Bloodline Academy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 1)

by Lan Chan

  “It means that as much as we’d like to offer you the option of freedom, we can’t risk the safety of those around you. Especially the humans.”

  “So I’m a prisoner.”

  “In a sense. But I prefer to think of it as an opportunity.”

  “What kind of opportunity?”

  She threw her arms out in a sweeping manner, encompassing everything around us as well as the tree line I could see outside the huge windows. “This Academy is one of the few in the world that caters specifically to cultivating the abilities of supernatural species. Here you will learn to enhance the gifts you’ve been given. We’d provide you with accommodation, meals, training and above all else, protection.”

  She leaned back in her chair and laced her hands behind her head in a classic power pose. “And I’d like to think that we offer friendship too. Something I have a feeling you might sorely need.”

  “Can we circle back to the meals bit?” I blurted out. Her smile widened so that her nose scrunched up with it. She swept over me with her eyes. I knew exactly what she saw. An almost-emaciated teenager. Dark blue eyes that bulged from a gaunt face, oily hair and clothes that didn’t fit right. At one stage I picked up lice and had to shave my head. For a while everyone I came into contact with thought I was a boy.

  “Three square meals a day,” she said, “and snacks any time you want them. Arcana fruit not included.”

  “What’s the catch?” I might not have finished high school, but life had taught me some lessons. You didn’t get something for nothing in this world.

  She pressed her shoulders forward. Not in a slump but in what appeared to be a fighting stance. “You’ll learn more about us and why we’re here in your lessons. But I don’t want to lie to you. Our world is not for the faint of heart. We train ourselves and our children because all of us are hunted.”

  “By humans?”

  The grin she gave me showed canines. “No, Lex. By demons. Like the one who possessed your grandmother.”

  “To what end?”

  “To an end. The end of life as we know it.”

  Oh, was that all?

  6

  As I sat there trying to digest what Jacqueline had told me, a wave of nausea clawed its way up my throat. She seemed to sense my discomfort and tried to change the subject, but I latched on to something she’d said earlier.

  “You said Raphael and Michael are archangels,” I asked. My mind tried to recall the lessons my Catholic primary school had tried to teach me. “They’re not the archangels are they?”

  “Yes and no. Yes, they are those archangels. No, the things you’ve heard probably aren’t accurate.”

  “So is there or isn’t there a Satan then?”

  I wanted to believe that she tried to hide the twitch in her cheek to spare my feelings. But something told me it was the fact that I was saying the name Satan aloud that had her reacting.

  “There are so many things you’ll learn at Bloodline Academy.” Her face closed over then. A chill ran down my spine. Call it instinct or intuition but something told me there was more to this story that she wasn’t telling me. But she started busying herself with administrative tasks.

  “We’ve taken the liberty of drafting up enrolment papers for you,” she said. Her warm smile was back. Boy, I’d hate to be on the wrong side of her. “On the off chance that you might decide to join us, of course. Under normal circumstances, we would ask that a parent or legal guardian sign the papers for you. Do you even know who your legal guardians are?”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t really kept in touch with any of that.”

  Jacqueline frowned. “That’s very unfortunate. Is there anyone else whom you might consider to be a parental figure?”

  I shook my head immediately. “All I’ve ever had is Nanna.” My voice wavered. “You said she’s in a coma?”

  “In a manner of speaking. The resonance in the dimensions between a demon and human are very complicated. Your grandmother hosted the demon for much longer than should be capable for a human. It’s a wonder she’s still…anyway, perhaps in this instance we’ll file you under the orphan clause.”

  I didn’t like the way that sounded. It made it seem as though Nanna wasn’t coming back. But she had to. No other possibility was acceptable. “May I see her?”

  Jacqueline took my hand again. “We’re keeping her as safe as we possibly can,” she said. “Raphael is the best chance she has of recovering. It’ll do neither of you any good to disturb her.”

  I bit my bottom lip. She gripped my fingers hard. “I know it’s asking a lot. Especially after all that you’ve been through.” She made it sound as though she wasn’t just referring to the last few days. I cleared my throat twice. She gave my hand one last squeeze and pushed the documents in front of me.

  “Sign right here,” she pointed to a dotted line.

  “I suppose I should read this first.”

  “If you must. But it’s not a contract, Lex. It’s just an administrative consignment order. Once you’re in the system, we’ll be able to make the necessary arrangements for your stay with us.”

  “Don’t you have computers for that sort of thing?”

  There were those pearly whites again. “Have you seen any advanced electronics since you’ve been here?”

  It was only then that I realised her desk was completely gadget-free. In fact, I hadn’t spotted anything remotely computer-based. “Our energy doesn’t mix well with electronics.”

  “I haven’t had a problem with them.”

  “You’re mostly human.”

  After a brief glance at the agreement which indeed only mentioned boring stuff like how I would be assigned to a room and what types of classes I would take, I signed the papers.

  Jacqueline kept looking at the papers expectantly so I watched too. At first nothing happened, but then it seemed like the writing wavered. It turned into row upon row of squiggly lines that shimmered on the page. And then, line by line, the words started to disappear.

  After ten seconds the page was blank. Jacqueline rolled her chair to the bookshelf beside her desk and pulled out a heavy leather-bound tome.

  She set it on the table in front of us and flipped to the section under surnames beginning with H. “Here you are. Alessia Hastings. Seventeen. Magical status: hedge witch. We’ve deduced that much from your ease of entrance into the Grove. Origin: unknown. We’ll soon get to the bottom of that.”

  She took out several sheets of paper and wrote things on them that I couldn’t see from where I was sitting.

  “Now I know you’re not used to sharing a bedroom with anybody,” she said. “But here at the Academy we’ve got a policy of integration. Our species were not meant to be in the Earth dimension, and we find it very worthwhile to have companions to remind us that isolation leads to more than just loneliness.”

  “Plus there’s someone who’ll notice if you’ve been possessed by a demon,” I added.

  “That too.”

  She handed me the piece of paper. It had what appeared to be a dorm and room number with a name written on it: Sophie Mwansa.

  “Your new roommate,” Jacqueline said. “All her details are there.”

  “This is like a very impersonal version of a blind date,” I muttered. “What if we end up hating each other?”

  “Just try not to get blood on the furniture if you kill each other.”

  That made my head snap up. Her expression was poker perfect. A reminder that she wasn’t just very spry for her age. She was an Amazon.

  “Umm….”

  “You can request a transfer if you have a good enough reason,” she said. After another painfully silent beat she grinned. “Just approach your House Captain.”

  “And who would that be?”

  This time it was Jacqueline who shrugged. “That all depends. Now run along. The entrance examination is tomorrow and I believe you have quite a lot to catch up on. My assistant Alex can give you a rundown or you can ask your new roommate.
”

  “Wait, what? Nobody said anything about an entrance exam.”

  “Relax, Lex. You’ve already gotten in. We just need to test the current level of your abilities so we know what the best classes are to put you in.”

  It all sounded so civilised. I should have known better than to trust the word of an Amazon. Her version of civilisation was about ten notches above what I would consider acceptable.

  7

  During summer holidays, most schools were a deserted wasteland. I would know since I spent the summer between grades seven and eight sleeping on the floor of the gym at my old school. But here, the grounds were crawling with people. And I used the term people in the loosest sense. It turned out my eyes had not deceived me earlier this morning. There were definitely students here who were of the para-human varieties.

  My attention was riveted by a tall female with white blonde hair so straight and long that it almost touched the ground. While the students around her jostled with each other, she floated across the stone floor. When she turned the corner, I craned my next to watch her and ran straight into something malleable.

  “Oops. Sorry!”

  The papers I’d been holding on to dropped to the floor along with a smattering of books. “Watch it!” a sharp voice said. I crouched down to pick up the papers. Any minute now I expected the girl I’d run into to do the same. I waited a long time.

  Instead, she stood there tapping her booted foot. Swallowing the remark that tried to slip past my tongue, I gathered her books and straightened. My eyes glossed over the perfect symmetry of her face to land on a pair of gossamer wings protruding from her back. They were almost transparent but for a skeleton of indigo veins that caught the light as they fluttered. A Fae. I didn’t know whether to be delighted or to run off screaming.

  She cleared her throat. Indigo eyes narrowed at me. Dumbly, I handed her books back. She took them, moving in such a way that our fingers wouldn’t touch.

  “Sorry,” I said again, unashamedly staring at the smooth perfection of her pearl-coloured skin amidst the ruby red of her hair.

  “Sorry,” she mimicked, mouth twisting into a smirk. Someone behind her snickered. It was only then that I noticed we were surrounded by other students. “Don’t they teach you how to walk in the human world?”

  She swept her gaze from the top of the bird-nest on my head to the sneakers that still had dirt on them from the Grove.

  “Did they pull you out of the garbage or something?” Her nose scrunched up and she stepped back dramatically. Like she’d only just noticed that I smelt off. I thought about the underpass beneath the train tracks. It was a fair assessment. I hated that place. It was a shithole. But it was my shithole.

  “Something like that,” I said. Pressing myself to the side of the corridor, I made a motion for her to pass by. As a street kid, I knew when a fight was worth picking, and this did not make the cut. Nobody seemed to care what I thought. By sidestepping, I ran into the front of somebody else. They shoved me forward and straight into the Fae.

  She made a sound of disgust and shoved me back. The wall broke my fall. And now dozens of people had stopped in their haste to get to where they were going and were huddled around watching the commotion.

  I was about to make a hasty retreat when Fae Girl fluttered a piece of paper in front of her minions and smirked again. It was my room assignment. She’d be so gorgeous if she didn’t have a massive stick up her ass. Right now, that stick happened to be me.

  “Can I have that back?” I asked. I considered adding the please but even I had instincts. Right now I was skirting the line between polite and submissive. Something told me I didn’t want to appear weak in front of these girls.

  “Why am I not surprised,” Fae Girl said. “She’s in the low-magic wing. Right next to the dirt collectors and cooks!” Her crowd laughed heartily.

  I tried to snatch the paper away, but she had a good five or six inches on me. “Are you serious right now?” I asked. “Give it back.”

  Ignoring me, she continued to slide her eyes down the page. As I watched, her smirk evened out. A shadow crossed her face the way an eclipse blotted out the sun.

  “Malachi brought you here?” she asked. There was a collective inhale. She didn’t wait for me to answer. This time, she stepped closer, her chin turning down so that she loomed over me. “Let’s get something straight,” she said. “Malachi Pendragon is mine. You get in the way of that, and homelessness is going to be the least of your problems.”

  When I tried to whip a piece of flat paper across a room, it went about a foot before it met resistance and dropped. When she did it, the paper turned into a streamlined projectile, shooting all the way down the corridor.

  I bolted to catch up with it, not caring this time who I ran into. Giggling trailed behind me, and I practically had to climb the wall to snatch the paper before it flew out the window. Muttering, I smoothed out the schedule and tried to get my bearings. So it turned out that supernatural bitches were just as bad as their human counterparts. I shrugged it off, thinking that they’d find another target soon enough. Now I just had to navigate this place and find my room.

  Last night, all I’d cared about was getting out of here. Now I realised the magnitude of this place. Outside the window, the grounds appeared to stretch on for eternity. The landscape was verdant green with sections of forested areas that I figured could not be Australia. It was just too lush. The mansion was a monolithic building of Gothic design. All heavy stone and archaic balustrades. It reminded me of so many of the schools for special kids in the comic books I read. The idea of being special in any way was laughable. Jacqueline had said I was a hedge witch. Whatever that was.

  I didn’t feel special. What I felt was lost. “Excuse me,” I asked a blonde girl who happened to be walking past. “Could you please tell me how to get to this place?” I pointed to the dorm on the piece of paper. She bounced on the balls of her feet, clearly not wanting to be there. Her eyes darted about, and I could swear when she blinked, she had another set of eyelids that closed vertically.

  “Don’t you know anything?” she said.

  I shook my head. She sighed and placed a hand against the wall. “Dorm 3. Room 45.” Then she gestured to the floor where footprints appeared. “Just follow the lead.” She raced off before I could thank her, but it was just as well because I was still trying to reconcile the claws I’d seen on her hands with the weird shit that was happening on the ground at the moment. Still, I followed the footsteps as suggested. They took me up a wide stone staircase at the end of the corridor and down another long hallway. The steps finally came to a stop in front of a plain wooden door. Here the footsteps turned into an arrow and then into a yellow icon that looked like a house. Home, it was trying to tell me.

  My stomach tied itself in knots. Inside Jacqueline’s office I’d been all bravado about sharing a room with a stranger. Now that I was faced with the prospect, my insides were twisting over themselves. My experience with kids my age usually consisted of watching them from outside the window of a fast food restaurant while they ate with their families. Sometimes they were bickering. Even then I would have preferred to trade places with them. I thought back to Fae Girl. What if my roommate was like her? What if we hated each other? I gulped and put my hand on the doorknob, willing myself to grow a pair. At that exact moment, a scream tore from inside the room and reverberated through the hallway.

  8

  I wrenched the door open to almost be pushed aside by a dark-skinned girl holding a pair of metallic kitchen tongs. She screamed her head off and held the tongs out in front of her like it was an explosive device. Pushing past me, she bolted down the corridor, her tightly woven, dark brown hair bobbing like a halo around her head. I dropped my stuff and raced after her, seeing a flash of something familiar in the claws of the tongs. It was Nanna’s ragdoll. A disgustingly ugly stuffed doll that looked a bit like a gingerbread man she’d had as a child.

  “Hey!” I screamed. �
��Wait!”

  But my roommate was on a mission. A screaming mission that sounded as though someone were murdering her. I caught up to her at the staircase. People parted for her like she was the Second Coming.

  “Alessia!” a voice I didn’t recognise called out. “Help!”

  My head turned in all directions, wondering where the voice had come from. “Down here!” My roommate had reached the base of the staircase. My jaw dropped to the floor once more when I realised that the voice had come from Nanna’s doll. The thing was waving its stuffed arms at me.

  “Alessia!” it said again. This time I stopped short. Whatever else I could say about her, my roommate was quick. So quick that some people didn’t have time to get out of her way. I saw the collision before it happened. One minute she was storming the castle and the next she slammed straight into the chest of a line-backer. The boy she hit was massive. She bounced off his chest in a move that would have been comical if it didn’t look like it hurt like a mother.

  For a second I thought she would be ejected back across the hall but then the boy reached out to steady her. I came to a screeching halt a few steps away from them. The boy turned his head up and stared at me with light grey eyes inside a corona of gold. Holy moly. Were all supernaturals unnaturally hot? My tongue felt too big for my mouth.

  “You right, Sophie?” the guy asked.

  “Demon!” she screamed.

  “What?”

  Just like that, the perimeter around us cleared. Sophie’s arms shook as she waved the doll near the boy’s chest. I almost had a heart attack as the doll moved of its own accord. It twisted in the pincher of the tongs and turned its shoulders to glance at me.

  “Alessia! Tell them I’m not a demon!”

  All eyes turned to me. The blood drained from my face. “Ahh…”

  Sophie whined. “What do I do?”

  “Come with me,” the boy said. He crooked a finger at me. “You too.”