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

“Go!” she screamed. Lightning backlit her drenched figure. For a moment she looked like an avenging angel. As she closed the door behind us, the side of the room broke away. The door itself was off its hinge. It only managed to shield us for a couple of seconds before it too was ripped away. The whole building was coming down around us. The wail of the wind and the relentless hammering of rain drowned out any other sound.

I raced behind after the bouncer’s hulking back. We went down a staircase with the elements at our heels. The warm summer’s day had given way to a chill that had more to do with something seeping into my soul than the drenched clothes clinging to my skin. I could have sworn we should have been at ground level now, but the staircase continued to spiral. Not that going outside was an option.

At any other time, it would have been pitch black inside the staircase, but the continued flash of lightning gave off enough light so we didn’t break our necks. The stairs finally ended in a small platform. George wrenched open a heavy metal door and disappeared inside.

The first thing to hit me was the red glow of candlelight. And then that bitter-dark odour wrapped itself around my nostrils and clouded everything else out. Ashton swept me inside the room and Rachel once more shut the door.

“What the hell?” George cursed. He zipped around the room trying to flick lights on to no avail. The electricity must have short-circuited. We didn’t need it to see amongst the glow of the candles. I wished they weren’t there. I wished I’d minded my own business and stayed at Terran. Rachel swallowed when I peered at her face to check whether she knew what was in this room. My mind went blank as I tried to comprehend the picture in front of me.

Ashton attempted to drag me back behind him, but I snatched my arm away. I took one step forward but that was all the energy I could muster. The rest was preoccupied keeping me from screaming. The walls of this dungeon—that was the only way I could describe this vile, dank place—were reinforced with steel. It provided us with protection from the flash storm raging outside. I could hear the wind and rain as it whipped around us. But it was now a muted threat.

The thing in front of me was not. I’d seen some messed-up stuff since I’d joined Bloodline, but it had all been sanitary compared to the blazing red circle that had been drawn on the concrete floor in this room. Aside from the circle, there was a cage of reinforced metal. It was the demon inside the cage that my brain refused to draw into a reasonable conclusion.

The demon was constructed of pure sinew. Its four arms reminded me distinctly of a crocodile’s. Its legs were reptilian and ended in three toes with claws protruding from them. The thing didn’t look up from where it was feasting on the severed torso of something that had once been humanoid. I swallowed repeatedly but the scream curled around my throat. Forcing myself to look away from the patches of grey hair on the torso was just about the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. My watery eyes ran along the tubes and cables that had been embedded into the demon’s limbs. Blood that was inky slithered slowly through the tubes towards what looked like a makeshift chemistry set-up. I caught myself wishing they were just cooking drugs down here.

I knew enough about predatory shifters at this point to reasonable gauge what type of shifter the severed arm belonged to. Judging by the length and shape of the claws, I would say it was badger. The corresponding leg that was half-hanging out of the cage could have been a gazelle. It was hard to tell with the hoof crunched away.

My olfactory senses were so overwhelmed that I had to stop breathing for long stretches. That was a bad idea. It made taking a breath all the more harrowing. I couldn’t get used to it.

“Alessia,” Rachel said. Her voice was thick. “You have to understand. We don’t have a choice.”

She too tried to reach for me. I slapped her hand away.

“What’s the issue?” George said. During our hurried escape from becoming crispy-fried humans, his mask had come undone. It scraped me up the wrong way that the rest of his face was unscarred. He was perfectly ordinary looking. But I didn’t want him to be. Evil of this nature should come with a physical warning. But Lucifer was the biggest contradiction to that rule. What they were doing here was far and away more monstrous than anything Bloodline could have come up with.

“You’re feeding supernaturals to demons,” I said. My voice was without emotion. It wasn’t the wet clinging to me that made me feel so cold.

“We’re feeding our experiment,” the bouncer said. “Same way we feed mice to snakes. What are you? Some kind of monster-lover?”

The flare of my magic made them all flinch. George came towards me slowly, his palms flattened in front of him. “Easy,” he said. “Think this through. We’re trapped in here for as long as the storm rides. That demon is suggestible. If you rile it up, we’re all in for major unpleasantness.”

The universe already had a sick sense of humour. It didn’t need me to rile anything up. The next time lightning struck the building the demon flung its meaty quarry aside and bellowed. I flinched as the half-eaten torso thudded against the cage. It smudged the circle but that didn’t matter. The spell to bring the demon forth had already been completed and there had been no intention of sending it back to the Hell dimension.

We dropped low once more to keep from toppling over. I placed my palm against the concrete and