“It’s about time you got here,” I hear Wednesday hiss as Kendall slips into the seat beside me. I am glad that for once her ire is not directed at me. Kendall just ducks his head, letting his long blonde hair fall in soapy tendrils across his face. The sight only makes me remember my encounter with Flynn in even more vivid detail, and my face burns hot.
I don’t realize I’m staring at Kendall now, my eyes wandering across his tightly fitted tee shirt and down to where his pants sit loosely on his narrow hips, until it is another voice that pulls me away. This time, it is Flynn’s.
“Unless you have forgotten, which would be quite difficult even for you, that means me as well.”
My head jerks up, first glancing back at the now empty seat that he previously occupied, and then up and back to where he stands directly over my shoulder. While I have been drifting off into a pheromone-fueled haze, all the students have already started pairing off. Wednesday raises an eyebrow at me before grabbing her books and moving down a couple rows to sit with the rest of the students who are on their own.
“If you’re so obviously annoyed by me, why even bother?”
“It is my duty as your paired Earth Mage. More accurately, one of your paired Earth Mages. However,” Flynn continues, “I can see this may have been pointless. Thus far you have shown little to no interest in your studies.”
I shake my head, as if somehow it will make what he is saying somehow less, just, rude. “It’s the first day of class…”
But before I can finish explaining myself, Kendall suddenly rises to his feet on my other side. “If Octavia’s study habits are really so important to you, then maybe you should sit down and get to work rather than distracting her.”
Kendall immediately sits back down and goes back to staring down at the teacher still talking at the front of class. Flynn blinks several times, but his jaw remains closed.
Mine, on the other hand, goes slack. What on earth has gotten into Kendall? There are whole months that he goes without saying so much as a word to me, and suddenly he’s out here defending my honor. Or at least my study habits. Which, if we are being perfectly honest, aren’t exactly worth defending.
Flynn takes the now empty seat without another word.
“As I was saying,” the teacher continues what I am hoping is the beginning of something more interesting than her previous monolog, “It is impossible to reach your full potential if you are at odds with your partner.” I glance between Kendall and Flynn and wonder what that means for me, since I have two of them. Do they have to be getting along as well?
She goes on to take out a basket of twigs. The basket grows legs and crawls around the room at lightning speed, dropping little sticks under everyone’s desks. I can hear the scuttle of it like a giant insect on the floor as it passes by us.
“This will be your first tool. You and your partner will take turns trying to manipulate each other’s sticks. Those of you who are second years, feel free to attempt something more complex. But don’t forget to guide your new partners along as well.”
And that is it.
I glance between Flynn and Kendall. I am sandwiched between them, but it may be better if we find somewhere at the back of class that we can all face each other. I swivel in my seat, looking for any chairs that don’t appear to be bolted to the ground.
“Stop it.” My head whips back, and I see Kendall’s stick rolling in tiny circles across the surface of his desk. Each time he reaches for it, it rolls away until, after several failed attempts, he slams both his hands across the top of his desk.
Faces all around the room turn in our direction. The teacher looks up from where she is trying to explain something to one of the unpaired students. “Are the three of you going to be a problem?” she asks, her eyebrows raising. I sink lower in my seat as all eyes fall on me. They aren’t the problem, I realize, but me. I’m the one with four paired mages.
Once the eyes start drifting away from us, I grab Kendall and Flynn’s sticks away from them.
“Can the two of you just please get along?” I say, trying to keep my voice low enough that we don’t disturb the rest of the class again. “I actually do want to learn this, and neither of you are helping.”
Kendall looks like he is not ready to forgive Flynn’s antics, but I’m not about to let these two boys get in the way of my learning magic. It’s freaking magic, after all. So I turn my back to Kendall, and hand one of the sticks to Flynn. “If you are so eager to show off, then show me.”
“I wasn’t showing off!” Flynn says.
Kendall sneers. “Then what do you call...”
“Enough!” I half stand up, but my voice and the scraping chair make several groups turn back to look at us again, and I have to quickly sit back down. “Stop it. Both of you.” I glare at Flynn. “I might have expected this from you, but you...” I swivel around and punch Kendall in the upper arm. He leans away and rubs the effected spot, even though both of us know it isn’t even likely to leave a bruise. “You are better than this, this petty fighting. Just help me learn how to do magic. I’m already at enough of a disadvantage.”
Kendall ducks his head again, and although he doesn’t say anything, I know he’s sorry. Flynn clears his throat, takes one of the sticks from my hand, and starts calmly explaining how to focus my power through the stick in my hand into the other one, or as he calls it, the “vessel”.
I squeeze one of the other sticks in my hand and try to concentrate on making the one on Flynn’s desk roll over. At first it doesn’t, and I squeeze harder out of frustration until the stick in my hand breaks. The one on Flynn’s desk shatters into a million tiny splinters.
I throw up my arms to shield my face. Immediately, Kendall is leaning over and brushing tiny bits of wood off my desk. “Too hard,” he says. “You’ve got to find the perfect balance between not enough, and way, way too much.”
He takes the only stick that remains intact, demonstrates a firm but gentle grip, and then nods in the direction of the wooden splinters. They slowly start to gather back together—even the ones that microscopically implanted themselves in the open palm of my hand.
“How can you already do that?” I ask. He was initiated in the same day as me, so he’s only had access to his powers for what…two days?
Kendall reddens and shrugs. “I’ve lived around dozens of practicing Earth Mages my whole life,” he says. “You pick things up.”
Within a few moments, all the little shrapnel is gathered back together into two piles and he hands me back the remaining unbroken stick. “Now you mend them.”
“But how? Should I try to imagine it or something?”
Flynn glances over at Kendall, and briefly the two share a nod. He places the stick in my hand and taps the desk beside the piles of wood. “Leave the imagining to Psychic class. Earth magic is all about the feeling. You have to feel it to make it happen,” he says, “Now, we aren’t trying to make it look exactly how it was before, only a general idea.”
I stare at the stick in my hand, and then at the pile in front of me. I have no idea how I am supposed to “feel” this magic, but I can only try.
I try to grip the wood in my hand the way I see Kendall do it. I must still be holding it too hard, because he reaches over and lays a hand on top of mine. “Relax your grip, hold it with your fingertips.”
He demonstrates again, this time moving my fingers for me. I feel a race at his gentle touch. It must go on a moment too long, because Flynn is clearing his throat again to remind us he is also here.
He taps the desk in front of the shrapnel. I imagine it piecing back together, once again forming a knobby stick. At first, nothing happens.
“As someone who is a Psychic Mage as well, at first it can help to imagine a concrete image in your head,” Flynn says. “Something exact and precise.”
“It’s a stick,” Kendall mutters. “Just feel the stick fixing itself.”
I ignore their subtle jabs at one another and focus on taking thei
r advice. I grip the stick in my hand firmly, but only with my fingertips, so I don’t squeeze it too hard this time. I try and picture a general stick in my mind, and then I paint in some specific mental details. A crooked broken arm. A knob. Flaking bark at the base.
At first I feel nothing. So I imagine that too. I imagine how I would feel if it were to work. Nothing happens. Then I imagine I am the stick; broken, frayed, shattered, and how it would feel to be whole again. To not feel confused. To know for sure that I am who I am supposed to be.
Slowly the pieces on the desk start to vibrate. They rearrange themselves into the shape of a stick. My stick, the one I imagined. In a way, me.
They don’t stay together, however, before my concentration runs out. The pieces collapse in a heap. At least they look a little more like a stick shape, albeit still a broken one.
My disappointment is not matched on either of their faces.
“Nice job Octavia, you must be naturally gifted with Earth Magic.” I look up quickly.
My nerves get the better of me, and I squeeze the last stick in my hand until it snaps in half too. The Earth teacher stands right over us. She must have snuck over while I was concentrating. “Keep up the good work, boys. Maybe once things are resolved, you will be an Earth Mage after all.”
12
Octavia
For the next couple of hours, Kendall and Flynn take turns showing me how to manipulate wood using Earth magic. I had expected Flynn to grow impatient with me and go on to practice something far more advanced, but he never does. We are given a whole basket of sticks, and by the end of class I break them all.
There is still a weird tension that hangs in the air, so the moment we are dismissed I lug my backpack over my shoulder and practically climb over the rows of seats behind us. I can’t get out of there fast enough.
Wednesday catches up with me outside the hall. “What was that all about?” she asks. I can see she is flushed with excitement from her first day actively practicing magic too, and I forget all the reservations I had last night. I tell her everything. Starting with Flynn.
“Wow,” she says once I’ve finished. We have found our way to a local bagel place that is still open. It is early afternoon, so the lunch rush already left for work and we mostly have the place to ourselves. We are only served meals at the Academy during special events, and all the rest of the times we have to fend for ourselves. I’m going to have to see about picking up an extra shift at the coffee shop—if I can somehow fit it into my already insane schedule.
I catch myself picking all the seeds off my everything bagel a second before Wednesday does. “What is it?”
“It’s actually something the teacher said, right before we left.” I force myself to fold my hands in my lap. “She said that ‘once things are resolved’ maybe I would be an Earth Mage after all.”
“And?” Wednesday says, “That would be a bad thing, because?”
I realize I’m in dangerous territory. I don’t mean to bash the affinity Wednesday has and loves. “It’s not about that. It’s the way she said it. When all what is resolved? I got the impression there is something they aren’t telling me.”
“Hmm.” Wednesday taps the tip of her chin with her finger. “I bet they don’t like that you broke the affinity ritual.”
“I didn’t break the affinity ritual!” I say, then quickly bring my voice down a notch before other bagel-buyers overhear us. “It broke on its own.”
“Wait.” She stops drumming her fingers on the table. “You said the runes on the floor did something weird, didn’t you?”
“Oh wait,” I say. “I have something that might help with that. Someone left this in my room the first night we got here.”
I start pulling the book on runes out of my backpack. As soon as Wednesday sees what I am doing, she stands up so quickly she almost bumps into a random person walking into the shop. The bell above the door jangles as she apologizes and motions for me to follow her outside.
I grab the rest of my bagel and hurry out onto the sidewalk after her. “What was that all about?”
“You can’t just go pulling books like that out in public. Where did you get it, anyway?”
“I told you, someone left it in my room,” I say.
“And you didn’t tell me?”
I shrug. “I forgot! There’s been a lot on my mind lately.”
“Right.” She glances down the street towards the Academy. “Let’s go somewhere we can take a look at it without being disturbed. Do you think you would remember the runes from the initiation ritual if you saw them?”
“Probably not,” I say. “But at least it’s a start.”
She nods and agrees. “Maybe we can find some other books on runes in the public library. Even if we don’t, it will be nice to get away from the school for a little while. This place already feels suffocating sometimes, and we only just got here.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to look in the school library?” I ask. “I mean, we’re a magic school.”
Wednesday shakes her head and starts heading down the street towards the subway. I have to shove down the part of me that desperately wants an afternoon nap as I go to follow her. “I’ll bet you any books that might have been useful have been pulled from the shelves. If there is something wrong with the affinity ritual, they aren’t about to just announce it. They are going to try to keep it a secret until they figure out what it means and fix it.”
We jog the first few steps down into the hot underground. The musty, cooped-up smell of it makes me feel instantly jittery. I hate confined spaces. I hate crowds more. I stick close to Wednesday as she scans our subway passes and follow her towards the closest car.
“There was something else the principal said that night that bothered me,” I say as we wait. Ever since that conversation I have mulled over the events of the evening over and over in my head. It all happened so quickly that there are still things I haven’t been able to process.
“What is it?”
“He mentioned that Flynn and I are the only two living mages with multiple affinities. I don’t like the sound of that.”
Before she can answer me, I am violently jerked out of step just as the subway train arrives. I lose my footing, and for a second, my bearings as well. The air is filled with the whoosh of the car and screech of breaks. I feel bodies press against me. I smell oil and sweat. My vision is still spinning when I realize what just happened.
“My backpack!” I shout, pausing only long enough to regain my balance and rub my sore shoulder from where my bag has been viciously torn. I catch Wednesday frozen, confused and alarmed to my right, just as I spot the person running off with my backpack through the drawing crowd.
I leap forward, clawing through the mass of people after him. Fortunately, the guy who stole my bag is having even more trouble than I am. It is almost as if people are purposefully getting in his way; bags fly out of hands in front of him, jackets catch on the hooks of his belt, someone’s briefcase basically explodes and keeps him from running directly up a very convenient side hallway.
I’m almost knocked off my feet myself more than once and feel the touch of the cold, grimy tile lingering on my fingertips.
The thief narrowly avoids a large man carrying a paper bag of groceries only to end up in a desperate struggle to detach himself from an overturned suitcase. I stumble forward a few steps and grab ahold of one of my backpack’s straps.
He pulls back once or twice, but the owner of the suitcase steps in and starts shouting at him—not because he is a thief, but because he is going to scuff up the leather details on her bag.
Either way, it works for me.
The commotion draws enough of a crowd that my assailant drops my bag and hurries off before I can get a good look at his face. I am only just getting back to my own feet when someone stops me in the middle of dusting off the city grime to take a selfie with my surprised face.
I reel back in shock, but not before she squeals some vague
thanks and then runs off too. Some people have absolutely zero sense of personal space.
Wednesday finally catches up to me. She drags me back into the crowd entering the subway car before anyone else can stop me for some kind of misguided photo-op. The doors close behind us and whisks us away from the scene of my backpack snatcher.
“God, what just happened?” she gasps.
I too am short of breath. I look down at the backpack slumped to the ground beside me. Who’d want to steal that? It’s like, the oldest backpack in the world, and I think it’s pretty obvious that I don’t have any money.
“New York, I guess.” I rest my head back on the wall of the subway. I am pretty sure it is sticky with something repulsive, but I can’t care enough right now. I force myself to take a few deep breaths.
Wait.
I crouch down and unzip my bag with shaking fingers.
“What is it?”
I look up at Wednesday with a whitening face. I am so stupid. This wasn’t some random mugging. It wasn’t even my bag he was after. It was its contents.
“The book. The book is gone.”
13
Octavia
Wednesday is nearly shaking with fury. I wish I could say it is directed towards the person that tried to steal my bag, but I am the one taking the brunt of it. “Do you have any idea how valuable books like that are? I’m not even a Ritual Mage and I would have killed to take a look at it.”
“You’re saying it like somehow I wanted it to be stolen. May I remind you that I’m the victim here?”
She stops walking for a second and looks back at me. We decided to head back towards the academy. I am too unnerved to go anywhere in public now, let alone somewhere that is going to be full of shelves and shelves of reminders of what just happened.
Absorb: Book One of the Forgotten Affinities Series Page 7
