“I don’t know—”
“You don’t know? They could come back…at—at any time—”
“This won’t take long,” she said, rounding on him with knowing eyes. They stood in front of a door now with the name “F. R. Leve” in orange lettering; beneath, in black, it said “Vice Principal”. With the turn of the doorknob, the door flew open and Adara beckoned for Ackerly to follow.
“I’m surprised he didn’t get a bigger office than the other teachers,” the boy marveled as they stepped into the room. “I, um, went to Floretta’s to ask her a question once, and it’s the same size.”
“Just went to ask her a question, hm?”
Even in the dim light that flooded through the back wall’s window from the half moon, Ackerly was clearly blushing. He tried to occupy himself by peeking around Fraco’s office, which was orderly but also inherently covered in a layer of oil. All of the papers stacked on his desk had greasy fingerprint smudges, and his sleek desk was slippery to the touch. The left wall was lined with doors—probably to his closets and living quarters—and the right wall was hidden behind shimmery, black filing cabinets.
“Here we go,” Adara muttered with mischievous glee as she approached them. She grabbed one of the handles to pull the drawer open, but her hand slipped over the oil, and she cursed. “Freaking Fraco and his grease…” Covering her hand with the fabric of her shirt produced a firmer grip, but she was disappointed to open it and find this drawer was full of files for people with T last names. “Dammit. I wish he’d labeled these.”
“It’s probably alphabetical…” Ackerly pulled a drawer open using the same method Adara had and saw that it was the D drawer.
“Hey, here’s yours, Greenie,” Adara said, extracting a green folder with the name Terrier, Ackerly on it. “Not that I need to look at it, since I’m sure I know everything there is to know about you already.”
Crouched on the floor and sifting through the D names, Ackerly glanced at her through his glasses and said, “I don’t think I’ve really told you much about myself, actually…”
“Really?” she mused, flipping open his folder and searching through the papers. “What are your deep dark secrets, Ackerly…Erick Terrier?” Her eyebrows shot up as she said his middle name, and he smiled diffidently.
“It’s my dad’s name…”
“Hm. Yes, I see here on the second page… They’ve got a hell of a lot of information on your parents—a weird amount. You were born at the Cleveland Clinic with brown hair and brown eyes, five pounds, six ounces—awe, how tiny, Greenie.”
He caught onto her sarcastic tone and was bold enough to actually roll his eyes at her. “I wasn’t that tiny…”
“I wonder how much I weighed when I was born,” Adara thought out loud. Recognizing her own sentimentality, she cleared her throat and said, in a tone of mock horror, “Greenie…did you…oh God, did you accidentally kill a plant once? How cruel—”
“Where does it say that?” he questioned in astonishment as he reached over to retrieve his file. When he scanned the page she’d been looking at—the page that was only information about his father—he scowled over at her playfully and tossed it back. “Liar. I’ve never killed a plant.”
Adara let out a hearty laugh before neatly sticking the papers back in the folder and sliding it into the drawer. “So gullible, Greenie. You should know by now that I’m rarely serious.”
“I found Lavisa’s file,” he said as he withdrew an orange folder from the drawer he was searching through. “Lavisa Kelly Dispus. Used to have brown hair and hazel eyes before they turned yellow…and she was born at the Cleveland Clinic, too!”
“What a coincidence, considering we all live in Ohio,” Adara intoned. “I’m more shocked that her middle name is Kelly—seems too girly for her.”
“Well, what’s your middle name?”
Shrugging, Adara kicked the T drawer shut. “Dunno. My parents didn’t stick around long enough for me to ask.”
“Well, you could look now—at your file, I mean. Apparently Fraco knows everything about everyone…”
“No time,” she answered shortly, yanking open drawers at random to find the L files. “We’re here for Hastings. While you’ve got Mustard’s file open, though, go look and see how she got her Affinity. I’m interested to know.”
“Oh, I—I don’t want to do that,” he stammered, slamming Lavisa’s file shut and hastily returning it to the drawer. “She’ll find out somehow and beat me up.”
“She’s too good to do such a thing,” Adara said as she unexpectedly pulled open the S drawer. Though she was tempted to extract her own file, she refrained and continued the search for L. “Besides, if Lavisa did try to hurt you, I’d defend you.” Ackerly’s green eyebrows were perked dubiously at her. “Fine. I’d defend you against her, if I had Seth and Hartman and Tray all on my side,” she amended, though he still seemed unsure.
“I don’t think Tray would ever be on your side,” he remarked, grimacing. “He, uh, complains about you…a lot.”
“Yes, I’m aware,” Adara sighed as she heaved open one of the top drawers. Since she wasn’t tall enough to see into it, she tugged out one of the files and froze upon reading the name: Mardurus, Calder. “Do you think Fraco will notice if I tear up one of the files?”
“Probably. Is it Tray’s?”
“No, the Pixie Prince—”
“Hey, I found L,” Ackerly enthused as he began digging through one of the bottom drawers. Adara reluctantly placed Calder’s file back into the M drawer before crouching beside her friend to filter through Hastings’s file, which had a considerable amount of papers.
“Hastings Salvator Lanio,” Adara read off the first page before Ackerly began to rifle through the rest.
“There’s a page on his mother, but nothing on his father… A bunch of records from the detention center he was at… Oh, here’s the Affinity page—”
Adara snatched the paper out of his hand and noticed it was wrinkled. Although grease stains riddled all of the files, none of them had been ripped, damaged, or folded in any way, but Hastings’s Affinity page looked as though someone had crumpled it into a ball and then attempted to smooth it out again.
“What happened to it?”
“The paper?” Ackerly clarified, tilting his head to get a better look at it in the darkness. “I…well, someone must have looked at it before us—and tried to destroy it, maybe. If Fraco did it, it’d be covered in oil…”
“Lavisa said she looked at it the first night we were here…” Adara pondered the thought, but after only a few seconds, she shook her head and refocused on the words. “It doesn’t matter what happened. What matters is Hastings’s Affinity.”
“Which is?”
“Affinity…Affinity—ah! ‘Can burst blood vessels by mental will.’” She swallowed and blinked as Ackerly squinted his eyes to assure she’d read it correctly. When he determined she had, his jaw fell slack, but he failed to produce a sound. “He can…pop people’s blood vessels just by thinking about it? Well, that is definitely the most badass Affinity I’ve ever heard of. Explains why he hated the name Blood Boy so much. Damn. I wish I was a Mental. If Kiki gets a cooler power than me, I swear—”
“Adara,” Ackerly interrupted, his eyes still wide behind his glasses.
“What?”
“H-his mother…” He paused to shuffle through the papers and then stopped when he found the one labeled Jocosa Pamella Lanio. “Look. She died in 2007 from hemorrhaging—all over her body. That’s impossible—”
“So?”
“So…it means all of her blood vessels popped. It means Hastings k-killed her. He…he killed his own mother… And,” he added, flipping to the pages that detailed the crimson-haired boy’s time in the detention center, “that’s why he went to juvie…when he was six. They didn’t give him any leniency.”
Adara’s lips twisted with a pang of sympathy that, despite her recent ridicule of Nero’s lack of compassion,
felt foreign to her body. Though it was difficult for her to imagine what it would be like to kill her own parent, since she’d barely ever had any, she thought about how Seth would feel if he had accidentally killed his mother, and it was enough to bring nausea to the forefront of her mind.
“It’s because they knew he had an Affinity,” she managed to say, feigning casualness. “If he was a Regg, they would have found some way to let him off, but he had an Affinity and they were afraid. Did they do tests on him in prison?”
“N-no,” Ackerly stuttered, still frazzled by this shocking new knowledge. “It, er, looks like they weren’t allowed to perform tests on him—probably because he was a minor…”
“Or because they were afraid he would kill them. Anyone who can kill their own mother must be capable of some dark shit. Even Nero fears him…”
“We’re all lucky he’s a nice guy—Hastings, I mean. I’ve…talked to him a few times, and he’s cool, you know—not crazy or angry or violent. It…it’s sad he formed such an evil ability.”
“He’d be dead if he hadn’t,” Adara reminded him as she stood straight, eyeing the S drawer and itching to peek at her file. “Didn’t you see the part that said he had aneurisms as a kid? His Affinity saved his life.”
“And took his mother’s,” Ackerly added, fidgeting as he struggling to fit Hastings’s purple folder back into the L drawer. “Hastings seems…like the kinda person who would rather be dead than be what he is.”
“To be evil or to be dead—it’s a hard choice…for some,” she added, shooting him a wry glance he didn’t return. He was standing now, and his body was visibly shaking, his hands clenching and unclenching nervously.
“Sh-should we tell Eliana—about Hastings’s power?”
“She probably already knows,” Adara scoffed. “She can read minds, and they’re always making out—”
“Wait—really?” he blurted, his shudders ceasing for a moment of perplexity.
“Obviously, Greenie—we’re teenagers. What do you think they’re doing in the library all the time, other than hooking up behind the bookshelves?”
“Um…studying?” Ackerly suggested innocently. Adara’s eye roll was exaggeratedly drawn out. “Well…how many guys have you kissed?”
His inquiry caught her by surprise, and all she could manage to say was a dismissive, “Please.” When he continued to stare at her, patient and waiting, she exhaled a groan. “Fine, none—but if you mention that fact to anyone, I will not hesitate to slaughter you.”
“It’s not that embarrassing. I’ve never kissed a girl.”
“Hm.”
“I’m not very smooth with girls, if you haven’t noticed…”
“Hm.”
“And you—well, you don’t seem like you’re very smooth with guys—” Ackerly yelped mid-sentence and fell sideways into the filing cabinets when the sound of stomping reverberated from above.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get to finish that sentence, Greenie,” Adara hissed as he struggled to compose himself. “C’mon, we should get out of here. The meeting must be over.”
“Right, um, yeah, I’m sorry—that I said that thing. You, uh, don’t want to check your file real quick—find out your middle name?”
“No time,” she repeated, sounding more rueful than before. With a forlorn glance at the S drawer, she grabbed Ackerly’s clammy hand and whisked him away from the horrible histories that lay within the hidden folders. There had been a time when Adara felt like she was the only person with a rough past—the only one without parents and with mental scars—but what Medea had said on the first day of class was correct: most Affinities had endured a kind of trauma no one cared to fathom.
27
Weapons
Only a week had passed since Hastings revealed his Affinity to Eliana, but it had been a good week—probably Eliana’s favorite week in Periculand thus far.
Where there had been a divide between them, there was now openness. Hastings’s thoughts flowed freely to her, and she no longer badgered him about his meetings with the principal; they seemed necessary to keep such a deadly Affinity under control, which was why she wasn’t perturbed to know he was, most likely, at one of those meetings now.
For the past few hours of the evening, Eliana had been alone with only the desk lamp lighting her otherwise dark dormitory. The third-floor corridor was empty on the other side of the open doorway, and her roommate was presumably watching television in the lounge with Seth.
Fraco had said they would replace the broken door to room 305, but it had been a week and a half since the Wacko attack and Eliana and Adara were still doorless. Her roommate didn’t mind; Seth had been opting to keep his door open across the hall, as well, and the two of them would sit in their desk chairs and shout jokes at each other from across the hall every night. The absence of the door also seemed to bother Calder Mardurus, which was a fact Adara reveled in.
Eliana despised the open doorway; she could hear everyone’s thoughts when they trekked up the spiral staircase and lingered in the hallway. Aethelred had been helping her practice blocking people out, but she wasn’t very skilled with it. Especially without a door, it was hard to feel truly and peacefully alone.
Currently, she sculpted a vase with clay, shaping it with a design of sprouting leaves and flowers. Art always helped take her focus off others’ minds, and she’d been inspired to create something nature-like after Ackerly had shown her his garden earlier that day. It sat near the forest in a bed of soil, surrounded by painted green wooden slats—a barrier, he’d told her, Adara and Seth had helped him build.
Everything he grew was so vibrant, lively, and refreshing, and knowing it would soon die with winter, Eliana had decided that, if she could find a kiln in this town, she would finish this vase and give it to Ackerly as a Christmas gift—a reminder of what he loved most. They hadn’t been particularly close friends over the past month, but his thoughts were always so pure, and she wanted to do something kind for a kind person.
Eliana was cutting the petals of a flower with her precision knife when something suddenly appeared in front of her face, frightening her. Without even looking at it, she jumped in her seat and, instead of cutting the clay, the sculpting knife sliced through her index finger.
Inhaling sharply, she stared at the gushing red blood pooling over the fabric canvas she’d been working on. She couldn’t think about whatever had been thrust in her face or the fact that there was a person hovering worriedly beside her; all she could do was gape at the wound and the blood.
“Here,” a steady voice said, handing her a wad of tissues. She glanced up, nonplussed, to see Hastings standing above her, his deep eyes riddled with concern. “Let’s get you to the nurse—”
“Where—how?” she stammered, staring down at the tissues now in her palm. “I—I’m sorry—”
“You shouldn’t be sorry,” he insisted, the hint of a crooked smile twitching onto his lips as he crouched down to her eye level and grabbed her bleeding hand. The thick, red liquid dripped onto her purple cargo pants, and he cursed under his breath before taking the tissues back from her. He’d begun to fold them when an idea struck his mind. Eliana felt it forming—comprehended his intention—and without question nodded.
“Do it. Try it.”
Hastings grimaced, his reddish eyebrows furrowed with dread. Sighing, he wrapped his hands around hers.
His Affinity was Mental, and he didn’t need to touch someone to affect their blood vessels, but she knew the sensation of her touch was encouraging. The thrum of her pulse attuned his brain to the inner workings of her circulatory system, and she felt his mind grope for her blood vessels—the veins and capillaries that had been severed with the knife. The brokenness of them was familiar to him, since he’d broken so many himself, but now wasn’t a time for destruction; it was a time for mending, the trickier process that seemed to physically drain him of energy.
Eliana remembered some details from her Regg school science
classes. The microscopic platelets in her blood were probably already clotting, forming a plug to reduce the bleeding. Hastings sped up the process, however, by sealing the walls of the wounded vessels and stitching them together in such a way that it was impossible to tell there’d ever been cut at all. All that remained on Eliana’s thin finger was the sheen of drying blood over a faint, white, superficial scar.
The sheer impossibility of him provoking such physical healing with just his mind was enough to paralyze her. The nurse had to touch a person to heal them, but Hastings had done the whole thing mentally.
“I can’t do much about the epidermis,” he said regrettably, motioning toward the remnants of her injury. “The top layer of skin doesn’t have blood vessels, but…”
“You’re…amazing,” she breathed, her lips parted and eyes protuberant.
I shouldn’t have snuck up on you, he thought to her, his parted lips frozen with her compliment.
“I’m glad you did… I’m glad I got to see you have the capability to heal.”
I only ever heal the ones I hurt. He cleared his throat, tearing his gaze from her to stare at the brightness of her desk lamp. “When I was younger, I used to…practice on my cellmates, popping their blood vessels and mending them. I wasn’t very talented at first, and…I couldn’t always heal them. That was why I ended up in solitary confinement. Nero was actually my cellmate for a while when he first came.”
“You weren’t scared of him?”
Hastings shook his head, his unruly hair falling into his eyes. “Never. He tried to intimidate me—and everyone—so I…practiced on him.” He winced as he spoke, remembering remorsefully. “He was the first one I ever healed.”
“Were you…friends after that?”
A sardonic snort escaped his nostrils. “No. He told on me and requested to be moved to a different cell.”
“Nero Corvis is actually terrified of you.” A smile cracked on her lips. “That’s so…strange. Even in his thoughts, he’s conceited… He’s—he’s always thinking about how undefeatable he is…”
Blood: An Affinities Novel (The Affinities Book 1) Page 37