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

That tiny thought settled something inside me.

Lucifer sensed the sudden change in my thought pattern. He tried to lock on to me once more. Instead of throwing more magic at him, I curtailed it. I hid it away in a compartment in my mind. Without it, I no longer felt the urgent tugging of his commands. He was still there, but I was able to stand. Alessia!

Shut up! Get the hell out of my head and take your stupid commands with you!

Something popped in my ears. The sound of wind howling in a vacuum overwhelmed me for a second and then…silence. I got to my feet. The waves were just waves. The water was just salty liquid. I wasn’t scared anymore.

38

I bit down on my tongue to stop from crying out. All this time it had been him. I was afraid of the water because Lucifer had commanded me to be. Insufferable bastard. When I did meet him in battle, I was going to enjoy kicking his ass.

At the moment, I had other things to attend to. Racing closer to the portal, I used the darker magic to draw a summoning circle. At the same time, I drew one in the sand with my toes. After so much practice, I could draw a circle with my eyes closed. The pattern appeared quickly. By the time I bit into the skin of my palm to draw the blood, Isla was crouching. Her breathing was laboured. Sweat clung to the collar of her top. We didn’t have long.

I hopped out of the circle and slammed my bleeding palm down onto the point of the star. Rachel chanted the words of the summoning spell with me. I thought of Hilary and asked her to appear. The outer edge of the circle imbued with Rachel’s magic. Phoenix let out a short bark.

At first not much happened. I faltered for a second, wondering if I’d done something wrong. I was about to slip into the Ley dimension to check whether a portal had opened up when a figure materialised within the perimeter of the circle. This time, Hilary’s form was more solid. I could see the laugh lines around her glowing blue eyes that she’d passed down to me. I almost had a heart attack when her mouth opened.

“Are you sure?” Hilary said. She made a sweeping gesture towards the open mouth of the whirlpool. “The consequences will be dire.”

Rachel inhaled sharply. “What the hell?” she said. “Since when are they so…coherent?”

Since my great-grandmother was a bone witch, I suppose. I was given to believe that most shades existed in a state of confusion. I looked into Hilary’s face. There was nothing but conviction there. “I think so,” I told her.

“Be sure,” she said. “Or we will have died for nothing.”

Despite her ominous statement, she cast her arms out. Her eyes closed. I felt something twist until snapping point in my chest, and then it unravelled so quickly I couldn’t keep up. Wind swept my hair into a halo around my head. I was assaulted by images and memories that didn’t belong to me. In them, I saw Nanna as a much younger woman. Hilary imparted the sum of her wisdom to me in the blink of an eye.

I gasped just as the magical shell around Gaia cracked. It splintered into millions of pieces to reveal the physical embodiment of the deity. The release of a decades-old magic had Isla wincing. Her control slipped and the water began rushing back. I saw her try to hang on to it, but Basil patted her shoulder. She slumped back onto the sand, her wings withdrawn.

Hilary bowed low. She reached out as though wanting to touch me, but then her appearance turned transparent and she disappeared. I sat back heavily. Phoenix licked my face as I struggled to take a breath and make sense of all that Hilary had bestowed on me just now. Too many memories to process at once.

It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. I heard Basil swearing. I glanced up to find the sky had filled with ominous storm clouds.

“Not this again,” Rachel said. Her attention was glued to the whirlpool. Isla no longer had control of it, but it hadn’t stopped spinning. Inside the protection of Basil and Rachel’s circles, we were somewhat protected from the elements. Outside, the wind had picked up enough speed that the tree branches were swaying crazily.

While Isla had control of the water, Basil had been able to shield it from being seen. Now that it was spinning from the phantom force, it didn’t take long for the supernaturals to feel the effects.

“This isn’t good,” Basil said. “We’re going to have to find cover if we don’t want to land in the middle of a fight.”

Too late. A half-dozen golden-armoured Nephilim touched down in the sand to our right. Smaller portals opened around us. Supernaturals streamed out of them. Basil made a frantic hand motion at me. But I couldn’t move. Behind him the water was beginning to rise in a conical swirl that hung suspended in the air. Higher and higher it rose until it was a towering cone that could be spotted from miles away.

I could tell Basil wanted to open a portal to get away, but he couldn’t risk it now with so many other mages present. Phoenix huddled beside me. For some reason he bit down on the hem of my T-shirt and wouldn’t budge no matter how hard I tried to push him off.

The first lightning strike hit the sand not three metres away from me. It rocked the ground and tore a hole in the dunes. Phoenix knocked me over in an attempt to protect me from the aftershock. Supernaturals scattered all over the place. Those who could fly or teleport grabbed their grounded companions as the sky was lit