Bloodline Fallacy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 5)

by Lan Chan

  It should have been a relief not to be sentenced to death on the spot. What it felt like was an anticlimax. I knew I was in shock. Right now, I was running on disbelief. A day later, the bubble burst.

  The cell doors opened and my parents were marched into the room by guards. They were accompanied by Scott and Orin. The bars lowered around all of us. I wanted to run to them, but the guards formed a barrier between us.

  “Mama?” I asked, not liking the deep lines bracketing her lips.

  “The supernaturals have decided to exile us,” she said. Her gaze swept over the room. “All of us. They’re going to wipe our minds and deposit us back into the human world.”

  “What the hell?” Harlow shouted. “They can get stuffed. What gives them the right to make these kinds of decisions?”

  “What about the other humans?” I asked, thinking of the human mates inside the Reserve.

  “It’s just us,” Mama said. “Any of us who had prolonged contact with Declan and might be compromised. And Bethany.”

  The shell of apathy cracked and in its place was a rage like I’d never felt before. “So they’re just going to toss us out because they’re afraid?” My jaw clamped so hard I could already feel the strain. “It’s not as though they’ve never done anything wrong. Why didn’t the Nephilim Council get exiled when they conspired to kill Lex?”

  “We took a vote,” Orin informed me. “Majority rules.”

  “What kind of majority?”

  “None of your business.”

  I took a step towards him only to be met with the blazing ends of Nephilim broadswords. Looking to Mama, I spoke again. “What kind of majority? The kind that might be tipped if Kai was still around?”

  Nobody answered me. The air grew thick with tension that ratcheted up a notch when a shadow blocked out the light from the door. Max came charging in, his eyes glowing gold as the Nephilim guards attempted to block his way. But it was the edge of red that bled into the very centre of his irises that made my heart stop. That wasn’t anything to do with going rogue. If I didn’t know any better, I would have almost classed it as demonic. It didn’t make the slightest lick of sense. Neither did the way the Nephilim suddenly shrank back at the smouldering of his displeasure.

  “I’m not in the mood,” he spat at the guards. Nobody moved a muscle as he stalked up to me, grabbed me by the wrist, and moved me into the corner where if we whispered, maybe their supernatural hearing wouldn’t pick up the sound of our voices. Max didn’t whisper.

  “Mate with me,” he said, as casually as though he were asking me for the time.

  “Now hold on a second,” Dad interjected. Mama stopped him from barging over.

  Blinking rapidly, I tried to take a calming breath. Despite everything that was happening, heat crawled up my neck and blazed in an inferno across my cheeks. “You’re out of your mind.”

  When I tried to step back, he reached out and clamped his hand around my forearm. “If we’re mated, you could stay.”

  It was about as romantic as a lump of coal. Still, I was tempted. Just like I was tempted by everything else about him. That was part of the problem. Frantic all of a sudden, I feathered my magic over the seal that kept the thing in my chest contained. My heart only stopped skidding when I saw it was intact. If Max found out about it, I would never see the light of day again.

  “Is that what you’re most concerned about?” I snapped to divert his attention.

  “It’s what I’m most concerned about at the moment.”

  I tried to tug away. He held firm. “You need to get your priorities straight.”

  His top lip curled. That dot of red began to pulse in an uneven rhythm that was both horrifying and mesmerising. What the heck was happening? “Stay with me.”

  I spoke through gritted teeth. “My best friend is missing.”

  He spoke through what sounded like hot coals in his throat. “So is mine. I can’t do anything about that right now. Not until I settle this.”

  The hot lick of gold that drenched his eyes at that very second told me he was an inch away from losing it completely. Helplessness would do that to an alpha. Kai was missing and Max had no way of finding him. The Reserve was still being rebuilt, its defences at half-strength. And now there was news of Lucifer’s return.

  The only thing he had any control over would be my whereabouts if we were mated. I would end up in a cage in the Reserve just as surely as I had been in a cage all my life in Zambia. But despite his crazy eyes and his tendency to regress into a non-verbal cave man, I swallowed hard at the thought of never seeing him again.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” I held my breath. It was a lot to ask. Too much. Especially right now. What sent a frightening thrill through me was that when he answered, it wasn’t because I was asking him to leave everything he had ever known behind. It was the other implication that had his grip tightening even harder.

  “Come with you where?” It was a possessive growl.

  I forced in a breath, willing my heart to beat normally. Or at least as normally as it could in this situation. “Back to the human world, of course,” I answered.

  “Sophie!”

  “No,” I said simply. Loudly. He wouldn’t let go. “I said no. I decline as per shifter custom.”

  He was lucky there were no shifters around. I was lucky there were others present. If the crowd was different, if he didn’t back down, they would make him. If the crowd wasn’t around, I had a feeling he would try to convince me in other ways.

  “Why are you making this so difficult?” he said, even as he released me.

  I bit the inside of my cheek, hating that I was hurting him in the process of asserting my independence. But it had to be done. “Because I’m just a human and I’ve never fit in your world.” I swept my arm around the room. “As demonstrated by this.”

  “That’s not –”

  “Really? So you’d be okay with me walking around the Reserve unguarded during the mating moons? You wouldn’t be looking over your shoulder knowing that almost every female in your pride and half the other female shifters might try to kill me because they don’t think I’m fit to mate with their alpha? Never mind the fact that I’ve committed a crime.”

  “Soph –” There was too much warning in it. Like he was trying to pretend I hadn’t done anything awful so he could still see me a certain way. Like my concerns were unreasonable and the only thing that mattered was that I was present, and I was compliant.

  “Go away. I’m done with this conversation. You are released from any obligation to me. I’m sorry. I can’t be who you want me to be.”

  A rumble started in the base of his chest. I turned away and marched back to the Nephilim guards, hoping to use them as a barrier if Max decided he didn’t care for shifter customs at the moment. When I heard the unmistakeable sound of bones snapping, I knew that was exactly what he was intending. Strangely enough, Orin was the one who stepped in his way. The Fae had a death wish.

  “The girl wants to return to the human world,” Orin said, holding out his hand. Like Brigid, he was a wind elemental. Air whipped against Max’s chest, making it difficult for him to move forward. “Take him,” Orin ordered. One of the Nephilim guards grabbed Max and teleported him away.

  His name lodged in my throat. I bit my tongue to keep it from slipping out. Goodbye, Maximus.

  Mama clamped her hand on my arm. I braced my spine and pulled my shoulders back, trying to look composed even though I was weeping inside.

  “What do we do about her?” one of the Nephilim guards asked Scott. The Councilman sneered.

  “Is she truly bound?”

  “Raphael has confirmed that she can’t be awoken.”

  “Then she shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “She also can’t be wiped then. If she happens to wake in the meantime…”

  Scott cracked his knuckles. “Then she remains here.”

  “No way,” Matilda said. “Either we all go or none of us do.”

/>   “That’s not your decision to make,” Orin said. “You’ve been sentenced. Be thankful exile was the outcome.”

  While they bickered, I found myself kneeling beside Giselle. Even though she was bound, there was still something scary about her. Like a wraith lying in wait to pounce. I kept thinking of the surprised betrayal on her face before Declan had hit her. Brushing a strand of hair from her face, my finger touched the skin on her temple. As soon as we made contact, a howl ripped through my mind. I smelt cut grass and clean earth.

  I clutched at my ears as icy cold clamped around my mind. “Sophie!” Mama cried. The room receded as my eyes rolled back in my head. And then all of it disappeared as I heard her voice.

  “Sophie,” Lex said, and I knew I was hearing it as an imprint inside the mind witch’s thoughts. “I tried but it wasn’t good enough. All this time I’ve been fighting against this prophecy, but I screwed it up anyway. I’m so sorry that you’ll have to bear the brunt of this now. At the end of the line, I’m glad it’ll be you and me. Don’t let them make you forget who you are. I love you. Take care of yourself.”

  Giselle’s eyes snapped open as the message receded. Her disapproving glare almost made me laugh. Looking up, I stared into the alarmed faces of the Nephilim guards, and worst of all, my parents.

  “I love you,” I told them, as I told myself they were better off having their minds wiped than follow me.

  White filled Mama’s eyes. “Soph –”

  I teleported away.

  Dear Reader

  If you’ve made it this far with me, I want to say a huge thank you for your patience. This year has been a bit of an unpredictable ride and I apologise that Bloodline Fallacy took some time to be completed. On top of everything else, I had a personal tragedy that derailed everything.

  As a result, there won’t be a pre-order for the next book in the Bloodline series until I can be certain that it will be released on schedule. If you want to be kept up to date with the timeline for possible release, please Join my reader group where you will be the first to know all of the news. Plus we have a lot of fun with snippets and other book chatter.

  While you’re here, I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has bought, read and shared the Bloodline series. I appreciate every single one of you who has left a review, flagged typos and grammatical errors and just plain allowed me to do the thing that I love most. You will never know how much it means to me.

  And finally, if you are having reading withdrawals, feel free to check out my other series Origin which is a bit of an Academy mash-up with X-men.

  All the best,

  Lan

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