Bloodline Alchemy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 6)

by Lan Chan

  I saw now why there were so few people around. Most of the classes had finished for the day. Pushing the sadness away, I studied my subjects. They were a far cry from what I thought I would be studying in fourth year.

  My finger lingered on the boxes marked Sinister Magic. Jacqueline and I shared an apprehensive look.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “We will find another way. We always have.”

  On my right, Charles made a grunting sound that we both ignored. “I’d like to try. It’s better than going my whole life being afraid of what I can do.”

  Jacqueline swiped her hand through her hair. “Under normal circumstances, I would agree with you. If Professor Mortimer could be here...anyway, I suppose that’s the whole point.” She reached out to me and held on to my hand. “I know you have no intention of giving into the dark magic, Sophie. But this kind of power, it has a way of persuading you. Agatha and her coven are very good at rationalising what they do. It’s why she’s not already in the Dominion prison.”

  “I know.”

  That didn’t stop her from continuing. “I can’t help wondering if it’s really worth this? Sacrifice shouldn’t ever be the answer. We can find an alternative.”

  Suddenly I wasn’t sure if she was referring to me or Lex.

  “Like what?”

  She pressed her lips together. I knew there was no satisfactory answer because I’d spent my nights for months trying to come up with something I could have done to change things. All of them ended in Lex dying well before now. I would not consider that alternative even if it saved us from the current apocalypse raining down on us.

  Jacqueline squeezed my hands before letting them go. I resumed looking at my timetable. My heart lurched when I saw Potions and Alchemy. She noticed me swallowing.

  “Professor Suleiman is going to take over the classes for now,” she said.

  Without even considering it, I asked, “May I see her?”

  Given how the shifters had reacted to me, I held my breath. “Of course. I’ll let Doctor Thorne know to expect you this week. But there’s not much to see. She’s stable, but we can’t seem to wake her.” Just like Durin.

  A war raged inside me. Professor McKenna had been in the Reserve consulting over their magical defences when the malachim had hit. What struck me as odd was that they went for her before the alpha couple. And now she shared their fate.

  My hand trembled as I picked at the edge of the timetable. All of the adult figures in my life were slowly being taken away. It was as if something was reaching out and plucking them from me. And there was nothing I could do to stop them.

  Not nothing. You have the power if you would use it, that insidious voice inside my head offered. I clamped down on it and redirected my focus.

  There wasn’t much else to see on my timetable besides Weaponry and Combat. “No Herbology?” I asked.

  “With the climate as it is, most of the Council are focusing on high magic, amongst other things, as a counterbalance to the malachim.”

  The edge in her voice said there was more that she wasn’t telling me. “What other things?”

  “Let’s just say that there’s a reason why anything you’ve done in the past has been swept under the table.” She sighed. “We’re getting desperate. I’ve been in enough battles to know what happens to an army when desperation begins to take hold.” This time she reached out and cupped my cheek. For some reason, she was smiling.

  “You haven’t changed,” she said, and there was wetness in her eyes. “Even after everything, you’re still the same.”

  Feeling my face flame, I coughed lightly. There had been so many nights when I’d raged at my own helplessness. Despair and fear lashed at me every waking moment as I sat in the border of the fens, where a portal into the Hell dimension was always kept open. That sinister voice in my head constantly pushed at me to step over the line because that was the only way I could claw back control. And yet, when it came down to it, I couldn’t. I had no right to give in to my fear when Kai and Lex were out there facing evil on a greater scale than I could ever imagine. And when they came home, even if everything else was different, I would still be there for them. It was the least I could do.

  I blinked slowly. “You know what they say. Girls mature faster.”

  She glanced surreptitiously at Charles. “In humans, perhaps. I have misgivings about the supernatural population.”

  “I can hear you, you know?” Charles said.

  “Can you?” Jacqueline asked. “It feels like you don’t hear anything anymore.”

  He stood. “Can we go now?”

  Without looking at him, I said, “Sit down.” He wouldn’t budge. I kept my gaze locked on Jacqueline. “I guess we’re going to be here for a while.”

  She looked from me to Charles and back again but didn’t say a word. There was an odd expression on her face that I couldn’t quite place. “You have no idea what the definition of stubborn is until you’ve lived with a hedge witch,” I told Charles. “I can do this all day.”

  His agitation spiked when I mentioned Lex. “Stop using her against me!”

  I played with the edge of my timetable. “Why? You’re using her against you. How do you think she’d feel about you cutting school and being a general nuisance?”

  “She didn’t even go to school for months before she left!”

  It was a good point. “When you have the Prince of Darkness bearing down on you, then you can complain. Until then, I think you should be here too.”

  “What?” he spluttered.

  “I’d be more than happy to enrol you back, Charles,” Jacqueline said.

  “No way! This is a waste of time!”

  “Is it?” I said. “You’ll be here guarding me anyway. You may as well learn something. Like, say, how to touch a demon blade without having your skin burned off.”

  “That’s not possible!”

  “And how would you know?”

  I swear I could literally see the cogs in his brain moving. But in the end, I knew he hadn’t even considered a high-magic solution. Truth be told, I was telling a little white lie. From what Lex had described to me, there was nothing that could bend the demon blade’s will for a shifter to tame it. But Charles didn’t need to know that.

  “I don’t have any magic in me,” he said.

  “No, but half of you is made of magic. Maybe that’s enough.” And if he learned the kind of magic that might come at him in the impending war, maybe it would help him survive. We waited for five whole minutes. An eternity in the mind of a teen.

  “Okay, fine!”

  Jacqueline beamed. “I’ll draw up a timetable for you.”

  By the time we left, he was scowling like I’d made him eat wolfsbane. “I thought I’d gotten out of this!”

  The thing about pulling a fast one on a shifter was that you had to be prepared for the retaliation. When he led me back to the Thompson residence, I was already dragging my feet.

  “He wasn’t serious about this, right?” I asked even as Charles was opening the front door.

  “I’m not going to justify that with an answer.”

  “I can’t stay here, Chuck!”

  His voice carried from well inside the living room. “Sleep on the lawn then. Because if you set foot off this property at night, he’ll clonk you over the head and drag you back.”

  “I’d like to see him try!”

  He stuck his head out of a first-floor window and grinned. “So would I! So please try and run away again!”

  Gritting my teeth, I stood there on the porch for an age. So long that the evening sun began to sink in the sky. “Where’s Dani?”

  “In hiding. We don’t...time....” I could barely hear him from the first floor.

  “Pardon?”

  Footsteps thudded. He came out the front door, took me by the wrist, and dragged me inside. That was bad enough but once inside, Charles grabbed me around the waist and bounded up the stairs.

  “Wh
at the hell?”

  We reached the first-floor landing. He marched through the upstairs hall and opened the door into a room with distinctly masculine decor. “Chuck! Put me down!”

  “With pleasure.” And then he slammed the door shut and left me inside.

  Twisting the doorknob was useless. “I’m going to skin you alive!”

  His laughter was a low baritone that gave me pleasure even as it fuelled my rage. Max’s masculine scent filled my nose. “Let me out right now!”

  Silence. I kept rattling the doorknob to no avail. Breathing through my mouth, I forced my attention to remain locked to the solid oak door. It was all that could exist.

  “Charles Atticus Thompson,” I screamed. “If you don’t let me out of here right now, I’m going–”

  The door burst open. I put one foot in front of me and halted. Max stood in the doorway, his features tight. The threat died on my tongue.

  “You’re in my room.” Husky words to add to the tension in his shoulders.

  “Well, you can thank your brother for that,” I snapped, having had enough of the both of them. “Please move.”

  To my surprise, he turned to the side and allowed me to leave.

  “Sophie,” he said as I was about to tear through the house to murder Charles.

  “What?”

  “Don’t come in here again.”

  The thing about being the reluctant belle of the ball for so long was that I kind of got used to it. It left me unprepared for the other side of his dominance. The side he showed to those who disobeyed him. The acid in his voice had me reeling.

  “I would gladly leave at a moment’s notice!” I spat before marching into the spare room—yes, I knew where the guest rooms were—and slammed the door shut.

  Throwing myself on the bed, I breathed out deeply into the pillow. Inside me, the mating link was a mass of insect limbs, trying to scratch and tear at the blood barrier. Frustrated, I shoved back and added another layer of protection. Away from his abrasive presence, it took about ten minutes to calm down. I sank into a meditation, repeating over and over the reasons why I couldn’t give in to the link, even though the urge to climb all over him was driving me out of my mind.

  As dusk ebbed into night, there was a quiet knock on the door. Cloaking myself in serenity, I opened it to find Charles looking slightly bashful. “It’s time to eat,” he said.

  There was nothing controversial in it, but I still wanted to break a vase over his head. “I’m not hungry.”

  We both knew it was a lie. I hadn’t eaten all day. Come to think of it, maybe I was just lightheaded from lack of nutrients.

  “Come on, Soph. I’m sorry, okay?”

  “Thanks. How can I say no to that?” Yet I stepped out of the room. There was no scent of food coming from the kitchen. “What are we having?”

  “The circle members are meeting up in the conference room.”

  My feet ground to a halt. All those shifters watching me while I ate would just make the food clog in my throat. “No thanks.”

  I retreated back to the room and closed the door. I could feel his presence for about a minute until he must have decided that I should be left alone. Without them, I ended up raiding the kitchen which was stocked with all of nothing. I had to make do with a cheese sandwich grilled over a flame of my own making.

  I found my belongings sitting in a heap outside Charles’s room. After unpacking as best I could, I tried to force myself to sleep. Despite being physically exhausted, I couldn’t shut down my emotions and tossed and turned all night. I was still awake when I heard the front door open. Only one set of footsteps came up the staircase. I was still awake when the wolf sentries passed by the front of the house. I was still awake when the moon moved to cast long shadows through the gauzy curtain.

  At about two in the morning, a growl rumbled through the house. “For goodness’ sake!” Charles snarled. He came thumping out of his bedroom. He made so much noise it sounded like a racoon had come down the chimney. My bedroom door opened.

  I shot up in bed. “Excuse me!”

  He threw something at the foot of the bed and then closed the door with an ominous click. The fir-and-sunshine scent hit me before anything else. Gingerly, I reached out and picked up the piece of clothing. I knew it was one of Max’s T-shirts before I’d fully laid it flat on the blanket over my knees. I’d like to have said that I thought long and hard before slipping out of my pyjamas and shimmying into the T-shirt, but I was so tired it didn’t seem like a fight worth having.

  It wasn’t like Max had given it to me. Charles had taken it. Any concern I had about what it meant was washed away in a cloud of peace. It didn’t completely soothe the gnawing, but it was enough to hold it steady.

  After about five minutes, I finally drifted off.

  11

  My great-grandfather was waiting for me inside a ritual circle when I closed my eyes. “Ba tata,” I whispered, using the affectionate Zambian term for him even though I had never known him.

  He lifted his head from over the bubbling cauldron and smiled. Apprehension coated my tongue in bile at the flash of red throbbing in his dark eyes.

  “Sophie. I’m so happy to see you, my girl.”

  Not understanding why I was here at all, I moved closer. The pulse of the circle made my gut roil. The black was interspersed with deep maroon runes whose lines warped and pooled like liquid held in shape by unnatural magic. The runes themselves were a mix of necromantic symbols. Bones sat at the five points of the pentagram star. Not just one or two bones but a pile of them. Each bundle was crowned by a tiny human skull. They were so small that there was no question they had belonged to a child. As I drew closer, I picked up the scraping marks on the bone as though they had been gnawed at.

  “Come, Sophie.” He beckoned me over. I was struck mute by our resemblance. It might have been easier to see his profile in the Book of Beasts if we didn’t look so similar. But it was obvious, from his soft features to his dark skin tone, where I had gotten my looks. Right now, it was the other legacy he’d given me that he wanted to demonstrate.

  I hesitated at the edge of the circle. Stuck between two opposing forces. Inside me, the blood alchemy churned. It reached out long tendrils and wanted desperately to sink into the circle and draw strength from the ritual that I was sure would grant me immense power. At the same time, both my kitchen magic and the mating link were rioting, screaming at me to step back and run.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “This is who you are.”

  When I wouldn’t budge, he grew impatient. “You can’t run away forever, Sophie. You make yourself miserable trying to be meek when you’ve been given the power to take anything and make it your own.”

  “What if...” I started. “There has to be another way.”

  “What other way? This is natural. This is what you were born with. Why would we have been given this gift it we weren’t meant to use it?”

  I couldn’t answer that question. And when I continued to stand there frowning, he lost his patience. “You make me sad, child.”

  He flicked his left hand and a figure materialised inside the circle. Kai’s wings retracted into his back as he knelt down. His knees hit the pile of bones at the circle’s centre and crushed them into dust. His eyes smouldered with the same intense red and black as the circle itself. My heart jumped into my throat. I took a step forward only to be slapped back by the might of his magic. “You had your chance to be part of it,” he said.

  “Ba tata!” I urged. “Let him go.”

  Inside the confines of the circle, Kai lifted his head back, exposing his throat. “Stop it!” I screamed. My great-grandfather set a chalice down beside Kai. When my fist connected with the circle, unrepentant pain shot up my arm and threw me away. Pushing back up and ignoring the throbbing in my side, I bit my finger and drew blood. My great-grandfather cocked his head at me. “You know nothing,” he said. And then he raised a scalpel and sliced a wound from Kai’s left ear al
l the way to his right.

  My head filled with the rush of horror and my internal screaming. Blood gushed out from Kai’s ruined throat, covering his white T-shirt and the grass all around him. Glowing green blood pulsing with his healing magic flowed into the chalice, dripped over its sides and turned the grass into marsh.

  I slapped my palm onto the circle, fully prepared to speak the most powerful words of light I could think of. Instead, the circle latched on to me, gripping me so tight I couldn’t move a muscle. I became plastered to an imaginary wall.

  Beneath my feet, Kai’s blood slithered over the grass until it reached the tip of my sneakers. Bit by bit it crawled over the canvas. When it touched my skin, the world exploded into a bright burst of colour and sound. Everything around me amplified like I had been sensing it through a dull filter. Now I saw and heard things on a level that I could only imagine. A supernatural level.

  Struggling against the blood was futile. I could hardly move as his power made its way through my bloodstream, making my skin tingle like I’d drunk ten glasses of Fae ambrosia. Even as my mind protested the intrusion, something in my core sighed.

  “Yes, Sophie,” my great-grandfather said. “That reluctance isn’t truly yours. It’s the conditioning they’ve filled you with to make you small. To make you weak so they can control you. But you’re free now.”

  With those words, Kai’s blood breached the chamber of my magic. It touched the pool of my kitchen magic and overwhelmed it, eating away at all that was good inside me. When it tried to broach the blood barrier, the mating link began to vibrate. It bubbled and boiled like a live, angry sentience. The two forces threw themselves at the blood barrier. Pain shot through my skull.

  “Remember who you are, Sophie,” my great-grandfather said. But I could no longer recognise his voice. And then my mind filled with the low rumble of a lion that gripped me and dragged me back from the edge.