“That doesn’t make it any better.”
“It’s not what you think,” I say, edging away from the door enough that I can get a good view out the window again. I think I see a shadow enter the front door to the academy, and I wonder which one of them it is. We agreed to all go in separately to avoid suspicion. Just another couple of students who, I don’t know, left their textbooks in class or something.
I guess I probably should come up with a better plan in case I get caught.
“Well then please,” Wednesday says, coming to sit beside me on the bed. “Enlighten me.”
I see another shadow pass outside, and I know both the boys are in the school now.
I take the opportunity and bolt out the door before she can stop me this time. I can’t risk Kendall finding out about this through her. He’s too easy to read. Cedric would know what’s going on before I even do.
My phone buzzes in my pocket on the elevator ride down.
WTF Octavia!
It is Wednesday.
I text her a quick response, promising to tell her all about it as soon as I can, and I dart out and across the road as quickly as possible.
I am stopped as soon as I get through the doors by a pair of massive stone lances.
“Halt!” Harvel shouts, effectively ending any possibility of sneaking in if anyone is within earshot inside.
“Who goes there?” Drummel adds.
I shove against one of the stone lances, but it doesn’t budge. “You know who I am,” I say. I try to duck under one of them, but Harvel is surprisingly fast.
“Are you following the other two in here?” He asks, moving the lance back and forth to keep me from squeezing through.
“Surely up to no good,” Drummel says, with a click of his tongue that sounds like the grate of stone rubbing against stone. “Nothing good ever happens after midnight.”
I look from one of them to the other. “That’s…right…” I say, carefully. “But why’re you stopping me in the first place? I thought this was one of the few places I was actually allowed to be.”
Drummel stops listing all the bad things he has ever personally seen happen after midnight and straightens up a bit to think about what I say. I take the opportunity to dive underneath them and dart well out of reach before either of them can stop me again.
I find Flynn and Draven perched on the edge of their seats in the Divination room. I pry the door open as little as possible to slip inside without letting the light spill out into the empty, dark corridor outside. As soon as they see me, they each jump to their feet. I’m glad to see that at least Flynn remains sober. Draven looks a little worse for wear.
I consider telling him he can go to bed if he wants, but I know I would just be wasting my breath.
“So?” Flynn starts, rubbing his hands together in front of him, “What’s it you need me to do?”
I shut the door carefully behind me and go sit in the center of the couch directly in front of the crystal ball. I tell Flynn about the first part of the vision that I never shared, and then about what Cedric told me back in the garden, about the identical image he has stuck in his head about his mother.
“And this concerns you because…”
“Because I saw it in the vision!” I say. “And something else. It may just be a feeling, but I just know I have to figure this out.”
Flynn nods, but the way he sits so slowly in front of me, those hands of his still ringing over and over, it tells me he is still not entirely convinced.
“Look,” I say. “It isn’t exactly like I can ask Cedric. Or his father. I just want you to take a look as well before we decide what to do about it.”
“Alright,” Flynn says, finally stilling his hands on the ends of his knees. “It couldn’t hurt just to take a look.”
This time when I place my hands across the top of the giant glass orb, I am not almost immediately transported into another place. The glass feels cool and smooth under my hands—almost too smooth. My hands do not want to stay put on the surface of the glass. Then Flynn settles across from me and puts his hands on top of mine.
We briefly make eye contact, and I almost have to force myself to look away from those deep, dark eyes. When I do, it is to look straight into the center of the ball and Flynn’s image reflected there. It is all strange, distorted, and upside down. Then I begin to picture the vision. I draw it up in my mind.
I begin with the little details, and then I allow them to grow into something bigger.
Then I am dragged back into the ball once again. And this time, I am not alone in the darkness. But there is something wrong.
24
Flynn
I feel like I have seen this place before. If not this exact place, then some place like it.
All around me are walls and walls of trinkets from another, darker, world. A world seeped in superstition and magic. I’d hoped to study Voodoo in depth when I came to America, but I immediately found the culture to be so blinded by their preconceived ideas of the religion and practice of it, that it would be nearly impossible to get an honest study of it.
Even the mage world had written it off as an ancient and antiquated magic—except when some ritual with Voodoo roots suddenly became necessary.
If I were to place what I see now, it would be there. Deep in the heart of Voodoo.
All this I gather in the brief blip of the vision that I actually get to see. I see the room, the principal and another man…and then all I see is darkness.
I no longer feel Octavia’s hands on mine. I no longer feel anything. For seconds, minutes…an age…I sit in darkness. And then images begin to form around me. I see the face Octavia described. A beautiful woman of Jamaican descent, her skin dark and smooth. But her eyes are closed.
For some reason, this fact causes a fear to bubble up inside me. Her eyes should be open. In every instance that Octavia described to me, her eyes were open.
And then, even as I think this, her eyes do open. But it is not Cedric’s mother looking back at me. It is Octavia. It is her face that turns dark, twisted, crinkled at the corners. Her mouth opens to reveal decay, her eyes widen, and the whites turn a dark, bloody red.
Now I feel her hands under mine. No, on top of mine. Octavia is no longer just a huge, floating and all-consuming face of decay, her whole body stands before me. But she is not herself. She is bent and broken with age. Her skin is a sickly shade of green, and her hands clutching mine sprout long black claws.
I want to cry out, but the harder I try, the greater the silence grows.
I want to shake her free of me, but she only sinks her claws deeper.
And then she does speak, and it is not her voice. It is Jessica’s.
“What have you done?” she says, her voice sleek and oiled like the snake that she is. “Or have you forgotten.”
And suddenly I can speak. I can shake myself free. So I do. I shake myself free from her grasp.
“How could I?”
And just like that, I am not in an endless black void filled with nothing but decay and fear, I am back to sitting in the divination room. The rest of my shout trails off even as my back hits the chair behind me and the rest of my senses rush back.
“How could I forget, when every day you torment me?”
I’m not sure if I spoke the final words aloud, or still in that twisted vision.
Octavia’s chest heaves wildly as her eyes lift to meet mine. Fear is written across her features. I don’t know if she saw the same as I did, but whatever she saw, it has the same effect.
It still takes Draven a second to register what is going on. One moment he sits bent forward in his seat, half out of interest, and half out of the beginnings of his hangover—completely unaware of what just happened. The next, he flies out of his seat to help Octavia up and back onto the couch, asking her what happened.
Her legs seem unable to hold her weight, and her eyes unable to leave mine.
After a few seconds, she manages to finally catch her breath. She
points an accusatorial finger at me. “What…the hell…was that?”
It takes me a few seconds longer to find my voice. I am the first one to break eye contact. First I look down at my hands, at the ball, and then back to her. This time, I am unable to meet her gaze.
I should have known this would happen. It’s a long time coming. I’ve been avoiding it, avoiding her, avoiding Jessica, my promises…everything. I knew it the moment Jessica arrived, the moment she reminded me of what I’d once agreed to. It’s just taken this long to catch up. It means only one thing.
I finally do look at her.
“I can’t do Psychic Magic anymore,” I say. My head falls into my hands, and I dig the tips of my fingers into my hair.
For second she splutters for words, so Draven manages to speak first.
“What do you mean?”
I don’t look up at them. “My other paired. Jessica.”
It takes him a second to remember. “You two aren’t getting along or something? I did wonder how that all—”
“Yeah, Flynn, how does that all work?”
I risk a peek up at Octavia over the top of my glasses. Even in the blur without the lenses, I can see now that her fear has been replaced by anger. And rightly so.
I pinch the bridge of my nose between two fingers, force a deep breath into my lungs, and sit up to face her. “Jessica was never supposed to come to this school. She was never supposed to interfere with us.”
“But she is, and she has,” Octavia snaps. She scoots further up onto the couch and squeezes her knees up to her chest. I wish I could go to her, sit beside her, hold her and tell her that everything is going to be okay. But Draven is doing the comforting now, so I might as well tell the truth. I can’t avoid it any longer. Not unless I want more episodes like…this…happening.
“Jessica came here to remind me of a promise I made her,” I say. “A promise I fully intended to keep. And then I met you.”
“You said your past with her was troubled…that she made it impossible for you to practice Psychic Magic while you were there.”
I go back to rubbing my hands nervously across the tops of my thighs. I knew this would be difficult to say.
“We came to an agreement that at least allowed me to study in peace,” I say.
Octavia squints up her eyes. “What kind? I mean, she hates you, doesn’t she?”
A strangled laugh escapes me. “With every fiber of her being.”
“Then what…”
“Almost as much as she would hate to bring shame to herself and her family if I were to reject her.”
Octavia’s mouth snaps shut.
I lean forward again, so far that I am in danger of toppling over. I’m afraid that after what I’m about to tell her I actually might. I’ll fall right off the edge of…something…and not be able to climb back up.
“Jessica and I are engaged,” I say. “And have been since before I met you.”
25
Octavia
“I’m sorry,” I say, brushing Draven’s arm off me so I can scoot forward in my seat again. I ignore the crystal ball between us that, just moments earlier, was the source of my terror. Now, even as the words Flynn just spoke start to settle in, I realize the real nightmare is the one pushing up his spectacles in front of me. “You did what?”
“It was purely out of necessity. I don’t have any feelings for her. Not unless you count loathing.”
I stare at him for a second, still unable to fully comprehend what he’s trying to tell me.
“And…you never felt the need to tell me this until now?”
“I thought it was obvious,” Flynn says. “Clearly, she’s interfering with my Psychic Magic, and since you tried to use it to see the vision again, it malfunctioned.”
“That was more than a…a malfunction,” I say, getting up slightly out of my chair.
Draven gets up. “I think this is a conversation you two should have alone,” he says, then glances at my other paired, “But seriously, Flynn?”
“No,” I reach out a hand and shove him back into his seat. “I don’t think I should be left alone with this boy. I might do something I’ll regret.”
I put my hands to my temples and try to focus on breathing straight for a moment. “You can’t just keep withholding information from me out of some, I don’t know, need to feel superior?”
“That isn’t it at all!”
“Then what is it?” My voice has risen far above an acceptable volume, but I don’t care. I can’t bring myself to care. Just like Flynn couldn’t bring himself to care enough to tell me he was engaged to his other paired, Jessica. Now I totally understand. All the hatred, all her snide looks, her careful remarks—it was because she knew, and I didn’t.
It was because she was holding the trump card all along.
Flynn must be able to tell exactly what direction my thoughts are going, because he suddenly stands up so fast he almost knocks the heavy armchair over behind him. A determined look is painted across his face.
“I’ve made a terrible mistake. I will fix it now.”
He’s already to the door before I stop him with my words. “So what are you going to do, just go marching over to Jessica’s hotel room and tell her it’s over in the middle of the night?”
“Well…yes.”
“And then we’ll get to experience more of this?” I motion to the ball in front of us. I move away from it, but I have to climb over the couch to stay away, to avoid looking once more into the terrible, terrible center of that glass nightmare. I don’t know if Flynn saw what I did, but what I saw will haunt me sleep and waking for as long as I live, I am sure. “No. You’re going to fix this. I can’t have my ability to study and prepare for the tribunal ruined because of you.”
“Then what do you want me to do?”
The fact that he’s gone from fearlessly determined to frightened puppy-dog in the same breadth of time it took me to cross the room somehow only serves to make me angrier. “I don’t know yet,” I say. “But you can start by getting the hell out.”
Before he does, he stops for a second and very calmly tells me what he saw in the vision, the moment before everything turned to death.
“Voodoo,” he says. “If there is something to it, the key is one of the most ancient magic practices of all.”
The second the door shuts behind him, I heard Draven let out a breath behind me. I didn’t realize it, but this whole time he must have actually been holding it in.
“Wow,” he says as I just stand there a moment, not sure what to do. “How does it feel being the other woman?”
I turn and glare at him. “Shut up.”
“Sorry,” he says, looking sheepish. “I couldn’t help it.”
I can’t decide what I want to do next. Part of me wants to run after Flynn and tell him that I understand his situation, that for a while I loathed him too…and the other part of me wants to delete his phone number and march straight over to the principal’s office to speak with him about a rebinding ceremony just for Flynn.
The only thing I am certain of is that I don’t want to stay here with that…thing. I can’t even bring myself to look at it for fear of seeing, even for the briefest seconds, those images that flashed before my mind inside.
Draven comes up to stand beside me and wraps his arms around me, but I still feel stiff and cold.
“What did you see in the ball?” he asks me.
I shake my head a moment.
“Was it his mother?”
I open my mouth, but like the gaping, rotten, decayed mouth of the woman I saw in the vision once again—this time worse—I struggle to find my words. “She asked me to help her,” I say. “Cedric’s dead mother asked me to help her.”
It was worse this time. Where before his mother filled my vision, staring but unspeaking, this time she begged me, pled even, for my help. I could feel the cold, dead grip of her wizen hand on my arm. The scent of the decay still lingers in my nose, and no matter how muc
h I try to remind myself that it was all just made up, all in my mind, I cannot get that image of her out of it.
I bury my face in the middle of Draven’s chest.
There’s no doubt in my mind now that something isn’t right about Cedric’s mother’s death. There are too many people keeping secrets all around us.
Even Draven, now, who is trying to comfort me by just squeezing me harder, still has things he hasn’t told me. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than what Flynn just told me. I’ve mostly forgotten about it until now, but the first day I got out of the infirmary, Draven lied to me about what he was doing in the principal’s office when we arrived.
I ask him again, insisting this time that he tell me the truth.
“Hmm?” His lips hover inches away from where they were about to press into my neck.
“The day I got out of the infirmary, you were already there.”
“I was just—”
“Please,” I say, closing my eyes and pulling away from him. “There’ve been enough lies tonight.”
Draven stands there for a moment, thinking about what I said. “I’ve been helping the principal with a little…side project, ever since Homecoming.”
I take another step away. “What…kind of side project?”
He holds up his hands for a moment, as if in surrender.
“The last I heard you were working on a ‘side project’ you almost got yourself, and then me, killed.”
Draven flinches at that, and I know I am being a little unfair. But that doesn’t make it any less true. He glances to the door a second, and then back at the crystal ball in the middle of the room.
“After Homecoming, the principal and the school board wanted to expel me too.”
He stops me from interjecting, and I clamp my jaw shut to let him continue.
“And to be honest, they should have. But I was given the opportunity to stay on, on a single condition.”
“What is that?”
Draven glances up at me. “If the crime syndicate reaches out to me again, I have to take them up on the offer.”
Adapt: Book Two of the Forgotten Affinities Series Page 13
