Chapter 16 Everly
Three days after the storm on the hill, I still have Atlas's grief humming in my bones.
It's not like the other magics inside me. The shadow magic settled cold and quiet, a stone behind my ribs. The first round of storm magic—the bolt I took in the quad—was sharp and electric, a current I learned to carry. The blood magic from Herbert was warm, intimate, a second heartbeat.
But the lightning I pulled from Atlas feels different.
Heavier. It sits in the same space as the first absorption, but it's layered with something that doesn't feel like magic at all.
It feels like memory. Sometimes, at the edge of sleep, I catch flashes—tomatoes on a counter, a woman's hand dropping a knife, the word run—and I jolt awake with my heart pounding and the taste of ozone in my mouth.
His grief. Stored in me alongside the lightning. And I don't know how to put it down.
I haven't seen Atlas since that night. He hasn't been in the dining hall, hasn't shown up at Tempest practice, hasn't crossed the quad where I'd normally feel his storms prickling at the edge of my awareness.
Miranda Voss—his inner circle, the one who went too hard in combat training—has been leading Tempest activities in his place.
When I asked a Tempest girl where he was, she looked at me like I'd asked about a funeral.
Callum I've seen, but only from a distance.
Crossing the quad in his silver and white, phone in hand, posture perfect.
He doesn't look at me. Not once, not even the cool, assessing glances I'd gotten used to.
Whatever opened between us in that classroom—the cracked mask, the hand that almost touched me—he's sealed it shut.
Boarded it up like Concordia Hall: condemned, off-limits, pretend it was never there.
Ren is the same as always. Quiet. Present.
Impossible to read. I feel him before I see him now—the blood magic responding to his proximity, a warm pulse that picks up whenever he enters a room.
He never acknowledges it. Never meets my eyes.
But twice this week I've caught him watching me from across the dining hall, and when our eyes met he didn't look away immediately the way he used to.
He held my gaze for a second—just one—before turning back to his plate.
I don't know what any of it means. Two presidents have cracked open in front of me and I still don't understand what I'm looking at.
Is it guilt? Fear? Something they don't have names for?
Or is it another layer of the same game—make the grimoire feel confused and off-balance so she doesn't see what's coming?
I don't know. I hate not knowing. And I really hate that a small, stupid, traitorous part of me is starting to care about the answer.
Wednesday. Warrick's Magical Theory class.
I'm trying to pay attention—she's lecturing on fixed channeling theory, the theory that magical energy retains characteristics of its source, which would explain why Atlas's lightning feels different from the bolt I absorbed in the quad—but my mind keeps drifting.
To Concordia Hall, which Brittany and I still haven't broken into because she said we need to wait for a night when campus security does their monthly sweep of the eastern grounds, which leaves the central buildings unwatched for about ninety minutes.
To the sphere on my desk, which showed gold for three seconds last week and hasn't done it since.
To the phrase the matter has been handled and the eleven documents and the women who disappeared without a trace.
After class, Warrick stops me.
"Miss Grey. A moment."
The other students file out, giving me the wide berth that's become standard. I wait by her desk while she arranges her notes with the precise, unhurried movements of someone who has been teaching for longer than most of these students have been alive.
"You've been tired," she says. Not a question.
"I haven't been sleeping well."
"No. I imagine not." She looks at me over her glasses—grey eyes, sharp, missing nothing. "I want you to know that whatever happens in the coming days, my classroom remains a neutral space. Do you understand?"
The cold thing in my stomach tightens. "What's happening in the coming days?"
"I can't say more than that." Her hands pause on her notes.
For a moment she looks almost pained—the expression of someone who wants to say more and can't, won't, has been told not to.
"Just remember what I've taught you about fixed channeling.
Magic retains the character of its source.
That's true for channeling, and it's true for people. "
"Professor —"
"That's all, Miss Grey." She turns back to her desk. Dismissed.
I walk out into the hallway with her words sitting in my chest like a splinter. Whatever happens in the coming days. She knows something. She can't tell me what, but she wanted me to know she knows, and she wanted me to remember.
Magic retains the character of its source.
I think about that all the way back to Bellamy Hall, turning it over, trying to see the shape of what's coming.
Something in the coming days. Something Warrick felt she needed to warn me about, obliquely, carefully, in the way everyone at this goddamn school communicates—sideways, in code, never just saying the thing that could save my life.
I'm so busy thinking that I almost miss Brittany.
She's pacing.
I've lived with Brittany Leigh for weeks now. I've seen her bored, annoyed, deadpan, mildly concerned, and once—the night I told her I was a grimoire—genuinely unsettled. I have never, not once, seen her pace.
But she's doing it now. Back and forth across our tiny room, five steps each way, Herbert perched on her shoulder like a lookout. Her black nails are bitten down—also new, also alarming—and when she sees me in the doorway, the look on her face stops me cold.
Brittany Leigh doesn't get scared. It's one of the fixed points of my universe.
The girl who responded to "I might be a magical nuclear bomb" with "are you going to explode?
" doesn't do fear. She does sarcasm, and dark humor, and the kind of bone-dry pragmatism that keeps you alive in a place like this.
She's scared now.
"Close the door," she says.
I close it. The click of the latch sounds very loud.
"Sit down."
"What's going on?"
"Sit down, Everly."
I sit on my bed. Herbert watches me from Brittany's shoulder, all eight legs tensed, and I swear even the spider looks nervous.
Brittany stops pacing. Stands in the middle of the room, arms crossed tight against her chest, and takes a breath.
"The fraternities are planning something."
My stomach drops. Not a surprise—Warrick's warning was barely an hour ago—but hearing it from Brittany makes it real in a way a professor's oblique hints didn't.
"What kind of something?"
"Some kind of demonstration. Public. Official.
" She's choosing her words carefully, which is how I know it's bad.
Brittany doesn't choose words carefully.
She throws them like knives and lets them land where they land.
"I don't have details. The Sanguis students have been tight-lipped, which is unusual because blood mages are the worst gossips on campus.
But people are talking. I've caught pieces—something about all four disciplines, something about capacity testing, something about the Administration being involved. "
"The Administration. As in Catalina."
"As in the headmaster who has been monitoring your every magical incident since you got here. Yes."
I think about Callum in the dark classroom. She wants capacity. Limits. Data. He said he didn't know what she was planning. Maybe he didn't, then. Maybe he does now.
"When?" I ask.
"Soon. This week, maybe next. The way people are talking about it —" She stops.
Uncrosses her arms, then crosses them again, like she can't figure out what to do with her hands.
"It feels wrong, Everly. The energy of it.
Like they're preparing for something they know is going to be ugly and they're doing it anyway. "
"Do the presidents know?"
"They're organizing it. All four of them." She watches my face as that lands. "Whatever Callum told you in that classroom, whatever Atlas showed you on the hill—they're still part of this. All four of them are still doing what they're told."
The lightning in my chest gives a dull throb. Atlas's grief, pulsing with a heartbeat that isn't mine.
"What kind of demonstration needs all four disciplines?
" I ask, even though I already know the answer.
I've known it since my sphere cracked in Warrick's class and cycled through four colors and Callum's mask slipped for the first time.
Since Catalina put me on probation instead of expelling me, since every president tested me with their own magic like they were running diagnostics on a machine.
"The kind that tests whether a grimoire can absorb all four at once," Brittany says quietly. "And the kind where someone gets hurt."
The room is very still. Outside, the afternoon light is fading, turning the walls grey, and Herbert's beady eyes are fixed on me like he's waiting for my response.
"What should I do?" I ask.
Brittany is quiet for a long moment. Then she walks to her desk, opens the top drawer, and takes out a set of car keys. She sets them on the surface between us—a plain keychain, black, with a tiny skull charm hanging from the ring. Of course.
"If things go bad," she says, "my keys are in my desk drawer. Take my car. Get out."
"I have my own car—"
"Your car is in the main lot. Twenty feet from the security booth, directly under a monitoring ward.
Mine is in the east lot by the back gate—no cameras, one ward with a twelve-minute reset cycle.
" She says it like she's reading from a manual.
Like she mapped this months ago. "If you need to run, you run east. Not south. "
"Brittany—"
"I'm serious. Don't argue with me, don't wait for me, don't try to be brave. If whatever they're planning goes wrong—and it will, because nothing at this school ever goes right—you take those keys and you drive until you run out of gas. Call your family. Go home. Forget this place exists."
"I can't forget. You know that. The mundane block —"
"Then drive until you figure out a plan. Just—go. Get away from whatever Catalina's building." Her voice is steady but her hands aren't. She shoves them into her jacket pockets. "You're my roommate. You brought me snickerdoodles on your first day. I'm not going to sit here and watch them —"
She stops. Swallows.
"Watch them what?" I ask softly.
"I don't know." She meets my eyes, and what I see there is worse than fear.
It's the look of someone who's been at this school long enough to know how it handles problems, and has decided that this time she's not going to look the other way.
"But I know what this place does to people who don't fit.
I've watched it happen. And I'm not going to watch it happen to you. "
It's the most she's ever said. The most she's ever given me in a single moment, without deflection or sarcasm or a well-timed don't make it weird.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't thank me. Just memorize where the keys are." She pulls her hands from her pockets, picks up Herbert, and sets him gently on her bed. "I need a cigarette. If anyone asks, I was never here and this conversation didn't happen."
"You don't smoke."
"I'm considering starting."
She leaves. The door clicks shut behind her and I'm alone in the room with a set of car keys and a spider and the growing, terrible certainty that whatever Catalina Bolingbroke has been building since the day I arrived is almost ready.
I pick up the keys. The skull charm swings gently from the ring.
Four presidents who have each shown me a crack in their armor—and who are still, all four of them, marching toward whatever this demonstration is.
Four men who have scared me, hurt me, cracked open in front of me, almost touched me—and who are going to stand in a room and channel all four disciplines into me at once because someone's mother told them to.
I could run now. Get in Brittany's car, drive south, call my family from a gas station and listen to their voices glaze over when I try to explain why I left.
Go back to state school. Go back to being normal.
Go back to being the girl in the bright clothes who doesn't know what magic is or what it costs.
I put the keys in my desk drawer.
I'm not running.
Whatever's coming—whatever they're planning, whatever Catalina wants to see when all four disciplines hit me at once—I'm going to face it. Because the alternative is becoming another name in a file that says handled, and I refuse. I refuse to disappear quietly. I refuse to make it easy.
My sphere pulses on the desk. Four colors, cycling through the crack. Shadow, storm, blood, chaos.
One of those I still haven't absorbed. One president who hasn't cracked open yet. And a demonstration that's going to put all four in a room with me and see what happens.
I think about Warrick's words. Magic retains the character of its source.
I think about Atlas's grief. Callum's cage. Ren's silence. Felix's—what? I don't have a piece of Felix yet. He's the one I understand least, the probability mage who studied me like a lab rat and called it fascination, who told me to be careful in the library like he meant it.
Whatever's coming, I'm going in with three disciplines humming behind my ribs and a list of questions that nobody will answer and a roommate who put her car keys in a drawer for me.
That has to be enough.
It has to.