"Stay away from me, Grey. I mean it. Whatever you are—whatever you'rebecoming—I can't —"
He turns. Walks into the rain, toward Fulmen Hall, his back rigid and his fists clenched at his sides and lightning flickering weakly around his knuckles like a dying fire.
He doesn't look back.
I slide down the wall and sit on the wet ground. The rain has softened to a steady drizzle, the storm dispersing now that its source has walked away. My clothes are soaked, my hands are shaking, and the lightning behind my ribs is humming with a charge that isn't mine—Atlas's grief, stored in my body like a recording, playing on repeat.
My back stings where the stone scraped it. My lips tingle where his breath touched them. My stomach is still warm where his body pressed against mine, and I hate myself a little for noticing that, for cataloguing the physical details of a man's breakdown like they're data points.
But I can't help it. The moment is burned into me—his forehead against mine, his heartbeat wild against my chest, the look in his eyes that saidI know this ends badly and I can't stop wanting to be near you anyway.
Four fraternity presidents. Four different flavors of damage.
Callum, caged by a mother who taught him love is a transaction. Atlas, broken by a mother whose magic killed everyone she touched. And now I know why he looks at me the way he does—not because he hates me, but because every time he sees me he sees her. The woman who tried to hold the lightning in and couldn't. The woman who saidrunand died making dinner on a Tuesday.
I absorb magic. His mother absorbed magic. In his story, this only ends one way.
I sit in the rain until I stop shaking. Then I get up, wring out my hair, and walk back to Bellamy Hall in the dark.
Brittany is still awake when I get in, sitting up in bed with her phone and a look that says she's been tracking the storm on a weather app and doing math on my likelihood of survival.
"You're alive," she observes.
"Barely." I peel off my soaked blazer and drop it on the floor. "Atlas's mother was a grimoire."
"You said that yesterday."
"Yesterday I heard the facts." I sit on my bed, dripping. "Tonight I heard what it was like to be seven years old and watch her die."
Brittany is quiet for a long time. Herbert crawls to the edge of her bed and watches me with his beady eyes.
"What did he do?" she asks.
I think about Atlas's body against mine. His forehead on my forehead. The way he shoved off the wall like I'd burned him.
"He told me to stay away from him."
"Are you going to?"
I pull a dry sweatshirt over my head. Crawl under my covers. The lightning inside me is still humming with his grief, and I don't know how to make it stop, and I don't know if I want to.
"I don't think it matters what I do," I say. "I don't think any of us get to choose how this ends."
Brittany turns off her lamp. In the dark, I hear Herbert scuttle across the floor and feel his small weight settle on my pillow, right next to my head, like a guard.
"Try to sleep," Brittany says.
I close my eyes. The tomatoes on the counter. His mother's face breaking. A seven-year-old boy sitting in a destroyed kitchen with his dead father for twenty minutes before anyone came.
I don't sleep for a long time.
Chapter 16: Everly
Three days after the storm on the hill, I still have Atlas's grief humming in my bones.
It's not like the other magics inside me. The shadow magic settled cold and quiet, a stone behind my ribs. The first round of storm magic—the bolt I took in the quad—was sharp and electric, a current I learned to carry. The blood magic from Herbert was warm, intimate, a second heartbeat.
But the lightning I pulled from Atlas feels different. Heavier. It sits in the same space as the first absorption, but it's layered with something that doesn't feel like magic at all. It feels like memory. Sometimes, at the edge of sleep, I catch flashes—tomatoes on a counter, a woman's hand dropping a knife, the wordrun—and I jolt awake with my heart pounding and the taste of ozone in my mouth.
