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

but a pile of them. Each bundle was crowned by a tiny human skull. They were so small that there was no question they had belonged to a child. As I drew closer, I picked up the scraping marks on the bone as though they had been gnawed at.

“Come, Sophie.” He beckoned me over. I was struck mute by our resemblance. It might have been easier to see his profile in the Book of Beasts if we didn’t look so similar. But it was obvious, from his soft features to his dark skin tone, where I had gotten my looks. Right now, it was the other legacy he’d given me that he wanted to demonstrate.

I hesitated at the edge of the circle. Stuck between two opposing forces. Inside me, the blood alchemy churned. It reached out long tendrils and wanted desperately to sink into the circle and draw strength from the ritual that I was sure would grant me immense power. At the same time, both my kitchen magic and the mating link were rioting, screaming at me to step back and run.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “This is who you are.”

When I wouldn’t budge, he grew impatient. “You can’t run away forever, Sophie. You make yourself miserable trying to be meek when you’ve been given the power to take anything and make it your own.”

“What if...” I started. “There has to be another way.”

“What other way? This is natural. This is what you were born with. Why would we have been given this gift it we weren’t meant to use it?”

I couldn’t answer that question. And when I continued to stand there frowning, he lost his patience. “You make me sad, child.”

He flicked his left hand and a figure materialised inside the circle. Kai’s wings retracted into his back as he knelt down. His knees hit the pile of bones at the circle’s centre and crushed them into dust. His eyes smouldered with the same intense red and black as the circle itself. My heart jumped into my throat. I took a step forward only to be slapped back by the might of his magic. “You had your chance to be part of it,” he said.

“Ba tata!” I urged. “Let him go.”

Inside the confines of the circle, Kai lifted his head back, exposing his throat. “Stop it!” I screamed. My great-grandfather set a chalice down beside Kai. When my fist connected with the circle, unrepentant pain shot up my arm and threw me away. Pushing back up and ignoring the throbbing in my side, I bit my finger and drew blood. My great-grandfather cocked his head at me. “You know nothing,” he said. And then he raised a scalpel and sliced a wound from Kai’s left ear all the way to his right.

My head filled with the rush of horror and my internal screaming. Blood gushed out from Kai’s ruined throat, covering his white T-shirt and the grass all around him. Glowing green blood pulsing with his healing magic flowed into the chalice, dripped over its sides and turned the grass into marsh.

I slapped my palm onto the circle, fully prepared to speak the most powerful words of light I could think of. Instead, the circle latched on to me, gripping me so tight I couldn’t move a muscle. I became plastered to an imaginary wall.

Beneath my feet, Kai’s blood slithered over the grass until it reached the tip of my sneakers. Bit by bit it crawled over the canvas. When it touched my skin, the world exploded into a bright burst of colour and sound. Everything around me amplified like I had been sensing it through a dull filter. Now I saw and heard things on a level that I could only imagine. A supernatural level.

Struggling against the blood was futile. I could hardly move as his power made its way through my bloodstream, making my skin tingle like I’d drunk ten glasses of Fae ambrosia. Even as my mind protested the intrusion, something in my core sighed.

“Yes, Sophie,” my great-grandfather said. “That reluctance isn’t truly yours. It’s the conditioning they’ve filled you with to make you small. To make you weak so they can control you. But you’re free now.”

With those words, Kai’s blood breached the chamber of my magic. It touched the pool of my kitchen magic and overwhelmed it, eating away at all that was good inside me. When it tried to broach the blood barrier, the mating link began to vibrate. It bubbled and boiled like a live, angry sentience. The two forces threw themselves at the blood barrier. Pain shot through my skull.

“Remember who you are, Sophie,” my great-grandfather said. But I could no longer recognise his voice. And then my mind filled with the low rumble of a lion that gripped me and dragged me back from the edge.

I startled up in bed, choking and sweating like nobody’s business. The blankets lay twisted on the floor on my left. Early morning sunlight broke through the gap in the curtains. The unfamiliar room made my already throbbing head pound harder. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was. Something warm and sticky made my nose itch. Swiping at it, my hand came away tinged pink.

“Shit.”

Fumbling for the Fae lantern, I flicked it on with the press of my thumb and stumbled out of bed. My ingredients trunk was still out in the hall because it was too heavy for me to lift alone. Instead, I found my backpack beneath a mountain of hair products and wigs. Unzipping it, I took out the enchanted wooden spell case and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the vials of health elixir were intact. Uncorking a single vial, I downed the sugary concoction and thought of pleasant things. Charles’s deep laugh that broke through the shell of his anger, the lack of stink in the fresh air of the Reserve, the familiar and comforting sight of the Academy, and just because I