Somewhere on this campus, there's a condemned building that used to house girls like me. Somewhere in the Administration archives, there are records that explain what "disappeared" really means.
I'm going to find them.
And I'm going to make sure I don't end up like all the others—a name in a file, a gap in the records, a girl who was here one day and gone the next while everyone pretended not to notice.
I'm not going to disappear.
Not without a fight.
Chapter 11: Everly
I don't remember walking back to the dorm.
I remember the library stairs, cold stone under my palms. I remember the lobby doors, heavy and groaning. I remember the grey light hitting my face like a slap, and the way the shadows peeled off my skin and dissolved into the morning air, reluctant, like they didn't want to let go.
But the walk from the library to Bellamy Hall is gone. Erased. One second I'm standing in the pale dawn outside the library with my arms full of stolen books and my head full of horror, and the next I'm sitting on the floor of my dorm room surrounded by everything I found.
Printouts. Photocopies. Three books I smuggled past the ancient librarian by shoving them inside my bag under a hoodie, which I'm pretty sure counts as theft, and I don't care. My notes cover the floor in a jagged semicircle around me, pages and pages of my own cramped handwriting that stopped being legible somewhere around four in the morning.
Grimoire Girls sorority—dissolved 1926.
Concordia Hall—condemned.
Helena Grimoire—vanished.
The matter has been handled.
The matter has been handled. I found that phrase eleven times in eleven different documents, always in the same clinical, final tone, like they were talking about a leaky pipe instead of an entire group of women who ceased to exist.
I'm crying. I don't know when that started either. The tears are just there, running down my face and dripping onto my notes, blurring the ink, and I can't stop them because every time I try tobreathe it comes out as this awful, hitching sob that sounds like it's being ripped out of me.
I'm a grimoire.
I'm one of them. One of the women they wiped from history, from the buildings, from every record they could get their hands on. The girls who could hold all four disciplines at once—who were powerful enough that the entire institution decided they needed to disappear.
And I'm sitting on the floor of a room I share with a goth girl and her blood-magic spider, in a university run by the same people who made those women vanish, and I have no idea what to do.
The door opens.
"Jesus Christ."
Brittany stands in the doorway, keys in one hand, a coffee from the campus café in the other. She's wearing an oversized Bauhaus t-shirt and the same black jeans she wore yesterday, and her eyeliner is smudged in a way that could be intentional or could mean she didn't sleep either.
She takes in the scene. Me on the floor, blotchy and disgusting, surrounded by a paper crime scene. The stolen library books. The cracked channeling sphere sitting on my desk, pulsing its four impossible colors in the early light.
"What happened?" She steps inside, closes the door. Doesn't rush to me, doesn't do the concerned-friend thing. Just leans against the doorframe and waits.
I try to say it. The word.Grimoire.But what comes out instead is a fresh wave of sobbing so ugly that Herbert emerges from under Brittany's bed, picks his way across the floor, and climbs onto my knee like he's trying to provide emotional support.
"Okay." Brittany sets her coffee on her desk. Sits on the edge of her bed, across from me, the way she did the night I cried about the notes. Except this time she doesn't bring out gummy worms or whiskey. She just sits there and lets me fall apart.
It takes a while. The crying has to run its course, and it's the kind that comes in waves—every time I think I'm done, I look at my notes and another one hits me. Brittany doesn't tell me to calm down. Doesn't ask again. Just waits, with the patience of someone who's familiar with the kind of crying that can't be reasoned with.
Finally, when the sobs have downgraded to hiccups and my face feels like a swollen, salty disaster, I push the printouts toward her.
"Read it."
She picks up the first page. Then the second. I watch her eyes move down the text, watch the crease form between her eyebrows, watch her go very still.
