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

by Lan Chan

  Blood. There was so much of it. So much that I couldn’t fathom how the poor baby was still breathing. She needed blood. I knew that much. But the way her body had been mauled, she had no strength and no capacity to drink the elixir.

  “Knife!” I screamed. One was placed in front of me.

  The cut was too deep. So close to the artery on my wrist that I might have just signed my own death warrant too. Objectively I knew it had to hurt like hell, but I felt nothing besides the throb of urgency in my thoughts.

  With fingers that were already too slick with somebody else’s blood, I uncorked the vials of elixir and let them soak onto the floor.

  “What is she–” a female voice said before Max cut whoever it was off with a growl.

  “Amy,” I gritted. “I need you.”

  She was there in an instant. Her knees collapsed beneath her, but she appeared on my left. I jammed the knife into her thigh, and she didn’t flinch. The others did. Their hackles rose as their eyes became drenched in yellow.

  “Hold,” I heard Max say.

  The flux of power that shoved at me from the wound in Amy’s thigh was ten times the strength that the essences of the rats offered.

  See? The voice in my head said. See what you could have if you took the leap?

  Pushing it all aside, I sank into the pool of my alchemy and began to transmute the blood and the elixir. Cell by cell, the blood soaking into Amy’s jeans loosened itself. So did the blood on her skin. Reaching out, I called to the blood painted on Jeremiah and the splashes on Noah. It was intricate work. The magic swept over them again and again until they were wrung dry better than any industrial washing machine.

  Pain built up behind my eyes. The exhaustion from the afternoon came back to haunt me. My stomach became hollow as my energy was sapped. Then it began to churn, as though it was pulling strength from somewhere deep inside me.

  Ignoring it, I forced the glow of pink magic into a whisper-thin strand that I directed over Lizzie’s chest. Drip by agonising drip, I transferred the blood back into Lizzie’s heart. Thankfully, the organ was still intact. The problem was that no matter how much blood I managed to give her, she would continue to bleed out until the wounds were stitched up. Gwen was already working on it, her deft fingers flying over the wounds using a mage-constructed salve and enchanted thread.

  Even if Gwen and I sat with her all night and day, without the gift of supernatural healing, I feared we were labouring in vain. Still, I kept her blood flowing, biting my bottom lip bloody because my heart was beating too slowly all of a sudden. Inside me, the magic was beginning to wane. The drawbacks of low magic at work.

  When Gwen finished the makeshift stitching, Lizzie’s skin was a patchwork of terrible, overlapping flesh.

  Completely out of my depth, I heard Basil’s voice in my ear. “Blood is about connection. It’s about family. It ties us together.” Shifters were about pack.

  “The pack link,” I said. “She needs the link.”

  “That’s impossible,” Ari snapped, his eyes two big saucers. “It’s already drained.”

  Looking into his disdainful face, I realised I had no more care to give for hierarchy or insulation or any of their crap. Lizzie was dying, and I didn’t give a damn how it looked. Picking her up, I started towards the door. A chest blocked my way. “Move,” I screamed at Harris.

  “You’re not–” that was all he got out before Max bulldozed over him, grabbed Lizzie from me, and ran.

  Amy followed after him. My legs were too slow. They were already specks in the horizon before I got past the flower beds out the front of the house. “They’re so inconsiderate, aren’t they?” Charles said before he picked me up like a doll and took off after them.

  Supernatural speed was a thing of wonder, but for a human, it was a sickening experience. The world rushed by me in a sweep of midnight, peppered with spots of brightness. The accommodation sector was aglow with activity as news must be spreading about the incident. There was no time to take in any of it as Charles raced towards the Cabin. Before very long, he had outstripped Amy.

  We pulled up to the field around the Cabin and were met with a battalion of shifter guards. Max made it through perfectly fine. But the moment they scented me, Charles and I were suddenly flanked on all sides by predators. He would have run right through them if he were alone. But with so many of them circling around us, there was every possibility that I might get hurt.

  We came to an almost dead stop too quickly. Charles placed his hand against the back of my neck to blunt the effect of the whiplash. The world was a spinning mess in my eyes. Without his support, I wouldn’t be able to stand upright and not fall on my ass.

  “Get out of the way,” Charles ordered. The mouths of the shifters pulled open as though they were silently laughing. Amusement didn’t change the fact that there were very sharp teeth bared at us.

  Amy arrived at our backs. Her eyes flicked between yellow and red. She blinked as though not seeing the reason why we had come to a stop. There was a tense moment when I thought she might start tearing into the guards.

  Max appeared in the threshold of the building, still holding Lizzie in his arms. He took one look at the situation, cupped his hand over Lizzie’s delicate ears even though I was sure she was zonked out, and roared.

  The visceral fury in it reached out phantom claws and swiped at the guards. They lowered themselves to the ground as the sound of thunder picked up momentum. It lashed at them in unapologetic waves of dominance. The three wolves directly in front of us began to bleed from their noses. The hairs on the backs of their necks stood on end, even as they rolled over and showed their bellies.

  If Charles hadn’t cupped my head in his big hands, I suspected I might have passed out. As it was, he leaped over the prostrating wolves and raced towards the Cabin. Oppression and bitterness slapped me in the face as soon as Charles stepped foot inside the glass doors. His ears pulled back and his top lip quivered. Setting me down, he turned his head in a slow sweep as though trying to parse out the origin of that depressive force. I didn’t have shifter senses, but goose bumps prickled my skin. Icy fingers trailed down my spine.

  Cold. It was so cold in here.

  I suddenly wanted to backtrack and get the hell out of there. The living room was empty. Not surprising at this time of night. What concerned me was that none of the alphas who were supposedly in residence had appeared to take us to task for barging in. They were shifters. Territory meant everything. And yet, we remained alone.

  Max turned in the middle of the living room. His gaze landed on me, the grey of his eyes suddenly full of storm clouds. For a second, he traded glances with Charles.

  I knew instinctively what they said without words. This was the centre of their pack. And I was effectively an outsider. Max gave me so much leeway, too much according to his inner circle, but allowing me here was another level of trust.

  His hesitation lasted all of two seconds before he barged forward through the back of the house. Charles, Amy, and I followed.

  Swallowing hard, I watched as Max slapped his hand on a sigil on the wall beside the bookshelf in the sunken family room. It glowed a bright green before an arcane circle appeared in the carpet. Max stepped inside and the light ascended into the ceiling. His body shimmered before disappearing altogether.

  I was not a fan of teleportation. The experience would now be marred by fear and rejection. But Lex had done it so often with Kai that I tried not to allow my gut to stretch taut as we followed in Max’s footsteps.

  The environment on the other side of the teleport had a gasp dying out in my throat. We were in a huge flat level with minimalist rooms on this end. The area was open plan. It stretched out into what was effectively a series of jail cells. Most of them were empty, but through the open bars, I swore I could see a hulking figure slumped in the corner. Whatever it was, the thing was huge. Lying down, its body took up most of the cell it which it was enclosed.

  Beside me, Amy winced. H
er dry lips smoothed into a grimace. Charles closed his eyes for a second, as though giving himself time to get used to the metallic taste of all the silver in the cells.

  They were on the far end of the space, but the shifter’s sensitivity to silver and their keen sense of smell must have made it highly uncomfortable.

  “Yolanda!” Max called out. Rather than wait for her to appear, Max began opening doors. If Yolanda was here, then it also meant that the clan alphas were in residence too. The way Charles hung back made nausea bloom in my gut.

  “What is this place?” I asked him. But he only looked down at the floor.

  A door three down from us opened. Yolanda staggered out. There was nobody to assist her this time. She grasped a railing that was bolted to the wall and staggered forward. Unable to watch her struggle, I found myself beside her.

  “Let me help you,” I said.

  Feeble though she was, when she looked at me, it was with the unbreakable will of an alpha female. “You shouldn’t be here,” she croaked. But her hand trembled towards me, and I grasped it before she could topple over. She was a slip of her former self. At least a head taller than me, her presence used to strike an awed wonder in me whenever she entered the room. Now I was certain I could lift her up with one arm.

  And then, two other figures emerged from the doorway beside her, and my legs were nothing but jelly beneath me. Though he was now frail to the point of breaking, Alastair held Shayla’s elbow as they staggered out of the room.

  I lost all speech. I lost everything but the urge to fall into the cold cement floor and weep. That voice in my head rose up.

  See what you’ve done? How can you balk at death when you’ve already destroyed everything you’ve ever cared about?

  One by one, more of the clan alphas appeared at the doors of the rooms. I knew all of them by reputation if not by name. Looking at them now, there was no way to recognise that they were the strongest of their species.

  “Max,” Shayla whined. “What’s going on?”

  Both the Thompson boys were mute. Their golden eyes were a reflection of the anguish in their hearts. But instead of becoming utterly useless like me, Max approached Yolanda holding Lizzie in his arms.

  “She’s in trouble,” he said. His voice was a mess of hot coals and pieces of glass. “She needs access to the pack link.”

  Yolanda’s heartbreak was a dark shadow that passed over her wrinkled face. She closed her eyes for a second. When they opened, a tear streaked down her cheek. “We can’t. There is no strength left to spare.”

  At the sound of her voice, the enormous thing at the end of the hallway groaned. It was as though a sinister wraith floated between us and dragged its limbs though our souls. Everybody went deadly still. Something both tightened and loosened in my chest, like my body didn’t know how to react to this level of fear. Everything was firing at once.

  “Get back to the portal,” Max barked all of a sudden. No sooner had he said the words did the thing in the cell groan. I winced as the taste of metal slid down the sides of my throat. Charles whined. His nose flattened. The beast in the cage smashed a paw onto the concrete. It exhaled in a puff of steam that spoke of a soul on fire.

  Somebody tugged at my shoulder. I turned around to look into Amy’s dead eyes, the hope for Lizzie bleeding out of them.

  “Is that Durin?” I asked.

  “Go!” Yolanda hissed. She began to cough.

  Blood is family. I found myself pulling the Ley sight around me. My suspicions were confirmed. A line of the deepest red wound around Yolanda and stretched all the way into the cage where the beast, where Durin, was now scraping at the silver in an effort to stand. Though both of them were damaged, the thread of their mating link, their ties of blood, remained intact.

  The longer I looked, the more the Ley sight showed me. Beneath the tie of unbreakable love, there was another, paler thread. One of absolute loyalty and trust. The pack link. It stretched out like the threads of an interconnected web between Yolanda, Alastair, and Shayla. What made my breath catch was that it was eroded on this side to the point where it was no thicker than gossamer.

  When I turned to where Max and Charles stood, I found that the links were there, but they were greyed out before they touched the boys. The ends of the links were frayed and floating as though buffeted by an ethereal wind.

  Turning, I followed the link to the cell. The closer the link to Durin, the sturdier it became, until it lodged in his chest in a glowing ball of pink-tinged light. The alpha of the Reserve was the source of their strength. His bond to the heart of their home was an anchor to which every shifter was tethered. What I saw before me was wrong on so many levels. Durin was sucking the life force out of the link. And in doing so, he was hampering the strength of his people.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder again. This time it was Charles. He opened his mouth, his eyes night-glow and filled with despair. When I turned and saw the same defeat in Max’s eyes, a switch went off in my head.

  “He hasn’t gone rogue, has he?” I said aloud, my third eye still firmly entrenched in the Ley sight. “He’s sick.”

  In a desperate attempt to save their beloved alpha, the shifters were killing themselves. Now poor little Lizzie would die too.

  For some reason, I took a step forward. Charles’s hand gripped tighter. Drawing a circle around him, I shoved and threw him off. Walking slowly towards the cage, I felt the throb of necromantic magic calling to me. Claws scraped against metal. Durin’s black hair was a mess of knots and clotted wounds. His skin was lacerated all over and scarred from the continued contact with the silver. When I pulled up short outside his cell, the thing that looked out at me from behind Durin’s black eyes was ancient. It sat on the bear’s haunches, breathing steamy breath and watching me with beady eyes. That was when I knew I was wrong. This wasn’t illness. This was some kind of unholy possession.

  The thing inside Durin was a parasite sucking at their pack link.

  “Why haven’t you tried to exorcise him?” I said, my voice razor sharp and carrying through the open room.

  “We can’t,” came Yolanda’s rasp. “All the Nephilim have failed. The mages too. Maybe if Lex were still here...”

  The implied notion was clear. Maybe if we had access to someone with real power. The words of light I tried to speak did absolutely nothing.

  “Come away, Sophie,” Shayla said. “It does no good to linger.”

  It did no good to give in, either. Whatever that thing was inside Durin, it had no right to monopolise the pack link.

  “Max,” I said, “give her to me.”

  Maybe it was the steel in my voice, or maybe it was that I hadn’t moved an inch from where I was standing, but he came towards me without argument. When our eyes met, I saw the blazing fury in his. Finally, I understood why nobody was allowed in here. The knowledge that their alpha was compromised would destroy the pack. For six months Max had led them, knowing that at any moment, all hell would break loose. It was no wonder he felt so trapped.

  Holding out a hand, I placed it on Lizzie’s cheek. Her skin was icy. My top lip curled. When I wrapped myself in the Ley sight once more, there was no room for mercy. Honing the blood alchemy that was my heritage, I funnelled the blood still smeared on my wrist into a fine blade.

  The sound of anguish that clawed in Durin’s throat when I sank the metaphysical blade into his hide brought a wail from the crowd of alphas. If they weren’t so frail, I would be dead in a matter of seconds. What happened instead was the thing inside Durin sat up to attention. It wasn’t a demon that looked out of his eyes but something old and mournful. Something that was injured beyond recognition.

  I had seen that same look in the reflection of the eyes of the malachim that had tried to communicate with me. He was possessed by a twisted angel.

  My resolve faltered. A warm hand suddenly cupped the side of my face, the gentle caress in it pulling me from the brink. Max trailed his thumb across my cheek, the physical contact g
rounding me. Inside, the mating link purred, wanting to revel in his touch. When it couldn’t break through the blood barrier, it threw up thorns and cut into the blood magic, making it agitated. The rage boosted the power of the alchemy, my own cage a hate-filled motivator.

  Taking a deep breath, I reclaimed my hold on the alchemy and yanked.

  A shrill cry came from the crowd. I knew from the connection that Yolanda had passed out. Pushing aside everything else, I rifled through the floating pack link threads in the room until I found the one that should have been connected to Lizzie.

  Pressing the alchemic blood blade deeper into Durin, I felt the throb of power seep into me. His blood was no longer the dull red of a supernatural but a glowing brightness. I gasped as my vision became saturated in white light, reminiscent of the brightness of seraphim wings. His essence was unlike anything I had ever felt before. Just a tiny trickle and the pack link became a solid thread. Without hesitation, I dispersed it into Lizzie. Her shallow breath immediately evened out. With each second that ticked by, I watched the skin that had been hastily stitched together knitting itself closed. First the fragile skin around her throat and then the patch that held her internal organs in place.

  In the cage, red eyes laced with white snapped open.

  For the first time, Durin seemed to recognise that I was stealing his power source. His claws gouged holes in the cement as he tried to take a running start in the cage. Though I flinched on the inside when he slammed his massive body against the door, I gritted my teeth and held on to the link.

  Had something not dragged my sight inwards, Lizzie might have already been healed. I glanced at the aura throbbing inside my mind. The mating link was trying to draw my attention to what was happening inside me. Every speck of power I stole from Durin was making me lose a part of myself. The soul tether was now a solid, dull brown.

  Panic had me severing all connection. The sudden snap of magic and the retracting pack link made Lizzie cry out. I sank to the floor as nausea gripped me and made the thing inside Durin rattle with apprehension.