Adapt: Book Two of the Forgotten Affinities Series

by Analeigh Ford

  The words hang in the air for another couple seconds.

  “But,” I say, “You said you were finished? You were…so happy about it.”

  He reaches out and takes my hands, giving them a quick squeeze. “And I told the truth. I hadn’t. I still haven’t…and I hope it stays that way.”

  “That’s what you were doing there?”

  Draven nods. “I have to meet with the principal whenever he asks, which is annoyingly quite often. He does his little mind-probe thing to be sure I’m telling the truth when he asks me if I’ve been contacted again.”

  “Yikes,” I say. I wrinkle up my nose and think back to the one time the principal was able to suck me in with those eyes of his. I lost my memory of most of the initiation ritual because of that. I was quick to learn how to stop that from ever happening again. “And when they contact you again?”

  “You mean if?” Draven says, but I shake my head.

  “We both know it is just a matter of time.” It’s who they are. People like that don’t let people like Draven go. Not now. Not ever.

  26

  Octavia

  So if my theory is correct, Cedric’s mother’s death has something to do with a visit his father paid to a practitioner of Voodoo with the head of the same mage crime syndicate Draven is supposed to be helping keep an eye on. How the hell am I involved in all this?

  But still, it was me that Cedric’s mother reached out to with that vision. I don’t know exactly what this has to do with me, but I can’t just let it go.

  I try to force myself to fall asleep after everything that happened, but I spend the entire night tossing and turning—unable to get the idea out of my head that I have to solve this somehow. Every time I close my eyes, I see her looking back at me—her face rotten, distorted, twisted from the screwed up version of the vision brought on by Flynn’s backfiring Psychic Magic.

  And then there is that.

  Even the light of morning does not coax my head out from under my pillows.

  For once, I just want things to be straightforward. It is never just prepare for the tribunal, or just get to know the four mages you’ve been paired up with, or just learn how to control this new kind of magic that no one knew even existed before. It’s that and a dozen other things, all at once.

  If anyone can help me sort it out, it’s Wednesday.

  But when I knock on her door first thing in the morning…well, almost early afternoon actually…I’m surprised she isn’t there. When she doesn’t answer any of my texts either, I decide to check the next best thing.

  When Kendall answers the door, his hair still sticking up at the back of his head, and the stubble still fresh on his chin—I immediately forget why I am here in the first place. My hand still hovers in the air where it was left knocking, even after he finishes blinking his eyes enough to surely have discovered that the idiot standing in the doorway is, well, me.

  “Sorry,” I say, as soon as I realize he’s wearing nothing but superhero boxers. I avert my eyes just long enough for him to catch me by my still-awkwardly floating wrist and tug me inside, rather than turning me away.

  I quickly burrow into the warmth of his shoulder. His voice is thick and full of sleep.

  “You should wake me up more often.”

  I have to clear my throat just as my mind clears enough to remember that’s why I’m here in the first place. Kendall keeps dragging me step by step closer into bed, and I’ve got to admit that the tangle of blankets looks very inviting for a multitude of reasons, but if I don’t find Wednesday soon and apologize for last night, I may get her infamous cold shoulder, which is the last thing I need right now.

  When I start to say as much, however, Kendall just buries my face into his chest and pulls me down into bed beside him.

  “Don’t worry. I doubt Wednesday is alone this morning.”

  Before I have time to even really figure out what is going on, he’s turned me around and pressed his chest to my back, tucked his knees up behind mine, and pulled the blankets back up around him. Around us.

  I’m not even entirely sure he doesn’t realize he isn’t still in some warm, soft, late-morning dream. But I decide not to wake him. Until, god knows how much later, he wakes me instead.

  His groggy, unfiltered mutter rouses me from that deep, dreamless sleep that only ever happens after falling back asleep on a Sunday afternoon. For a couple of seconds as my eyes blink open and try to take in the soft blonde hair falling into my face, I am not sure that I am not the one stuck in some dream.

  It’s been so long since I got to look at Kendall this close. Close enough to really look at him.

  In the weeks since I last saw him shirtless, I swear he’s gotten even more ripped. It still feels a little wrong to be looking at my best friend’s twin brother this way, but I can’t help it. He’s still filling out from a boy to a man—and it the most superb way.

  I have to take my free hand and run it across one of his well-rounded shoulders a moment, before I realize he’s caught me staring.

  He still looks tired, but there is no doubt he knows this isn’t a dream.

  It is only now that I realize that as well. This is not some dream. I am actually here in Kendall’s bed.

  I feel my hand scrabble to my sides, feeling the soft jersey of his sheets tangled up in my hands, and the soft spring of the bed beneath me. I lift my head up a little to try to get a look at the clock on the wall, but Kendall’s hand on my shoulder gently pushes me back down. He doesn’t immediately take it away, but leaves the soft warmth of his palm pressed to my exposed shoulder.

  Just the feel of it makes me tingle.

  “If anyone asks, I was helping you study,” he says. He moves his hand from my shoulder to glide it slowly down the length of my arm, one warm inch at a time until he reaches my hand. He entwines his fingers, rough from years nurturing young plants, between mine and lifts the joined pair to his lips.

  “You’ve been working so hard, you deserve a break.”

  It’s hard to argue with Kendall, not when his words, so few and far between, make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  “But there is still so—”

  “Shh.” Kendall raises one of his fingers, still entwined with mine, to his lips and makes the soft shushing sound. “Just breathe,” Octavia. “Take a moment to just…breathe.”

  And then rather than giving me breath, he steals it away with a kiss.

  The first one is sweet, a soft surprise that lingers on my lips when he pulls back to look at me. Little lines are still pressed into the side of his face where the pillow left sleep marks. I reach out with my other hand, the one not still woven into Kendall’s, and trace the pattern of them until they disappear into the little hairs at the back of his neck.

  My fingers continue to explore, rooting further into the tangle of his hair until they are as entwined as our fingers.

  His lips part and he leans in for another. The hot air from his nostrils caresses my skin in little waves as we kiss again, the stubble of his unshaven chin scratching roughly in contrast. When he draws back another second, I get the slight whiff of something herbal, rosemary or patchouli maybe, on his breath.

  I immediately shake my hand free from him and put it up in front of my own mouth. I forgot to brush my teeth last night, and the fact that somehow Kendall’s breath smells even better in the morning just makes me a million times more self conscious about my own.

  But as soon as I do it, little lines crinkle up at the corners of Kendall’s eyes and he starts to chuckle.

  He just bats my hand away and leans in once more for a kiss, this time lingering even longer to show me he isn’t afraid of a little bad breath.

  In that moment, something behind him on the wall catches my eye. Once it does, I can’t look away.

  Kendall sees the shift in my focus. He glances over his shoulder and then slowly sits up and plucks what it is, a small hand-sketched drawing, from the wall and gives it to me so I can see it be
tter.

  I recognize it at once. It is the tree that we grew for the homecoming demonstration.

  The twirling branches, twisted trunk, bursting blooms—it is unmistakable.

  One of my fingers traces along the edge of the drawing, and my eyes wander from the careful, perfect, details to Kendall, and the wall behind him. I didn’t notice earlier because I was too distracted by Kendall himself, but all the walls have been papered in tiny drawings like this.

  Plants. Trees. Rocks. Crystals.

  Kendall watches the trail that my eyes make. When we make eye contact again, he takes the paper back, gently, and rubs his thumb and forefinger against it so that I can hear the scratch of his calloused thumb across it.

  “Like the Earth teacher said, the more you study something, the more you can control it.”

  I have to scoot out from under his considerable weight in order to sit up. This takes a great deal more writhing to try to get free of the blankets than it should, and I think that Kendall doesn’t help me because he’s enjoying the sight of it.

  Once I am up, I have to crane my neck back to look at all the rest of them. “I didn’t even know you liked to draw.”

  Kendall ducks his neck and rubs at the back of it with his hand, as he so often does, when he is embarrassed. “Not many people do.”

  “What’s this?”

  I disentangle the last of me from the sheets and hop up to get a better look at a couple of drawings pinned to the wall behind the desk. The look on Kendall’s face goes from bashful to horrified, and he shoots out of the bed after me. He manages to snatch the drawing out of my hand, but not before I got a little hint of what it is.

  “Is that…” it is my turn to duck my head, “me?”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  I hold out my hand, and after a long moment, he relents. Kendall slowly sets the now crinkled paper in my hand, face down.

  The drawing isn’t erotic, but it might be better if it was. The look he’s drawn on my face, it is too honest, too sure, too…I glance up at Kendall, and he grins down at me. “Just like that,” he says. He cups my face in one of his hands, and turns it to catch the light.

  “You really think I look like this?”

  I glance down at the girl in the drawing one more time. The girl he drew was pretty, beautiful, even.

  Kendall smiles even wider, and tilts my face up to look at me again. He doesn’t need words to tell me what he is thinking, but he tells me anyway. “I think you’re more than that. You’re brave, and smart, and hardworking. You worry too much,” he says, trying to smooth away the frown that’s started furrowing my brow as he says it. “Now, are you going to sit and wait around for me to keep reminding you of how beautiful you are, or are we going to actually do some Earth Magic to back up that little white lie we’re planning to perpetuate?”

  My eyes flicker down to his superhero boxers, which are still the only thing he’s wearing.

  “Aren’t you a little old for those?”

  His face turns a lovely shade of pink, and he reaches for a pair of jeans so quickly, I immediately regret letting him see my thoughts.

  “It’s almost Halloween. Give a man a break.”

  I bark a short laugh. “If that’s what you need to hear.”

  It might not be, but this, this is exactly what I needed. Kendall was right. I took a break, and now I am ready to dive into this Voodoo problem, this time, in full. And his little comment just gave me the perfect idea of where I might be able to start. There is just one more thing that I need to find out first.

  27

  Octavia

  If I want to discover where that vision took place, I am first going to have to find out just how closely Dr. Fashu is monitoring our movements when we leave the academy.

  Something is different about Dr. Fashu’s office on Tuesday morning. I don’t know if it is because he seems to be the only teacher that hasn’t done some kind of Halloween decorating, or if it is Dr. Fashu himself. He seems to be, well, he seems to have an emotion. I don’t know which one, but something about it just seems…less distant and cold than usual. This is not necessarily a good thing, especially after the events of our last session.

  One thing that does remain the usual is his uncanny ability to read my mind without even having to, well, actually read my mind. “We do not celebrate Halloween in China,” he says. “So why would I here? We have our own celebrations. Ones that still have meaning and aren’t reduced to an excuse to eat candy and wear inappropriate costumes.”

  “Well I hope you enjoyed looking in on our excursion last weekend,” I say.

  Dr. Fashu doesn’t even look up at me as he works. He waves a hand in the direction that Jessica just disappeared to go fetch something or other.

  “That’s my assistant’s job,” he says. “I have much more important things to be attending to.”

  I make a mental note of that little piece of information. It’s exactly what I’d hoped to hear.

  I go ahead and push past him to the examination table, all ready to drop my bag to the floor and climb on top to be basically tortured in the name of “finding my limits,” but Dr. Fashu stops me.

  “Octavia,” he says. “I think it is about time we moved on from such basic tests. We’ve already established where your limits actually lie, now it’s time we see them in action.”

  “Have we?” I say, now standing awkwardly as he shuts the door behind us. “And that is different…how?”

  “It is one thing for me to test your resistance to magic, we need to see if you can actually reach those same limits on your own. The tribunal will be meeting sooner than you think, these things always do, and I need to be sure you’re not completely wasting all of our time.”

  Something about how he words it doesn’t seem right to me. “I still have over two months,” I say. “And I’ve been practicing non-stop.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Even though he’s promised that today is somehow going to be different, my arms throb at the sight of the examination table every time I catch sight of it out of the corner of my eye.

  Dr. Fashu finally turns around and waves an arm, and just as it did during my first visit, the room shifts around to take a new form. The examination table flattens out even further, and all the odd instruments that he’s always had sitting there, but never actually used, disappear beneath it.

  He motions for me to stand on one side, while he moves to stand on the other. The light overhead lengthens and adjusts its angle to our new height.

  A slight creaking sounds breaks what is otherwise usually a very sterile environment, and Jessica appears in the doorway to Dr. Fashu’s private rooms with a tray of tea. The fact that she does not look particularly pleased to see me at least reassures me a little bit that whatever is in those cups, it is probably not going to poison me to death.

  She sets the tray on the edge of the table and calmly sets out two cups.

  There is no sugar or milk in sight, but I consider asking for it just to piss her off. The fact that it might, in turn, lead to more painful examination on Dr. Fashu’s part is the only thing that keeps me from acting on it. I reach for the cup closest to me, but as soon as I do, Fashu smacks my hand away.

  “You would just drink the tea without even knowing what’s in it?”

  I catch a smug smile on Jessica’s face before she turns away to return the tray. I just hope she enjoys her little bout of smugness. We’ll see who’s the smug one once all is said and done.

  I don’t respond to Dr. Fashu. I just fold my hands in front of me and wait for him to inevitably tell me what he was going to already.

  “There is more than one way to boost your magical abilities,” Dr. Fashu says. “And these ways do not always require the use of complex and antiquated rituals.”

  He is referring to, of course, the ritual I performed with the rest of my paired mages for the homecoming ceremony. Leave it to Dr. Fashu to somehow turn one of my greatest achievement
s into something...less.

  He motions to the tea in front of us. “The ancient people of nearly every culture agree that the steeping of leaves or bark of certain plants can produce benefits for humans.”

  I want to roll my eyes at what is quickly turning into a history lesson, but I remind myself that the longer he talks, the less time he has to, I don’t know, torture me again.

  “And for mages, these benefits are often so much more than just energy or pain relief or enhanced sleep cycles. For instance, this particular leaf derived from the Mitragyna speciose tree of Southeast Asia, is known to stimulate both the mind and body when it comes to spellcasting.”

  Now he does lean forward and pushes the cup slightly toward me. The color is dark and murky, like stagnant pond water. Maybe they are trying to poison me, after all.

  “Hold on a second,” I say. “I don’t understand. If you want to see me test my limits, why would you want me to take this first?” I motion to the glass without touching it. “Besides I am pretty sure this is just kratom, and I’ve never been a big fan.”

  “Kratom is the common term for it,” Dr. Fashu says. “And to answer your question, it is quite simple. Mages cannot reach the full extent of their powers without some kind of further aid. And now that you’ve ruined that little device I had…” He stops a second and has to gather himself together. Frankly, I don’t care if it was pricelessly valuable and impossible to replace. I’d break it again if he tried to use it on me.

  Dr. Fashu continues. “As a sign of goodwill, I will drink alongside you.” He picks up his own cup of tea and brings it to his lips. “You might find the effect to be a little disorienting, intense even, at first. I assure you Jessica has brewed it to be mild enough it won’t cause you any adverse side-effects.”

  Jessica grimaces at me from her position by the door, where she has reappeared with an empty tray to clear things away. “Though do try not to vomit on me this time if it’s still too much for you to handle.”