Abandon: Book Three of the Forgotten Affinities Series

by Analeigh Ford

  I may have nothing left to try and convince Bram, but I do have something else left.

  There is more than one dial to press on the pocket watch in my hand.

  As always when time stops, I am left in a void of sound. The silence is overwhelming. The fire has frozen in in the grate, it’s orange and red tendrils reaching upward like the tentacles of a creature trying desperately to escape. The light it casts is too steady, too still.

  Kind of like me.

  I step around the table in the frozen moment. Bram stands still before me. I should be shaking, but I’m not. The spell Bram once intended for me to use against my fellow mages is now the same spell that will be his downfall.

  It’s really a shame that I didn’t think of this to begin with. It would have all be so much simpler.

  This was never the way it was supposed to be. This was never the way I was supposed to end it.

  There are many ways to die. Many ways to kill a man. Beating him to death with his own cane seems, somehow, one of the cruelest. It’s some poetic justice though. The night I met Bram, he ended another life the same way.

  Given more time I could have prepared. I could have brought poison—or a vial of his own drugs to kill him with. A dagger. A sword. A gun. Anything other than the blunt, brute force of an old man’s walking stick.

  I pluck the cane from Bram’s unmoving fingers. It’s heavier in my hands than I expected. I’d have liked to learn more from him. He was truly a great mage.

  I stop myself a moment. Was…or is? I’m already thinking about him like he’s gone.

  Funny that, the one thing a Time Mage doesn’t have enough of is time itself. Every second that I suspend time is agony. Every particle of me is being slowly torn apart as I draw from the very source of my magic. I do not have the time to search for another way.

  But still, I have to pause for a moment to consider. By stopping time, I also broke the time loop. I cannot go back now. I cannot change my mind and just let things run their course.

  It is Bram’s last gift to me.

  And mine, to him, is freedom from his own sorry, miserable, existence.

  When I finally straighten up, cane in hand, the light of the fireplace has begun to cast moving shadows across the wall before me once more. I raise a shaking hand to wipe away the blood splattered across my face.

  There was a moment, at the end, where the spell had lifted and my cane came down a final time.

  The echo of it still rings in my ears.

  I step back, my gaze turning from the horror I’ve painted on the study floor to the same I expect to see on Edgar’s face as he steps in the door. I meant it to be silent, but I couldn’t hold the spell long enough.

  But there is no horror on Edgar’s face. That same admiration, that respect, fear even…it’s plain this time. There is no mistaking it. The things that Bram once wanted from his followers, Edgar now gives to me.

  “You know what, Octavia,” he says, shaking his head. “I always knew I could count on you.”

  “What?”

  “Only one of you was walking out of this room alive,” he says. “We all knew it. Seems the only person who didn’t…was him. And, well,” he says, his eyes looking at me with a reverence I never expected from him, “You.”

  Somehow, in this moment, he must know me better than I know myself. It’s not much of a feat, because I no longer know myself at all.

  It takes all the strength left in me not to just collapse on the floor in front of him. I lean against the cane for a moment to steady myself. I don’t understand what he’s saying.

  Footsteps follow behind him. Kendall, Cedric, Draven, and Flynn appear in the doorway. I see the same exhaustion I feel in them as well. For them, it was only seconds—maybe minutes—in which their power dwindled. But in the end, they must have known something happened.

  I’m not the only one shaking from the pain of those last awful, drawn-out, desperate moments.

  Flynn is the only one of us not affected. It is he who steps forward, and then stops—his eyes falling to the remnants of my biggest triumph and also, I am beginning to realize, my biggest mistake.

  “What…what happened?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Edgar says with a grin. “The Underground just entered a new era, with Octavia here at its head.”

  I have to face them, so I do…but when I meet their gaze, I find the horror there that I did not find in Edgar.

  I did it to save them. I did it to save us.

  Somehow, that only makes it worse.

  From the Author

  Thank you for taking the time to read the third book in my debut series, Abandon, Book Three of the Forgotten Affinities Series. Book four, Atone, will be released in early 2019.

  If you enjoyed Abandon, please consider leaving a review on Amazon!

  You may subscribe to my newsletter here.

  This book couldn’t have been made possible without the support and encouragement of my friends, family, and readers like you.

  With love,

  Analeigh