Not hear. Feel. The cold prickle of shadow magic and the sharp static of storm energy, mixing together in the air like oil and water—distinct, clashing, unmistakable.
Atlas and Felix are standing at the end of my aisle.
Atlas takes up most of the space, broad shoulders blocking the exit, arms crossed over his midnight-blue jacket. His expression is the one I've come to know well—hard jaw, flat eyes, thunder barely leashed. Felix is leaning against the shelf beside him, but the easy slouch is wrong. Forced. His cards are in his hands but he's not shuffling them. Just holding them, still, which is how I know this is serious.
"You need to leave," Atlas says.
No preamble. No pretense. Just the words, landing in the quiet library like stones dropped into water.
I close my book. Slowly. "Excuse me?"
"Leave. Nyxhaven. Before you hurt someone."
"I haven't hurt anyone."
"Yet." Felix. His voice is flat in a way I've never heard from him—none of the warmth, none of the teasing. "But you will. It's what grimoires do."
The word hits me in the chest.Grimoires.He says it like it's a diagnosis. Like it's a sentence.
"You don't know what I'll do." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Neither of you do."
"We know what youare," Atlas says. The overhead lights flicker. Thunder rumbles somewhere outside, low and distant, responding to his mood the way it always does. "We've seen whatyou can do. You pulled shadow magic out of a death spell. You pulledmylightning out of the fucking sky." He steps closer and the static in the air intensifies, making the fine hairs on my arms stand up. "You're a walking bomb. And every day you stay here, the clock ticks closer to zero."
"That's not—"
"How do you know?" Felix cuts in. He's pushed off the shelf now, standing beside Atlas, and his green eyes are sharp in a way I haven't seen before. Not calculating—scared. "How do you know what happens when a grimoire absorbs too much? You don't. Nobody does, because the last ones either lost control or disappeared. Those are the options, Everly. Explosion or erasure. Pick one."
My throat is tight. I want to argue, to throw back some cutting response that proves I'm not afraid, but the truth is Iamafraid. I'm terrified. Because Felix isn't wrong. I don't know what happens at the end of this. I don't know what my limit is or if I even have one.
But I'm not leaving. I'm not running away from the only place that might have answers because two boys who've spent weeks making my life hell have decided I'm too dangerous to tolerate.
"I'm not going anywhere," I say. "If you want me gone, you'll have to—"
"That's enough."
The voice comes from behind them. Cold, precise, and carrying the kind of authority that doesn't need to be loud.
Callum Bolingbroke steps out of the shadows at the end of the aisle like he was born there. Which, given his discipline, he might have been. Shadows pool around his feet, darker than the dim library lighting accounts for, spreading across the floor in tendrils that make the air go several degrees colder.
Atlas turns on him. "Stay out of this, Bolingbroke. You said yourself she's dangerous—"
"I said," Callum repeats, and the shadows at his feet climb the bookshelves on either side, "that's enough."
The temperature drops. Not metaphorically—I can see my breath for a second, a thin white puff in the air between us. Felix's cards frost over in his hands and he grimaces, tucking them into his jacket.
Atlas holds Callum's stare for a long moment. Lightning crackles between his knuckles, static answering shadow, two fraternity presidents squaring off in a library aisle over a girl they both apparently want gone.
Then Atlas looks away.
Of course he does. Because Callum is a Bolingbroke, and that name carries a weight at Nyxhaven that even storm magic can't match.
"This isn't over," Atlas says. He's talking to me, not Callum, and the look in his eyes is something I can't read—anger and fear and something else, something that almost looks like grief.
He turns and walks out. Felix follows after a beat, pausing just long enough to look back at me with an expression that's worse than Atlas's fury. It's pity.
"Be careful," he says quietly. "With all of it."
Then he's gone, and it's just me and Callum Bolingbroke in the restricted history section, surrounded by shadows and screaming books.
