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

by Lan Chan

  46

  There was a rock digging into my butt when we landed on the other side. Another one pushed right into the spot where I had been shot by an arrow. Until now I had gotten by on adrenaline, but I could feel it ebbing away. My limbs felt heavy.

  Our surroundings were dim. The only light came from what appeared to be luminous fungi growing from between the rocks. I had to squint to see in front of my face. I almost squeaked when I saw the stalactite hanging from the ceiling. It took me a second to reason that it was unnaturally warm in here. Therefore, it couldn’t be the Hell cavern.

  Angus’s voice rolled through the cavern. “To win a war, you will need a weapon. You just gave up yours. Go find new ones.”

  I heard Andrei sniff the air. I did the same. It stank like sulphur. My heart raced in my chest. Andrei moved closer. I froze, remembering too late that he could hear my heartbeat.

  “What is this place?” I asked aloud. My voice bounced against the walls, too loud in such a small space. The air was seriously warm. I placed my hand on the rocks and almost came away with blisters. What the heck?

  “There’s a slight breeze coming from that way.” His voice came out barely above a whisper. I heard it clearly enough with the echo. He pointed to a space up ahead that grew darker as it got farther from the light.

  We couldn’t blunder ahead in the dark. Then something occurred to me. “How well can you see in here?”

  Andrei shrugged. “Well enough.” It took him a second to realise why I was asking. And then a grin split his face. “May I have your hand?”

  I hoped he could see the evil eye I was giving him. Instead of reacting, I grabbed onto the hem of his T-shirt. “Aww, you’re no fun.”

  “Just start walking!”

  I didn’t even know why he was bothering to terrorise me while Kai wasn’t here. An ominous feeling pressed around me as we walked deeper into the gloomy cavern. The smell of sulphur grew stronger. Luckily it wasn’t the bitter death-coated smell of the stuff I had choked on in the Hell dimension. This sulphur had an almost charcoal aftertaste to it.

  Vampiric sense of smell wasn’t as good as a shifter’s, but it was better than a human. “What do you smell?” I asked Andrei.

  “Para-human stink,” he said.

  I wanted very much to punch him in the back. His shirt bunched as I curled my fingers. “Oh calm down. I don’t have a problem with them. But you asked.”

  There was no point arguing with him. “What do you think that means?”

  The words had just come out of my mouth when a rumbling bellow reverberated through the rock walls. The cavern groaned. Loose pebbles fell from the ceiling. I let go of Andrei to shield my head. I had a sudden flash of being buried alive with Kai. For a second, the darkness was illuminated by a red light tinged with blue. It left a blotched residue behind my eyelids.

  “Holy shit!” I said. “That isn’t a dragon in there, is it?”

  Andrei’s complexion was sheet white in the dim light. Fire was one thing all of the supernaturals were susceptible to. Fire and beheading were the two ways you could actually kill an immortal being.

  The breath of a dragon could melt your bones off from a hundred metres away. I’d read in Demonology 101 that the dragons had died out because there wasn’t enough food for them in this dimension. They starved to death in their caves rather than leave their piles of treasure.

  Doctor Thorne said that was a myth. He told me most had been slain by the Fae because they were too volatile. They were intelligent and couldn’t be subjugated. Dragon scales were also tougher than any metal known to man.

  I had a very bad feeling about this.

  “If that is a dragon,” Andrei whispered, “it sounds pissed.”

  Normally, light in the dark was a beacon that lifted my mood. We turned a corner and the cavern opened up to reveal an enormous room. It became flooded with orange light. My bladder felt like it was suddenly too full. This wasn’t a cave anymore. It was an underground city.

  Andrei and I instinctively dropped low. We belly-crawled until we reached the lip of the opening. It was fully three minutes before I could even start understanding what I was seeing. The room was bigger than the library at the Academy. Etched into the walls were threads of black mineral. Dragon glass. It grew from hairline fissures and bloomed into huge deposits. It gave the walls an artistic look that was completely at odds with what was happening below.

  I blinked a dozen times and rubbed my eyes to make sure they weren’t deceiving me. Andrei pinched himself.

  There was a dragon down here. It was chained by the throat and from each of its four legs. It stood in a crater with smooth walls made entirely of dragon glass. A metal harness like you would put on a dog kept its wings in place. The metal glowed a faint red. The dragon was a deep, midnight blue that turned to aqua when it breathed fire. The flames lit a forge above its head. There was a complicated industrial pulley mechanism that was being used to melt gold and other precious metals.

  The cavern had been split into various levels with stone staircases and ramps making it possible for equipment and supplies to be delivered to each work area.

  Para-humans of every shape and size were busy carting away rock, cutting into the rock with pickaxes, pouring the gold into moulds, and hammering the heck out of the weapons that came from the forge.

  We’d stumbled upon a para-human black smithy. That would have been well and good except that by the far side of the room from where we lay, black steps led up to a raised platform. On the platform was what I could only describe as a throne made of dragon glass. The back of the throne arched up to form two outstretched dragon wings.

  Sitting on that throne was a man in a red tunic. It fell down to his knees. He had long, coal-black hair that hung almost to his waist. The pointed ears screamed Fae. The staff leaning against the arm of the throne said mage. The staff itself was carved of hardened wood. It fanned up into the image of flames around a red crystal with a blue heart.

  Just great. A Fae fire mage.

  The platform was directly in front of a narrow rock walkway. It fell away to empty air on either side. The bridge itself led to another opening. From here I couldn’t see inside.

  “How much do you want to bet that’s where the armoury is?” Andrei said. I wasn’t really listening. My focus was on the dragon inside the hole. It wasn’t all that big. Maybe the size of a small sedan. Every once in a while, when the dragon stopped breathing fire, some of the goblins and trolls stuck spears into the hole to poke it.

  The dragon roared and let out a seething breath. I could feel my left eye twitching. Mature dragon scales would be impervious to normal weaponry. If the dragon still felt pain, it meant the dragon was young enough that its scales hadn’t hardened.

  Andrei hissed. My eyes tracked to what had gotten his attention. Within the upper levels of the cave, there were openings around the top just like the one we were in. I spotted movement in several of them and saw the other contestants. “How are we going to do this?” Andrei said.

  “Do what?” I asked, my attention back on the dragon. In between breathing fire, it was making a high-pitched whining sound that translated to crying in my ears. I couldn’t help thinking about Billy.

  Andrei pinched my arm. “Pay attention!” He pointed to the suspected armoury. “We have to somehow get from here to there.”

  I looked down. It was a pretty decent drop. I’d break every bone in my body before I died from drowning in my own blood. “There has to be another pathway leading down,” I said. If there was a city down here, it meant there had to also be sleeping quarters and somewhere that served food. There was probably a warren of paths through the mountain. The trick was trying to find it.

  I could tell Andrei was contemplating the drop. Vampires were a lot sturdier than humans. Then again, he hadn’t drunk blood in years. He must be quite brittle at this point.

  The dragon hadn’t breathed fire in a little while. Two dozen of the para-humans grabbed their s
pears. They struck down into the hole. The dragon went nuts. The poor thing fought its chains. In doing so, it caused the entire cavern to shake.

  I curled into a ball and wrapped my arms around my head. It left my injured side completely open. Rocks fell from the ceiling. One of them struck me on my side. I bit my tongue to stifle the pained sound. My skin suddenly felt slick. I was bleeding again.

  When the tremors subsided, Andrei grabbed my wrist. Down below, one of the para-humans pushing a wheelbarrow of gold bars had stopped moving. He lifted his head. His stubbed nose sniffed the air in our direction. Para-humans didn’t have a very strong sense of smell, but I imagined if all you were used to was fire and ash, the scent of blood would give you pause.

  I was in the midst of shrinking back into the cavern when the whole world began to shake. It wasn’t a build-up like an earthquake but a sudden rumbling roar. It hit hard. My vision blurred. Below, the para-humans became frenzied. Some of them dropped their tools and started to scramble out of the cave along the various paths.

  Andrei grabbed me and wrapped me in his arms. And then suddenly we were airborne. He jumped out of the cavern, trying to stay pressed against the wall as though using it for traction. I heard him grunt and felt his muscles contract.

  All around us, the world trembled. Orange light blazed against my closed eyelids. I braced my head against Andrei and hoped like hell this wasn’t going to hurt as much as I thought it would. We came to an abrupt halt. The stench of still water and mud filled my nose. My eyes snapped open just as Andrei groaned.

  I came face to face with a set of obsidian eyes sunk deep into a brown clay face. A clay golem.

  The thing was eight feet tall. It had Andrei and me clamped in its meaty hand. In its other hand, it held the two necromancers pinched by the toes of their shoes. It dangled them in front of its face and sneered.

  I heard a scream and turned to see that the others were also trapped. Two other giants had appeared in the aftermath of the earthquake. The one holding the two teams with Fae contestants was a deep, pewter grey. The Fae groaned. Their skin turned a sickly green colour. An iron golem.

  The other golem was polished until it almost shone. It stood there like a movie award. It had Max and Bradley in the grip of one hand and a pair of mages in the other.

  Another quake hit us. It rattled the room like a child’s toy. My head rolled around but the clay golem didn’t lose its footing. The thing made its way towards the platform. Ah shit.

  The dragon gave a corresponding roar when the cavern groaned around us. It threw caution to the wind and tried to yank at its chains. On the throne, the Fae mage shot a fireball of blue light that hit the obsidian walls of the hole. The dragon screeched.

  Outside the mountain, something must have picked up the sound of the dragon’s distress. The answering bellow was like nothing I had ever heard before. The vibration started in the core of me. It rippled outwards and tore through my cells. It was as though the scream hit on a different frequency and my body didn’t know how to process it. There had only been one other time I had felt something close to this. It was when I had been temporarily possessed by a demon.

  The vibration rammed at the circumference of the seal. There was a split second when I felt my magic surging up to meet the roar before it crashed back and was rebuffed. My nose started to bleed. My head throbbed. I bit the side of my cheek and tried to hold on to consciousness.

  Andrei’s head lolled to the side. The two necromancers also hung limp. A quick glance at the others showed me that all of them besides Max had passed out. The lion looked decidedly worse for wear. The parts of his skin that touched the silver golem had started to blister.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted movement clinging to the back of the iron golem. Somehow, Kai had managed to slide onto the thing without being detected. My eyes flicked up to the holes in the wall. Chanelle was perched safely on the ledge.

  There was no time to think of a way to drag her down here. We were suddenly in front of the platform. The para-humans left behind had stopped their work and were milling around beneath the feet of the golems. There were so many of them I could no longer see the floor.

  From this angle, I could now see into the room at the end of the treacherous walkway. It was very dimly lit by an enormous crystal globe that hung from the ceiling. Shelves had been cut out of the rock. On them sat every weapon known to man and hundreds of others that were beyond our reckoning.

  Too bad there was a pissed-off Fae mage in our way. “What’s this?” he said as he stood from his throne. Behind his back, I spotted the other mage team creeping towards the walkway. Those bastards were using us as a distraction. I tugged at Andrei’s shirt, hoping to rouse him. He was out cold.

  The mage swept his gaze over us. He stepped closer and looked into the faces of the two necromancers still dangling unconscious. His gaze settled on the Nightblood emblem on Andrei’s T-shirt.

  The Fae mage spat on the ground. “So the Supernatural Council would send spies into my mountain to steal my treasure,” he said. There was a part of me that had hoped this was an illusion like some of the other trials. But this wasn’t an obstacle course. Things didn’t keep appearing and disappearing at random.

  I didn’t know where we were, but something told me this was more than real. As was the demented gleam in his eyes. A layer of sweat collected on his upper lip. He wore a jewelled ring on each of his fingers. While he spoke, his focus kept darting over to where some goblins were mining sapphires. I’d heard about treasure-sickness before, but I’d just chalked it up to pure greed.

  “Take them to the smelting pot,” the Fae mage ordered. I tried to struggle against the clay golem, but my arms were plastered to my side. As we turned, I saw the mage thieves had reached the doorway to the armoury. They were about to step inside when the earth shook once more.

  I braced myself for the psychic assault. This time it didn’t come. Instead, the cavern rocked like it was being battered from the outside. Cracks snaked up the side of the walls. Rocks the size of my fist rained down from the ceiling. The Fae mage sent columns of his magic skirting over the cavern. It melted the dragon glass in a futile attempt to keep the mountain intact.

  Pandemonium ensued as the para-humans tried to avoid being struck. A golf-ball-sized rock smacked Andrei right in the nose.

  The hit startled him into consciousness. When he opened his eyes, they were saturated in red. It was a good thing the clay golem had him immobilised. At the moment, it seemed he might have completely forgotten that he didn’t drink blood.

  I heard Chanelle scream but my attention was glued to the mage team. The walkway they were trying to sneak across crumbled as the mountain trembled.

  One of the mages lost his footing when the path disintegrated beneath his feet. His legs kicked out as his arms flailed. The other mage reached out for him, but the cavern shuddered. Both of them went tumbling over the side of the walkway. I winced and turned my head away, hoping that the elite guard had seen it and saved them.

  Now if only somebody would save us.

  47

  The para-humans that had streamed out of the cavern came back in shouldering pieces of equipment. As the golems marched us to the smelting pot over the baby dragon, they frantically began to assemble some sort of machine. Whatever was outside bashed at the side of the mountain again. The baby dragon responded in kind.

  The Fae mage turned towards the dragon, his features drawn tight. He raised his fists. The red of his magic swirled around his hands. Streaks of blue and silver interlaced with the red. “Cease your bellowing or I will silence you.”

  The baby dragon tugged at its chains, trying to get as far away as possible. By now I’d pieced together that the mountain was being attacked by another dragon. Probably the baby’s parent. The para-humans had almost finished building what looked to be a set of long-range siege weapons. Some kind of heavy-duty bolt throwers.

  It was amazing what all those hands could accomplish in
minutes. Two cave trolls appeared from the direction of the armoury. They carried dozens of black arrows longer than I was tall. The tips of the arrows were made of dragon glass tinged blue. The Fae mage must have hexed them. How nice of the elite guard to drop us into a warzone.

  The baby dragon seemed to sense that its cries had made things worse. It sat uncomfortably on shackled hindquarters. Doctor Thorne had told me that dragons were highly intelligent. They possessed their own form of telepathy.

  All I saw when the baby dragon’s head lowered to the lip of the crater was misery. It blinked dark eyes at me.

  The Fae mage waved his hands. A low rumble that had nothing to do with a dragon attack caused the ceiling to shift. I craned my neck to watch as two square pieces of the cave roof slid aside. A midnight sky appeared. It lit up at intervals with bursts of dragon fire.

  The para-humans heaved the siege weapons into the right angle. The cave trolls notched it with arrows.

  Through the holes in the ceiling, I caught an occasional glimpse of membranous wings in glittering gold and green. The next time a hint of dragon showed up in the sky, one of the cave trolls fired. The arrow whistled through the hole. Outside it flared in a bright blue that burned my eyes. A blanket of cold air descended on us. Again and again the para-humans reloaded and shot. With each arrow that exploded, the temperature dropped until I couldn’t feel my nose in front of my face. The gold in the smelting pot began to solidify.

  The Fae mage had forgotten about us in the face of a more threatening foe. Sadly, the golems had not. Without the smelting pot to boil us alive in, the clay golem decided it was just going to crush us into dust instead.

  I winced as the golem contracted its hand. Andrei gave a pissed-off snarl and pushed back. The crushing grip eased a little.

  A shadow loomed over the opening in the ceiling. There was a second where it felt like the entire world stood perfectly still. A single malevolent thought ignited in my mind, but it didn’t belong to me. It came from the mind of a dragon so steeped in myth and power that I could barely stop from blacking out. It started as a tiny wave that rolled and boiled until it became a tsunami. So much rage and anguish saturated the wave that I felt my heart clench in my chest. I began to cry. The only thing that held my consciousness tethered was Michael’s seal. I latched on to it and the comforting hum of my magic behind it like a shield.