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

game that supernaturals kids were apparently into. She offered to let me put my name on the card, but I didn’t think that was right.

On the day of Charles’s birthday, that prospect was sounding more and more attractive. I was watering the Arcana tree and desperately figuring out what to get a thirteen-year-old boy who pretty much had everything already.

It wasn’t until I found myself staring at the tree that it hit me. All of those big round fruit just hanging there. I still couldn’t get used to the delicious scent that wafted off them.

“Hey, Purple!” I yelled.

The nymphs had names that my human tongue could not wrap itself around. I was still the joke of the Dead Language class. Luther had brought in a mirror that had been magicked to record sounds and taped me trying to say some of the goblin words. It was so much fun being the butt of a joke for your much younger classmates. My only consolation was that Maddison found it hilarious and it had lifted her mood a little when she first came back to class.

The purple nymph appeared out of thin air. I could swear that they were always around spying on me. Three more of them winked into existence. The pink, blue, and red nymphs danced around me. They all thought I was a fool to be used as servant. But I’d been busting my ass here for over six months. It was time I got paid.

“Can I please take one of these fruit?” I asked.

I’d deciphered some of their sounds in the past few months. The skipping trill they gave now was akin to their version of laughter. The kind of laughter that rocks you from head to toe because the person you’re laughing at is an idiot.

“Come on!” I said. “I’ve been helping you for nothing when I could be getting a part-time job or something. I have zero manna.”

More laughter. Their sympathy for me was non-existent. The purple nymph started speaking in her high-pitched, super speedy language. I rolled my eyes.

“It’s one fruit,” I said. “I don’t understand what the problem is.”

She made a sweeping hand gesture to indicate all of the students in the school. It took me a while, but I gathered the message was that if she gave me this one fruit today, it would make the others want fruit too.

“But they can’t get in here without permission,” I said. “They can’t steal the fruit.” I rubbed my chin then, contemplating doing just that. I got a wack in the head with a stick for my troubles.

“Ow! Quit it!”

They did not. It was like I had asked them for their firstborn or something. “How about a trade then? What can I give you for one fruit?”

I lifted my arm to block the neck blow. They stopped hitting. Hovering into a huddle, they spoke in hushed, shrill voices. I wasn’t sure why, I couldn’t understand their speech most of the time. We usually kind of gestured at each other.

They broke apart and flew to face me. A little row of colours all lined up. I was glad they were so small. Bite-sized, I could deal with the ethereal beauty of them. Until of course they snarled and showed those razor-sharp fangs. The purple nymph pointed at the demon blade on my back.

“No way,” I said. “You’re not getting the blade.”

She huffed out. She made a gesture by dragging her pointed finger across her tiny palm reminiscent of the way blood magic was performed. Then she drew a circle with said palm and pointed first to herself and the other nymphs and then to the Grove.

The light bulb turned on. Protection. She wanted protection from the Soul Sisterhood. And she wanted it by way of a blood pact. “You know I can’t guarantee anything,” I said. I was the worst kind of saleswoman on the planet. No wonder nobody was jumping around offering me a job.

She clapped her hands anyway. Then she extended it like she wanted me to shake it. Gingerly, I held out a finger. She took it with both her hands. The shake was a lot firmer than I’d anticipated. I almost tripped from the vibration. They made me do the ritual first, of course. They were too shrewd to just hand over the fruit without getting payment.

I wasn’t even sure what I was doing. That meant a call to Basil using the reflective pool. “I’m going to have to come down there,” he said. This presented a bit of a problem. While I hopped over the fence that guarded the Grove without too big a magical shock these days, Basil’s origin was still a mystery. I went to retrieve him from the dorms and when we arrived back at the Grove, it was to a line of nymphs with their pointed teeth bared.

“I can’t do this without him,” I said. Their symphony of whistles blasted through my eardrums to the tips of my toes. I flattened my palms against my ears, but the barrier was pointless.

“Ladies,” Basil said. “There’s no need for alarm. I am but a soul bound to an inanimate object.” The purple nymph sneered. As their unofficial leader, she dropped to the ground in front of him. It was the first time I’d ever seen her walking. It reminded me of the awkward hop of a bird. By rights, Basil was powerless in his current form. Purple skirted around him in a display of Kai-inspired paranoia.

It was the quiet that tipped me off. Barely a second after I bound Basil in a protective circle, Purple lunged. As did half a dozen other nymphs. They tried to grab hold of any piece of wool that stuck out of him and tugged. The circle didn’t keep them out, but it wrapped Basil in a layer of supernatural glue. His soft body warped into an amorphous blob. I winced as the cotton inside him flattened and expanded at the same time. Thankfully,