Grimoire Girls: Off Campus (Grimoire Girls of Nyxhaven University)

Chapter 1

EVERLY

The road unspools in the headlights of Brittany's car—two lanes of nothing, black trees, the occasional mile marker flashing white and gone. We crossed the Massachusetts state line heading north thirty minutes ago, Vermont-bound.

Or maybe it was an hour. Time went weird after we hit the highway. Stretchy. Like the whole night is holding its breath and forgot to exhale.

Except if this is a held breath, we haven't gotten to the exhale yet. Not even close.

"Left at the next junction." Felix, from the back seat.

He's been navigating from memory—no GPS, no phone.

He made everyone ditch their phones in a gas station dumpster outside Nyxhaven before we even hit the highway.

Tracking spells, he said. Administrative backdoors in every device registered to a student.

"The surveillance odds on major routes are climbing by the second.

We need to take the back roads from now on. "

"You want me to turn left into a forest."

"I want you to turn left onto a poorly maintained state road that will eventually connect to Route 7 northbound. The forest is just what's around the road."

I turn left into darkness and trees based on nothing but a chaos mage's hunch. The 4Runner's headlights sweep across a dirt road that looks like it hasn't seen maintenance since before cell phones existed. Something crunches under the tires that I choose not to think about.

I catch glimpses of the back seat through the rearview mirror.

Felix is in the middle, squished between, though he doesn't seem to mind it.

No doubt he likes that he can see everyone and everything.

His cards are in his hands, shuffled almost constantly, the soft thwip thwip thwip of paper against paper the only sound besides the engine.

His face looks wrong in the dashboard glow. Too sharp. Hollowed out around the eyes. Like somebody scooped out whatever usually lives behind his charming grin and left nothing but the shell of him behind.

I guess the somebody who hollowed him out is me.

Atlas is behind me in the driver-side rear seat.

He hasn't spoken since we cleared the wards around campus, but because of the bond, he's a presence inside me now.

He feels like a thunderstorm building on a hot day—pressure in my chest, static prickling on my skin, everything waiting for something to happen.

His conductor is in his lap. Every few minutes his fingers spark, seemingly out of his control, tiny flickers of blue-white energy that make the shadows in the car jump.

Ren is in the front passenger seat with his eyes closed and his hands open on his thighs, palms up, like he's meditating.

But that isn't what he's doing at all. He's holding a blood spell that's masking our signatures, and it's costing him more than he can give so soon after nearly dying in the amphitheater.

I can feel it through the bond, this taut, breathless pressure, like watching someone hold a heavy door open with their whole body.

His bandaged hand has bled through the gauze, the crimson stain darkening as it dries, but he hasn't even glanced at it.

Because it doesn't matter if he's exhausted, is just this side of death, or is bleeding.

He has to keep the spell going if we're going to get away from the Administration before they kill us—or, more accurately, me.

For all I know they'd capture these four and give them a nice little pat on the head. I'm the one who'd be tortured to death.

Callum is behind Ren. The shadows in his corner of the car are thicker than the night sky calls for, pooling around him like something he's wearing.

His eyes are open, ice-blue and gorgeous yet cold as always.

His face is blank but I know that doesn't mean he isn't thinking about anything.

He feels like a room with the lights off. Not empty. Just dark on purpose.

Five people. One bond. No plan beyond a name Felix gave us in Brittany's dorm room nine hours ago.

Professor Wheeler. Vermont mountains. A warded house that doesn't appear on any magical registry.

The disgraced Tumult professor who'd been researching grimoire history outside approved channels, who'd contacted Felix three years ago through some kind of chaos mage channel because he'd been waiting for someone like me to surface.

I need to figure out how that works—how chaos magic works in general—but for now I've simply chosen to accept it because it's not like I have a better idea.

That was the plan. Wheeler was the plan.

"Felix."

"Mmm."

"How much further to Wheeler's?"

The cards stop shuffling. That's never good. Felix's hands are never still unless he's making a decision, and his decisions tend to be the kind that rearrange everyone else's life without asking.

"We're not going to Wheeler's anymore."

The car goes very quiet. Even Atlas's sparking stops.

"Excuse me?" Callum. His voice could freeze the Connecticut River solid.

"The probability shifted." Felix leans forward between the seats.

I can smell him—burnt sugar and exhaustion and something acrid underneath, like he's been running his magic too hot for too long.

"I've been reading the odds since we left campus.

Wheeler's compromised. If we go to wherever he is, there's a two in three chance that Catalina will have us before we've even parked the car.

" He tilts his head toward Callum. "Mother dearest has people heading north already.

She knew about Wheeler before I said the name. "

"You told us Vermont." Atlas's voice is low and dangerous, a boom of thunder happening before the lightning hits. "You sat in that room and said Vermont and we planned around Vermont and now—"

"I told you what was true six hours ago.

Things change quickly." Felix's hands have gone back to shuffling.

Faster. "I have another contact. Further west. A chaos mage—my mentor's mentor.

He's off the grid in a way that Wheeler isn't. You can't find him unless he wants you to, or unless—" His eyes flick to me.

"—you've got someone who rewrites luck just by reaching for it. "

"You had a backup plan," I say. "This whole time. And you didn't tell us."

"I always have a backup plan. I usually have six." A ghost of a smile makes his green eyes dance with mischief for the first time since the amphitheater. "Aren't you glad I'm an untrustworthy bastard?"

"West where?" Ren asks. His eyes are still closed, his voice strained with the effort pouring out of him. "I need a direction. The masking spell orients geographically."

"New Mexico. Possibly Arizona."

Silence.

"That's two thousand miles," Callum says.

"Two thousand one hundred and fourteen from our current location. Give or take." Felix settles back into his seat. "Plenty of time to bond. Pun intended."

Nobody laughs.

I grip the wheel and stare at the road and feel the four heartbeats in my chest rearrange themselves around this new information.

Vermont was five hours away. New Mexico is five days away.

Five days in a borrowed car with no money, no plan, and four men whose feelings keep slamming into mine through the bond like someone else's headache that won't quit.

The bond hums. It always hums now—this low, four-note chord that lives somewhere between my sternum and my spine. Doesn't resolve. Just hangs there, waiting, like an itch I can't scratch in a place I can't reach.

"Fine." I adjust the mirror. Check the road. Nothing behind us. Nothing ahead. Just dark and the headlights and the absolutely insane thing we're doing. "Someone find me a route to I-80 West."

Felix already has directions.

Of course he does.

---

We stop at a motel outside Scranton at four in the morning because I'm about to drive us into a guardrail.

The exhaustion hits all at once—one moment I'm doing just fine, the next the road is blurring and my hands are shaking on the wheel and Ren says "Pull over" in a voice that doesn't leave room for argument.

The bond broadcasts my fatigue to all four of them at once, which means by the time I pull into the parking lot of the Shady Pines Motor Lodge—and yes, it's really called that, because apparently the universe thinks this is funny—everyone is awake and irritable and the collective mood in the car could curdle milk.

The motel is exactly what you'd expect. One story.

Twelve rooms. A neon sign missing the S so it reads HADY PINE in a sickly flickering orange.

The parking lot has four cars in it, all of which look like they've been decomposing since before Britney Spears' conservatorship, and the woman at the front desk doesn't look up from her phone when I walk in.

"One room," I say. "Five people."

She looks up. Looks past me, through the smudged glass door, to where four men are standing in the parking lot in various stages of menace.

Atlas, sparking. Callum, leaking shadows.

Ren, pale and bleeding through his bandage.

Felix, shuffling cards like his life depends on it, which—honestly, it sort of does.

"Sixty-five a night," she says. "No pets."

I pay with cash from Brittany's emergency fund—three hundred dollars in twenties, tucked into the center console in a Ziploc bag labeled brEAK GLASS IN CASE OF EVERLY'S BULLSHIT. God, I miss her. Practical to the point of prophecy.

The room has two double beds, a bathroom the size of a coffin, carpet that was beige in the late 1900s, and a painting of a barn that's been hung slightly crooked in a way that will no doubt bother Callum to the point of insanity.

"Sleeping arrangements," I say, because nobody else is going to. "We've got to figure out who gets which bed."

"I'm not sharing a bed with any of you." Callum is already moving toward the bathroom. He returns with a towel folded over his arm and his chin up like he's heading to a board meeting and not a sixty-five-dollar bathtub. "I'll take the tub."

"You can't sleep in a bathtub."

"I assure you, a bathtub is preferable to the available alternatives." He disappears. The lock clicks.

Atlas takes the bed nearest the door without asking.

Lies on top of the covers fully clothed, conductor clutched in one hand, and drops into sleep—or something like it—within three minutes.

I feel him go under fast and hard, and then the dreams start almost immediately.

Dark. Burning. A kitchen and screaming and the smell of ozone.

Ren takes the chair. "I'll keep the masking spell active," he says, which means he's not sleeping. He settles between the beds and the door, hands on his knees, eyes closed. His heartbeat in the bond goes steady and slow. Standing guard.

Felix claims the other bed. Kicks off his shoes, stacks two pillows, lies on his back with his ankles crossed and his cards fanned across his chest like a fortune he's already read.

"You can have the other half," he says, patting the mattress.

"I'd rather sleep on the floor."

"Suit yourself. The carpet probably only has three inches of dirt and a few antibiotic-resistant bacteria."

I take the other half of the bed. Not because of Felix—because the floor is genuinely horrifying and the bond makes it easier to be near them and I'm too damn tired to make a point about anything.

My principles won't keep me warm in a room this damp and chilly.

The AC seems to have been set for a climate New England never sees, and it's on a temperature both low 60s and frighteningly moist.

I lie on my back and stare at the water-stained ceiling and listen to five people not sleeping. Callum's silence from the bathroom. Atlas's breathing going ragged as the nightmares dig in. Ren's careful calm. Felix's cards, still going, thwip thwip thwip, slower now.

At three minutes to five, lightning cracks inside the room.

Atlas jerks awake with a sound that isn't quite a scream, and a bolt of electricity arcs from his conductor to the ceiling, scorches the plaster, blows the lamp on the nightstand. The bulb pops. Glass sprays everywhere.

Everyone moves. Ren's eyes snap open. Felix sits up, cards scattering. In the bathroom, Callum's shadows pour under the door, fast and instinctive, reaching for whatever threat woke them.

"Hey." I'm on my feet before I've decided to move. "Atlas. Hey. You're here."

His eyes are wild. Blue and electric and still half in the dream—lightning crawling up his arms, conductor glowing white-hot, the bond screaming his panic into my chest so loud it drowns out everything else.

I grab his arm. The electricity bites—sharp, ugly, like sticking my hand on a hot stove—and I don't let go.

"You're here," I say. "Pennsylvania. Shady Pines Motor Lodge. The carpet is terrible and the painting is crooked and you're here, with me, with Everly. And the—the others."

The lightning dies. Slow. His breathing comes down. His eyes find me.

He looks at my hand on his arm. Looks at me.

"Sorry," he says. Barely a word. Just air passing out of his parted lips.

"Don't be."

Through the bond: shame. Thick and hot. He can't control it. Even asleep, he can't make himself safe, and he knows it.

I don't let go of his arm. He doesn't ask me to.

My phone buzzes. I'd forgotten I had it—a burner Brittany bought at a gas station last week, tucked into the glovebox with the bag of cash. She really seemed to have known something was coming.

A text flashes across the phone screen.

Brittany: Catalina questioned me. Played dumb. She bought it. For now. Where are you?

I stare at the message thread, which has just begun. The cursor blinks.

I don't answer. Can't risk it. Can't risk her.

I put the phone face-down on the nightstand and lie back on the bed I'm sharing with a chaos mage, trying not to let our bodies get too close.

Then I listen to the four heartbeats in my chest, to Atlas trying to breathe, to the drip of the faucet in the bathroom where a boy who's never slept on anything less than thousand-thread-count sheets is lying in a tub because it's better than being near anyone.

The AC rattles. The clock says 2:07AM.

This is my life now.