Bloodline Secrecy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 2), Lan Chan [readict TXT] 📗

so that I could take more. If I was going to end up fighting the devil, then I was going to go down kicking and screaming.

17

Sophie screamed at me when she saw me in Potions and Alchemy ten minutes later. “Where were you? Did you get into a fight? Why are you all bruised?”

Half the class was already there. Most of their heads turned in our direction. I was feeling slightly dizzy from not having had lunch. Thankfully, I’d swung by the dining hall just before class and was trying to stuff a savoury bacon and cheese muffin in my face.

“Left the sword in the Grove this morning so I had to go back for it. The nymphs are going to teach me how to fight.”

She snorted. “They’re, like, five inches tall.”

I shrugged. “Nothing else has worked so far.”

“Good point.”

Professor McKenna arrived and we got busy working on our respective potions. I retrieved my desk cauldron and tried to wrangle Puff, my allocated salamander. He kept racing around the glass enclosure to get away from me. In the end I had to entice him with a lump of flavoured coal.

I was working on a waking spell. The likelihood of it being able to wake Nanna given the Nephilim weren’t having much luck was minimal. But it couldn’t hurt to try.

Sophie was working on an illusion spell. At the moment the clean-up crews who went to handle demon and supernatural attacks used Fae and vampiric glamours. Sophie said those didn’t sit so well with human physiology and psychology. She was working on something that vibed better with our brainwaves.

We had to do all of our own research into what ingredients would go into our potions. It was not a fast process. Spell brewing was a precise art. More than once we’d had to evacuate the room because someone added an ingredient they shouldn’t have. I loved it. Even all of the reading. It was nice to see the results of my work unlike the endless maths I’d had to do in my old high school. That was part of the reason why I skipped out on it.

Halfway through the class I remembered the invitation. “Hey,” I said to Sophie. She was biting her tongue and adding dew collected from a lotus plant to her brew one drop at a time. That stuff was expensive because it was hard to come by. It took a specialist mage to determine what was dew and what was pond water.

“Do you want to come to Charles’s birthday party with me?”

She tipped the last drop in and looked up at me. “Charles. As in Thompson?”

“How many other Charleses do we know?”

“As in Max’s brother?”

“Which part of this are you finding difficult to understand?”

“You know he’s twelve, right?”

I sniffed at my brew and coughed. Too much lavender oil. Dammit. Now I would have to distil some of it out and start over. “He’s about to turn thirteen. That’s kind of the point of the party. Max will be there.”

Sophie scrunched up her nose. “If that’s the case then so will Kai.”

I paused. “Why would he be there?”

“Duh! They’re best friends. Did you think Max would go to his baby brother’s birthday on his own to hang out with kids?”

“Why not? That’s what I was going to do.”

Now that she mentioned it, though, it made a lot of sense. “Aw man!”

“What’s the problem, though? I thought you guys came to some kind of truce?”

I placed the distilling equipment over my cauldron and switched it on. “If by that you mean we’re totally avoiding each other unless we have to be civil then yes, we have a truce.”

Other then taking me to see Skander, I hadn’t seen or spoken to Kai all week. We didn’t really talk in class. It wasn’t as though we were friends. I got real interested in the colours of the flame coming out of Puff’s open mouth. It had been easy to say the words that would make him step back. It was far harder to live with the reality.

“Lex.”

I shook my head. “It’s fine. So he’ll be there. So what? It’s not like I can’t be in the same room with him. I mean, all we ever did was argue anyway.”

Sensing that I wasn’t going to keep talking about it in class, she returned her attention to her potion. By the end of class, I’d managed to distil most of the lavender from my brew. When the bell rang, I dropped the stabilising crystal into the potion and returned my cauldron to the shelf. Puff scuttled off with Sophie’s salamander, Charming.

Weapons and Combat was up next. I was forbidden from using the demon blade on fellow students, though. So I had to make do with the wooden swords. Diana ran through drills with me. I learned to watch her feet. But at the same time it made me miss her swinging her sword down to hit me in the back of my arm.

“Ow!”

Isla groaned. “You are seriously terrible,” she said. I would have snapped back except there wasn’t the same bite to her words as there had been last semester. “It’s like you’re fighting with your eyes closed or something.”

“Sorry!” I snapped. “It’s not my fault you’ve all been born with supernatural speed. How am I supposed to keep up?”

“Have you ever tried meditating?”

“Why does everyone keep saying that to me?”

She only smirked and walked off.

We were on our way to the dining hall for dinner when the sirens went off. Sophie gripped my arm. “Not again,” she said.

The last time this happened, it was because criminals had escaped from the Dominion prison. My thoughts went straight to Skander. “Students,” Jacqueline’s disembodied voice boomed out. “Please make your way to the assembly hall.”

“Why don’t we ever have assemblies for good news?” I said.

Everybody poured out of the buildings they were in to make their way to the junior campus. I saw a figure in light blue streak across the sky.

“Astrid! What’s going