Abandon: Book Three of the Forgotten Affinities Series

by Analeigh Ford

  And then his eyes do bore into mine.

  “The time is drawing near. I hope you’re prepared, Octavia. You know what is at stake if you are not.”

  I’m left standing beside the body of a mage who got killed by a spell too powerful, in the middle of a crowd that thinks I’m responsible. I am overwhelmed with guilt, and anger, and most importantly, and finally—understanding.

  Ever since I arrived in The Underground, something felt off. The mages here view the affinity rituals, the bindings, the rules of society as a yoke to be cast off. I myself escaped because they wouldn’t allow an aberration like me and my paired mages to exist in peace.

  I allow one last look down at the mage Michael, his life drained from him. I know how he died. I’ve experienced it myself. It is not a peaceful death.

  I once risked all to save us, to get us here. I didn’t know what I was getting into then.

  This time, I do know. The Underground’s way is not the answer. Drugs. Unchecked power. Control through fear. These are not the way. There has to be another.

  I brought us here for protection, but all we’ve found so far is death.

  31

  Octavia

  There will be no funeral for Michael.

  Edgar and Brendan follow after Bram, the latter just throwing the boy over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes and stomping out; the crowd parting to let him through.

  Michael once told me that he and the other new recruits left everything behind to come here. I wonder if there is a family out there somewhere still looking for him, still wondering where he went to.

  He might have only been in The Underground for a couple of days, a week or two at most, thanks to the way time passes more slowly here, but his family must think he ran away or worse.

  Worse. It is so much worse.

  I used to think I was used to getting uncomfortable stares in the hallways of The New York Academy of Mages…but nothing could prepare me for this.

  Edgar sums me up a moment before following Brendan. Where once there was nothing but disdain, disgust even, at my sight, now I think I see a hint of admiration. For a mage who values only ruthless power and mages who can inspire fear, I am not glad to see it.

  The crowd does not disperse after him. Instead, they all look to me. Even Acacia, still clutched tight by Horatio at her side, just watches and waits to see what I do next. I don’t know what to do. I always have a plan, but for this, there is none.

  I am exhausted. Every part of me screams for me to just collapse here and curl up in a sobbing mess. I want all their eyes to turn away from me, but they just keep judging, watching, staring, waiting.

  “What are they waiting for?” I whisper.

  “For you to signal it is safe to leave,” Flynn says. He steps up in front of me and takes my hand.

  Cedric and Kendall stand close behind, their touch nudging me forward. At first, I don’t budge. My feet are cemented to the floor. I’ve forgotten how to move them.

  Draven slips up a few steps ahead and stares down the crowd until they shift uncomfortably apart a bit more to give us all room to pass. Cedric and Kendall nudge me from behind again, and I take a first stumbling footstep.

  I have no right to be so upset by Michael’s death. I did nothing but goad and be annoyed by him, when all he did was admire me. Acacia is right. I killed him.

  With each step, I am surer of this fact. Cedric’s mouth moves close to my ear.

  “Let me help you.”

  I touch his hand on my shoulder, and glance up briefly into his face. His bright blue eyes meet mine, and in that moment, I wish I could. I wish I could open up my emotions to him, but I have no magic left in me to do it.

  I shake my head, softly.

  There are some things that must be carried on their own it seems.

  Each step through the crowd feels like an impossible task and yet, each one becomes easier. I don’t look away from their faces. I need to know what it is they think of me.

  I see the same things I did once, when I accidentally performed Time Magic in front of a school of mages drunk on Salamander Brandy. They do not panic here, but their feelings toward me remain the same. The predominant feeling towards me is fear.

  And in others, not just Edgar, I realize with a shiver, is also admiration.

  A boy is dead, and these mages do is admire me for my power.

  Little do they know that at this very moment I’ve not a spark of magic left in me. If I were to try the sloppy ritual that Michael just did, I too would be carried out thrown over a shoulder as if I never mattered at all.

  I know our passage through the crowd only takes seconds, but it feels like hours. Maybe that’s because somewhere, in the world we left behind, it does.

  It isn’t until we’re outside in the hall that I discover I’ve been holding my breath. When I do finally manage to pull air into my lungs, the shudder wracks my body until I feel sick. I’ve lived a sheltered life. Up until now, death was never something waiting on the other side of a poorly performed ritual.

  Now, all in the span of one day, I’ve been the cause of not one, but two deaths. I am violently sick against the wall, but there is nothing but bile left in my stomach.

  Kendall holds my hair back while I dry heave the bile. I don’t know how long I sit there, my forehead pressed to the cool cement between bouts of futile puking.

  When I do finally manage to come to, Flynn has crouched down beside me with a fistful of crumbled crackers.

  “They’re from the nurse’s office,” he says. “I had them in my pocket.”

  For some reason, I find this hilariously funny.

  It is probably just the exhaustion and the utter emptiness inside me, or the combination of the two and the earnest way that Flynn offers the terrible, crushed up crackers, to me. Whatever the reason, the sobs that once wracked my body are replaced with uncontrollable laughter.

  Fortunately, in all this time, the rest of the mages who gathered to see the dead boy have long since gone. We’re alone in the hall. No footsteps echo around us. Tonight is going to be a quiet night in The Underground, I can feel it.

  Anyone who sees me now would just have their hunches confirmed that I am, indeed, a psychopath.

  Once I’ve gotten ahold of myself enough to at least move away from my own spewed vomit and take the cracker crumbs Flynn has offered me, I realize I’m not the only one laughing.

  Cedric and Kendall sit with their backs against the opposite wall. As soon as I make eye contact with Kendall, I break out into uncontrollable snickers again.

  “What is wrong with us?” I manage through choking laughter.

  “Often laughter is a form of release when a person goes through a traumatic experience,” Flynn says.

  His matter-of-fact way of saying it sobers me just a bit. I tear open one of the packets and toss the dry crumbs into my mouth. It takes work to swallow. All my insides are dried out from tears and expulsion. But I do, and it somewhat calms the sour roiling in my stomach.

  I ask where Draven went.

  Cedric’s head turns to look down the hall in the direction of the sleeping quarters. “He didn’t think it was a good idea for us to sleep in there tonight,” he says.

  “It may not be safe for you,” Kendall adds, quietly.

  I look at him and wait for an explanation that does not come.

  I guess it doesn’t matter. I’m tired enough to fall asleep right here on the concrete floor. I scoot a little closer to Flynn who is settling down against the wall beside me and lay my head in his lap.

  For a second, his hands freeze in the air, unsure of what to do with them. Then he slowly lowers them down to stroke the hair at the side of my face. Flynn might not know who he is without magic, but I think that without it, I’m beginning to finally find out.

  My eyelids are suddenly so heavy, I can barely keep them open. As they begin to flutter shut, I find myself babbling on about some kind of apology.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, my
words slurring together. My blurry vision is fixed on the two mages across from me.

  Cedric saves my breath. “Stop, Octavia,” he says. “You need to stop being sorry.”

  I chuckle again. I’m so tired, it’s more like a quiet rumbling in my chest than full-out laughter.

  “But I’m always doing things to be sorry about.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  Draven’s voice punctuates the silence.

  I force my head up a little in order to see him.

  He stands at the end of the hall, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He catches me looking, and a slight smile forms at the corner of his mouth. “But you don’t see us apologizing for it all the time.”

  It’s my turn to grin. “What have you done that deserved apologizing lately?”

  Draven walks over to the rest of us slowly. He crouches down in front of me and gently lifts my chin up to look at him better.

  “This.”

  And with that, he sticks a needle in the side of my neck. All is black.

  32

  Cedric

  Normally the image of another mage shoving a needle into Octavia would send me into a frenzy. Tonight, it just allows me to finally breathe.

  “Is she asleep?” I ask.

  Flynn reaches across her and presses two fingers to her wrist. After a second, he nods.

  I take in another deep breath and let it out.

  “Thank god,” I say, “I was starting to worry she never would.”

  “I still don’t like that I had to be the one to do it,” Draven says. He straightens back up and stretches his cramped muscles. “It was one thing to steal another of the stimulating serum, but another to figure out which one of the tranquilizers will put her to sleep, and which one would just kill her.”

  Kendall stiffens a bit to my side. He wasn’t a fan of the idea in the first place, and the mention of the worst-case scenario has made him bristle again. I reach over and pat him on the knee. Anyone else might’ve seen the gesture as condescending, but Kendall just glances over and forces himself to relax back again. That’s why I like him. He just takes things at face value, doesn’t over think things.

  Not like Flynn.

  Octavia has been out for all of thirty seconds, and I can already see him trying to work out the next six steps of our plan, or his plan, or whatever it is he’s always thinking about. Not that any of us ever gets the chance to really make plans. Octavia is always stubbornly pushing forward, onward, always two steps ahead.

  We once promised to protect her, but all we keep managing to do is stumble around behind her, barely able to keep pace. For once, I want us to be the ones doing the protecting.

  Though I do feel a little guilty as Draven moves and I catch a good glimpse of her completely passed out in Flynn’s lap. No one wants to get tranquilized, but she has to sleep. Her powers won’t return to her without proper rest.

  Draven has started pacing a bit. I wish he would just sit here with us. His motion makes me anxious. Maybe it’s because I want to be pacing too. My legs ache to tap my own rhythmic, anxious, beat on the cement floor. I force them to still, however. I don’t want to risk waking Octavia.

  Flynn, on the other hand, seems bent on determining how deep her sleep is. He picks up one of her wrists, drags her arm up a bit, and then lets go. It lands on her side with a dull thud. When he reaches for it again, inevitably to try again, I snap at him to stop.

  “She’s asleep,” I say, “But she won’t stay for long if you keep on doing that. She needs to rest, remember?”

  Not everything has to be tested and analyzed.

  My own aching muscles remind me that we need sleep, too. I’ve already started to feel a little swell of power trickling back into me as we sit here in the hall, but if we’re going to be able to help Octavia, we’re going to need to get some proper rest as well.

  “Well then?” Draven says as he finally stops pacing. “Have we decided what we’re going to do about it?”

  “We haven’t even discussed it,” I say. “We’ve just been waiting for her to fall asleep, remember?”

  He nods his head too vigorously. He did not remember.

  “Any day now, Bram is going to have Octavia follow him out to the academy and have her interrupt the tribunal’s meeting,” Draven says. “We can’t let that happen. That’s the kind of thing you can’t come back from.”

  Both Kendall and I shush Draven at the same time.

  I shoot him a look. “For being the only mage here with prior experience with this place, I’m surprised you’re not more careful.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I sigh. “Nothing,” I say. “Only that we’re all exhausted, and it’s probably the only chance we are going to get to discuss this without her knowing.”

  I nod at Octavia. For a second, I catch myself staring. Even in her frail state, she’s stunning. I’m jealous of the way Flynn’s fingers continue to absentmindedly run though her hair. I should be jealous of much more, I know, but I think I’ve always known I wouldn’t be her first.

  But I do hope she’ll choose to be with me one day, too. I meant what I told her. I’m not going anywhere, no matter what. I’m just grateful to be by her side still. I can’t imagine what my life would be without her.

  Probably quite uneventful, to be honest. I’d still be home and blissfully unaware of the inner workings of the crime syndicate. I would also still not know what my father—

  No. This is not about me. I can’t disappear down that road again. Not here, not now.

  Draven finally sits down in the middle of the hallway.

  “What if we just leave?” Kendall asks.

  Draven is so quick to shake his head, I know he too has already considered the possibility. “Octavia could theoretically do it the next time Bram opens a tear between the planes, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?” Kendall presses. “Once we get to the other side, we could be so long gone by the time he catches us, he’d never be able to find us.”

  “He’s got a point,” I add. “Even an hour’s head start here could be days, or even weeks, out there.”

  “Or it could be no time at all,” Draven retorts.

  It is Flynn’s turn to interrupt. “I’ve been paying close attention to the time differences,” he says. “There is no rhyme or reason to it. Draven is right. If we left that way, even with Octavia using all of our powers to hold time still as long as possible, there is no guarantee that Bram wouldn’t just step out right behind us. There is also the very real possibility that we could get lost in the in-between and never find our way out.”

  “What about the exit in the lounge?” I ask. I know we were all thinking it earlier today when Edgar and the others led us through.

  Draven shakes his head. “I thought about it too. I checked when I went to steal the potion. It’s already been sealed up.”

  That is not a good sign. If Bram’s dealings with drugs are taking a hiatus, he must be close indeed to moving on his next set of plans.

  “So we can’t just leave,” I say. “Back to the drawing board.”

  “What if Bram lets us leave?”

  I glance over at Kendall beside me. “You’re kidding us, right?” I say. “You know Bram isn’t going to just let any one of us walk out. He wouldn’t let us do it to save Flynn here, even though it meant Octavia’s powers would be significantly weakened.”

  “And those powers are the reason we’re here in the first place,” Draven says before hastily adding, “I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s just a fact.”

  After a second, Flynn looks pointedly at Kendall. “I think we should hear him out.”

  I turn my head lazily against the wall to look at the Earth Mage and wait for him to speak again.

  “It’s something Octavia recently learned how to do,” he says, “From one of the mages here.”

  Draven crosses his arms. “You mean the way she’s been reading us and thinking
we don’t know it?”

  I shake my head. “She’s not very good at it.”

  “Yet,” Kendall says. “She can learn, we all know she’s fast.”

  “Alright,” I say, “Say she learns how to do it better. Well enough to read any one of us, even Bram, without us knowing it. What then?”

  Kendall shrugs. “Then she can read Bram well enough to know how to convince him to let us go. Or, at least, to get us out of here with enough of a head start that we will be able to disappear on the other side.”

  If Octavia had a year or more to learn the skill, it might not be half bad. But even she can’t master a skill like that in just a couple of hours, even days at the very most. I’m about to say so when I stop.

  Both Flynn and Draven have come to the same conclusion. I can see it on their faces.

  “Could it actually work?” I ask. I do not address the question to Kendall, but rather, to Flynn.

  His eyes are already scanning the floor like he’s remembering the pages of a text read long ago. After a long second, he looks up.

  “During one of Dr. Fashu’s sessions, Octavia once created a time loop,” he says.

  I sit up, my mind reeling. “Why didn’t we ever hear about this?”

  Flynn shakes his head. “It did not end well.”

  “But that was before she had the watch,” Draven says, leaning forward as well. A light has returned to his eyes. “If she can do it again, she could have plenty of opportunities to try to convince Bram…and he wouldn’t know it.”

  He falls back onto his haunches.

  There is a moment of silence as we all consider whether or not this is really a possibility.

  “The issue lies in probability,” Flynn adds, his eyes still moving so quickly they are a blur. “The chances of Bram letting us go for any reason are next to none.”

  “But that isn’t none,” Draven says.

  “What kind of risk does Octavia run, if she chooses to do it?” I ask.

  Flynn’s eyes stop flashing, and move up to look at us. There is a new look on his face. I don’t remember the last time I saw it on anyone here in this godforsaken place. It is hope.