Bloodline Alchemy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 6), Lan Chan [free ebook reader for android TXT] 📗

Even though her voice was laced with derision, I could see the envy in her balled fists. Reaching out a hand, I opened my fist. Without even thinking, she took it, her fingers trembling. “I’m perfectly fine,” I told her, sensing through practice in the Zambian compound the deep shame in her.

“We shouldn’t have been out there,” she said. Cheyenne clutched at her shoulder, but Kate’s attention was only for me. “I didn’t even know where I was running until it was too late.”

“The malachim got into your head?”

She gulped. “I woke up because I heard Rowena walking past my house.” Rowena was her friend. She was also half-human. “I called out to her, but she wouldn’t acknowledge me. Before I knew it, we were out of range and Ed and the boys were with us. That’s when they came.”

Her fingers constricted. I could feel the vein in my neck spasming, but I didn’t let go. “If you hadn’t shown up–”

“Hey,” I said. “I did show up. We’re all okay.”

She took in the bonfire and the kids around me. “You’re trapped here. That’s my fault.”

“Kate,” I said. “It’s my own fault I got caught. It’s my fault I did things that warrant my captivity. None of that is your fault.”

“But...” She trailed off. I saw her glance in the direction of the pack circle conference room which was only just up the slope of the hill. “They’re saying you did bad things and that’s why you can’t leave.”

I grinned at her. “Yep. That’s also why you shouldn’t worry. I can take care of myself.” Edward snuggled in deeper. She swallowed hard, trying to determine whether the lie I had told her was acceptable.

The quiet was punctured by the sound of snoring. “For goodness’ sake,” Charles said.

“Don’t wake him!” Cassie and I hissed at the same time. Luther was dead to the world. His mouth hung open and his snores spoke of exhaustion. Sniffing, Charles eyed me.

“You drugged him.”

I wasn’t sorry. “That’s right. A reminder of what happens when you displease me.”

Kate and Edward stayed with us until Cheyenne declared it was past their bedtime. As she dragged him reluctantly from me, she bent down and whispered in my ear, “Thank you.” Her arms were suddenly shackled around her son, holding him for dear life. “I don’t care what anyone says, Mark and I will never forget what you’ve done for us. They’re just afraid. They’ll come around eventually.”

Charles grumbled as he slung Luther’s limp body over his shoulder. “Oh, shush,” Cassie said as she shouldered our packs. “He weighs nothing.”

“It’s not that he’s heavy! It’s that he’s shooting fire while he’s asleep.”

I burst out laughing when, at that very moment, Luther snored and a small blaze ignited in the grass. Cassie and I spent the whole way back dousing flames while Charles yelped and complained about getting his hair singed.

There was hardly any space inside the room, but Cassie managed to squeeze herself between the ingredients chest and the base of the bed. “Are you sure you don’t want to come up here?” I asked.

“No thanks. I don’t want to risk Max mistaking me for somebody else and murdering me in my sleep.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m not joking. I’m really tall for a girl.” She had shot up even more in the past six months. She could rest her head comfortably on Charles’s collar and he would only need to bend his neck to hold her in place. I couldn’t help wondering what Kai would think of that if he were here. Her thoughts were on him too it seemed.

“Do you think you’d be able to explain to me what happened?” she asked. “I was all the way on the other side of Terran when it happened.”

The unmasked pain in her voice was the only thing that convinced me. I would sooner never think about the final battle ever again. If I didn’t know how badly she needed this, I would have refused. We were both sobbing by the time I was done. Cassie from grief and fear and me from the lie I maintained to hold on to the illusion that I wasn’t the cause of at least half of that grief. Once she closed her eyes, her breath evened out quickly. Like Luther, she was wrung out emotionally. I only wished that I could believe my own crap so I could forget for a second that it was all my fault.

20

Kai agreed with my assessment. When I finally fell asleep, it was to be dragged into a swirl of darkness that ended with me standing beside him on the precipice of a cliff. His wings were unfurled but they were no longer a beautiful white. Instead, they were stained with a silver sludge that dripped from him in waves of despair.

“Kai?”

My breath caught in my lungs when he turned and pitiless black eyes bore into me. I tried to take a step back, but my legs were cemented to the ground. In front of us, the swirl of darkness was punctured by a ravenous keening sound, along with an agonising scream that dragged out until I thought I was going to go crazy, only for it to start all over again.

When I tried to look down into the void, all I could see was a bottomless pit that had no end. It had no anything. It was just...empty.

“Where am I?”

When he spoke, I wished I’d never asked the question. “You are where you should have always been,” the thing that was no longer Kai said. His voice was like the sound of a million souls begging for release. The sound of torturous rage and unending grief. His voice belonged to that thing that kept encouraging me to use my blood alchemy.

A sob escaped me. He reached out a hand as though to slide it along my cheek. I flinched. His beautiful face lit up into a smile that made me want to scream. He was at once Kai