The Broken Academy 3: Power of Blood (A Paranormal Academy Reverse Harem Romance)

by Jade Alters

  “River…are you sure you want to get caught up in this?” Cece calls back. “What about Serah and Jehan?”

  “Am I sure?” River mocks, rolling her eyes, “Am I sure I want to run away from a tribe and a Council that see me as a problem to be managed and contained? Yeah, I’m sure. I’m also pretty sure coming with you might be the better chance at helping my folks. And…I’m not about to be left behind by the only two people who tolerate me being myself, all the time.”

  “What do you think, Serge?” Bart calls my eyes back to the other side of the unexpected pincer trap. “Make your move, if you will. I’ll admit you’re my favorite Dalshak. More of a head on your shoulders than any of the others combined. But do you really think you can stop a Vampire, a Shifter, a Dragon, an Astral and the woman you love?” The last part is what robs me of my strength. What shuts me down. My fingers peel apart from one another. My arms fall like two useless noodles beside me. I’m so stunned, I don’t realize Cece walks towards me. Not until she speaks a few inches from my face.

  “Besides…is that really how you want to remember the way we say goodbye? A fight?” she asks. Her lips force a smile while her eyes do anything but.

  “I don’t want to remember saying goodbye…I don’t want to do it,” I admit in a whisper that only she can hear. “There must be something else we could do. Things like this aren’t so black and white!”

  “No, they’re not. But I had to make a decision, and I did. Now I need to follow through. You have to do the same. And if this is it, then…” Cece brings her smile in close to my face. I close my eyes to make it all go away. In the black, we don’t have to be here, in the Sierra Nevadas, vying for one another’s futures. In the black, we could be back in my room, rolling in the sheets. Or on the wall of the Academy at sunset. Yeah, that’s better. It doesn’t matter where, as long as I feel her lips between mine. Then they pull back, just far enough for me to feel the shape of the word on my skin. “Goodbye.”

  I open my eyes to a bright blue flash of light. It feels like seconds until it dims and I can see again. I can tell immediately from the changes in my surroundings that this is not the case. When my senses fully return, the sun has climbed across the whole mountain landscape. All five of my schoolmates are gone. My friends. There isn’t a single trace of them, not even footsteps.

  “Damnit…” I mumble to myself when I realize what had happened. Blue light… Missing time… Possession. What frightens me is that I don’t know if it was Stephanie or Cece. That hardly matters now, anyway. “Damnit!” I scream into the clear blue, Sierra sky. They’re gone. Cece’s gone.

  Home

  Bart,

  The Kyrie Stronghold

  “Welcome to your new home,” I announce to the latest batch of Kyrie refugees. One of them, I planned to recruit all along. Impressed as I’ve always been by her, I hardly expected the gravity of her choice to pull so many with her. Cece. But aside from Lee, the Kyrie is the perfect home for this group. An Astral-Dragon hybrid, an Astral without a body and a Shifter with an unstable form? I mean every word of the greeting I announce when we enter the fountain atrium.

  “A little…nicer than I expected,” River mutters, which resounds through the cavernous halls that branch out all around.

  “I appreciate your honesty,” I chuckle. I lead the group around the stony circle. “

  “Will…you separate us into different wings?” Cece asks. The tinge of true fear in her voice tugs on even my old heartstrings.

  “Probably. Eventually,” I tell her in the interest of the new honesty I plan to have with her. With the Academy out of the picture, there’s no more need for my usual deception. “Although I’m sure we could negotiate something different, if that’s preferable. The Kyrie doesn’t require separation of races. It just doesn’t force relations between them. For now, you’ll all stay together in the Dragons’ Quarter.” Cece looks back to the others to share a nod of confirmation with each of them before she answers:

  “Alright.” The only one who doesn’t nod back is Stephanie. When I lead the group around the fountain to the hallway, her blue glow doesn’t follow. I turn back with the rest of the group to find her grasping one arm with the other. A stance I’ve seen Cece in more than once, when she was troubled.

  “Chances you’ll see Dorian… My… My husband,” Stephanie gulps at the word, “are…pretty high, aren’t they?”

  “I would say so,” I tell her. She shrinks back from us even more.

  “I think I’d better make myself scarce. If anyone needs me, I’ll be around, I just… I don’t think I’m ready…”

  “Hey,” Cece reaches out to touch Stephanie’s spectral shoulder. Whether because it’s two Astrals, mother and daughter, or some other reason, it looks like they both feel it. “We all get that. Right?” Cece looks to me, presumably because I’m the host in the situation. The fire in her eyes hardly implies I have any choice in reply, though.

  “Of course,” I smile. “Take your time getting adjusted.” Stephanie manages a smile in return before her frame disintegrates, from the feet up. When the last of her shimmering blue particles fades away into the air, Cece’s eyes shine like two blue headlights.

  “I can…still see you. A little bit,” she smiles.

  “Really?” Lee marvels. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

  “I think there are a few things I’m missing,” River comments.

  “Feel free to explain on the way,” I invite Cece, and start down the stony hallway once more.

  It amazes me that, without any knowledge of the betrayal of the Council in Cece’s birth, River is here with us. She hardly needed a reason to drop everything in her life and come right along. I listen to the retelling of tragedy as we file alongside the water and rock. It might just be me, but there seems to be even more emotion in Cece’s voice since all of it drove Serge away. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible if I’d never met Cece, for one woman to love more than one man so deeply.

  “This will be your room, River,” I announce at the tail end of a pensive silence. Cece had only just finished her retelling seconds ago. I unfold an arm to the first of the dark wooden doors set in the stone of the cavern. She nods and puts a hand on the knob. With one last, longing look at Cece, she twists it. I can imagine how odd it is, after three years of living together, to be so close, yet separated absolutely by rock. River goes in. “Lee, yours is two doors down.” He too, moves down towards the door with a heavy degree of reluctance. “Cece, yours is between them. But…there’s something I want to show you first.”

  “Right now?” Cece asks. Lee cracks his door and stands with half his face turned out at us.

  “I’m afraid that, with how quickly things may advance from here…there won’t be another opportunity,” I tell her. Hesitation plummets down Cece’s throat with a dry gulp.

  “Alright,” she says. I extend an arm to show her the way, a dimly lit branching hall with no water trickling down inside it. “I’ll be fine,” she assures Lee as we pass him by. His door seems to be made of two tons of lead, with how hard it is to pull shut. It does finally click closed just as I lead Cece down the branching hall.

  “I want to be straight with you. Tell you a few things you’ve probably inferred already, from my own lips,” I say, once I’m sure we’re alone.

  “What a fun game to play in a dark, underground alley,” Cece sighs. We walk on a few steps in silence. She quickens her pace to walk close to my side, for a view of my pale, bony profile. “Alright. Let’s hear it.”

  “First…I’ve been trying to recruit you to the Kyrie all along. I was never playing double agent for the Academy,” I confess.

  “I…had my suspicions,” Cece admits. “So you’re actually loyal to who? Lucidous?”

  “Lucidous and I share loyalty to the same idea,” I correct her.

  “And what idea is that?” she tests me. This time, I plan to pass, with points for honesty.

  “How old do I look, Cece? You can be ho
nest.” I turn my head sideways to smile at her. Cece hums for a while to formulate a number somewhere between insulting and truthful.

  “I’d guess seventeen or eighteen,” she says. I let out a single, sharp bark of laughter.

  “I picked a good time to get bit, I suppose… I’m about six times older than I look, then,” I tell her. Cece does her best to keep a straight face, but she can’t hide that sharp little gasp from me. “But age is just a number.”

  “You honestly believe that? You, Mr. century-old-teenager?” Cece pokes.

  “I do. It hardly matters that I’ve lived past a hundred years. What matters is what I’ve seen in that time. As the VampKing that preceded Lucidous, I saw that prejudice persisted, even if most action based on it was prohibited,” I confess. It takes her a moment, with everything else there is to see in the Blood Farm, but Cece’s eyes eventually shoot over to me, bloodshot and wide.

  “You… The VampKing… You voted in the decision for my life?” she murmurs.

  “As one who was once persecuted for my own nature…you can imagine which way my vote swung. But it hardly mattered. The Shadewalkers weren’t part of the Council back then. All it took was the fear of the Big Three and…well, I’m glad I got to meet you, Cece,” I force a smile to put off the grim note of the revelation. It takes Cece a few seconds to transition from shock to anything else. I watch her face loosen as she thinks it out, and reform into the hint of a smile.

  “You know…I can’t believe it, but so am I,” she admits. Our gazes connect in a new fondness for transparency, before I draw in a sharp breath to switch gears.

  “I’ve seen the story of humans and Vampires play out a hundred times over. It always ends the same. Newly turned Vampires need time to adjust, before they can feed without killing. We need to feed. Humans need to live. We are as inseparable as we are incompatible… It’s all very tiring,” I say. I peek around the corner of an intersecting hall before turning down it. We’re still alone. We can speak freely.

  “So…the Kyrie is your solution? How?” Cece asks. Straight to the point, as always.

  “The Kyrie is a means to achieve our solution,” I amend. “We needed its resources to create what I’m about to show you. A sustainable source of food that eliminates our need to hunt. And the humans’ necessity to be hunted.”

  “A bold endeavor,” Cece admits. Just then, we arrive at the steel doors to what I’ve brought her to see.

  “Remember that when I show you this. The solution isn’t without any sacrifice. It’s simply the least evil way to do something necessary,” I warn her one last time as I type in the code for the doors. They slide apart to a field of translucent, steel eggs. “This is the Blood Farm.” Cece doesn’t wait for permission or an invitation to rush in. She puts a hand up on the first pod she reaches. I watch the peaceful, bobbing masked face inside reflect in the crystal surface of Cece’s eyes.

  “These are… All of these… People?” Cece mutters with what little breath she has left.

  “Yes,” I tell her, “Pacified with Magicians’ tricks, all of them.”

  “Do they ever wake up?” Cece asks one rare question I wasn’t prepared for.

  “No,” I manage to say.

  “So they just stay this way…for what, their whole lives?”

  “That’s the concept. Those masks over their faces give them plant-based, sustainably farmed nutrition. They dream all day. For all they know, what they dream is their reality. A happy one. We harvest blood from them in rotation, so no one gets too dehydrated,” I condense into the easiest-to-digest form I can.

  “This is…” But, for once, Cece’s powers of decision fail her. She can’t quite isolate a single emotion to represent everything she feels just now. I can’t blame her – I was hardly different. “How many are there? And where did you get them all?”

  “Right now…we have one-thousand pods. It’s enough to sustain the Vampire population of the Kyrie, plus several hundred more, indefinitely. As for where we got them…” I cross my hands to decipher how best to say it. “You can imagine we didn’t want to take people anyone would look for… They were mostly homeless. It might be in poor taste to say, but…more than a few of them have better lives now, in dreams, than they ever did awake.”

  “I...can’t say exactly what I think about this right now, but…I appreciate you sharing it with me,” Cece forces out.

  “I want to be transparent with you from now on. I admit…keeping things from you proved much harder than I thought it would,” I say. Cece turns around to face me, her expression a little lighter at last. She almost cracks a smirk. “Now…the next thing we need the Kyrie for is to boot up a Runic Gate and find the Vampiric Realm of Power. Lucidous and I plan to relocate the Blood Farm there, where we can live apart from all other humans at last. No more hunting. No more persecution. It’s best…for all of us. The sacrifice of a thousand lives for trillions.”

  “Yeah… Still not sure how I feel about that part,” Cece murmurs.

  “Your brother was a victim of the old way… Was he not?” I dare to ask. I’m not sure if the face I’m looking at is more surprised I know about Jason or more furious I would dare bring it up. “After we’re done…things like that won’t happen anymore.” Angry as she wants to be, Cece can’t help the rebellion of her eyebrows. They tilt up to regard me with understanding.

  “You just had to go and put it that way, didn’t you?” Cece sighs. “If you really believe this is the way to end the violence between humans and Vampires…”

  “I do,” I assure her.

  “Then I guess I’m in,” she says.

  Lee,

  The Kyrie Stronghold, Dragon’s Quarter

  I’ve entirely lost track of what time it is when a knock jostles the door to my new room. I shoot straight up on my admittedly plush new mattress inside a cave. For about five seconds, I have no idea where I am. It all floods back at once. That’s right. I forsook the Academy that saved me from myself. I departed from my old life, alongside my lover..

  If it weren’t for the foreign, rocky walls closing me in, I’d have thought it was all a dream. That, and the fact that I can still feel her nearby, right through those walls. It’s faint here, with such a high concentration of other Dragons nearby, but impossible to mistake for anyone else. Cece’s sapphire ember in the Soul of Fire… I can’t believe a hint at her true nature has been staring me in the face since the day we met. I’ve never heard of another Dragon with a blue ember because there’s never been a Dragon quite like her before. One connected to both the Soul of Fire and the Blue Plane. Wait- She’s closer than I thought she was.

  “Lee,” I hear her thoughts in my own mind just before the gentle knock at my door.

  “Hang tight,” I send back to her through our interwoven souls. I slide off the edge of the bed and cross my inch-thick azure area rug. That, along with the teal color of the lights in the room and the constant trickle of water through a groove in the floor, gives a constant, somehow comforting reminder that we are deep in an underground cave system. I swing the door in for Cece. “Hello, beautiful.”

  “Hello, suckup,” Cece smirks tiredly back at me. She leans in for a long kiss. Only in the crashing together of our bodies and spirits do I feel the distance that’s kept us apart. Time. Space. All pointless vacuums that separate us no more. Cece leans into me, arms around my neck, and gradually lets her legs give out. I take her up in my arms and she wraps her legs around my waist. A firm hand under each thigh, I carry her over to my bed. I lay Cece gently down and slide in beside her.

  “Hey, you’d better start appreciating it, now. I don’t really need to suck up anymore, do I?” I tease her to lighten the mood. A cloud of grief has hung over Cece’s head since we left Serge paralyzed out in the mountains this morning. I can hardly blame her. Impossible as it seems, even to me, I didn’t want to leave him there either. Neither of us needed to say it, but there was a kind of inexplicable bond that developed while we teetered on the scales of
Cece’s affections together.

  “I…guess you don’t. Not any competition left,” Cece sighs. Her whole body deflates with the exit of a long breath. Then some of her old spark jumps out from her eyes again, at last. “Except maybe for Bart.”

  “You’re kidding. Albino slim jim?” I laugh. Some of Cece’s life returns as she sits up to slap me, chuckling.

  “Hey, don’t let your guard down yet. He’s got big plans.”

  “Oh, and I don’t?” I bounce right back, twisting her arm around into a hold we both use to spar. It’s far gentler here, though. I leave her a huge opening to slip out, but she doesn’t. She reverses the hold to pull me closer.

  “If I had to bet, I’d say your biggest plans involve me, and scooting this bed across the floor,” Cece laughs.

  “That…may be one of them!” I admit. When the giggles subside between us, though, Cece’s face grows heavy all over. She lets her hands down, no longer armed for playful combat. She takes my hands in hers. Our heat radiates together, an invisible campfire warming the sheets between us. “What about Bryant?” I remember. “Did you…even tell him?”

  “I couldn’t,” Cece shakes her heavy head. “The Academy is the only reason he’s still alive. They helped him learn to control himself. He’s still learning, actually. I couldn’t tell him. I’m not sure how he would have reacted. If he wanted to come too…I don’t know what would happen to him.”

  “Just us, then,” I smirk, though my heart is hardly in it. Cece’s not the only one who’ll miss his constant misinterpretation of emotion and social convention. “For now.”

  “Lee…” Cece speaks my name in a way she may never have before. It’s so kind, so honest, without any of the walls that usually surround her true intent. I feel the intensity of her unprocessed emotion in my own chest through the Soul of Fire right as she lets it out. “I don’t ever want you to think I don’t appreciate you. Everything you do. Everything you are… You just being here means… I can’t even tell you how much it means.”