Bloodline Legacy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 4)

by Lan Chan

  I wanted to go back to make sure the professor was okay. This was mixed with a bone-deep shuddering that threw layers of terror at me. Through sheer stubbornness, I pressed it back. I was sick at the idea of running when somebody I cared about was in mortal danger. In a sea of disapproving supernatural jerks, Professor Mortimer had always been kind to me. The thought of losing him to a demon made me pause mid-run. My mind was made up to turn back when a streak of green light filled my vision. The brightness of it had me shielding my eyes.

  Kai landed for all of a heartbeat before he grabbed me. We spiralled towards the junior school. “Wait!” I screamed. It was snatched up by the wind whistling past us. The Academy flew by so quickly I could barely see anything but a blur. Kai pressed my head against his chest, holding me in place. At this speed, if I made a jerky movement, my neck would snap. We landed just outside the front door to the dorms. Nephilim and Fae guards were already circling the perimeter in the air. There were shifters in the tree line nearby.

  The kids were always the first priority. The very same runes and glyphs I’d seen outside the senior campus blazed in a column around the junior campus. By now, portals would have opened up in the senior school and the older kids would be streaming into the building. It made it easier to defend one central spot. And if all other defences failed, we would be their last protectors.

  “Get inside!” Kai snapped.

  “But–!”

  He turned on me, his green eyes molten. “Get inside.” It was a snarl. “Don’t you dare put a foot out the door until I come back.”

  The front door opened. Somebody yanked me backwards just before Kai’s wings unfurled. He shot straight up into the sky. I caught sight of the horizon. The breath whooshed out of me as I stumbled into a pair of cold hands. I spun to face Sasha as he dragged me towards the spot at the windows where the rest of my friends were gathered. The older students formed a clump three deep around the windows. The younger ones sat along the staircase railing. A few wolf pups and a fox prowled around in circles. Their fear had made the shifter kids transform.

  “Thank goodness,” Sophie hissed when she saw me. I felt her hug me, but my attention was too scattered to really register it. In the reflection of the window, my eyes were two big saucers. The slack expression on my face was mirrored by everyone else around me. I saw now why there were so few guards who had gone to Professor Mortimer’s aid.

  In the air around where Nightblood Academy sat, was a portal the size of a football oval. It spun in a slow orbit like a spaceship bereft of light. Where the perimeter of the portal kept expanding, it ate up every scrap of light around it. A chill skirted down my spine.

  A roar reverberated through the Academy. It was a soul-crunching sound like meat and bone going through a grinder. Sophie dug her nails into my arm. A skeletal claw the size of a spear pierced through the centre of the portal. The ground shook beneath us. If I hadn’t been holding on to the window ledge, I would have lost my footing. Boom! Another claw. Boom! A monstrous head. Boom!

  Hairline cracks ran along the wall. The world vibrated around me. It was lucky I had a low centre of gravity, otherwise I would have fallen over. A demon was coming through the portal and it was bloody massive.

  34

  Somebody grabbed my arm. “Get away from the windows,” Charles screamed. He all but tossed me against the staircase. I collided with Cassie. When I’d first met her, she was so painfully shy she would hardly look at me. Now she righted me and then disappeared in the crowd of younger students, barking orders at them.

  She hustled them into the common room farther out the back. The supports there had been reinforced to withstand an earthquake. Great. I was being ordered around by the kids. All of the fourth-year students and some of the third-years would be out there fighting.

  I didn’t spot Isla in the room. Trey, Sasha, and a group of boys from our year were the only ones Charles hadn’t tried to wrangle away. I might have thought he was relying on them to protect us if I hadn’t heard him calling them demon fodder as he whipped past with the little fox in his arms.

  Somebody tugged on my jeans. Billy stood next to me. He was completely nude and holding what appeared to be a pet rock. It had two googly eyes glued on the top corner and a big, fat red line for a mouth. His skin had turned a speckled grey-green. Some of the para-humans were polymorphic. They could change the colour of their skin for camouflage.

  I wasn’t sure what Billy thought he was imitating. His slitted nostrils flared. He swiped a tear away. I picked him up and held him close as I disregarded Charles’s order. Sophie was also at the window again. Diana had never left.

  The ground shuddered over and over. I became dizzy trying to keep my focus on the portal. Nobody uttered a word as we watched helplessly. While I’d been away, the demon had completed its slow trespass out of the Hell dimension. It was at least a head taller than the top spiral of Pantheon Academy. Its limbs, all eight of them, were long and wiry.

  It crawled on its legs, dragging a long body made mostly of ribs draped in folded bits of skin. The contents of its belly were openly dripping into the building below. Where the black tarred blood hit the stone walls of Nightblood, it ate away at the building. The demon had no face to speak of. Just a mishmash of features without a nose or chin. Sunken into the demon’s head were two bright orbs of red for eyes. Its mouth opened into a cavernous gape with twisted white spines for teeth. And as a double-feature, some of its buddies were coming through the portal behind it.

  Misshapen creatures shot through the portal around the huge demon’s feet. The only way to describe it was a horde. They slashed and shoved their way through the portal and onto the grounds of Nightblood. There they were met with the forces of the Nephilim and the other guards. We were too far away to see the details of the fighting, but any idiot could tell we were outnumbered. I bit my lips and tried to watch out for the familiar glow of green. It was nowhere to be found.

  Billy whimpered in my arms.

  “Go with the others,” I told him. When I tried to set him down, he latched on to me with such suction I thought my spine was going to snap. I skidded at the same time the earth groaned again.

  “Shit!” Diana said. I followed the direction of her gaze. A speck of light rose up and levitated mid-air. The flapping of a cloak made me squint.

  “Is that Professor Flint?” Sophie asked. She had her face pressed up so close to the glass it fogged up.

  A heavy, sinking feeling materialised in my gut. First Professor Mortimer, and now Professor Flint. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Mages didn’t have a penchant for flying. Sometimes they levitated when they were spellcasting but to remain in the air for so long spoke of something unnatural.

  Professor Flint went higher and higher until he floated level with the head of the enormous demon. If he weren’t possessed, it was at this point when I would have expected the demon to open up its gaping maw and swallow the professor whole. Instead, the professor lifted his palms to the sky. Silvery-grey light ignited within them.

  Sophie hissed.

  Multi-coloured lights bloomed around him. Three Nephilim and two Fae guards with their swords drawn appeared. My focus became fixed on the burst of green. Kai’s blade shimmered with a blaze of angelfire. They all hung in suspended animation.

  “What’s happening?” I heard Charles ask from behind me. Guess he wasn’t very good at taking his own orders.

  “They’re trying to talk to him,” Sasha said.

  “What’s he doing up there?”

  By now Billy had pressed his head to my chest. The bumps on his forehead dug into my collarbone. I placed my hand over his ear as though it would do something to stifle his hearing. “He’s conjuring,” I told Charles.

  “What the hell for?”

  What else would a necromancer conjure for? The answer came in a shattering groan of the ground beneath our very feet. Where the earlier pressure had been from the influence of demonic bulk, this pressure came from the earth itself.
The trees around us let out a wail that my hedge magic picked up as distress. Clawed fingers and decayed teeth bit into them. The undead Professor Flint was trying to resurrect tore into their places of confinement. They scratched and gnashed, eating away at the roots and earth until the ground started to cave. I shuddered and shut my eyes, trying to keep my composure so I didn’t scare Billy further.

  Sasha cursed. The guards converged on the spot around the perimeter ward where the earth was crumbling into a sinkhole. First it happened in one spot. And then another. The lawn around this side of the junior school looked like a pockmarked monstrosity. The first decayed hand to bloom from the dirt was met with swift dispatch from Bran’s broadsword.

  The amputated undead gouged into the dirt around it with the stump of its wrist. What had been a slow procession of undead bodies suddenly turned into a frenzy. It was as though the first undead triggered a starter gun to go off. They crawled their way out of their graves like they had Lucifer himself on their tails. The guards leaped on them, slashing and striking with such speed my eyes were unable to settle on anything for too long.

  “How many bodies are buried here?” a Fae boy named Kieran hissed.

  He hadn’t seen the faint grey glow in the grass that was scraping against my skin and making it difficult for me to breathe. Even if there were no dead buried under Bloodline, it didn’t matter. Professor Flint was transporting them from elsewhere. I had a feeling there would be no shortage.

  “He shouldn’t be able to do this!” I heard a girl scream. She came racing from the back of the dorms.

  “Why isn’t the Iron Court here?” another Fae kid whimpered.

  Diana rolled her eyes. “Bloody Fae,” Roland spat. “Too stupid to see what’s happening right in front of their faces.”

  He was referring to the edge of black that we could see swirling in the horizon. It was a dampening field. Something that high-level demons were notorious for. As non-native inhabitants of this dimension, their magic caused a ripple in the atmosphere. It clashed with the wards around the schools and dampened them so that we weren’t able to communicate with the outside world. None of the elite guards were here because they had no idea we were in trouble. Such was the fury of the demons. That’s how they rolled. Though they had numbers on their side, they fed on the fear and confusion of their prey. Cutting off all forms of escape, all avenues of hope, made the demons stronger. If they could get into this school, they would have a feast on their hands.

  Billy was shaking uncontrollably in my arms. His skin had turned ice cold. I was basically holding onto a stone encased in hard scales.

  Charles bit out a cuss that would have turned his mother’s face blue. I followed the direction of his gaze. The slew of curses that came out of my mouth was no less abrasive. To the far right of the window, a figure walked leisurely towards us. When I’d left him, Professor Mortimer had been struggling to maintain his humanity. The only way I knew it was him right now was because of the clothes he wore. His magic floated around him in a twisted mauve nimbus polluted with brown stripes. It choked out behind him like smog. Horns had actually broken through his skin. They sat like a pointed crown on his head. But it was his eyes that had every bone in my body liquefying. They were pitch black. Empty.

  “Cassie!” I screamed. She came running from the common room with Luther following after her. “Take Billy.”

  The goblin had to be wrestled out of my arms. He curled into a ball and howled. I blocked it out. “Get back into the common room and bar the door.” I grabbed Charles by the shoulder and was rewarded with a toothy snarl. “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Very scary. Save it for your next birthday.” He protested when I shoved him away.

  “I can fight!” I didn’t doubt it. Even at his age, I would bet money on him against some of the kids in my year level. He was already taller and bigger than most of the Fae. I pressed my palms to either side of his face. To do so, I had to stand on tippy-toes. There was no time to comment on the scrape of stubble that grazed my palm. He was growing up right in front of me. Something twisted in my chest, but I shoved it aside.

  “Listen to me,” I said. Two feline eyes latched on to me, their rims turning to copper. “If something happens and the wards go down, you grab the kids and you run.”

  A snarl rent the air. I shook the refusal from him. “I know you don’t like it. I don’t either. But if something happens to the rest of us, it’s your responsibility to look after them.” I glanced at Luther. “You know how to create a portal, Lu. Run as fast and as far as you can until the demon sphere allows you to teleport. Don’t look back.”

  Where Charles would fight me to the death, Luther nodded. He grabbed his friend and tugged him away. Not before I saw Luther blink slowly, his eyes glassy but his jaw firm. One day those kids would be formidable. Even now I wished I had half of Luther’s cool head in a crisis.

  Unfortunately, I was too human. Like most humans, when I was crapping my pants like I was at the moment, all I could think of was to lose my shit. I went back to the window and came face to face with Professor Mortimer gliding through the outer perimeter barrier as though it didn’t even exist.

  “Son of a bitch,” I spat. “I take it Professor Mortimer was the one who placed the protection wards on this place?”

  Sophie’s muted nod said it all. Protection wards were unbreakable to a weaker magic user except in a few circumstances. One was if someone inside let down the guard. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. The other was when the creator of said wards decided to unmake them. “What are the chances that the magic won’t recognise him?” I hedged.

  In answer, the professor lifted his arm and the building groaned. Bran shot from the left like a golden cannon, his broadsword raised in a deadly strike pose. For a second, I held my breath, unsure how I wanted this to go down. If Bran struck true, the professor would die. There was no room for anything else anymore. If Bran failed, I wasn’t even sure what would happen.

  Sophie squeezed her eyes shut. I gripped the window ledge so hard my fingers clicked. A split second before Bran could pierce the professor with his blade, the professor snapped his wrist and the Nephilim disappeared. Just like that. He was gone.

  Everyone who stood at the window took a collective step backwards. The realisation hit all of us at once. We were trapped inside a building that may as well not be warded. One of the most powerful mages in history was out there and nobody was coming for us. My gaze flicked to the horizon. Green light flashed as Kai battled with the giant demon. It only had four of its eight legs now. But four was enough to keep him occupied. The trees in the courtyard of Pantheon painted a gruesome picture for me of what was happening over on that side of the divide.

  They were fighting for their lives. Many of them had already been trampled on by the enormous demon. Others were being bent and broken by the low demons who snapped their branches to use as gleeful weapons.

  Diana and Roland had managed to find a cache of weapons. They were each loaded up with a couple of axes. Diana had a belt around her waist holding an assortment of knives. I heard the snap of bones and tearing of skin. Trey was going furry. The Fae burst into showers of coloured sparks around me as their wings unfurled.

  The guards outside were waging a losing battle. A golden spark of light appeared in the air to the left. Bran popped back. Blood coated his side. An open wound wept on his cheek. Wisps of black smoke sizzled against his armour. Where the hell had the professor sent him? The granite set of Bran’s jaw said it wasn’t somewhere he wanted to return to in a hurry. Yet it didn’t make him hesitate to swing for the professor again.

  This time, rather than going to for a direct strike, Bran used his teleporting ability to blink in and out of existence. He did it so quickly I could hardly keep up with him. I held my breath as he struck again and again at the protected space around Professor Mortimer without getting a direct hit. Too late I realised he wasn’t trying to get to the professor. He was just trying to weaken the demon enough s
o that somebody else would be able to finish where he left off.

  Something tugged at the pool of magic inside of me. It yanked me into the Ley dimension where the vast blue scrape of energy was now tipped with darkness. The two opposing forces collided as though they too were on a field of battle. I screamed as the darkness reached out a tendril like an arm shooting out.

  My sight snapped back to the present. Sophie gasped beside me. The professor had Bran in a phantom choke hold. The Nephilim’s face was turning blue.

  “Teleport!” Sasha screamed at him. Whether Bran heard or not, he didn’t take heed. His sword arm continued to swing wildly at the circle around the professor. Where it made contact, flashes of grey scalped onto the grass. Where it landed, the vegetation withered. I bit back the acid scrape of pain that registered on my hedge magic.

  I beat at the window with my fist. Other guards tried to get at the professor. He waved them away like they were flies. I felt it the second Bran’s sword arm went limp. Vines of purple laced with brown slithered from the hand the professor had splayed around Bran’s throat. Golden light surged along the vines. As it escaped Bran’s body, the armour cracked and bent. Everything that had been light about Bran died at the same time he did.

  35

  My fist hit the glass so hard it cracked. Professor Mortimer dropped Bran’s body like he was nothing more than an empty sack. Beside me, Sophie was sobbing. Something fractured inside of me. I clawed at the tears threatening to spill over my cheeks. The professor took a step forward. He raised his arms into the air. A series of pops rent the night sky like somebody setting off firecrackers to mark the beginning of the New Year.

  As each of the runes was unmade, a hollow feeling ripped through me. The popping sound drowned out the keening of the undead. It blanketed out the roar of the other guards as they fought furiously to protect us. Trey and Roland argued with Sasha about running out there and attacking the professor.