Adapt: Book Two of the Forgotten Affinities Series

by Analeigh Ford

  A new housekeeper greets us at the door after a single ring of the bell. Once again, Cedric appears halfway down the stairs, an exact picture of how he appeared the last time, even down to the silver cufflinks he’s in the middle of attaching to the ends of his silk sleeves.

  But some things have changed. This time, it is a broad smile the breaks across his face. There is no icy stiffness, no perfect posture, no secret agenda. He meets me at the bottom of the stairs and puts one hand on each side of my arms.

  “I was thrilled when you asked to come over for dinner,” he says. The blue of his eyes trace down my face, the lines of my neck, down to the curves of the dress Wednesday picked out for me. “This time, I promise I don’t have any ex-girlfriends hiding upstairs.”

  He takes a second to fiddle with Dr. Fashu’s ring on my thumb.

  “And kidnappers? Will we be meeting any of those?”

  Draven coughs loudly behind me. I glance back and he grins.

  “That depends…what’s the definition of ‘kidnapping’?”

  Cedric clicks his tongue at Draven and the other two each punch him once each on the arm that is closest to them. Sufficiently pleased with the punishment, I turn back to Cedric and run one of my own hands down the soft line of the dress.

  “This time I’m even dressed the part,” I say, although standing this close to him, with his arms pressing my own gently to my sides, I am finding it difficult to breathe normally.

  Cedric bows his head and I stretch up onto the tops of my toes to meet him a gentle, and all too brief, kiss.

  That magical bell rings off somewhere in the house and breaks us apart. Cedric takes my arm and sweeps us down the hall towards the dining room.

  The last time that I was here, I was so overwhelmed by everything, so obviously out of place, that I never really got to appreciate it. Cedric’s house is one of those places that becomes more interesting the more you look at it. Every painting, every pattern in the wallpaper, every intricately carved statue just gets more and more detailed with each moment I stare. I can feel magic in these very walls.

  I have to pause at the entrance to the dining room. My eyes scan the table, not to admire the fine china, though it is arguably very fine…but rather to count the number of place settings.

  “Don’t worry,” Cedric says, as he steps up to the one chair at the head of the table, “As I said before, it’s just us tonight.”

  I slide into the seat that is offered me, and Cedric takes the one to my right. The rest of the boys settle in as well. Kendall immediately picks up one of the plates and starts examining it closely. I have to kick him under the table to get him to stop. I shoot him a look that I hope will remind him he is lucky to be here in the first place.

  That little bell rings again, and this time Cedric is the one to stand and raise his glass in a toast. “To second chances,” he says, looking at me first. “For all of us.”

  I am probably hungrier than I should be, because as much as I try to concentrate on whatever everyone is talking about over dinner, all I really am able to think about is the food. It isn’t until Cedric catches me leaning forward in my seat to see if he’s finished his crème brûlée as well that I realize he’s trying to ask me something.

  “Huh, sorry?” I scoot back in my seat as gracefully as I can, so he doesn’t realize what I was doing.

  “I was just asking you if you’d like to see the garden.” He picks up my empty dish and swaps it for his own as he says it.

  I run my little dessert spoon around the rim of the crackled, glazed surface and then lift it up and dart my tongue across the sweet pudding. “Only if you promise I’m not going to come out of there drenched in Dragon’s Blood.”

  He stares at me funny for a second, but Draven leans forward and says, “We’ve been processing the resin in Ritual Class. It gets a little…messy.”

  The memory of it dripping down my hands in long, sticky tendrils kills the rest of my appetite. I set the spoon down and get up. Cedric points down the hall and promises the housekeeper will show the rest of them all to the game room.

  “Game room?” I lean a little to the side, trying to catch a glimpse down the hall where he is pointing. I’m interested to see what kinds of games Cedric’s family might play.

  “We’ll join them soon, I promise,” Cedric says. He rests one hand on my arm and leads me the opposite direction, through another door in the dining room and past what I think is a butler’s pantry—a small narrow room lined with china and silverware. I don’t see a butler, but I do catch a plate floating in the space above a table, polishing itself with a fine white rag.

  I expect to be met with the chill late October night when Cedric pushes the door open, but instead warm, damp air rushes over me instead. I relax my arms, which I’ve instinctively wrapped around myself in preparation for the cold, and Cedric takes one of them gently in his own.

  He reaches up to brush a giant fern out of the way. It grows from beside the door to our left up overhead and then droops down in a graceful arc that mostly, up until now, obscured the view into the rest of the garden.

  From above, it once looked like an ordinary, though large, patch of trees and flowers. Down here in the thick of it, the garden is a magical maze. The heat and moisture allows for all kinds of flora and fauna to grow here that I never expected.

  When I tilt my head back, I can only see the tiniest sliver of the night sky from between the branches of the trees overhead. But even from those tiny slivers, I can see more stars than I’ve seen the entire time since arriving in the city. A city that never sleeps doesn’t leave much night sky for the stars to shine.

  Cedric sees me looking, and he stops to tilt his head back as well.

  “Is it an illusion?” I ask. I lift one finger up and point to the sky. I wish I could push the tree branches out of the way like he pushed back that fern, revealing something magical and beautiful beyond.

  He shakes his head. I have to stop craning my neck back or else I am going to get some kind of crick in it, but as soon as I do, I am immediately overwhelmed by the garden itself again. We’ve come to a crook in the path. To the left, it leads into some denser plants—large, with massive leaves where dew forms and trickles into the crevices. To our right, a willow tree has overtaken a bench—its branches dangling down in a curtain of tiny white flowers so that if I weren’t looking directly at it, I might not notice it was there at all.

  Cedric nudges us in that direction, and parts the flower curtain just enough for me to slip through. The flowers brush against my shoulders as I do. Their scent is both sweet and fresh, a little like honeysuckle.

  “Not an illusion,” he says. “It’s a little hard to describe, actually. This garden…it is like it exists in two places at once.”

  I sit down beside him on the bench and try to look up again. But here, the tree branches grow so close together than I cannot see even one of the stars. But if I cannot see the stars, then, I realize, the others can’t see us from upstairs either.

  “Where are we?”

  “We’re in the Upper East Side,” Cedric says, but amusement plays on the corner of his mouth, “But we’re also somewhere else. Somewhere tropical.”

  I glance back down the path, from where we came. “And if we go back through that door, we’ll be back in your house?”

  He nods.

  “And what about this one?”

  I push back the wall of flowers on the other side, where another door lies. It is a small, plain, wooden door. It was once painted red, but has long since faded to a dull, peeling rust. While the rest of the house is kept in immaculate, near bourgeoisie-levels of perfection, there has to be a reason this one has been allowed to age and rot where the others have not.

  Cedric reaches over to brush the flowers back into place, covering the door from view once more.

  “That’s what I wanted to bring you out here to talk about,” he says.

  He turns both his hands palm up, and I slip mine into them.
I feel the way he reaches for my mind and for just a moment, I let him in.

  This time he is careful only to give me a smidge of his emotions. For someone who is usually so reserved, the tempest that rages inside him has overwhelmed me more than once before. I feel sorrow at the forefront of his emotions, and right behind it, shame.

  “I behaved badly the other day,” he says. “In class. I shouldn’t have overreacted like that. It would have been easy for me to imagine any other face in that mirror. But I didn’t. And I got upset when I saw you looking.”

  “I shouldn’t—”

  He stops me. “Don’t apologize. You did nothing wrong.”

  One of his hands lets go of mine and reaches into his pocket. It reappears with a small framed photograph he hands to me.

  It is the image of the same woman I saw in the mirror. And then again, I know, in the vision. Just seeing her again gives me shivers.

  “What’s wrong?” Cedric asks. He puts an arm around me, but that only makes me feel guiltier.

  “She just…how did you remember her so well?”

  Where the image of my mother that I conjured was just a cheap imitation of her, the one that Cedric conjured was so exact, so perfect, down to the tiny freckle in her left eye. I would remember—the image of it black against the bloodshot whites of her eyes is seared into the back of my mind.

  Cedric takes the photo back. “I don’t have many memories of my mother,” he says. “She came to New York from Jamaica….and although marrying my father meant she had to make a home here, she never really quite left her homeland. So my father had this door put in.”

  He reaches out through the branches and rests a hand on it briefly, before letting it return to stroke the photograph in his lap.

  “She died before I was old enough to understand what was going on. My father isn’t a very sentimental man, so he kept only this one photograph. Which he gave to me.”

  I know I should be concentrating on how sorrow swells up in Cedric as he says it, at how he has chosen this moment to share the tragedy of his mother’s death with me, but all I can think is what he said about his father.

  He isn’t a very sentimental man.

  It’s just what the man in my vision said, in the midst of a conversation about a powerful mage, her powers in danger of being cut off too soon. The more he tells me, the more my new suspicions about the vision continue to be confirmed.

  “Cedric, how did she die?”

  I flinch at the insensitivity of my own words, but they can’t be helped. I have to know.

  He keeps staring down at the photograph, but even as he does, I feel the link between us sever. He withdraws his emotions inside himself, I am sure, to protect me from what he must be feeling. But though his sorrow was a burden, the sudden emptiness behind it is surprisingly lonely.

  I squeeze his hand as he finally starts to speak.

  “Cancer,” he says. “It came out of nowhere. By the time they found out, it had spread past the point that even our most talented mage healers could help.”

  He has to stop a second to clear his throat. “The time was devastating for my father. She deteriorated so quickly, it was like one moment she was healthy and normal, the next our house had been turned into a hospital.”

  I have no personal experience with death, but I can imagine how difficult that must have been for him as a child. It’s hard to imagine Cedric as anything other than the stoic, very grown-up young adult that he is. I imagine the process of losing his mother probably robbed him of the rest of his childhood. I squeeze his hand tighter for a second, as he continues.

  His face has taken on a far-off look. He’s not one to ramble, but I have a suspicion he’s never told anyone these feelings before. He might never have even processed them himself.

  “When she died, I distinctly remember my father taking on an incredible amount of blame. He was investigated by the mage tribunal at one point, for mishandling her death. It was awful.”

  He hangs his head. “As if losing her wasn’t bad enough, he was blamed for her death. Not only by himself, but many others as well. They thought that he should have handled it differently, or maybe that he should have grieved longer, or…” he shakes his head again. “I don’t know, pretended to be less powerful? For years, people speculated about why he never re-married or found another pair. Sometimes they even asked me. I don’t remember all the accusations, but the worst was when one of my father’s close friends had the audacity to claim she hadn’t even died.”

  His words make me freeze over.

  “Sorry, what was that?” I say.

  He glances up at me. “He was crazy, of course. Dozens of people saw her body. Even I saw her body.” His eyes flicker away again, and then shut for a long moment. “I think that’s why I focus on this picture so much. I don’t want to remember how she looked when she died, after the cancer ravished her.”

  I don’t tell him that I know exactly what he means.

  I reach out my other arm and try to put it over his shoulder, but he shrinks back. He isn’t staring at the photograph anymore. He is staring out ahead, past the leaves, past the door, past the wall and the night sky beyond.

  He stares into darkness. “It’s the only image of her that I remember, and even that is ruined. I was so terrified that I created her into a monster. I remember her ashy, dead, and rotten,” he says. “Her eyes bloodshot and staring. I know it isn’t true. I know it’s made up. I know she didn’t suffer…I have to believe he didn’t let her suffer…but it still haunts me.”

  His head droops, and suddenly, he is reaching for me again. I gather him in my arms, and though he doesn’t cry, I almost wish he would. The sound of it would drown out my thoughts. My own fears.

  The fear that what Cedric remembers is not just a dream…because I saw it too.

  22

  Octavia

  I cannot get Draven alone soon enough. He is upstairs playing a game of pool that somehow involves throwing darts at the balls to call them ahead of time…and no matter how many times I catch his eye and cough as conspicuously as possible, he cannot get my meaning.

  Normally I probably would have been disappointed that they weren’t about to introduce me to some cool new mage game…but all I can think about is what Cedric told me about his mother.

  He doesn’t even realize it, but that brief conversation in the garden might be the key to the vision I had just days ago. I don’t know what his mother has to do with me, or why I would see it to begin with, but I do think I am beginning to understand what I saw in the vision itself. It’s a start.

  It isn’t until a little sip of that outrageously expensive bourbon gives me just enough liquid courage to focus in on the white ball and it a little telekinetic nudge that makes Draven scratch on the last shot that he actually pays me any attention.

  Kendall’s face is positively lit up when he calls the game. I can see Flynn squinting a little suspiciously from the corner while Kendall squats down to the side to start collecting the balls for a re-rack and Cedric calls partners.

  Meanwhile, Draven steps up to the side table and pours himself another glass of bourbon. His eyes are already slightly glazed. I learned at the last event we attended that Draven only looks tough. It is because of this that when he lifts the glass to his lips, but rather than drinking right away, cuts his eyes over to me with a very knowing look in them, I am surprised he is able to keep it together this well. I never took him to be a graceful loser—especially if he knew the game was rigged at the last moment.

  “So,” he says, his voice low enough that only I can hear it over the breaking of the next round of balls, “What’s so important it couldn’t wait until later?”

  I wait until I am sure Cedric is busy enough concentrating on his shot that he won’t overhear us. “I think I know what the vision was about, or at least I’m starting to.”

  “So you’ve figured out what that woman’s got to do with you?”

  “Not exactly,” I say. I glance
once more at the game. “The vision…I don’t think it was about something that is going to happen. I think it’s something that already has. I think…” I have to wait until the end of the next round to finish what I’m saying. Flynn still seems lost in the corner, trying to figure out how Cedric scratched on that last ball the previous game.

  “What is it?”

  I realize, I’ve been gripping the glass in my hand so hard that my knuckles have turned white. I set it down on the table before any more liquor makes me too rash.

  “I think there is more to Cedric’s mother’s death than he was led to believe,” I say. “And I don’t know why yet, but I’ve got to figure it out. Why else would I have had that vision if I wasn’t supposed to?”

  “Figure what out?”

  I jump a little. Flynn has apparently finally realized how Draven really lost that last game, because I can see he was about to point it out to me before he overheard the last little snippet of conversation.

  I am about to lie about it just to keep things simple, but then another idea comes to mind.

  “Flynn, how much do you really know about working a crystal ball?”

  23

  Octavia

  I stay with Wednesday for a total of fifteen seconds, just long enough that I see Cedric’s car disappear around the corner, before I jump back up off the edge of the bed and reach for the door handle again.

  “Hold on—where do you think you’re going?”

  Wednesday blocks the door.

  “I have something I have to do.”

  “No way,” she says. “I planned it like this for a reason. You can’t go sneaking off with one of the boys. Not after your first official date!”

  “I’m not sneaking off with one of them. Both Flynn and Draven promised to meet me.”