atmosphere and no comfort.
The old oaks that line the main paths are going orange and red, dropping leaves onto stone walkways that are older than the country.
The Gothic architecture catches the late light and throws long shadows across the quad, and somewhere a bell is tolling the hour in deep, resonant notes that vibrate in my teeth.
I'm supposed to be invisible. That was Brittany's advice after the dining hall incident: stay small, stay quiet, stop going to the library at hours when people can see you.
Good advice. Practical advice. The kind of advice I'm terrible at following, because staying small has never been something my body knows how to do.
But I try. I keep my head down, my charcoal blazer buttoned, my bright colors buried under layers of Nyxhaven-appropriate dark.
I take the long way around the quad, avoiding the clusters of students heading to the dining hall, skirting the edge of the Tempest practice fields where I can hear distant thunder and the crack of lightning against metal targets.
Atlas is probably out there. Training, or just existing, which for him is the same thing—his magic doesn't stop when he does.
Brittany told me that Tempest students are the worst sleepers on campus because their dreams call storms, and the more powerful you are, the worse it gets.
I think about Atlas standing alone in the quad during that storm, eyes blank, lightning pouring off him like sweat. Not attacking me. Just falling apart.
I don't know what to do with that. With any of them.
Callum, who dragged me to safety and then told me not to mistake it for kindness.
Who sought me out in the dark and cracked open for thirty seconds before his phone put him back together.
I keep replaying the moment his hand came up—the cold radiating off his fingers, the way my shadows reached for him—and I don't know what it means.
I don't know if he knows what it means. He told me to stop researching.
He told me his mother removes love like pulling bricks from a wall until the whole thing collapses.
And then he left, because she called, and he went.
Ren, who I still can't figure out. The healer who won't heal me.
The blood mage whose magic should scream at him to help when someone near him is bleeding, and who looked at me with twelve stitches in my arm and chose to walk away.
Brittany's words keep circling: he looked at you like you were a wound he couldn't close.
I don't know what that means either, but it sits in my stomach like a stone.
Every time I pass him on campus—in the hallways between classes, in the dining hall where he sits with his Sanguis students in their crimson and black—I feel it.
A pull. Not the cold prickle of Callum's shadows or the electric static of Atlas's storms, but something warmer.
Deeper. Like a thread connecting my pulse to his, barely perceptible unless I'm paying attention.
I'm always paying attention now.
I think it's the blood magic. The absorption from Herbert left something in me that responds to Sanguis energy the way the shadows respond to Mors and the lightning responds to Tempest. And Ren is the most powerful blood mage on campus.
When he's nearby, the warmth behind my ribs intensifies—not painfully, just noticeably, like standing near a fire you can't see.
He has to feel it too. Blood magic is about connection, Brittany said.
If I can sense him, he can almost certainly sense me.
Which means every time he walks past me without looking, every time he chooses not to acknowledge my existence, he's doing it while his magic is telling him exactly where I am and exactly what I'm feeling.
That's the cruelty of it. Not violence, not threats, not manipulation. Just a man who can feel your heartbeat refusing to meet your eyes.
I'm cutting through the eastern courtyard when I hear them.
The courtyard is one of the older parts of campus—a square of weathered stone flanked by covered walkways with arched pillars.
Ivy chokes the walls, and there are stone benches that look like they haven't been sat on since the Schism.
At this hour, with most students at dinner, it's supposed to be empty.
It's not.
The voices carry in the cold air, bouncing off the stone in a way that makes them sharp and clear even from twenty feet away. I freeze behind one of the pillars, one hand on the rough stone, my heart already hammering because I recognize both voices instantly.
"—can't be serious." Atlas. Tight, strained, the words bitten off like he's chewing through wire. "She's exactly like—"
"She's nothing like your mother." Ren. Sharp. Sharper than I've ever heard him—the quiet, gentle healer voice replaced by something with edges. "You need to stop saying that."
"You don't know that." Atlas's voice breaks on the words, not all at once but in pieces, a crack running through the middle of a sentence that started angry and ended somewhere else entirely.
"You don't know what she'll become. You don't—you didn't see it, Ren.
You read about it in some file. I was there. "
I press my back against the pillar. The stone is cold through my blazer. My breath is coming too fast and I force it to slow, force myself to be still, because every instinct I have is telling me that what I'm about to hear is something neither of them would say if they knew I was listening.
"I know you were there." Ren's voice has changed—still sharp, but there's something underneath it now.
Not softness, exactly. Restraint. The sound of someone choosing their words carefully because the wrong ones could break something.
"I know what it cost you. But she's not your mother.
She's a nineteen-year-old girl who didn't know magic existed six months ago, and you're treating her like she's already lost control. "
"Because she will." Flat. Certain. The sound of someone who's played this scenario out a thousand times and always reaches the same ending. "They always do. It's what grimoires—"
"You don't know that."