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

the face as soon as Charles stepped foot inside the glass doors. His ears pulled back and his top lip quivered. Setting me down, he turned his head in a slow sweep as though trying to parse out the origin of that depressive force. I didn’t have shifter senses, but goose bumps prickled my skin. Icy fingers trailed down my spine.

Cold. It was so cold in here.

I suddenly wanted to backtrack and get the hell out of there. The living room was empty. Not surprising at this time of night. What concerned me was that none of the alphas who were supposedly in residence had appeared to take us to task for barging in. They were shifters. Territory meant everything. And yet, we remained alone.

Max turned in the middle of the living room. His gaze landed on me, the grey of his eyes suddenly full of storm clouds. For a second, he traded glances with Charles.

I knew instinctively what they said without words. This was the centre of their pack. And I was effectively an outsider. Max gave me so much leeway, too much according to his inner circle, but allowing me here was another level of trust.

His hesitation lasted all of two seconds before he barged forward through the back of the house. Charles, Amy, and I followed.

Swallowing hard, I watched as Max slapped his hand on a sigil on the wall beside the bookshelf in the sunken family room. It glowed a bright green before an arcane circle appeared in the carpet. Max stepped inside and the light ascended into the ceiling. His body shimmered before disappearing altogether.

I was not a fan of teleportation. The experience would now be marred by fear and rejection. But Lex had done it so often with Kai that I tried not to allow my gut to stretch taut as we followed in Max’s footsteps.

The environment on the other side of the teleport had a gasp dying out in my throat. We were in a huge flat level with minimalist rooms on this end. The area was open plan. It stretched out into what was effectively a series of jail cells. Most of them were empty, but through the open bars, I swore I could see a hulking figure slumped in the corner. Whatever it was, the thing was huge. Lying down, its body took up most of the cell it which it was enclosed.

Beside me, Amy winced. Her dry lips smoothed into a grimace. Charles closed his eyes for a second, as though giving himself time to get used to the metallic taste of all the silver in the cells.

They were on the far end of the space, but the shifter’s sensitivity to silver and their keen sense of smell must have made it highly uncomfortable.

“Yolanda!” Max called out. Rather than wait for her to appear, Max began opening doors. If Yolanda was here, then it also meant that the clan alphas were in residence too. The way Charles hung back made nausea bloom in my gut.

“What is this place?” I asked him. But he only looked down at the floor.

A door three down from us opened. Yolanda staggered out. There was nobody to assist her this time. She grasped a railing that was bolted to the wall and staggered forward. Unable to watch her struggle, I found myself beside her.

“Let me help you,” I said.

Feeble though she was, when she looked at me, it was with the unbreakable will of an alpha female. “You shouldn’t be here,” she croaked. But her hand trembled towards me, and I grasped it before she could topple over. She was a slip of her former self. At least a head taller than me, her presence used to strike an awed wonder in me whenever she entered the room. Now I was certain I could lift her up with one arm.

And then, two other figures emerged from the doorway beside her, and my legs were nothing but jelly beneath me. Though he was now frail to the point of breaking, Alastair held Shayla’s elbow as they staggered out of the room.

I lost all speech. I lost everything but the urge to fall into the cold cement floor and weep. That voice in my head rose up.

See what you’ve done? How can you balk at death when you’ve already destroyed everything you’ve ever cared about?

One by one, more of the clan alphas appeared at the doors of the rooms. I knew all of them by reputation if not by name. Looking at them now, there was no way to recognise that they were the strongest of their species.

“Max,” Shayla whined. “What’s going on?”

Both the Thompson boys were mute. Their golden eyes were a reflection of the anguish in their hearts. But instead of becoming utterly useless like me, Max approached Yolanda holding Lizzie in his arms.

“She’s in trouble,” he said. His voice was a mess of hot coals and pieces of glass. “She needs access to the pack link.”

Yolanda’s heartbreak was a dark shadow that passed over her wrinkled face. She closed her eyes for a second. When they opened, a tear streaked down her cheek. “We can’t. There is no strength left to spare.”

At the sound of her voice, the enormous thing at the end of the hallway groaned. It was as though a sinister wraith floated between us and dragged its limbs though our souls. Everybody went deadly still. Something both tightened and loosened in my chest, like my body didn’t know how to react to this level of fear. Everything was firing at once.

“Get back to the portal,” Max barked all of a sudden. No sooner had he said the words did the thing in the cell groan. I winced as the taste of metal slid down the sides of my throat. Charles whined. His nose flattened. The beast in the cage smashed a paw onto the concrete. It exhaled in a puff of steam that spoke of a soul on fire.

Somebody tugged at