Bloodline Diplomacy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 3), Lan Chan [best way to read an ebook .TXT] 📗

“Where are you going?” Sophie asked.

I hadn’t realised I was standing up. “I need to check up on Phoenix. Alone.”

The dingo was fine, of course. He’d taken to the billabong and swamp areas easily. Though I kept bringing him food, he never seemed particularly hungry.

“I hope you’re not hunting supernatural animals,” I said. I was sure if he did he would be in a buttload of trouble. I didn’t feel up to the rest of the day’s classes. Instead, I stayed in the billabong and practiced my phasing. It was still an imprecise art, but I was getting there.

I skipped out on dinner in the dining hall and went straight to my room. The one time I wanted to be alone, Sophie was inside. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked. It was only seven but she was already in her pyjamas.

“Why?” I asked. “So you guys can all make placating noises at me while at the same time working to get rid of Terran?”

“That’s not what’s happening,” she said.

“Isn’t it? So you’re not relieved that the Sisterhood threat is neutralised?”

“Aren’t you?”

I sat down hard on my bed. “What about the supernatural threat?”

“What threat?”

For the first time, I looked at her through purely human eyes. Sophie of all people must have known what it was like to be a vulnerable human amongst supernatural creatures. Then again, they had feared her from the start. They didn’t see her as prey.

“Forget about it.”

“Please don’t be angry.”

“I’m not. But I’m having a hard time getting on the Terran destruction wagon.”

“They murdered a Nephilim,” she said. “I don’t want that to happen to my parents!”

“It wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t it? If Giselle were still alive, we’d be traitors in their eyes. Not having a way to defend ourselves sucks!”

“Imagine how all those humans feel.”

“They don’t need to know about us. The Council protects them.”

“The Council have their own agenda.”

She bunched her pillow in her hands and contemplated what I was saying. “Maybe they do. But I’ve seen the recounting of what happened the last time somebody tried to go public. It was a bloodbath. On both sides.”

“So I guess the only solution is the systematic wiping out of the Sisterhood. No wonder they hate you.”

It was the way her big, brown eyes became all whites that winded me. With just those words, I had distanced myself from all of them. I had said they and you. Not we and us. At the same time, it felt right. I couldn’t take a side because they both kept trying to manipulate me.

Sophie sniffed. “They don’t care about us,” she said. I suspected she meant the low-magic users. “They only want you. They’ve been insular for too long. And now with Gaia missing, they’re feeling trapped. Sooner or later they’re going to try something.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing?” I asked. “Helping the Council to find a way to counteract the Sisterhood?”

She hung her head. “No,” she said. “I’ve been helping my parents stave off a full-on Council assault on the Sisterhood. The guard rotation outside their Academy was a compromise. Some of us don’t have the luxury of floating the rules.”

“I don’t!”

She shook her head. “Come on, Lex. You get away with tons of stuff the rest of us never could. We have a system that needs to be followed. Sometimes doing what’s immediately right doesn’t trump what could have far-reaching implications.”

For some reason, what she said sank into my soul. If Basil were here, he would call it a Hastings Knowing. I couldn’t shake the feeling and it made me weary.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“For what?” she asked, suddenly alert.

“For everything.”

“Lex.”

I crawled into bed and pulled the covers over my head. But I couldn’t get her words out of my head.

35

In the dream I was silent. My feet glided across the marble floor of a house that could have doubled as a museum. It was dark but I had no trouble picking my way across the foyer with its ornate tapestries and sculptures. I floated up the staircase and headed to the right. A sheet of moonlight illuminated the upstairs level. In the corner of the ceiling, motion sensors blinked red. They cut out in a spark of electricity followed by a puff of smoke.

The technological safeguards were as insubstantial as the magical wards that had been deactivated by one of their own. My human accomplices. Right now they were disposing of the bodies belonging to two Sisterhood bodyguards. Smug girls who were so blinded by their species hatred that they were unprepared for an internal betrayal. I stepped past two doors and then opened the one at the end of the hallway.

The room was simple but for the thickly woven Egyptian rug and the ornate grandfather clock opposite the bed. The hands on the clock read eleven in the evening. My footsteps were soundless. The couple asleep in their bed didn’t stir. Not when I stepped beside the male to confirm his identity. Not when I drew a single sharpened claw across his neck from ear to ear. Not when the cotton sheets soaked in crimson.

Dimly I registered the hunger. The lust to drop my head and taste the lifeblood gushing from him. But I wasn’t an agent of my own mind. The woman’s hand twitched where it had lain on her husband’s pillow. Something triggered her alertness. She turned her head in my direction. The part of me that was Alessia Hastings became frozen. The body I was in progressed to her side of the bed.

Samantha’s eyes fluttered open. Her hand, now covered in her husband’s blood, curled into a fist. Her nostrils flared as though she scented blood. We screamed at the same time. She bolted upright in the bed and cast around frantically.

The vampire whose body I inhabited swung his arm at her. With the miniscule force of will I had control of,