Chapter 29 Everly #2
My eyes burn. My throat closes. I'm standing in the middle of my dorm room holding car keys and looking at my best friend, who is telling me to leave her behind in a school run by a woman who makes people disappear, and she's making jokes about her spider's dietary requirements because that's how Brittany Leigh says I love you—sideways, through sarcasm, disguised as something smaller than it is.
"Brittany." My voice cracks.
"Don't." She holds up one hand. "Don't make this a thing. I hate things."
"You're my best friend."
"I know. That's why I'm staying." She drops the hand.
Picks up the map—the security map, the one she's been building since September—and puts it on the desk beside the car keys.
"East gate. Midnight. The ward resets every twelve minutes.
You have a three-minute window after each reset where the coverage drops to sixty percent. Felix can handle the rest."
She's given us everything. The keys, the map, the plan, the cover story. Everything she has, laid out on a desk in a dorm room that's too small for two people and impossibly too small for the goodbye that needs to happen in it.
I pull her into a hug. She's stiff at first—Brittany doesn't do hugs, Brittany does arm's-length and sarcasm and the occasional shared bag of stale gummy worms—but after a second her arms come up and she holds on.
Tight. Her face pressed against my shoulder, Herbert scuttling out of the way to perch on the headboard.
"Don't die," she says into my jacket. "I just got used to you."
"Don't let her win."
"Please. She wears cream suits and pearl earrings. I've hated her since orientation."
We hold on. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Long enough that I memorize the feeling—her arms, her sharp shoulders, the smell of her black nail polish and her doom metal t-shirts and the particular Brittany-ness of a person who has been my anchor since the day I arrived in pink shoes and she told me I looked like a Lisa Frank explosion.
She lets go first. Steps back. Wipes her face with the back of her hand—fast, angry, like the tears are a betrayal she's going to deal with later.
"Go pack," she says. "All of you. Take what matters.
Leave what doesn't." She looks at the four men who have been silent through all of this—four men who spent months tormenting me and are now watching my best friend sacrifice her safety for mine, and I can feel through the bond what each of them is feeling.
Atlas's gut-punch of respect. Felix's sharp, surprised admiration.
Ren's quiet ache. And Callum—Callum, who understands what it means to stay behind in a building that belongs to your enemy, is looking at Brittany Leigh with something that might be the first genuine emotion he's felt for another person in years.
"Rule four," Brittany says, looking at each of them. "Take care of her. Or I will find you. And I will bring the spider."
At nine PM I pack. Two bags. Clothes, phone charger, the first aid kit Brittany assembled, the books from the restricted section that I smuggled out over the past weeks.
The testing sphere is gone—shattered on the amphitheater stone—but I wrap the sock it lived in around my phone anyway, because the mundanity of it feels like a talisman.
Brittany packs too—not for herself, for me. She adds things I wouldn't think of. Granola bars. Cash from the emergency envelope in her desk. A flashlight with a skull sticker. A note, folded small, that she slips into the side pocket of my bag when she thinks I'm not looking.
At eleven-thirty, we kill the lights. At eleven-forty-five, we slip out the back door of Bellamy Hall into the cold October dark.
Atlas pulls clouds over the east side of campus—a slow, heavy overcast that eats the moonlight.
Callum's shadows spread around us like a cloak, swallowing our footsteps.
Felix walks with his cards in one hand, eyes half-closed, nudging coincidences—a guard turns left instead of right, a ward glitches for three seconds, a dog doesn't bark.
Ren walks beside me. His hand finds mine in the dark—not a gesture, just a blood mage anchoring to the heartbeat he can't stop hearing. His fingers are cool. The bandage on his palm rough against my skin.
Brittany walks with us to the parking lot. No further.
Brittany's 4Runner sits under a dead lamp—a 2012 Toyota, dark green, ten years old but clean.
The kind of car that gets its oil changed on schedule and its tires rotated every six thousand miles, because Brittany Leigh maintains the things she decides matter with the same meticulous care she brings to everything else.
The car she's handing to five people she didn't choose and one person she did.
She stops at the edge of the lot. Herbert is on her shoulder. The darkness is thick around us—Callum's shadows, Atlas's clouds, the October cold.
"Keys work on the first try. The heater's slow but it works.
There's a blanket in the trunk and an emergency kit under the passenger seat.
" She's talking fast. Practical. Filling the silence with information because the alternative is the thing underneath, the thing neither of us can say without falling apart.
"And if any of you scratch my car, the spider thing is not a joke. "
"Brittany."
"Go." She steps back. Crosses her arms. Chin up. The posture of a person who has decided to be strong and is going to be strong even if it cracks every bone in her body. "Get out of here before the ward resets."
I get in the car. The driver's seat smells like her—black nail polish and coffee and the faint iron scent of the blood magic that makes her nauseous and the doom metal she plays loud enough to feel in her teeth.
My hands shake on the wheel. The key jiggles left. The engine coughs, catches, turns over.
Atlas takes the back seat first—slides in, conductor across his lap, his broad shoulders filling the space.
Felix climbs in beside him, then Callum on the far side, the three of them shoulder to shoulder with the stiff, hostile proximity of people who have no choice.
Ren takes the passenger seat—closest to me, the bond settling, the proximity easing the pull to something bearable.
I look in the rearview mirror.
Brittany is standing in the parking lot with her arms crossed and Herbert on her shoulder, lit by the faint glow of Callum's retreating shadows.
She's small. She looks small in a way she never looks in the dorm room, where her personality fills every corner and her sarcasm takes up more space than the furniture.
Out here, in the dark, with the campus rising behind her like a Gothic painting of everything that wants to eat her alive—she looks like what she is.
A nineteen-year-old girl standing alone in front of a monster because her best friend needed a head start.
I put the car in gear. Pull out of the lot. The east gate is ahead—Felix counting under his breath, the ward cycle, twelve minutes. At the reset the ward flickers and we slide through, the 4Runner's engine steady, Callum's shadows eating the light from the guard station.
In the mirror, Nyxhaven shrinks. The spires and the oaks and the buildings full of magic and secrets and a woman with a thin smile, getting smaller with every second.
And Brittany. Standing in the lot. Getting smaller too. Until the dark swallows her and she's gone.
I drive.
The four heartbeats in my chest hum in a chord that doesn't resolve. The highway opens ahead of us—dark, empty, stretching north toward Vermont and a professor who's been waiting and a future none of us can see.
Felix's voice from the back seat, quiet: "She's going to be okay."
"You don't know that."
A pause. "No. I don't."
We drive in silence. The heater takes ten minutes to kick in, just like she said. The blanket is in the trunk, just like she said. Everything she told me is true, because Brittany doesn't waste words on things that aren't.
At the bottom of my bag, in the side pocket, the note she slipped in when she thought I wasn't looking.
I don't read it yet. Not tonight. Tonight I drive, and the bond hums, and four men who were my enemies sit in a car that belongs to my best friend, and somewhere behind us a girl with a spider on her shoulder is walking back toward the buildings alone.
I'll read it tomorrow.
Tomorrow, when I can stand to find out what Brittany Leigh writes when she thinks nobody's watching.