Bloodline Diplomacy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 3), Lan Chan [best way to read an ebook .TXT] 📗

the time dinner rolled around, I was so exhausted I could barely lift my fork to eat. I almost forgot to draw the circle around my bed. Groaning like an old woman, I got out of bed. It was a force of habit to take salt from Sophie’s bedside table, but there was none in sight. Rachel hadn’t even come to bed yet. Her side of the room was a homage to heavy metal music. Thankfully, I had some salt sachets in my suitcase. I crashed after I’d finished. It felt like I had only just closed my eyes when my breathing became heavy. My eyes snapped open to find a hand covering my mouth.

Hushed voices whispered around me. I kicked out wondering why the circle hadn’t alerted me. Somebody grunted, but they didn’t let go. A cloth was placed over my nose. Of course as soon as I commanded myself not to inhale, that was the first thing I did. My lungs filled with a sweet scent. My eyes drooped and everything went black.

16

I might have thought that I was still dreaming because of the sound of waves crashing all around me. It washed up on all sides, the spray close enough that it spat in my face. When I opened my eyes, it was pitch black but for the crescent of the moon.

That was enough to see the foreshore in the distance. I glanced up and saw that I was underneath the very tip of the pier. My back was pressed up against one of the wooden beams. Something rough held my hands in place behind me. The tide dragged my legs up and down in tandem with the swell of the waves. The thing that told me this was all too real were the figures treading water around me. Their faces were covered with Halloween masks, but the flow of hair billowing in the water around them told me they were female. My mouth was covered by soft material. I tried to kick at the person closest to me. She huffed as my foot grazed her, but the resistance in the water was too much for there to be any force behind the kick.

The figure on the left made a circular motion with her hand. The other two nodded. They moved off back towards the shore. Hysteria that had been building in my chest broke free. I screamed, but from behind the bandage it came out as incoherent mumbling. My chest constricted so that my breathing became ragged. I rubbed at the bindings around my wrists, but they were too tight. There was no give in the knots. I didn’t have the strength to get them to loosen.

The water closed in on me from all sides. At first it had been just under my chin, but as I struggled, the moon danced across the sky and the water rose. The bandage over my mouth was soaked through. As were the rest of my clothes. It made breathing even more difficult. I was freezing. Fear lapped at me each time a wave carried something close. In the rational part of my mind I thought it might be seaweed. But the rational part of me had receded. In its place was something wild and uncontrollable. I screamed until my throat was hoarse. The water rose so that I had to strain my neck to keep breathing. Even then I didn’t manage every time. I swallowed more water than I would have drunk in one sitting.

The beach in this area was too secluded for there to be traffic at this time of night. A single car had driven by, but it hadn’t stopped even when I screamed as loudly as I possibly could. I had rubbed my wrists to the point where I’d broken skin. It matched the pain in my legs where I kept trying to push away from the plank of wood that held up the pier. There were no plants out here for me to take advantage of with my hedge magic. Seaweed didn’t have roots that I could use to help me break the pier. The wood itself was too long dead. It would take a lot of power to revive them.

You have power, Lucifer’s voice broke into my thoughts. A flashing image of him in his prison with his fist pressed up against a stone wall assailed me. Will you die by their rules?

In a moment of clarity, or perhaps sheer stupidity, I decided to throw my personal belief about balance out. Reaching into the depths of my magic, I shoved the surface of blue aside and willed the black beneath it to rise.

Water smashed against my ears and nose. Something scaly brushed up against my palm. I inhaled loudly. It sounded like the agonised bleating of a dying animal. With all of the resolve I had left, I directed the full spectrum of my magic into the pier. Grow, I commanded.

At first nothing happened. All of the energy inside me surged and then bottlenecked as it attempted to race out of me at once. There was an instant where it sat in limbo. At the same time, I lost control of my body. I was so exhausted from having fought to get free that my head bobbed forward. It didn’t have far to go. Just a small tip and my face was in the water.

Panic like nothing I had ever known before overcame me. But it was a panic that had no outlet. Instead, it dragged at my soul until the world around me became a glittering of lights. And then the rushing sound erupted in my ears. It roared like there was an aircraft engine right beside my ear. A burst of blue light flashed like a star going supernova. Night turned into a blazing blue day that blocked out the sky. The pier behind me turned into kindling.

Circles upon circles, millions of them, rippled out into the ocean. They pushed