Bloodline Secrecy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 2), Lan Chan [readict TXT] 📗

“What do you mean she’s awake?” he screamed.

“Apparently she woke up just after my incident with Lucifer.”

“And nobody thought to let us know?”

It was gratifying that somebody else was as incensed as I was. “I want to see her!” he said. That’s when it hit me. He could see her. Nanna had no recollection of Basil. She wouldn’t have a bad reaction to him. Sometimes, I was too stupid for words.

When Nora arrived home, Basil demanded to see Nanna. “You’re a Councillor now,” Basil said. “You can make it happen.”

“I could,” Nora said. “But –” She glanced uncertainly at me.

“I want Basil to be with her,” I said. If I couldn’t be, he would be the next best thing. His duty was to look after Nanna first and foremost. I’d just been the fallback when she went into her coma.

Things happened quickly all around me. I took it all in through a daze. Nora got on the MirrorNet and organised for Basil to take up residence in the apartment with access to the sanctum where Nanna was being kept. Maybe Raphael confirmed Basil wasn’t a demon because none of the Council seemed concerned about him not actually having a physical body.

It meant that when Sophie and I returned to the Academy on the Sunday night, we were alone.

It was dinnertime. “You wanna go to the dining hall?” Sophie asked tentatively.

I slid into my bed. “I’m not hungry. I’m going to sleep.”

I turned my back to the door so I wouldn’t have to see the expression on her face when she left. After she was gone, I wriggled around and grabbed the demon blade from under the bed. At the back of my mind, the phasing that had happened to me was still festering. The reaction I had gotten from the Nephilim guards was priceless. I’d seen that kind of phasing before. The Soul Sisterhood assassins had done it.

Now, more than ever, I was convinced I was one of them. So were the Council probably. I was a Sisterhood candidate with a demon blade and the ability to control low magic. I shouldn’t have existed. Yet here I was.

What you are doesn’t matter, Azrael’s voice said in my head.

I know, I told him. Nothing matters.

Aless –

I stopped listening. Why bother when they were all lies anyway?

36

I didn’t bother going to class the next day. I stayed in the Grove and practiced meditating. It was somehow easier to clear my mind now that I didn’t have to worry about anything else. Warning bells rang. I meditated right through them. For hours afterwards, the nymphs helped me improve my timing. I slipped into the realm of the Ley lines and tried to apply the meditative steps. It took a lot of concentration. At first nothing happened. But inch by excruciating inch, the lights I saw around me began to slow to a crawl. When I opened my eyes again, the nymphs were moving at a normal speed.

They still got me more times than I managed to hit them. Just the fact that I blocked some of their hits was a vast improvement.

At lunch time, I left a message with Alex to tell Jacqueline that I would take the job as a guard. I needed to make some kind of money. If that was all I was good for at the moment, that’s what I would do. When I wasn’t at the Grove, I was in the Fae forest. It had been months since I’d stepped foot in there.

Not since the day I’d been dragged into the Hell dimension. The only reason I was here now was because of the residual dark magic. The demon blade reacted badly to the essence. By badly, I meant it became excited. It wanted to unleash hell.

I sat around the scorched circle of grass that the Fae still had trouble regrowing. Not many people came here anymore. I set the demon blade down on the dead patch. Moving as far away as I could, I practiced calling to it. The blade resisted. I was there so long that when the cold breeze danced across my chilly nose, I was surprised. Somehow, night had descended around me.

My stomach ached. I was starving. It was well past dinnertime. Some of the vamps would only just now be waking. I tried to dredge up some memory of when Sophie had her next dining hall shift. Hopefully, it wasn’t tonight.

I got lucky with that one. Unfortunately, the transition between dinner and the vampire meals meant there were whole rows of blood in cartons. These ones were twice the size of the ones on offer during daylight hours.

Sitting alone on a table in the corner of the room, I tried to block out the sipping of blood happening around me. Not for the first time, it hit me just how messed up that was. I was human, sitting in a room full of vampires. Some of them shot me furtive glances. Halfway through dinner, I realised that I was sitting there spooning food into my mouth with one hand while my other grasped the strap of the demon blade’s sheath.

I arrived back at the dorm to two messages. Sophie and Diana were both there waiting for me. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“That’s okay,” Sophie said. I could feel them making silent signals to each other behind my back as I placed my palm on the mirror.

Jacqueline’s image was the first to appear. “Lex,” she said. “While I’m happy that you’ve decided to take the role as guard, I’m worried about the reasons you may be doing so. Please come to see me at your earliest convenience to discuss this further.”

That was all she said. I wanted to kick the wall. If there weren’t two voyeurs in the room, I might have.

The next message was from Basil. Rather than listen to