Bloodline Alchemy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 6), Lan Chan [free ebook reader for android TXT] 📗

Another figure reared up on Max’s right. The demon blade in Charles’s hands was a riot of all the colours of the rainbow. Black threads of smoke wafted from where both his hands gripped its hilt. Charles’s face distorted even as he stalked forward.

Max stepped in front of him, seeing what I saw. The demon blade was treacherous. Even with Lex. It was trying to cut a path back to the Hell dimension. Without her will to subdue it, the blade was going to force Charles into the portal and leave him stranded. The thing was already making him jittery. His teeth snapped like he was in immense pain. And still he continued to nudge at Max’s chest.

Both of them evaded and rolled away as the whip cracked where they had been standing. Another whip appeared in the demon’s other hand. It used the weapon with deadly accuracy. One of the wolves was pushed into the fire demon’s line of sight by another low demon.

Max roared in warning and dove. He pushed the wolf out of the way. As a result, he took the full brunt of the lashing of the whip on his back, as well as the spine of the low demon in his ribs. Grating his teeth, Max slashed out and cut the low demon in two. He pushed himself to standing as the bite of the whip’s magic ate into the skin on his shoulder. It warred with the magic in the tattoo that Lex had given him, fizzling as Max’s immunity took over.

The twitch of Max’s nose was the only indication of the pain he was feeling. That he reacted at all said that it was immense. I shuddered to think what would have happened if he hadn’t pushed the wolf shifter out of the way. Max must have been thinking the same thing because a steely darkness seeped into his features.

Ignoring all common sense, he ran at the fire demon in earnest. The demon stepped back, unprepared for a kamikaze attack. It raised both whips and snapped them furiously. Every single one of them hit its mark. But Max kept on coming. Welts the size of my arm appeared on Max’s skin, too many for him to heal so quickly. I bit the inside of my cheek raw to keep from crying out. The pain must have been unbearable. Max’s right leg wobbled as the whip cut through the skin on his thigh. But it was too late for the demon.

Max reached out as his leg caved and snagged the demon as he went down. They crashed to the ground sending a shockwave that we felt all the way in the conference room. Bracing his enormous paws on either side of the demon’s head, Max’s claws pricked out and sank into the demon’s flesh. The thing gave an enraged bellow that was cut short by the cracking of its skull as Max crushed it to pieces. As he crashed to the earth, Max wrenched the demon’s head from its neck and then bashed it on the ground.

When the demon died, the flames extinguished.

A sigh of relief washed through the room. I was not proud to say that I’d been a hostage during too many demon attacks to believe it was over. Sometimes I really despised being right. Laughter sounded in my head as Agatha lowered herself to meet Max’s eye.

“Well done, boy king,” she or it said. “But there are demons, and then there are my children.”

Laughter sounded in my head. That ancient voice that wanted my soul. It echoed in my mind at the same time the room erupted in screams and chaos. All around the perimeter of the Reserve, dark shadows began to condense. The malachim had arrived.

I drew the circle without thinking. It sealed the room shut and snapped the door closed just as the cubs went crazy and tried to rush it. Claws and teeth sliced out around me, the persuasive magic of the malachim making the shifters crazy. Laila drew up close to me. Her eyes were big, white orbs.

Below us, the guards let out a groan. Some of them broke ranks and tried to go for the throats of their packmates. The guards around them that could still maintain enough of their composure knocked them out so that they couldn’t be pushed to act through the malachim’s compulsion.

Inside the conference room, the same thing was happening. Parents yelped as one partner had to subdue their own child so they wouldn’t hurt themselves. Kate backed up against the wall, her fingers massaging her temples. Her lips moved silently in what I recognised were words of light.

Sluggishness infiltrated my head. It brought with it a rasped-out command for me to pick up the knife on the floor by my knees and jam it into Laila’s neck. Andrei’s compulsion snapped into place before I moved an inch. Thwarted, the voiced reshaped itself into a thorn and tried to burrow into my mind to render me unconscious. Instead, the blood alchemy grabbed hold of it. I became locked in a tug of war. Pink magic laced with blood-red warred with that iridescent white light again.

Biting back a scream, I gritted my teeth and tugged with all my might. The alchemy exploded, severing the white thread from its origin. Something dripped down my nose, but it was the transformation happening inside me that held all of my attention. As I watched, the alchemy ingested the white light and expanded. It grew and grew and grew until all I could see as I slipped into the Ley dimension was the glow of my pink aura. Unsure what was happening, I reached out and brushed my hand against it.

My vision spiralled. It stretched out and expanded until what I saw in front of me was a web of white light against pink. The world around me fractured like the shattered glass of a mirror. When I blinked, the pink receded and was replaced by