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

bed and blew out a breath. “Still, this is big news. It means she could be the one behind it all. Mind mages can insert thoughts into other people’s heads. She could have put Skander and the others up to this.”

I shook myself to dislodge those morbid thoughts. “I can’t spend more time thinking about it,” I said. “If I do, I might go insane.”

That was easier said than done. Two weeks went by in which the supernatural community held its breath. When there was no sign of any of the fugitives, the tension wound so tight there was talk of cancelling the Halloween Showcase. In the end, Jacqueline decided that we needed to continue living life as though there wasn’t a serial killer on the loose. Anything else would fly in the face of everything this world stood for.

While they weren’t allowed to show outward signs of weakness, Astrid told me some of the Council members had begun relocating their families to distant magical safe houses. Too bad for the rest of us who couldn’t do that. Kai worked himself into an irritated rage because he wasn’t allowed to hunt. He spent most of his free time in the training room tearing apart imaginary foe.

With the Showcase looming, I was working overtime on my project. I had wanted to make my demonstration something breathtakingly terrible like the stunt I had pulled with the manticore during my entrance trials. The more I spoke with Peter and Thalia about it, the more I realised that the hedge witch part of me wasn’t the part that had made that happen. Low magic was about subtlety and balance.

That’s how I ended up standing beside the scorched earth of the Fae forest where I’d been taken captive. The Fae had managed to fill the gaping hole in the earth and smooth it over, but they didn’t have any interest in attempting to re-sow. They considered it tainted earth. In their realm, they would have condemned it and magicked it out of existence. They couldn’t do that with Academy land. Now it sat unused and unloved.

That’s where Sophie and I came into the picture. I’d convinced her that helping me would be an added credit to her kitchen-witch trials.

Today, she made a face over the brew steaming on the makeshift hearth we’d built into the ground. I had jumped the first time Sophie had conjured up the fire but as a kitchen witch, her magic extended to low levels of fire manipulation.

“How else am I supposed to cook anything?” she’d asked in response to my surprise. It made sense. I’d just never considered it.

“I don’t know how you talked me into this,” she gagged over the concoction of nettles, comfrey, and some of her growth potion which had a plethora of other herbs intertwined with the thoughts of her magic. It stank to high heaven.

I could barely talk because my gag reflex was triggering bigtime. “After all the dodgy potions I’ve had to drink for your experiments, this is the least you can do!”

I held my stomach. Sophie pinched her nose as the remaining ingredient, a scraping of a bull’s horn, was dropped into the cauldron.

“That’s disgusting,” Isla’s voice called from behind us. We didn’t turn around. I heard her footsteps coming closer. She sputtered. “What are you doing?”

“Baking a cake,” I shot back.

“You’re stinking up the whole quadrant!”

“Thanks for the bulletin.”

Despite her protests, she didn’t leave. Sophie went into that terrifyingly focused state she got into whenever she was invested in a potion. Her eyes shone like black pearls. She ignored both Isla and me as she recited an incantation in an ancient African language I couldn’t hope to master. I wrapped my arms around myself when the concoction began to glow a warm coppery-red tone.

Isla’s eyes went wide. Dipping a wooden ladle into the concoction, Sophie spooned out a small quantity and dropped it into the dozens of watering cans filled with water we’d lined up along the tree line. When the boiling mixture hit the cold water, it hissed and let off a puff of steam. I raced around with a bamboo stick and stirred the mixture into the water. When they were all completed, Sophie and I began to water the ground that I had tilled and planted with grass and tree seedlings.

“Want some help?” Isla asked. I shrugged.

“It’s a free country.”

She was a lot stronger than she looked. With Isla’s help, the time it took for us to water the entire tainted ground was cut in half.

“Okay,” Sophie puffed. “Your turn.”

Walking to the wheelbarrow I’d laboriously pushed from the Grove, I picked up a handful of dirt in each hand. I walked around the entire field drawing circles of black dirt. When I was done, the field looked like a child’s frantic drawing. I crouched in the middle of the field and closed my eyes.

My thoughts slipped into the Ley dimension without much effort these days. In my mind’s eyes, I could see every tiny seed that I’d placed in the dirt just this morning. It was tempting to reach into the well of power inside me and force them to grow. It certainly would cut the growth time considerably. But the point of this experiment was to prove that life could come back against the darkness. So all I did was draw the cloak of Sophie’s fertiliser brew around the seeds. That alone should be enough for the seeds to sprout and begin shooting up by the end of the day. By the time the Showcase came around, I expected the field to be unrecognisable from the rest of the Fae forest.

It was a gamble. If it worked, we would have proof that low magic could beat back the forces of hell where high magic couldn’t. If it didn’t, I would drop to the bottom of the field and my points average wouldn’t improve. Pressing my hand against the seedling at the very centre of the field, I willed