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

Oh, I knew exactly what it was I was doing. The problem was that I didn’t care. Because in my heart, I knew she would do more good for the pack than any of them would ever know.

22

Sophie

Two days after my discussion with Max, he sent Gwen to let me know that he’d informed the Council of my nightmare.

“Angus says that a few others with the Sight experienced the same thing,” she said.

I doubted it. “Did they see Kai as well?”

Gwen chewed on her bottom lip. “They saw an iteration of somebody they knew. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. Angus says to monitor the situation. They’ve got too much happening to be able to spare resources for this.”

In the back of my mind, an unpleasant thought reared its head. If it had been Lex, they would have dropped everything and listened. Charles’s lament rang in my ears: she doesn’t always come first.

Proof however that Angus wasn’t just playing favourites appeared in the cancellation of my classes with Agatha for the week.

“Why?” I asked Jacqueline when she informed me.

Her features darkened. “The elite guard have commandeered the Trinity to help secure Seraphina.”

“I can’t even understand that sentence right now.”

The way she gripped her pen said she felt the same but was tired of bashing her head against a brick wall with these people.

Finding myself with more free time than I cared for at the moment, I busied myself making health elixir and helping in the infirmary. Every evening for a week, Noah dragged me back to the Reserve in a stupor.

“You can’t keep doing both,” he said.

“I’m fine! I just need to sleep it off.”

Thankfully, my dreams were no longer full of death. Instead, when I lay my head down at night, I was tormented by light grey eyes bleeding to bright gold and that deep voice telling me that I couldn’t run forever. I woke with the sheets tangled in my legs, Max’s T-shirt bunched at my waist, and my hairline damp with sweat.

The only bright side was that Max seemed to be avoiding me altogether. So was Anastasia. She didn’t even look at me once in Weaponry and Combat, even though I spent two classes just sitting there staring at the Angelical without so much as attempting to trace the words.

At dinnertime, more and more members of the pack joined us on the conference field. It got to a point where I was becoming worried.

“What do you think about the correlation between population density and malachim attacks?” I asked Noah one night when Charles was busy on a guard shift. We sat in the dirt around the Thompsons’ while I planted seeds in the garden beds.

He paused, his lips moving silently, which was something he tended to do when he was thinking. “I doubt there’s any veracity to it.”

“So, I shouldn’t be worried that there are too many people gathered at dinner time?”

He eyed the seeds that I was planting. Lines appeared on his brow, because as soon as I watered, they sprouted. “Are you worried—what the heck kind of plant is that?”

I grinned. “Lex created them for my birthday.”

“Created?”

I held the seeds in my palm out so he could see. “Yeah. She didn’t have any money, so she worked with Peter and Thalia to create a flower for me.”

He scratched at the skin under his eye. “I didn’t know that was possible.”

“Anything is possible with Lex.”

He searched my face. “Dorian says it’s likely that she’s still alive.” I thought he meant to be comforting but his voice had become robotic again. “He says that if anybody can survive the wrath of Lucifer, it’s Alessia.”

My heart twisted at the same time the smile appeared on my face. “Dorian says a lot of stuff.”

“You’re still angry at him?”

Angry wasn’t the word. Deep down I suspected a part of me was terrified of a world where Dorian Abara didn’t know the answer. “What do you care anyway whether I’m upset at Dorian?”

He scowled in a way that said he cared a great deal what anyone thought of Dorian. “You know he’s not dating anyone at the moment, right?”

I remembered that time Lex had lied to Andrei about Dorian wanting to take Astrid out, without knowing that Dorian wasn’t into women. It had been the funniest thing to listen to her curse and try to come up with another lie to tell to get under Andrei’s skin.

Noah stared at the ground. “I don’t think we should be discussing this.”

It was progress that he didn’t tell me to shut up and be done with it. There were definitely complications there. Dorian was a bit older than Noah and there was the issue of Dorian being part of the crew who rescued Noah from my great-grandfather. Come to think of it, I already had my own issues to deal with in that department.

I let it ride and concentrated on planting flowers. When I had done the Thompsons’, I decided that the rest of the Reserve could use some brightening up as well. We were four days into it when I took a chance and sank alchemy into the earth around the garden beds. Noah caught on right away. I sighed inwardly as he latched onto my wrist.

“What else are you doing right now?” he said. The wolf was in his voice. We’d been kneeling in the dirt, but he pushed up into a crouch, his ears suddenly hairy and flat against his head. The wrist he had shackled went limp. I didn’t know why I thought I could pull a fast one on him. Even with the invisibility circle. His senses were just too attuned to magic.

“Nothin–”

He shook me. “Sophie!”

“It really is nothing.”

Pulling me close, his nose shifted, and he sniffed. “Don’t lie to me.”

I stared into the yellow eyes of a predator and saw inside them an echo of the trauma he had gone through. My