I think about the shadow spell pouring into me like ice water. The lightning flooding my veins like liquid fire. Both of them terrifying, both of them fitting into me like keys into locks I didn't know I had.
"Okay," I say. "Do it."
* * *
Brittany picks up Herbert and cradles him in her palm. He sits there, calm and patient, eight legs arranged neatly. She closes her eyes and I watch her concentrate, watch the faint furrow between her brows.
Herbert begins to glow.
It's subtle at first—a faint crimson light pulsing from his body, like a heartbeat made visible. Brittany's blood magic flowing through him, the connection she's maintained since she first made him her familiar. Her hand trembles slightly, the way it always does when she uses magic, and I wonder again why a discipline that's supposed to be hers makes her look like it's making her sick.
"Touch him," she says.
I hesitate. The crimson glow pulses, warm and alive. Herbert's beady eyes are fixed on me.
I reach out. My hand is shaking.
The tip of my index finger brushes Herbert's back.
The sensation is nothing like shadow, nothing like storm. Those were elemental—cold and heat, darkness and electricity, forces of nature pouring into me. This is different. This isintimate.
Warmth floods through the point of contact and spreads up my arm, through my chest, into the space behind my ribs where the other magics have settled. But it's not just warmth. It's a pulse. A heartbeat that isn't mine, thrumming against my own in a rhythm that's close but not quite synchronized. I can feel Brittany in it—not her thoughts, not her emotions, but herlife.The blood moving through her veins, the steady drum of her heart, the quiet hum of every living cell in her body. It'slike pressing my ear to someone's chest and hearing the whole machinery of them, every valve and chamber and rush of blood.
And underneath that, something deeper. The magic itself. Red and warm and alive, sliding into me like honey into a jar, filling spaces I didn't know were empty.
Herbert goes still under my finger. The crimson glow flickers, dims—
I yank my hand back.
Herbert skitters off Brittany's palm and disappears under the bed so fast he's a brown blur. Unharmed, but clearly over it.
Brittany is staring at me. Her face has gone pale under her dark lipstick.
"That," she says, "felt like someone reached into my chest and squeezed."
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. It wasn't—painful, exactly. Just." She flexes her hand, the one Herbert was sitting on. "Weird. Like you were pulling something out of me through a straw."
I look down at my own hands. They look the same as always. No crimson glow, no visible sign that anything happened. But inside me, in that space behind my ribs where the shadows settled cold and the lightning settled electric, something new is humming. Warm. Alive. Beating in time with my heart.
Three disciplines.
Shadow. Storm. Blood.
One left.
"You're a grimoire," Brittany says quietly. Not a question.
"Yeah." The word comes out barely above a whisper. "I'm a grimoire."
Saying it out loud makes it real in a way the research didn't. A way the absorptions didn't, because I could explain those away—adrenaline, coincidence, some weird fluke of being undifferentiated. But this was deliberate. Controlled. Brittany channeled blood magic through her familiar and I pulled it into myself as easily as breathing.
There's no explaining that away.
"They're scared of me," I say. "That's why they're doing all of this. The bullying, the testing, all of it—they know what I am, or they suspect it, and they're scared."
"Obviously."
