Adapt: Book Two of the Forgotten Affinities Series

by Analeigh Ford

  And then, as soon as her body is no longer in contact with it, a shudder wracks through her. Her eyes roll in her sockets and her lungs suck in a great quantity of air—so much that she immediately breaks down in a fit of coughing. The feel of her body twitching beneath me only makes me hold her tighter.

  She mustn’t recognize me at first, because she fights back. Octavia’s balled up fists shove at my chest, push against my arms, flailing at me until those rolling eyes land on mine. I reach out with my mind, feeling for the walls that she usually has up. When I find none, I push further. Though I’m curious to find out what has upset her, I don’t pry. Instead, I plant my own emotions in her. I show her concern, safety and finally, only after she has stopped trying to fight me off, curiosity.

  Her next breath comes out in the sound of my own name.

  “Cedric.”

  This time when our eyes meet, I see her looking back at me with recognition.

  She throws her arms around my neck and squeezes tight. I freeze for the shortest second, and then I accept it. I force my own muscles to relax and envelop her. Her body shakes softly in my arms. When she finally lets go, I lean back so I can look her in the face.

  “What happened?”

  I reach up and wipe away a small trickle of blood from her nose. She makes a gagging sound at the sight of it and pulls back, her hands flying up to her face. I see her struggle for a moment to remember. Her eyes cut over to the glass crystal ball, then to the blood on her hands, and finally, to me.

  “I had a vision.”

  If I hadn’t just walked in on her in a fully catatonic state like that, I might not have believed her. There is a reason the academy stopped teaching divination long before I was a student. Unlike most magical practices, divination can’t be taught. It is rare a mage comes along with a gift that allowed them to actually see anything. Rarer still that it was the truth.

  Before she can tell me what she saw in the ball, we are joined by the others. Kendall first, then Wednesday. She takes one look at her friend and flies at her in a frenzy.

  Wednesday manages to coax Octavia off of the floor and into one of the chairs. She doesn’t say much, just mutters that she is fine…but she needs a minute. I don’t like the way she keeps looking at me. Neither does Kendall. Before he can draw any conclusions, however, Flynn arrives next. At least he has the good sense to take one look around the room, and swiftly step inside to shut the door.

  He looks at me for some kind of answer, and the way he looks makes me glance down at myself. I’m smeared in some of her blood, transferred to me in those fevered moments where Octavia was still coming-to.

  “Octavia was unconscious when I arrived,” I say. “She says she saw something in the ball.”

  Flynn crosses over to crouch in front of her, pushing Wednesday out of the way. She looks cross, but she doesn’t stop Flynn from reaching out and taking Octavia by both of her shoulders.

  “Tell us what you saw,” he says. “The longer you wait, the more your mind is likely to forget the details.”

  “Give her some time Flynn,” I say. I motion to how she still shivers on the couch. She’s pulled her knees up to her chest and scooted into the far corner. I still feel the overwhelming mixture of emotions that were inside her when I first got here. All divination is taxing on the body and mind. And if Octavia actually did see something, there is no telling what it might have been.

  “It isn’t me I’m worried about,” Octavia says.

  Wednesday looks immediately less anxious. “I thought for a second that you’d completely lost the ability to speak,” she says. “How did you even have time to use the ball before we got here in the first place?”

  “That is my fault. She was removed from Psychic class. I should have tried to stop it, but I didn’t think…” I gesture to the scene unfolding before us. “There was no way to know.”

  That isn’t enough for Wednesday, however.

  “You need to be more—” she begins, before Octavia cuts her off.

  “Stop!” she says, trying to scoot further back in the couch. Her outburst makes the rest of us quiet. Kendall finally moves to sit opposite her. I can tell he’s struggling with the need to touch her, but from the way Octavia keeps pressing the tips of her fingers to her temples and pushing back into the chair though there is nowhere left to go, it is clear she needs to deal with this alone.

  “Stop,” she says again, this time less forcefully. When she opens her eyes, she is looking at me. “I had a vision, or something…I don’t really know what,” she says. “About your father.”

  It is my turn to freeze. “What?”

  “He was in some kind of…some dark place. And he was there with…with…” She squeezes her eyes shut as she tries to recall the facts. “A man I recognized from somewhere else.”

  “Octavia, you are going to have to be more precise,” Flynn says. “Take a moment. Think about where you were, how you felt.”

  “I was scared,” she says. “Terrified, at first. I…I didn’t understand what was happening. But then I saw him, the principal I mean, and he was talking…I think he was talking about me.”

  “And why is that?”

  Something about the surgical way that Flynn is trying to dissect Octavia’s vision bothers me. “Just let her tell the whole thing, Flynn,” I snap.

  She squeezes her eyes shut for a second, and then looks back at me. “They were discussing a girl…and he said something about how it wasn’t her fault she was ‘this way’…that it would be a waste of her powers.”

  I nod slightly. “And?”

  She’s not finished.

  “It wasn’t so much what he said that bothered me, it’s who he was saying it to,” Octavia says. Her eyes dart around the room, and she squeezes her knees up to her chest harder. “Where’s Draven? I wish he was here.”

  “Doubtless still in Ritual class,” Flynn says.

  “What does it have to do with him?” I ask.

  “It’s because of Draven that I know him,” she says. “The man he was talking to in the dream, it was the head of the mage crime syndicate that…that...”

  She trails off, and I understand why. It isn’t common knowledge that Draven once was under the employ of some of the less-than-savory members of The Underground…but I had no idea Octavia actually met one of them. Something about how she says it makes a chill run through me.

  She can’t be insinuating what I think she is.

  “I still don’t get it though,” she continues. “Why would your father be working with The Underground in the first place? It doesn’t make any sense, unless…” She stops and shakes her head. She covers her face with her hands for a moment, and then slowly drags them down her face until they cover just the lower half. “They were working together the whole time.”

  But it isn’t just that.

  I straighten up a bit and force down a stubborn pride that has suddenly reared its ugly head.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, trying to keep the tone of my voice in check, “Are you implying that my father is somehow involved with them?”

  “I’m not implying anything. I’m just telling you what I saw,” Octavia says. “I mean, think about it. The Underground has only been supposedly acting up ever since I arrived. Couldn’t there be more to it than we think?”

  “You do realize that all this time, all these weeks…” I stop and check myself again. “Even I am working with him on this Octavia.”

  All eyes are on me now, and I know I have to tread lightly here. “I don’t mean to discredit what you saw…but I know my father better than anyone. He’d never work with men like that. He doesn’t have to.” I open up my arms and gesture all around us. “They have nothing he doesn’t already have.”

  “I think we can all agree on one thing at least,” Flynn says. He climbs up from the floor and takes the space on the couch between me and Octavia. “This vision wasn’t clear enough to draw any true conclusions from. We’re only assuming this has to do with Oc
tavia in the first place.”

  “But who else would it be?” She says, a hint of annoyance creeping into her voice. “I know what I heard. And I know what I saw.”

  A small shudder wracks her body before she continues. “I knew that the principal wouldn’t be helping me if he didn’t want to gain something from it. Now…I just need to know why he was reaching out to the crime syndicate in the first place. Do you think this means…” and here she pauses a moment before she glances between the rest of us, “That I’m going to fail the tribunal?”

  “It means absolutely nothing,” I say. This time I stand, and it is my turn to cross over to crouch beside her. I run a hand across the side of her face, where a little blood still remains as a darkening smudge. “Visions are fickle and often difficult to understand. All we can do is take it as a warning.”

  I try to swallow down my own pride, and keep my personal feelings out of it, but it is difficult.

  I’ve had my disagreements with my father over the years. Hell, there have even been times were I too wondered if he was mixed up in something unsavory, but never once to this kind of level. He’d never get mixed up with the kind of people who would effectively destroy his career, were he to be found out.

  The thing that bothers me even more than Octavia being so quick to believe my father might be wrapped up with The Underground, is the fact that it bothers me at all.

  “There is something I was planning on telling everyone, when the time was right,” I say. I’d have liked to wait until Draven was here as well, since I know how he gets when he’s been left out. But now is as good a time as any.

  “The work I’ve been doing with my father isn’t as glamorous as you might think,” he says. “When I say we’ve been monitoring The Underground movements for any sign that they took advantage of that ‘blip’ in The Sight to find new mage recruits, I really mean I get to spend most of my evenings sifting through news reports and internet posts about the odd things people saw that night.”

  “And?” Octavia asks.

  “And,” I say, “I can pretty confidently say that we don’t think anyone else made any legitimate enough claims to get scouted out.”

  “So what does this mean for us?” Flynn asks.

  “Well,” I shove my hands in my pockets and rock back a bit on my heels. “Likely within a few weeks, things should calm down a bit at the school. Teachers should stop freaking out so much about teaching protections spells and whatnot.”

  “I think he means, for us?” Wednesday says. “I mean, I occasionally sneak out of the school for coffee…”

  “You do?” Octavia says, looking betrayed.

  Her best friend just shrugs. “Sorry, but you’re the one on house arrest, not us.”

  “Yes, that is actually what I was getting to,” I say.

  Now everyone’s attention is turned on me. Octavia leans forward in her seat, some color finally returning to her face.

  “I’ve convinced my father to let Octavia arrange one evening a week off campus,” he says. “So long as at least two of us second-year mages are with her, it will be allowed.” I glance at Kendall and add, “Sorry man, I really did try to convince him, for your sake, that it wasn’t quite fair. But I took what we could get.”

  Octavia scoots a little further in her seat. I know it is too much to ask for that her vision is completely forgotten, but at least she has something new to occupy her thoughts. She looks like a prisoner who’s just been told the date of her release is sooner than she originally thought.

  “Yes,” she says, “This is exactly what I need.”

  “Now before you get too excited, there is one more specification that my father insisted on.” I fish in the breast pocket of my jacket and take out a tiny, metal ring. “Dr. Fashu has been given the task of keeping track of your movements off campus,” he says.

  Octavia looks a little skeptical at first, but she reaches out a hand and lets me place it in the center of her palm. She weighs it for a second, and then tests the fit on several of her fingers, finally settling on her thumb.

  “It’s not like a tracking device,” I assure her. “It’s enchanted to alert him if you suddenly get separated from us.”

  She admires it a moment, before taking it off again. I’m worried she might refuse it at first. I know she hasn’t told me all the details of her meetings with Dr. Fashu, but I get the impression that she doesn’t hold much respect for him.

  “It’ll do,” she says, and though she’s trying to look pleased, I can tell she’s a little disappointed. I walk back to her side and lean down a second to rest my lips on the spot where her hair meets her forehead.

  “It isn’t forever,” I promise. But truth be told, it might be. Mages like her don’t just get to do what they like, even after they graduate. I think the other know it too, or at least are beginning to understand it. I’d never tell her, but Octavia is likely to be hunted down by someone, some organization, for as long she lives.

  18

  Octavia

  Between the vision and another unavoidable session with Dr. Fashu, I’m so tried by Friday morning that I almost consider skipping Ritual class altogether. Jessica attended once again, and this time she behaved even worse to me. Rather than simply ignoring me, she took every opportunity she could to make everything as difficult as possible.

  Though Flynn promised me that these sessions “testing my limits” wouldn’t last, I am going on three-for-three now, and starting to think this is just going to be the new normal. If Dr. Fashu weren’t quite so open about his poor opinion of mages like myself, those from non-magical families, I would think it was all in the name of science and my own good. As it is, I am beginning to wonder if he is really just a sadist like I thought.

  But I can’t skip Ritual class. Draven is the only one of the boys who I haven’t gotten to tell what I saw in my vision—and he’s also the only other one who actually might have some sort of insight into what was actually going on.

  Cedric may have apologized for his behavior in Psychic class, but I’m still unable to get past what I saw, and how he reacted when I told him. I don’t know why I am so upset by it. After all, in the vision, Cedric’s father was trying to help me, wasn’t he? Maybe that is what disturbs me the most about it. Nothing about the vision seemed quite…right.

  Flynn says that is normal for visions, but it doesn’t mean I am any less anxious about what it might mean for me.

  Luckily, I have the opportunity to discuss what it might mean with Draven on our way to class. But as soon as I mention who I saw in the vision, his face darkens.

  “What is it?” I ask, immediately halting at the top of the basement steps. A couple of disgruntled mages have to stop and move around me to pass through the crowded back hall, but I don’t care.

  The Ritual classes were moved to the academy basements as one of the school’s new protection measures. I never understood why they kept them so far away in the first place until we met last week and the ingredients we were using to prepare a basic fire ritual smelled so potently of rotten eggs that even Harvel and Drummel complained when I passed by them in the entrance hall.

  Draven shoves his hands deep inside his pockets and lets out a long sigh, his head tilting back and his gaze turning skyward. “I just, I had really hoped to leave that part of my past behind,” he says.

  “I thought you said that they’d never let you go…even after that last favor.”

  He nods, but not to agree with me. “I haven’t heard from them since. I was starting to think that, well, maybe I was wrong. Maybe they did decide to leave me alone.”

  We wait for another couple of students to pass by. The basement isn’t very popular. You can’t even get downstairs if you aren’t a Ritual Mage, but the doorway is right outside one of the nicest bathrooms on the first floor, so there is always an inordinate amount of foot traffic.

  “Well then, what do you think it means?” I ask.

  He has me tell him exactly what I saw again. I star
t with how I recognized Cedric’s father—but then he stops me.

  “Wait a second,” he says. “Before that. Before any of that. Was that the very first thing you saw?”

  I scrunch up my eyes and try to remember. Like Flynn said, the more time that passes since the vision, the harder it is to remember the details. I remember the blackness fading into the scene, how I wasn’t able to recognize most of them until the third person—someone I am quite sure I have never seen before in my life—arrived. But before that…

  My eyes fly open. I’d forgotten how it started this whole time. “I saw Cedric’s mother,” I say. “Or, at least, I think I did.”

  A bell overhead announces that classes will begin any minute. Another pair of black-clad students appear around the corner, spot us, and start walking over. The Ritual Mages are the only ones so far who don’t immediately shy away from me. I guess they’ve all probably seen things…worse things…than watching a girl’s toenails sprout like weeds in a National Geographic time-lapse.

  Draven looks a little annoyed. He puts a hand on the small of my back and leans in to whisper in my ear, “We’ll talk about this later,” before greeting the other two. The girl, a small pale mage with choppy black hair cut Joan-Jett style doesn’t smile at me, but she does give me a nod of acknowledgment.

  “About time you came back,” the girl says. “We were all rooting for you, you know.”

  I blink several times, a little surprised. “You…were?”

  “The name is Acacia.” She nods again, and nudges the boy at her side. “Horacio and I just got sick of watching this one mope around like a kid who found coal in his stocking on Christmas.”

  Draven bristles beside me. “I don’t mope.”

  “No,” Horacio says, just as we all start heading down the stairs. “You brood.”