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

“Did you hear about the new guard positions they’ve advertised on the MirrorNet?” Sasha asked. Diana shot him an evil glare. His eyes flicked to me for a moment. “What? She doesn’t care, do you, Lex?”

“Care about what?”

“We learned about it in Dimension Integration,” Trey said. He paused between sentences, making me think he was choosing his words carefully. “The Council have posted new guard positions.”

“Where?”

If looks could kill, Diana would have murdered Sasha. His perpetually chilly complexion remained unchanged. “Around the perimeter of Terran Academy.”

I dropped my fork. It clattered on the plate. The vibrations lingered and became my sole focus for a moment while I gathered my composure. “I see.” It was all I could think to say.

“They’re not going to be close,” Diana said. For some reason Sophie was being very quiet. “They still have their perimeter warded, but the Council has decided we just need to watch the area around that.”

I pushed up to standing. “Lex,” Diana said.

“It’s fine. I just need some air.” Footsteps followed me outside. We were almost at the billabong but Sophie hadn’t said a word. She just trailed behind me like a shadow. I didn’t care for it at the moment.

“Can I please have some space?” I asked.

A red-and-tan flash caught my attention. Phoenix’s head appeared through the underbrush. He yelped but didn’t come any closer. “I’m sorry,” Sophie said.

“Why? It’s not your fault the Council are idiots.”

Any other time she would have heartily agreed with me. Today her cheek twitched. “They’re being overly cautious,” she managed to concede. “But at the same time, the Sisterhood are still dangerous. You were helping to guard against them, remember?”

I hated it when people tried to be reasonable when I was feeling the opposite. It was impossible to stay irritated.

I heard the flap of wings above us. Something inside of me snapped at the intrusion. “What exactly do you think I’m going to do?” I yelled, at the passing guard. I was quite certain said guard was for me specifically.

“Lex.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

She cracked her knuckles. “You won’t say anything to them, will you?”

It was at that moment that it really dawned on me. Sooner or later, I really would have to choose a side. And right now, I wasn’t sure which one it would be.

22

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” Rachel said on my second night at Terran for the week. I was pacing around the room with some table salt in my hands.

“It’s a habit.”

“You’re messing up the floor.” She snapped the deadbolt that had been newly added to the lock on account of my unplanned ocean adventure.

A good point. I ignored it all the same.

“I’ll clean it up in the morning.”

It was still strange to be sleeping in a room that wasn’t my dorm at Bloodline. But I’d slept rough plenty of times. Still, there was a difference between sleeping somewhere for the sake of it and being forced to spend time in a place. Rachel sat on her bed in her underwear and a white singlet. She was sharpening one of her knives. It was disconcerting to say the least. I didn’t know what to do with myself. The room and indeed the whole house, felt like it was pressing in on me.

“Do you have any idea how a person would go about finding a lost deity?” I asked her.

She didn’t look up from where she was oiling her blade.

“Beats me,” she said. “If we knew that we’d have tried it already.”

“But surely there are common ways to call upon her.”

“We’ve tried it all. Summoning, searching circles—heck, we’ve even prayed on it.”

“How did they call upon her before she disappeared?”

“The same way your Nephilim call upon their seraphim.”

I scrunched up my nose. “First of all, they’re not my Nephilim. And second of all, the seraphim preside over all of us. Not just the supernaturals.”

A derisive sound came out of her throat. She shoved off her bed and proceeded to pick the spent leaves and flowers off the many indoor plants she had in here. That was the one saving grace of this room. The window ledge was stacked with hanging baskets filled with African violets, geraniums, and marigolds. Beside Rachel’s bed was a peace lily and next to our door was a fiddle leaf fig that was almost bursting out of its pot.

“Right,” Rachel said, in response to my correction. “Like that Nephilim doesn’t think he owns you. How come he never calls you by your actual name?”

The immediate answer on my tongue was that he was a jackass. But now that I thought about it, I couldn’t really come up with an answer. Rachel suspected as much. “It’s so that he can put a distinction between you,” she said. “They make you believe they’re close to human so that when they show their true forms, you’ll be less likely to resist.”

I could feel my face forming a frown. “Have you ever been around any of them?”

Something snapped. I wasn’t sure if she’d broken a plastic hanging pot or if she’d broken the actual ledge. “I’ve been around enough.”

When she turned and slid under the covers on her bed, the same look she’d given Sean when I’d first arrived was etched onto her face.

“What happened?” I asked, knowing for sure that this kind of hatred must have been a result of something horrific. Kind of like my terror of the ocean. If only I could bloody remember what that was actually about.

She grunted at me in the universal sign of not wanting to talk. A moment later she turned her back. I sighed and snuggled under my own covers. I heard her breath even out a little while later but it was still a long time before I could get to sleep myself.

In my dreams the ocean returned. I lay in bed paralysed as water rose all around me. Petrified, I tried to call out to Rachel only to see her bed was no