"Don't make it weird."
I don't make it weird.
But when I turn the lights off that night, I lie in the dark and think about cages. The kind you can see, like bars and locked doors and boarded-up buildings. And the kind you can't — the ones built out of expectations and family names and the slow, careful removal of everything that makes you human until all that's left is something useful.
I wonder which kind is harder to escape.
I'm starting to think it might be the second.
Chapter 14: Everly
The sphere won't cooperate.
I've been sitting on my bed for forty minutes, holding it in both hands, trying to do what Warrick taught us in the first week of Magical Theory: focus your intention, feel for the channel, let the magic find its shape. Easy, she'd said. Natural. Like breathing.
My breathing is fine. The sphere is not.
It pulses in my palms—all four colors cycling through the cracked glass in a slow, restless rotation. Shadow-dark, storm-blue, blood-red, chaos-purple. Round and round, never settling, never choosing. The crack that appeared during my first demonstration has gotten wider since the absorptions started. I can feel it under my thumb, a jagged seam running from pole to pole, and sometimes when the colors shift I swear the glass flexes, like something inside is pressing outward.
I try to push the shadow magic first. It's the oldest—the one that's been inside me longest, settled behind my ribs like a cold stone since the Mors demonstration. I close my eyes, reach for it, try to guide it into the sphere the way Warrick showed us.
The shadow moves. I feel it shift inside me, liquid and dark, sliding toward my hands. The sphere goes black for a second—pure, deep, lightless black—and then the crack widens with a sound like ice breaking and the shadow snaps back into my chest so hard I gasp.
"Shit."
I open my eyes. The crack is wider now. Not by much, but enough that I can see it without squinting. The colors resume their rotation, unbothered by my failed attempt, and the sphere hums in my hands with a vibration that feels almost smug.
"You're a useless piece of glass, you know that?"
The sphere pulses purple, then gold, which is a color it's never shown before. I stare at it. The gold fades. Back to the usual four.
"Great. Now you're showing off."
I set it on my desk and lean back against the wall. Brittany is at the library—she's been spending more time there since I told her about Concordia Hall, pulling old campus maps and maintenance records that she thinks might show us how to get inside. Herbert is with her, tucked into the front pocket of her jacket, because apparently blood-magic spiders make excellent research assistants.
Which leaves me alone in the room with a broken sphere and a growing list of things I can't control.
I pull out my notebook and flip to the section I've been adding to all week. It started as research notes—fragments from the restricted section, names and dates and the phrasethe matter has been handledwritten so many times it's lost all meaning. But it's become something else. A map of everything I know and everything I don't, organized in the obsessive, color-coded way my brain works when it's trying not to panic.
What I know:
I'm a grimoire. I can absorb all four disciplines. Shadow, storm, and blood confirmed—chaos untested. The Grimoire Girls sorority was destroyed after the Schism of 1926. Concordia Hall is condemned. Helena Grimoire vanished. Cordelia "disappeared" in 1930. Every grimoire since has been "handled." Catalina Bolingbroke has been watching me since before I arrived. Callum reports to her. The four presidents have been testing me on what might be her orders.
What I don't know:
What "handled" means. What Catalina wants. Why the grimoires disappeared. What happened to Helena andCordelia. What happens to me if I absorb all four disciplines. Whether there's a limit. Whether I'll explode.
I stare at the second list for a long time. It's longer than the first. That's the problem.
I need air.
The campus at dusk is beautiful in the way that a graveyard is beautiful—all atmosphere and no comfort. The old oaks that line the main paths are going orange and red, dropping leaves onto stone walkways that are older than the country. The Gothic architecture catches the late light and throws long shadows across the quad, and somewhere a bell is tolling the hour in deep, resonant notes that vibrate in my teeth.
I'm supposed to be invisible. That was Brittany's advice after the dining hall incident: stay small, stay quiet, stop going to the library at hours when people can see you. Good advice. Practical advice. The kind of advice I'm terrible at following, because staying small has never been something my body knows how to do.
But I try. I keep my head down, my charcoal blazer buttoned, my bright colors buried under layers of Nyxhaven-appropriate dark. I take the long way around the quad, avoiding the clusters of students heading to the dining hall, skirting the edge of the Tempest practice fields where I can hear distant thunder and the crack of lightning against metal targets.
Atlas is probably out there. Training, or just existing, which for him is the same thing—his magic doesn't stop when he does. Brittany told me that Tempest students are the worst sleepers on campus because their dreams call storms, and the morepowerful you are, the worse it gets. I think about Atlas standing alone in the quad during that storm, eyes blank, lightning pouring off him like sweat. Not attacking me. Just falling apart.
