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

and not Kai at the same time. The wrongness of it caused me to draw in on myself. My teeth gritted hard, and my toes curled, not wanting him to touch me.

A smile sliced across his mouth. The air around us shimmered and the voice disappeared. Instead, we stood on a bridge overlooking a foaming white-and-cobalt-blue waterfall. The water rushed into the lake below that fed into a network of rivers. They forked away from the lake and wound around the landscape, disappearing behind the towers of the golden castle structures. Seraphina.

As I watched, great opalescent bodies broke through the water. The rainbow whales swam in small pods, shooting glistening spray from their blowholes. The unparalleled beauty of it stole my words until something flickered in the air in my line of sight.

Kai turned his back on me. His wings shot out and lifted him in the air. All around us, foggy outlines shimmered. Bit by bit they solidified into the towering, grotesque shapes of the malachim. There were hundreds of them floating in the air, half solid, half transparent. For a moment I wondered why they didn’t move forward. And then the white glow of thousands of Angelical wards snapped into being. They lit up every inch of the perimeter, the paranoia of the Nephilim coming into play. Given the current situation, they had every right to be paranoid.

The malachim in front of me parted for Kai. He glided through the air, his essence cloaked in sickly darkness. Where was his angelfire? He raised a hand haloed in sludgy darkness, and I finally understood. Wherever he was, Kai was no longer in control of his body. Whatever now lived inside him shot a beam of black fire at the wards. For a second, darkness met the light and engulfed it.

The wards shattered. As soon as they did, Nephilim guards teleported in, their golden armour blinding in the sun. Below them, portals opened up and spat out para-humans and mages. The Fae came shortly after.

The malachim rose up to meet them. Kai drew back as though keeping himself out of the limelight. I watched with my heart shredding bit by bit as the malachim cleaved their way through the ranks of the elite guard. My head swam as my eyes tried to find a safe spot to land so that I wouldn’t be assaulted with carnage.

Kai moved up beside me. “You did this,” he said. “You can stop it.”

“No.” I wasn’t even sure at this point what I was refusing. And then I saw her. Astrid. She was a speck of silvery light in the near distance. She took down one malachim after another with an insidious rage. For a moment, I thought Astrid had spotted Kai and was cutting a path to him. But the look of sheer astonishment on her face when she finally noticed him was heartbreaking. It was made a thousand times worse as it morphed into joy and then leeched away when it dawned on her that something was very wrong with him.

The momentary lapse in judgement gave the thing that was Kai an advantage. He teleported behind her. Before I could even gasp, he reached out with hands adorned in black talons and snapped her wings. The crunch of bone and cartilage was blocked out only by Astrid’s scream. Pain made her forget to teleport. Confusion stayed her blade when she would have struck out at him. Grabbing onto a fistful of her hair, Kai jerked her head back and pressed his mouth to her ear. His words, when he spoke, were for me.

“Because of you,” he said, “he’ll watch as he kills everyone he cherishes.”

When Kai raised a taloned finger to Astrid’s throat, I threw out my arms. I had every intention of using the alchemy to hurt him. The dusky pink of my magic wrapped itself around the creature Kai had become. It clashed with his intent, and I felt a stabbing pain in my head as his will beat down on my mine. Blood spat from my mouth as I heard somebody screaming my name. Inside me, the mating link roared. As alchemy bled from my fingers to curl around Kai, so too did a tendril of pure golden light.

Kai gasped. A flicker of green snapped behind the dark orbs. He released Astrid and she fell. I wasn’t sure if somebody caught her, because pain burst in my shoulder and I was ripped into consciousness.

Cassie shook me harshly. “Sophie!” she yelled. Behind her, Charles was a bleary-eyed ball of fur. His hair was a long mane over shoulders roiling with shifting muscles.

I coughed blood, and it splattered onto Cassie’s sheet-white face. She didn’t take any notice. “Sophie?”

Realising that she needed me to speak, I forced my mouth open. “I’m okay.” It was barely more than a croak.

“No, you’re not! You’re bleeding.”

The evidence was soaked into Max’s T-shirt and my blanket. “Help me up.” She grabbed my hand and pretty much lifted me until I was standing. Charles moved out of the way, his lips still peeled back into a silent growl. Fumbling around in my ingredients chest, I plucked out the remaining vials of health elixir and drank them both in a big gulp.

My head cleared in an instant. With it came the cold fear. It occurred to me that there were voices coming from the living room. “What’s going on?”

They were silent as they followed me down the staircase. Luther sat on the couch pointed towards the mirror. His eyes were still glassy, but I didn’t think it was from the sleep potion I’d doused him with. The image in the mirror was of a grim-faced Patricia.

“...extreme caution. The best course of action is to run when engaged.”

“Astrid?” I asked. Their heads turned to me, mouths open.

“How did you know?” Luther asked. “It only just happened.”

Not wanting to frighten them, I said, “She’s the only one I know in Seraphina.”

They were too shocked to think things through properly. “She’s in