Chapter 15 Everly #2
It's different from the first time—in the quad, the absorption was sudden, violent, a bolt of lightning slamming into me all at once.
This is slower. A current flowing between two points, his body to mine, the storm magic inside me reaching for its source and pulling. Not hard. Not greedy. Just enough.
The lightning flows out of him like a sigh.
I feel it pour into the space behind my ribs where the other storm magic lives, warm and sharp and achingly familiar.
His lightning tastes different up close—not just ozone and heat but something underneath, something heavy and ancient, the accumulated charge of years of grief stored in a body that was never meant to hold this much.
His shoulders drop. The shaking slows. The bolts arcing off him sputter and fade, one by one, until the only lightning left is the natural kind—the storm overhead retreating, losing its anchor, dissolving into ordinary rain.
He stares at me.
The rage is gone. The mask is gone. What's left is something I don't have a name for—the expression of someone who's just been emptied out, everything pulled to the surface and poured away, and now there's nothing left but the bare, terrible relief of not carrying it anymore.
"You're just like her," he says.
"I'm not —"
"You are." He moves. Fast—not a step but a surge, his body closing the distance between us before I can react, and suddenly my back is against the stone wall of Fulmen Hall and he's pressed against me, hands braced on either side of my head, rain dripping off his face onto mine.
He's breathing hard. His chest against mine, his heartbeat slamming through both of us, wild and desperate.
I can feel the heat of him even through our soaked clothes—Atlas runs hot, storm mages always do, and right now he's burning.
His eyes are locked on mine from inches away and they're blue, so blue, washed clean by the rain and the crying he'll never admit to, and the look in them is the furthest thing from soft.
It's hunger. Grief-hunger. The desperate, irrational need to grab onto something living when everything else has been ripped away.
His forehead drops against mine. I feel his breath on my lips, ragged and uneven, and his hands are curled into fists against the wall and his whole body is shaking—not from cold, not from magic, from the effort of holding himself at this exact distance and no closer.
I don't move. Not toward him, not away. I stand there with my back against wet stone and a storm mage pinning me to a wall and I think: this isn't want. This is drowning. And I'm the closest thing to air.
His hips press forward—just barely, a fraction of an inch, his body moving without his brain's permission.
I feel the hard line of him against my stomach and my breath catches and his eyes go wide, startled by his own body, and for one second—one raw, terrified second—I think he's going to close the distance.
He shoves off the wall so hard the stone scrapes my back through my blazer.
Three feet between us. Then five. Then ten. He's backing away with his hands up like I'm the dangerous one, like I'm the storm, and his face is doing something complicated and awful—shame and grief and fury and something else, something that might be horror at himself.
"I won't watch that again." His voice is wrecked. Scraped down to nothing. "I can't."
"Atlas —"
"Stay away from me, Grey. I mean it. Whatever you are—whatever you're becoming—I can't —"
He turns. Walks into the rain, toward Fulmen Hall, his back rigid and his fists clenched at his sides and lightning flickering weakly around his knuckles like a dying fire.
He doesn't look back.
I slide down the wall and sit on the wet ground.
The rain has softened to a steady drizzle, the storm dispersing now that its source has walked away.
My clothes are soaked, my hands are shaking, and the lightning behind my ribs is humming with a charge that isn't mine—Atlas's grief, stored in my body like a recording, playing on repeat.
My back stings where the stone scraped it. My lips tingle where his breath touched them. My stomach is still warm where his body pressed against mine, and I hate myself a little for noticing that, for cataloguing the physical details of a man's breakdown like they're data points.
But I can't help it. The moment is burned into me—his forehead against mine, his heartbeat wild against my chest, the look in his eyes that said I know this ends badly and I can't stop wanting to be near you anyway.
Four fraternity presidents. Four different flavors of damage.
Callum, caged by a mother who taught him love is a transaction.
Atlas, broken by a mother whose magic killed everyone she touched.
And now I know why he looks at me the way he does—not because he hates me, but because every time he sees me he sees her.
The woman who tried to hold the lightning in and couldn't. The woman who said run and died making dinner on a Tuesday.
I absorb magic. His mother absorbed magic. In his story, this only ends one way.
I sit in the rain until I stop shaking. Then I get up, wring out my hair, and walk back to Bellamy Hall in the dark.
Brittany is still awake when I get in, sitting up in bed with her phone and a look that says she's been tracking the storm on a weather app and doing math on my likelihood of survival.
"You're alive," she observes.
"Barely." I peel off my soaked blazer and drop it on the floor. "Atlas's mother was a grimoire."
"You said that yesterday."
"Yesterday I heard the facts." I sit on my bed, dripping. "Tonight I heard what it was like to be seven years old and watch her die."
Brittany is quiet for a long time. Herbert crawls to the edge of her bed and watches me with his beady eyes.
"What did he do?" she asks.
I think about Atlas's body against mine. His forehead on my forehead. The way he shoved off the wall like I'd burned him.
"He told me to stay away from him."
"Are you going to?"
I pull a dry sweatshirt over my head. Crawl under my covers. The lightning inside me is still humming with his grief, and I don't know how to make it stop, and I don't know if I want to.
"I don't think it matters what I do," I say. "I don't think any of us get to choose how this ends."
Brittany turns off her lamp. In the dark, I hear Herbert scuttle across the floor and feel his small weight settle on my pillow, right next to my head, like a guard.
"Try to sleep," Brittany says.
I close my eyes. The tomatoes on the counter. His mother's face breaking. A seven-year-old boy sitting in a destroyed kitchen with his dead father for twenty minutes before anyone came.
I don't sleep for a long time.