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

she would go down with the lie rather than admit she’d been wrong. When Sophie lied, it hurt her in a way that made her shrink in on herself. She was almost apologising before she even opened her mouth.

“Not much,” she finally said. Truth.

“So what makes you think anything has changed?”

“I was hoping you might participate with me. If Kai could sense you, he might appear.”

I closed my eyes for a second. In my head, the lion lowered itself into a hunting crouch. The roar began as a small sound that built and tripped over itself as it rolled and gained momentum. My chest vibrated silently as thunder erupted in my ears. I heard metal groaning under my hands.

When I opened my eyes, Sophie was leaning forward. Her hand gripping her knee like she was going to reach out but thought better of it.

“What you’re asking means he’s dead,” I said. It came out a harsh bark.

“Not necessarily.”

The metal crumpled beneath my hands. It groaned as I stood, picked up the entire seat, and began breaking it apart. “He was hit by the full blast of her Angelical at the soul gate. If you’re searching for him via summoning, it means you think he’s dead. Is that what you think, Sophie?” My left eye was twitching. Kai was not dead. End of discussion.

“I don’t know.”

She looked away and shuddered from the high-pitched sound of the metal bending in my hands. Setting it down, I lowered myself to the ground. “A summoning inside the Reserve will bring the malachim down on us. It’s not happening.”

“You don’t even know if there’s a causal relationship.”

“If there’s even just the slightest link, I won’t risk it. There’s too much at stake.”

The softness in her voice rubbed me up the wrong way. “Since when have you given in to fear?”

There was no challenge in it, but the sentiment was the match that lit a raging inferno inside me. In the early hours of the morning, half the circle had advocated to cut us off from supernatural society. Chief amongst that contingent was Jeremiah.

“They keep meddling in sinister magic even though they know the malachim are drawn to it,” he’d said. “If we don’t allow it in the Reserve, we’d give ourselves a chance. Maybe some time to rebuild.” I knew he thought of Lizzie when he made his decisions. Just like I should have been thinking of Dani. And Charles. And my parents.

What I’d been thinking of instead was the brown-eyed woman in front of me. If we cut off high magic—any magic at all, in fact—it meant Sophie would petition the Council to stay in the fens. Now that Andrei wasn’t likely to leave Seraphina until Astrid was well, she had no reason to be here.

“I’ll take it on advisement.”

“But–”

The needling that her presence created reached fever pitch. It was like all day the lion was actually trapped in some kind of cage, and it was scratching and clawing, but it couldn’t be freed. All I could think of was a lion inside a circus, forced to perform. So broken it didn’t remember what it was like to have agency. I saw red.

Bitterness coated my words. “If you want to have a say, join the inner circle. Until then, my decision is final.”

Her jaw dropped. I regretted the harshness when her cheeks flushed, but I was too raw at the moment to take the words back.

She stood, knowing I wasn’t in the mood to be bargained with. At the door, she turned back. “I never asked for any of this,” she said.

An echo of Anastasia’s words piggybacked on the statement. I couldn’t bring myself to couch it in any softness, even if it was the truth.

“Nobody could fault your perfect handling of this whole thing,” I told her. “You would make a perfectly submissive shifter female.”

Except the thing looking out at me behind those richly dark eyes of hers was anything but submissive. It made me think that if the circumstances had been different, I would have claws at my throat right now.

Instead, she opened the door. “You’re wrong about one thing,” she said. “If I were a shifter, I wouldn’t let the most vulnerable members of my pack flounder while I holed up in a room with a bunch of stubborn jerks having a big sook about how nothing is fair and everyone else is mean. You can shut yourselves off as much as you like. It just means you’ll die alone. There’s no shame in accepting help.”

It wasn’t until after I’d run myself into exhaustion in the jungle sector that the meaning of those words slammed into me. The Reserve was a vast landscape of open ranges and territories. We didn’t often run into each other when we roamed. If we did, it was easy enough to avoid each other physically, if not through scent. For months now, even scent was scarce. The civilian population had given up anything but living in close quarters. They were too worried about the malachim appearing.

Today, I crossed paths with two other shifters. But it was when I looped around the accommodation sector that the change became apparent. People were leaving their homes again. Despite the news last night, they were socialising. Remembering what it was like to take strength from each other.

My mind was already made up before I made the mirror call to Angus. “I want to start talking about exchanging guards.”

He raised a brow. “I thought outsiders were off the table.”

“Well, it’s back on now.” I cleared my throat. “I’m going to tell you something about Sophie now. But you don’t get to make her leave or interrogate her.”

He frowned when I was done. “You realise we are at war with the Hell dimension, don’t you? Whatever is in her head might be critical.”

“What exactly do you think you’ll be able to do besides monitor her like an animal in a cage?” When he said nothing, I went on. “She’ll be safer here.”

“Her