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T he university convulsed. All around us, the stones shivered like the surface of a pond rippled by a breeze; the trees rustled and roared as though caught in a storm; the wind tore through the library like a scream. The force of it threw me to the ground, knocking my glasses from my face and the breath from my lungs.

The library writhed and cracked. The books fell from the shelves in a blizzard; I curled up, shielding my head, and so heard rather than saw the domed ceiling shatter, and glass rained down around us.

The great oak didn't move. But through stinging eyes blurred by tears and my hair whipping across my face, I saw something small and slender and insubstantial step from its trunk. She was more shadow than being, a glint of moonlight with the ghost of a branch crown on her head. She looked around, bewildered and dazed, a child woken from a very deep sleep unable to remember where she had been put to bed. Then her gold eyes lit on Hero, bound with silver chains at the centre of the room, and they flashed. She stepped forward, her lips parted, and the silver fell from the faerie's stolen body like rain.

The walls were tumbling down. I couldn't see Eddie. I couldn't see Alden. In all the noise and wind and debris, there was room for only one thought.

Hero.

The faerie was free now, along with her sister, and she had everything she wanted. There had been no bargain made between us, only proposed. There was no reason to keep her word. She could flee the ruins of Camford in Hero's body, and nobody would ever see her again.

I did the only thing I could think to do, in that screaming chaos with the world tearing apart around me. I pulled myself to my knees, fighting the battering wind, and as the two of them passed, I lunged for Hero's wrist and I held as tight as I could.

The faerie hissed as though burned and wrenched back her arm with a strength like the crack of a whip. In response I felt the new magic in my blood flare and catch alight. The movement pulled me forward, knees scoring the rubble, but I held on.

The faerie's voice came in a snarl without words. Let me go.

"No," I said. My voice was lost in the roar, but I knew the faerie would hear. "You can't have her. Not this time."

The dryad stretched out her free arm, tilted her head to the sky, and changed.

She was a birch tree shooting up to the sky, a pillar of burning fire, a twisting torrent of water. She was a monster that snapped and snarled with ravening teeth, a creature of rock with a gaping open mouth, a thing of shadow and claw. Pain shot up my arm, burning hot then ice-cold, flesh withering and tearing from my bones, my skin bubbling and cracking like scales.

I held on. I held on as she twisted into form after form, again and again. And then, as the pain and the cold and the fever-heat pierced beyond what anyone could bear, I held on as I changed. I held on as my bones melted and my skin turned to shadow. I held on as the howl building in my throat burst from my lungs, as the world rippled and sharpened and ceased to make sense.

I had never seen what Grimoire had become that night we had broken in, but I had heard its cry, and I felt it now in my own heart. Camford Library was falling around us. Until it fell I was its ward, and I was home.

I killed the last ward , the faerie said. I could kill you.

It was very likely true. Yet she didn't want to. Whether because I had saved her sister, or because the last part of Hero was still holding on, or because she had at last everything else she had wanted, she only wanted to leave.

Let Hero go , I said. Let her go, and we'll let you go. We'll let all of you go. We'll see the last of the doors are closed forever. We'll never trouble you again. Just let her go.

There was no answer. Perhaps the faerie had never heard me at all. I don't know, at that point, if I was human enough for words.

I held on.

The ceiling was falling in. It crashed around us, stone and books and wood in a violent cascade, the sky wheeling overhead and the ground beneath me surging like the sea. I closed my eyes shut, and held on. I put myself on the library roof even as it fell about me: Hero braced like an explorer on a ship, her hair tumbling and her dark eyes amused; Alden lying in the sun, relaxed and playful and at peace; Eddie quiet and shy and pleased, taking in everything; Camford stretched out before us as far as we could see. I held all of them in my mind, and Hero I held closest of all.

She had pushed me from the circle the last time the world was ending. I had let her do it. I had let her keep pushing me until we were no longer a part of each other's lives.

Not this time.