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

me, I held my breath. “Of course. I’ll let Doctor Thorne know to expect you this week. But there’s not much to see. She’s stable, but we can’t seem to wake her.” Just like Durin.

A war raged inside me. Professor McKenna had been in the Reserve consulting over their magical defences when the malachim had hit. What struck me as odd was that they went for her before the alpha couple. And now she shared their fate.

My hand trembled as I picked at the edge of the timetable. All of the adult figures in my life were slowly being taken away. It was as if something was reaching out and plucking them from me. And there was nothing I could do to stop them.

Not nothing. You have the power if you would use it, that insidious voice inside my head offered. I clamped down on it and redirected my focus.

There wasn’t much else to see on my timetable besides Weaponry and Combat. “No Herbology?” I asked.

“With the climate as it is, most of the Council are focusing on high magic, amongst other things, as a counterbalance to the malachim.”

The edge in her voice said there was more that she wasn’t telling me. “What other things?”

“Let’s just say that there’s a reason why anything you’ve done in the past has been swept under the table.” She sighed. “We’re getting desperate. I’ve been in enough battles to know what happens to an army when desperation begins to take hold.” This time she reached out and cupped my cheek. For some reason, she was smiling.

“You haven’t changed,” she said, and there was wetness in her eyes. “Even after everything, you’re still the same.”

Feeling my face flame, I coughed lightly. There had been so many nights when I’d raged at my own helplessness. Despair and fear lashed at me every waking moment as I sat in the border of the fens, where a portal into the Hell dimension was always kept open. That sinister voice in my head constantly pushed at me to step over the line because that was the only way I could claw back control. And yet, when it came down to it, I couldn’t. I had no right to give in to my fear when Kai and Lex were out there facing evil on a greater scale than I could ever imagine. And when they came home, even if everything else was different, I would still be there for them. It was the least I could do.

I blinked slowly. “You know what they say. Girls mature faster.”

She glanced surreptitiously at Charles. “In humans, perhaps. I have misgivings about the supernatural population.”

“I can hear you, you know?” Charles said.

“Can you?” Jacqueline asked. “It feels like you don’t hear anything anymore.”

He stood. “Can we go now?”

Without looking at him, I said, “Sit down.” He wouldn’t budge. I kept my gaze locked on Jacqueline. “I guess we’re going to be here for a while.”

She looked from me to Charles and back again but didn’t say a word. There was an odd expression on her face that I couldn’t quite place. “You have no idea what the definition of stubborn is until you’ve lived with a hedge witch,” I told Charles. “I can do this all day.”

His agitation spiked when I mentioned Lex. “Stop using her against me!”

I played with the edge of my timetable. “Why? You’re using her against you. How do you think she’d feel about you cutting school and being a general nuisance?”

“She didn’t even go to school for months before she left!”

It was a good point. “When you have the Prince of Darkness bearing down on you, then you can complain. Until then, I think you should be here too.”

“What?” he spluttered.

“I’d be more than happy to enrol you back, Charles,” Jacqueline said.

“No way! This is a waste of time!”

“Is it?” I said. “You’ll be here guarding me anyway. You may as well learn something. Like, say, how to touch a demon blade without having your skin burned off.”

“That’s not possible!”

“And how would you know?”

I swear I could literally see the cogs in his brain moving. But in the end, I knew he hadn’t even considered a high-magic solution. Truth be told, I was telling a little white lie. From what Lex had described to me, there was nothing that could bend the demon blade’s will for a shifter to tame it. But Charles didn’t need to know that.

“I don’t have any magic in me,” he said.

“No, but half of you is made of magic. Maybe that’s enough.” And if he learned the kind of magic that might come at him in the impending war, maybe it would help him survive. We waited for five whole minutes. An eternity in the mind of a teen.

“Okay, fine!”

Jacqueline beamed. “I’ll draw up a timetable for you.”

By the time we left, he was scowling like I’d made him eat wolfsbane. “I thought I’d gotten out of this!”

The thing about pulling a fast one on a shifter was that you had to be prepared for the retaliation. When he led me back to the Thompson residence, I was already dragging my feet.

“He wasn’t serious about this, right?” I asked even as Charles was opening the front door.

“I’m not going to justify that with an answer.”

“I can’t stay here, Chuck!”

His voice carried from well inside the living room. “Sleep on the lawn then. Because if you set foot off this property at night, he’ll clonk you over the head and drag you back.”

“I’d like to see him try!”

He stuck his head out of a first-floor window and grinned. “So would I! So please try and run away again!”

Gritting my teeth, I stood there on the porch for an age. So long that the evening sun began to sink in the sky. “Where’s Dani?”

“In hiding. We don’t...time....” I could barely hear him from the first floor.

“Pardon?”

Footsteps thudded. He came out the front door, took me by the wrist, and dragged me inside. That was bad enough