"It never is."
He turns and walks away. Doesn't run—that would be undignified—but his pace is fast enough that he's gone before I can think of anything else to say.
The rain slows to a drizzle. Then stops entirely, like someone turned off a faucet.
I stand in the middle of the scorched quad with lightning humming under my skin and shadow curled around my bones and Felix watching me with those sharp green eyes that see too much.
"Two down," he says quietly. "Shadow and storm. I wonder what's next."
"What do you mean, two down?"
His smile doesn't reach his eyes. "I mean you're collecting, Everly Grey. Whether you mean to or not." He tucks his cards away, turns to leave, then pauses. "Word of advice? Figure out how to control it before you absorb something you can't hold. Not all magic wants to be swallowed."
He walks away, leaving me alone in the wreckage.
Dahlia is gone—fled while Atlas was grabbing me, probably. Smart girl. The quad is empty except for scorch marks and puddles and the faint smell of ozone.
I look down at my hands. No visible lightning, but I can feel it there, buzzing just beneath the surface. When I flex my fingers, the shadows lean toward me and the air crackles with static.
Two types of magic now. Two pieces of something I don't understand living inside me, changing me into something I don't have a name for.
Grimoire, the old books called it. Whatever that means.
Whatever I'm becoming.
Chapter 10: Everly
The letter arrives on a Monday morning, slipped under our door sometime between midnight and dawn like a coward's love note.
I almost step on it on my way to the bathroom. White envelope, cream paper inside, the Nyxhaven crest embossed in gold at the top. Very official. Very polite. The kind of letter that uses phrases like "we regret to inform you" and "failure to meet expectations" while meaning something else entirely.
Dear Miss Grey,
Following a review of your academic performance and conduct during your first semester at Nyxhaven University, the Office of Student Affairs has determined that you will be placed on Academic Probation effective immediately...
The rest is bureaucratic filler. Weekly meetings with a faculty advisor. Satisfactory grades. No "unsanctioned magical activity," whatever that means. Failure to comply may result in expulsion.
I read it three times. Brittany reads it once, says "That's bullshit, your grades are fine," and goes back to sleep.
She's not wrong. But we both know this isn't about grades.
The squeeze starts slowly.
Professor Robertson cold-calls me with questions that weren't in the reading. A Mors TA loses my essay and I have to rewrite it overnight. My meal card stops working for four days—"technical error," they say, like the system just happened to forget I exist.
Group projects become exercises in invisibility. I approach three different clusters of students for Parker's sensory mappingassignment. They scatter like I'm carrying plague. Eventually Parker assigns me to a group herself, and my partners spend the entire project talking around me, through me, like I'm a ghost they've collectively decided not to see.
Someone salts my laundry. Literally—dumps actual salt into the machine, which apparently interferes with magical residue and ruins anything that's been near active spellwork. Brittany's band tees come out stiff and faded. She doesn't yell at me. Just looks at the ruined fabric for a long moment and says, "I'll add it to the list."
And the storms keep following me. Small ones—localized drizzle when I'm crossing the quad, static shocks every time I touch metal. Once, lightning strikes a tree I'm walking past, close enough that I smell my own hair singeing. I never catch Atlas doing it. But I feel his magic now, that electric hum before a strike, and I know.
They're all still watching. Callum from windows. Felix from corners. Atlas from storm clouds.
And Ren. Ren is the strangest of all.
It takes me a week to notice him.
Not because he's subtle—he's terrible at subtle, too tall and too still, standing in doorways like a well-dressed statue. It's more that I've trained myself not to look for him. After combat training, after watching him step over my bleeding body, I decided Ren Ashford didn't exist to me anymore.
