Brittany walks with us to the parking lot. No further.
Brittany's 4Runner sits under a dead lamp—a 2012 Toyota, dark green, ten years old but clean. The kind of car that gets its oil changed on schedule and its tires rotated every six thousand miles, because Brittany Leigh maintains the things she decides matter with the same meticulous care she brings to everything else. The car she's handing to five people she didn't choose and one person she did.
She stops at the edge of the lot. Herbert is on her shoulder. The darkness is thick around us—Callum's shadows, Atlas's clouds, the October cold.
"Keys work on the first try. The heater's slow but it works. There's a blanket in the trunk and an emergency kit under the passenger seat." She's talking fast. Practical. Filling the silence with information because the alternative is the thing underneath, the thing neither of us can say without falling apart. "And if any of you scratch my car, the spider thing is not a joke."
"Brittany."
"Go." She steps back. Crosses her arms. Chin up. The posture of a person who has decided to be strong and is going to be strongeven if it cracks every bone in her body. "Get out of here before the ward resets."
I get in the car. The driver's seat smells like her—black nail polish and coffee and the faint iron scent of the blood magic that makes her nauseous and the doom metal she plays loud enough to feel in her teeth. My hands shake on the wheel. The key jiggles left. The engine coughs, catches, turns over.
Atlas takes the back seat first—slides in, conductor across his lap, his broad shoulders filling the space. Felix climbs in beside him, then Callum on the far side, the three of them shoulder to shoulder with the stiff, hostile proximity of people who have no choice. Ren takes the passenger seat—closest to me, the bond settling, the proximity easing the pull to something bearable.
I look in the rearview mirror.
Brittany is standing in the parking lot with her arms crossed and Herbert on her shoulder, lit by the faint glow of Callum's retreating shadows. She's small. She looks small in a way she never looks in the dorm room, where her personality fills every corner and her sarcasm takes up more space than the furniture. Out here, in the dark, with the campus rising behind her like a Gothic painting of everything that wants to eat her alive—she looks like what she is. A nineteen-year-old girl standing alone in front of a monster because her best friend needed a head start.
I put the car in gear. Pull out of the lot. The east gate is ahead—Felix counting under his breath, the ward cycle, twelve minutes. At the reset the ward flickers and we slide through, the 4Runner's engine steady, Callum's shadows eating the light from the guard station.
In the mirror, Nyxhaven shrinks. The spires and the oaks and the buildings full of magic and secrets and a woman with a thin smile, getting smaller with every second.
And Brittany. Standing in the lot. Getting smaller too. Until the dark swallows her and she's gone.
I drive.
The four heartbeats in my chest hum in a chord that doesn't resolve. The highway opens ahead of us—dark, empty, stretching north toward Vermont and a professor who's been waiting and a future none of us can see.
Felix's voice from the back seat, quiet: "She's going to be okay."
"You don't know that."
A pause. "No. I don't."
We drive in silence. The heater takes ten minutes to kick in, just like she said. The blanket is in the trunk, just like she said. Everything she told me is true, because Brittany doesn't waste words on things that aren't.
At the bottom of my bag, in the side pocket, the note she slipped in when she thought I wasn't looking. I don't read it yet. Not tonight. Tonight I drive, and the bond hums, and four men who were my enemies sit in a car that belongs to my best friend, and somewhere behind us a girl with a spider on her shoulder is walking back toward the buildings alone.
I'll read it tomorrow.
Tomorrow, when I can stand to find out what Brittany Leigh writes when she thinks nobody's watching.
Chapter 30: Brittany
Chapter 30: Brittany
I didn't sign up for this.
I want that on the record. I want it carved into stone and mounted above a doorway and pointed to whenever anyone asks how Brittany Leigh—mundane-born, low-magic, statistically the least likely person at Nyxhaven to be involved in anything dramatic—ended up lending her Toyota 4Runner to a bunch of fugitive magicians.
I signed up for a degree. Specifically, a degree in applied blood magic from the only institution in New England that accepts mundane-born students, which I would use to build a career in magical veterinary science, because animals are better than people and blood magic is the only discipline that lets you talk to them. That was the plan. Four years. Keep my head down. Graduate. Get out. Open a practice somewhere quiet where nobody knows what a grimoire is and nobody cares.
Instead I got Everly Grey.
She showed up on the first day in pink tennis shoes and a purple sundress and a yellow cardigan that made my eyes hurt, carrying a plate of homemade snickerdoodles and a smile so genuine it was physically painful to look at. I thought she'd last a week. Mundane-raised, no magical training, scholarship kid at a school that eats scholarship kids for breakfast. She'd wash out, cry, go home to whatever nice suburb produced her, and I'd have my room to myself again.
She didn't wash out. She didn't cry—well, she cried, but she did it at night when she thought I was sleeping, and then she got up in the morning and went to class and sat in the front row and took notes and raised her hand and kept going. She kept going when the storms hit. She kept going when the shadows came. Shekept going when four of the most powerful students on campus decided to make her life a waking nightmare and she had no magic, no allies, and no reason to believe it would get better.
