“She can do it,” he says, quietly. “With next to none.”
Kendall nods and leans forward. “Bram would never know. No one would ever know.”
We all take a second to consider. I feel that same emotion dangerously taking over, but I have to stop it. It’s rare to get an opportunity to try something like this without actually running the risk of any consequences. So long as Octavia is careful not to use too much of her magic, there’s little chance of ever getting found out—no matter the outcome.
“And once we’re on the other side?” I ask, looking at each one of them in turn. “What then? We’re fugitives. We stole priceless artifacts. As far as they are concerned, we’re traitors.”
“What is the alternative?” Draven says. He stares back, his gaze steady. “To spend the rest of our lives cowering here, waiting for death, slowly turning into the kind of monsters who live and work here?”
I have to look away, but he continues.
“You know it’s true. This place changes you. We can’t stay here.”
I know he’s right. We all do. There is only one thing left. I have to break my promise to Octavia that I would never make her face Bram alone.
33
Octavia
My last conscious memory is that Draven was supposed to be off figuring out a safe place for us to sleep now that apparently everyone thinks I killed a mage boy. No. I rethink that. It is of Draven sticking me with a needle and then…nothing.
I’m not sure I had the consciousness to prepare for something when I woke up, but if I did, it certainly wasn’t this.
Something heavy rests across my shoulders, partially restraining me. The ground is too hard to be a proper bed, but certainly more comfortable than the straight-up concrete floor I fell asleep on.
The darkness is so thorough when I open my eyes, that for a moment, I think I am trapped in that that terrifying place between dreams and waking—where monsters creep at the corners of my vision and all my limbs are pinned to my sides. But then the thing that’s on top of me moves.
I roll to the side only to bump up against something else warm and moving. I let out a little screech and sit up, elbowing what I now realize is a person to my side in the process. Someone else moves in the room near my feet. The person I elbowed groans and sits up too, but it’s too dark to see straight away who it is.
Somewhere by my feet a door creaks open and lets in a tiny, blindingly bright sliver of light. I throw up an arm to block it a second while my eyes adjust. It takes me a second while the bodies around me rustle about before I realize where I’m at.
I’m back in the locker room. Someone has dragged the thin mattresses off a bunch of beds and stuffed them into the back corner. Draven still sleeps to my left while Kendall stretches and nurses what is sure to be a bruise just above his heart. Flynn is searching the ground by the bottom of the bed for his glasses—which I can now clearly see set carefully on top of a bench.
“The hell happened?” I ask at the tail end of the world’s longest yawn. I can’t stand to see Flynn floundering a moment longer, so rock forward enough to crawl over to the bench and grab the glasses for him. He squints at me a second as I hand them over, as if he’s trying to decide if it’s really me.
Cedric answers from the doorway. “We’ve been taking shifts sleeping with you all night.”
“You what?”
“Only in the most literal sense,” Flynn says, nudging the glasses up to rest at the top of his nose.
Kendall sits up and reaches for me, but I bat his hand away.
It takes me another second to get my bearings. My head still feels fuzzy. I could have slept for years, it certainly feels like it. My mind is filled with a slowly building fog that only strong coffee is going to clear.
However, it isn’t so foggy as to have completely forgotten how I got this way in the first place.
I grab a pillow from my side and hit Draven over the head with it as hard as I can.
“Let him sleep, he took the last shift,” Cedric says, taking another half-step into the room.
“He doesn’t deserve sleep. He drugged me!”
Kendall catches the pillow before I can hit him again and wrestles it from me without even trying to make it look like it is difficult to do.
“It wasn’t his idea to begin with,” Flynn says. “It was mine.”
I sit back. “What? Why?” I consider hitting him too.
“You need to rest, to get your strength back,” Kendall says. At least he has the good sense to keep his voice at an appropriate level. Every other sound on my morning ears is like a train barreling past at high speed—all high-pitched screeches.
“No,” I say, “I need to be practicing.”
The way Cedric glances over his shoulder before slipping inside makes me think there is something they’re not telling me. I don’t have time to think about this before he flicks on the lights and blinds me again.
Even Draven can’t sleep through the flurry of protestations that follow. He wakes like a bear from hibernation—all flailing arms and legs and loud grunts. I wait until he’s managed to sit up before I tug the pillow from Kendall’s unsuspecting grasp and smack him in the face with it one last time.
The shocked look on his face once it falls away is highly satisfying. So is the way his naked torso disappears into his mussed blankets.
“I guess I deserve that,” he mutters.
“Yes,” I say, his sexy body still not enough to make up for being knocked out against my will. “You do.”
Cedric comes to sit on the bench just over my shoulder. The others straighten up where they sit as well, signaling that feeling once again that I’m about to be told something.
“Is this what the tranquilizer was about?” I ask, after looking over their suddenly overly-serious faces. “You knocked me out so you could talk about something without me?”
Flynn nods. “That, and you really did need to rest.”
“Well,” I grumble, “I can’t fault you for being honest.”
“Actually,” Cedric says, “Honesty is kind of what we came here to talk to you about.”
Draven leans closer, the blanket pulling away from is naked torso in a way that makes me wonder if he’s even wearing anything underneath. I know I shouldn’t be thinking about that at a time like this but, it is what it is.
Then what he says finally pulls my mind from the chiseled abs and two-day-old stubble gutter.
“We need you to lie to Bram.”
Once they are through explaining, I just get to my feet without saying anything. An odd mixture of looks cross their faces, everything from excitement, to fear, to confusion.
I raise one hand up before they can try to say more. “Please,” I say, “Give me a minute, and maybe some coffee, to think about it.”
“But time really is of the essence—” Flynn starts, but Cedric is quick to hop up from his seat and step in front of him. He opens the door for me and waits, but not before shooting a look at Flynn that shuts him up.
“I think that’s an excellent idea,” he says, jerking his head at the others. Though it’s clear they are also anxious to hear my thoughts, both Draven and Kendall rush to get to their feet as well and follow us out. I’m a little disappointed to see that Draven did not, after all, sleep in the nude.
Neither, it seems, did Flynn. Cedric’s little jibe the other day must have gotten to him after all.
It’s not what I should be thinking about again, but it’s easier to think about than the plan these four just laid out to me.
I refuse to consider it until I’ve had caffeine.
The moment we’re all out in the hall, I know something has changed since yesterday. It’s more than the fact that I, begrudging is it is to admit it, had a good night’s rest for the first time since we arrived. Mages who I swear I’ve never seen before in my life see us coming and cross to the opposite side of the hall, their eyes darting to the floor.
I try to ignore it until we arr
ive at breakfast, or more accurately, something between breakfast and lunch. As soon as we arrive, the entire room goes silent.
I pause, not entirely sure what I should do. That decision is made for me when the first few mages sitting closest to us get up quickly, grab their things, and scuttle further to the back of the room to pick out seats among the throng.
Draven is the first to move. He slips through the door and scoots into the closest now unoccupied seat to the door and stars heaping food up onto a plate.
I don’t move to follow until Kendall takes my hand and leads me after him.
I sit sandwiched between Draven and Kendall at the end of the table to save anyone the apparently terrible pressure of having to sit beside me. This isn’t the same kind of fear I saw at the academy, full of gossip and whispers.
Strained conversation slowly picks up at the table, but it never quite reaches the mages sitting closest to us. They finish their food at record speed and then excuse themselves, completely unnecessarily, to me before they leave.
Even this, this I could handle; but when Edgar and Brendan come in and wait to be acknowledged before they sit beside us, it is just too much.
If even these mages fear me, or even worse, consider me an equal—then maybe it is time to make some rash decisions after all. All this, and I still haven’t had my coffee.
34
Octavia
As soon as I make up my mind, I reach in my pocket for my watch—only to find it missing. For a horrible, split second right here in the middle of breakfast, I think I’ve lost it.
It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had something stolen from me while I sleep—but then I lay eyes on Flynn, and see his head ducked low to read a book he’s snuck under the table with him—and I remember exactly where it was last.
He catches me staring, and while keeping his hands underneath the table, he shows off the tiniest hint of gold, and with it, a sly smile. Cedric must have given it to him after I was sleeping, and the cheeky bastard is already trying to figure it out.
It’s a better plan than the one I was counting on, and that was trial and error; otherwise known as pressing all the buttons in rapid succession and hoping none of them will send me back to the prehistoric era.
My rest has finally given me an appetite. I shovel as much food into myself as my stomach will let me, and then I stuff several sticky rolls into a basket for later. I don’t think it’s allowed, but I doubt anyone is going to try to stop me now.
Edgar watches me with interest, but he doesn’t say anything until I start reaching for an extra pot of coffee as well.
“Prepping for something?” he asks, his eyes counting the pretty ridiculous amounts of food I’ve piled up.
I stare him down while I finish stacking up my stolen tray with sugar and crème as well.
“You’d have a healthy appetite too,” I say, “If you were working on stopping time.”
Both Cedric and Draven look at me funny as I say it, but it isn’t until we’re heading out—and they’re the ones carrying my platter of food—that they ask me what that was all about.
“I thought we agreed to keep it a secret,” Draven says, quietly. He’s trying to keep an even keel to his voice, but his frustration is still evident.
“We were,” I say, “But I need Bram to call me to his office. I can’t just go asking for an audience again, not after last time.”
The only way I can think to get Bram to want to see me is to make him think I’ve finally figured out the watch. In the meantime, so long as I make it look like I’m still busy learning, I may be able to buy us the time we need to learn how to use the watch.
Unless Flynn has already figured it out, and from the look on his face, I think he already might have.
I collapse on the floor in front of him as soon as we get back to the locker room, taking the watch from him so I can feel the weight of it in my hands again. So far no one else has dared interrupt us in our makeshift den. Now that we have the food and coffee as well, I see no reason to leave it unless absolutely necessarily anymore. All that’s waiting for me on the other side are more whispers and sidelong glances.
I shouldn’t be eating already, but the scent of the buns is so potent in this little room that I find myself reaching for one right away while Flynn keeps flipping through the pages of one of his books.
When he holds out his hand for the watch again, I give it to him only a little reluctantly.
He lays the book out flat on his lap and points to the first dial, the one I already know will stop time if I press it again.
“I took what Cedric told me about the era this watch was made to match up the most likely translation of the runes.”
Cedric places a hand on his shoulder so I don’t have to. “The fast version, please.”
I know it takes everything in Flynn not to lay out all the steps to his discovery in explicit detail, but he does as Cedric asks and instead he just flips forward a couple pages and points to a chart of some pretty similar looking runes.
“They aren’t identical, but they’re close,” he says. “This top one here, it should set a point to which you can return to by clicking…” he thinks a moment before pointing out the dial directly below it, “Here.”
“You don’t sound as confident as I’d like,” Draven says. He sits up from where he was apparently taking a nap under some blankets in the corner, unbeknown to me, and nearly gives me a heart attack.
He must have crept over there while I wasn’t paying him any attention.
“Is Kendall hiding in here too somewhere,” I ask, one hand to my chest as I peer under the benches screwed into the floor, just in case. “Where did he go? I thought he came in here with us.”
“Nah, but he’ll be back soon. We decided we want to be showered and clean before we go back to meet our families. Or, you know, in case you and I end up alone for any period of time.”
Draven’s wink makes me blush, and I quickly look back to the dials Flynn pointed out.
“Jumping the gun a little bit on both those things,” I mutter.
“So long as I’m the one doing the jumping next…I’m okay with that.”
My face no longer blushes so much as it burns. Thankfully at least Cedric is still paying attention to what really matters right now.
“And if they aren’t the right dials?” Cedric asks.
“Well,” Flynn says, “They could be for creating a wormhole. That’s the second option.”
“A what?” Kendall says, appearing in the doorway with dripping wet hair.
“Octavia here is about to either set a time loop or open a wormhole. Not a big difference really,” Draven says.
I put a finger to my lips and loudly shush him. “Not so loud. There’s no use in all this if you go and blow our cover before I even get the chance to try.”
“So then do.”
I glare at him for a second, and then, I do. Nothing happens. I shake the watch and double check that it is still ticking, but I feel no surge of power, and nothing to indicate it worked.
“Oh, right.” Draven pulls a massive syringe out of his pocket, sticks it in me, and injects a foreign substance into my body without asking for the second time in the span of a single day.
I am so angry, I cannot even look at him.
“Later,” I growl, a promise of my future wrath heavy in my voice. He didn’t inject the whole thing this time, but rather just enough for me to feel the race of magic heightening in my veins.
This time I take a moment to concentrate. I focus on what I did the times before, and on the flush of power flooding my body. Earth, Psychic, Ritual, and Time.
“Well then,” Draven says, apparently deciding to dig himself even further into the hole he’s already dug, “Get on with it.”
This time, when I press the button, I feel a pull inside me. The ticking of the clock skips a beat.
Flynn leans in a little closer. “I think I heard something.”
“Well,” Cedric ad
ds, sitting down slowly on a bench. “We haven’t been swallowed up by a wormhole, so it seems promising this far.”
Kendall shuffles a little closer. “How do you know it’s worked?”
I stare at it for a moment.
“She won’t until she resets it,” Flynn says. One of his hands reaches out to rest on my forearm. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“Now, hold on a moment,” I say, staying the finger that hovers over the second dial. “You’re telling me that whatever I do now, no one but myself is going to remember in a couple of seconds?”
Flynn thinks on this for a moment.
“Most probably.”
I turn to Draven, grab and pillow, and smack it across his face as hard as I can.
And then I press the dial.
Cedric is standing again, watching me from above with bated breath. Flynn keeps pointing at the second dial, and Draven leans forward, and says, snarkily, “Well then…”
“Get on with it…” I mutter, before he can.
He sits back, a little disappointed that he didn’t get to say it. “You’ve gotten good at reading people.”
But Flynn is watching me closely.
“No,” he says, “She just already knew what you were going to say.”
I nod, a knot unwinding and rewinding in my stomach.
Cedric and Kendall both rush closer, their eyes alight.
“It worked then?” Cedric asks.
I nod again.
Kendall seems to the be the only one who realizes I’m not exactly as thrilled about it as I should be. He rests a hand on my shoulder, and as usual, the touch warms me. I lean my cheek against the touch, relishing in this simple moment.
This might be the last of these simple moments that we get for a while. Now that we know how to work the watch, I actually have to use it.
35
Octavia
I needn’t have been worried about having time to practice. I wait the first whole day with baited breath for the moment I’m called to Bram’s office. But he does not come. Then another day passes, and then one more.
Abandon: Book Three of the Forgotten Affinities Series Page 17
