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

he turned smoothly back to the counter. In my periphery, I could see the bouncer still eyeing me warily. The stranger at the counter was engrossed in conversation with Ashton. Not wanting to be sniffed again, I drew closer to them. There was another door behind the counter. It was a solid wooden one with a gilded pattern to the frame. It didn’t fit with the ramshackle appearance of the rest of the place. Something told me it had been replaced recently. The small window on the left side of the room was covered in newspaper. Why did people think that was okay?

“Same amount as before?” the stranger asked. The mask obscured too much of his face for me to make out anything but deep lines around his brown eyes. He had the kind of leathery skin that spoke of long hours spent in the sun.

“We’ll take everything you’ve got, George,” Ashton said.

“No can do. We’ve got orders backed up. Best I can do is a double dose.”

The wad of cash Ashton produced from his back pocket had me stilling. He set the spools of hundreds on the counter. “We’ll pay cash now.”

George didn’t take his eyes from Ashton’s face. It was like the money was insubstantial.

“You know the rules. We gotta have enough to go around.” He traced his palm along an opaque glass panel. I watched as ochre light glowed around his fingers. I could feel my brows knitting into a frown. Rachel noticed my disapproval and pressed her lips together. A reminder for me to keep my mouth shut.

It was hard. I wanted to know why an earth wizard would be caught up in an organisation like this. Earth magic and hedge magic were synonymous. It hadn’t been more than ten minutes and I felt like my lungs were being squeezed shut. How could he stand being in this confined space with the stench of those chemicals? I tried to breathe through my mouth. Something bitter and dark coated my tongue. It caused my lips to draw back from my teeth in a very shifter reaction. I bit my tongue and tried to scrape the taste away with my teeth.

“When will you have more?” Ashton pressed him palms on the counter and leaned forward. Until now he’d seemed like the easy-going one at Terran. But I’d been around enough addicts in my time on the streets to recognize the fervour in his voice. In the way he tracked George’s every movement. Terran wanted this stuff really bad.

“We’ll have more when we have more.”

A vein in Ashton’s jaw jumped. Rachel placed her hand on his forearm. “You’ve got our contact details,” she said. “Let us know as soon as you’re in stock.”

“Don’t I always? At least you’ve got other ways to protect yourselves.”

A thumping sound came from the door at his back. A low groaning that reminded me of something I’d heard recently. George was unperturbed by it. Nobody else seemed to pay it any heed either. But now that it had claimed my attention, I couldn’t help straining to figure it out.

I was standing there with my neck almost out of joint when the keening noise was overridden by a rumble in the sky. “What in the world –” Rachel said. As she did a half-turn the air boomed again. “Is that thunder?”

The bouncer strode to the window. He tore a small section of newspaper from the corner and squinted out. His sharp inhale was not a good sign. “It’s bucketing down outside,” he announced.

“We’ll be fine in here,” George said with the authority of somebody who didn’t have a care in the world. “It’s just a bit of rain.” It was that kind of certainty that I had learned not to trust. The tightening in my gut had reached a pinnacle. Like the tree roots, I had an inexplicable urge to burrow into the earth.

When Rachel’s hand went to her side where she usually kept her knife belt, I strengthened the circle around me. No sooner had the circle completed than the building rocked with the sound of a thousand jet engines roaring around us. Light flashed behind my eyes. It created an image residue that captured the moment Rachel’s eyes went wide. The lightning was a precursor to the thunder that spiralled down around us.

“Shit!” the bouncer screamed. He jumped clear of the window just as the glass exploded. The frame of the room buckled. Cracks began to appear in the ceiling. I tracked a line that raced down the wall in a zigzag pattern. It joined several others as the room shook anew. We were being hit by lightning. I opened my mouth to scream but it was drowned out by the roar of thunder.

23

I sprang aside in time to make the leap over the fissure that opened up in the floor. The magic in me heard the sound of metaphysical tearing as the barrier around the door loosened and then cracked altogether. This wasn’t right. Everything I’d learned about elemental magic said that it couldn’t be undone by simple natural phenomenon. The crumbling floor begged to differ.

With a twelve-inch gap in the ceiling, water began to slough into the room. What sounded like bullets rained down on the roof. A hurried glance out the now-broken window told me that golf-ball-sized hail was battering at the building.

A slither of lightning brightened the interior of the room. I counted three seconds. My heart constricted at the boom that sounded as though it were right beside my ear.

Rachel grabbed me and tried to push me back out the corridor. We’d taken two steps when the shaking became unmanageable. Sinking down low on instinct, I crouched in an attempt to find my equilibrium.

“This way,” George yelled. Hail smashed into my side as I shoved off the floor and half-crawled towards the door behind the counter. Ashton grabbed my arm just shy of the opening. “Wait.”

Hair slick and darkened by the water, his expression had me pausing.