Bloodline Diplomacy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 3)

by Lan Chan

  23

  I sprang aside in time to make the leap over the fissure that opened up in the floor. The magic in me heard the sound of metaphysical tearing as the barrier around the door loosened and then cracked altogether. This wasn’t right. Everything I’d learned about elemental magic said that it couldn’t be undone by simple natural phenomenon. The crumbling floor begged to differ.

  With a twelve-inch gap in the ceiling, water began to slough into the room. What sounded like bullets rained down on the roof. A hurried glance out the now-broken window told me that golf-ball-sized hail was battering at the building.

  A slither of lightning brightened the interior of the room. I counted three seconds. My heart constricted at the boom that sounded as though it were right beside my ear.

  Rachel grabbed me and tried to push me back out the corridor. We’d taken two steps when the shaking became unmanageable. Sinking down low on instinct, I crouched in an attempt to find my equilibrium.

  “This way,” George yelled. Hail smashed into my side as I shoved off the floor and half-crawled towards the door behind the counter. Ashton grabbed my arm just shy of the opening. “Wait.”

  Hair slick and darkened by the water, his expression had me pausing. Rachel urged us forward by shoving an elbow into his back.

  “Go!” she screamed. Lightning backlit her drenched figure. For a moment she looked like an avenging angel. As she closed the door behind us, the side of the room broke away. The door itself was off its hinge. It only managed to shield us for a couple of seconds before it too was ripped away. The whole building was coming down around us. The wail of the wind and the relentless hammering of rain drowned out any other sound.

  I raced behind after the bouncer’s hulking back. We went down a staircase with the elements at our heels. The warm summer’s day had given way to a chill that had more to do with something seeping into my soul than the drenched clothes clinging to my skin. I could have sworn we should have been at ground level now, but the staircase continued to spiral. Not that going outside was an option.

  At any other time, it would have been pitch black inside the staircase, but the continued flash of lightning gave off enough light so we didn’t break our necks. The stairs finally ended in a small platform. George wrenched open a heavy metal door and disappeared inside.

  The first thing to hit me was the red glow of candlelight. And then that bitter-dark odour wrapped itself around my nostrils and clouded everything else out. Ashton swept me inside the room and Rachel once more shut the door.

  “What the hell?” George cursed. He zipped around the room trying to flick lights on to no avail. The electricity must have short-circuited. We didn’t need it to see amongst the glow of the candles. I wished they weren’t there. I wished I’d minded my own business and stayed at Terran. Rachel swallowed when I peered at her face to check whether she knew what was in this room. My mind went blank as I tried to comprehend the picture in front of me.

  Ashton attempted to drag me back behind him, but I snatched my arm away. I took one step forward but that was all the energy I could muster. The rest was preoccupied keeping me from screaming. The walls of this dungeon—that was the only way I could describe this vile, dank place—were reinforced with steel. It provided us with protection from the flash storm raging outside. I could hear the wind and rain as it whipped around us. But it was now a muted threat.

  The thing in front of me was not. I’d seen some messed-up stuff since I’d joined Bloodline, but it had all been sanitary compared to the blazing red circle that had been drawn on the concrete floor in this room. Aside from the circle, there was a cage of reinforced metal. It was the demon inside the cage that my brain refused to draw into a reasonable conclusion.

  The demon was constructed of pure sinew. Its four arms reminded me distinctly of a crocodile’s. Its legs were reptilian and ended in three toes with claws protruding from them. The thing didn’t look up from where it was feasting on the severed torso of something that had once been humanoid. I swallowed repeatedly but the scream curled around my throat. Forcing myself to look away from the patches of grey hair on the torso was just about the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. My watery eyes ran along the tubes and cables that had been embedded into the demon’s limbs. Blood that was inky slithered slowly through the tubes towards what looked like a makeshift chemistry set-up. I caught myself wishing they were just cooking drugs down here.

  I knew enough about predatory shifters at this point to reasonable gauge what type of shifter the severed arm belonged to. Judging by the length and shape of the claws, I would say it was badger. The corresponding leg that was half-hanging out of the cage could have been a gazelle. It was hard to tell with the hoof crunched away.

  My olfactory senses were so overwhelmed that I had to stop breathing for long stretches. That was a bad idea. It made taking a breath all the more harrowing. I couldn’t get used to it.

  “Alessia,” Rachel said. Her voice was thick. “You have to understand. We don’t have a choice.”

  She too tried to reach for me. I slapped her hand away.

  “What’s the issue?” George said. During our hurried escape from becoming crispy-fried humans, his mask had come undone. It scraped me up the wrong way that the rest of his face was unscarred. He was perfectly ordinary looking. But I didn’t want him to be. Evil of this nature should come with a physical warning. But Lucifer was the biggest contradiction to that rule. What they were doing here was far and away more monstrous than anything Bloodline could have come up with.

  “You’re feeding supernaturals to demons,” I said. My voice was without emotion. It wasn’t the wet clinging to me that made me feel so cold.

  “We’re feeding our experiment,” the bouncer said. “Same way we feed mice to snakes. What are you? Some kind of monster-lover?”

  The flare of my magic made them all flinch. George came towards me slowly, his palms flattened in front of him. “Easy,” he said. “Think this through. We’re trapped in here for as long as the storm rides. That demon is suggestible. If you rile it up, we’re all in for major unpleasantness.”

  The universe already had a sick sense of humour. It didn’t need me to rile anything up. The next time lightning struck the building the demon flung its meaty quarry aside and bellowed. I flinched as the half-eaten torso thudded against the cage. It smudged the circle but that didn’t matter. The spell to bring the demon forth had already been completed and there had been no intention of sending it back to the Hell dimension.

  We dropped low once more to keep from toppling over. I placed my palm against the concrete and tried to push my hedge magic into the surrounding dirt. It was curtailed by a wall of what felt like static electricity.

  “We should have gone outside,” Rachel said. Her fists were balled. I had a feeling she’d tried to reach out with her magic too.

  “That’s insane,” Ashton said. “This room is made of metal. It’s just a storm.”

  By now I knew there was never just anything when the supernatural was involved. Rachel and I glanced at each other. It occurred to me that we were inside a metal room while a lightning storm raged outside. Despite the anger seething in me, I drew a circle around the group of us. Rachel reinforced it.

  The first strike felt like pinpricks stabbing at my palms. The room groaned. In my mind, I saw the branches of lightning gathering pace in the density of clouds concentrated above us. They speared the ground above us again and again. The demon snarled each time the lightning surrounded us. Far from being hurt, it appeared as though the lightning was making it stronger.

  My magic circle blunted the shock of the first few hits. By the third, I was losing ground. The first signs of destabilisation came in the form of bent cell bars.

  “Shit!” the bouncer said. He and the others were huddled against the door. Boom. The left side of the room buckled like a soda can. As the cell bars bent, it gave the demon enough leverage that it managed to squeeze its misshapen body through the opening
. Shit, indeed.

  “Knife!” I screamed at Rachel.

  “What?”

  “I know you’ve got one on you. Give it to me.”

  She took her left boot off and produced a multi-tool with a knife attachment. She’d sharpened the blade to a fine enough point that I barely had to put any pressure behind it and it cut my palm open.

  The demon tore away the tubes that had been surgically embedded into its body. Around us, the storm hit even harder. George tried to ask the earth to cushion the blows, but his magic wasn’t strong enough to hold back the tide of water. It sloshed onto the cement floor. The demon kicked aside the leftover leg from a previous meal. There was fresh meat in its sight now. My bleeding palm hit the ground at the same time it made a running dash for us. The circle rebuffed it and sent it flying across the room. It landed on its haunches and dropped forward onto its arms and legs. Water dripped down from the ceiling.

  “Alessia,” Rachel said. She spoke some other things, but I couldn’t concentrate whilst trying to keep the lightning from frying us and also stop the demon from killing us. When this was over, I was going to kick some serious human ass.

  The demon snapped its rows of teeth at me. Something black oozed out of its mouth. That bitter scent curled around me once more. It was that dark substance that the humans had been harvesting for their supernatural poison. The thing reared. But instead of taking a run at me like I had anticipated, two bulging discs on either of side of its face inflated. When it looked like a reptile that had lost a battle with a dentist, the thing opened its mouth and spewed black lava at me. The substance hammered against the side of my circle.

  Rachel screamed and toppled, clutching at her head. Every nerve fibre in my body was on fire. I grit my teeth and pressed my forehead to the pool of blood that I’d left on the cement.

  I couldn’t think past the pain. In the back of my mind, I knew I should do something with that blood. Something to do with magic. But all I could concentrate on was trying to force the hot breath in my lungs to inflate.

  Overhead, water dripped onto the barrier of my circle. It trickled down the sides. Where it touched the black saliva it sizzled and morphed into steam. Seeing that I was down, the demon crawled forward. It tested the strength of the circle by scratching one claw down the side. I whimpered. It felt like that time I’d been stabbed through the ribs. Behind me, I felt somebody moving.

  “You can’t,” George said to Ashton. “It’s not an animal. Your magic won’t be able to tame it.”

  The next lightning strike and lava spit hit at once. They braced against the barrier of the circle and smashed clear through it. The circle broke. So did I. Figuring out who was screaming was impossible. The demon snatched me from the damp cement. Terror blanketed my senses until I was unable to fight back. It latched onto my left arm and my right leg. The thing was going to tear me in two. For a split second, I imagined it sitting in the corner feasting on my body.

  “Alessia!” Ashton screamed. The sound of his voice sent a hot lance of new rage through me. They’d done this. They’d summoned a demon and now it was going to kill me.

  Is it? Lucifer’s voice interjected in my thoughts. I made you better than this.

  I tried to shut him out of my head, not wanting the last voice I heard to be his. Instead, he rapped against the well of my power. The blue hedge magic shrank away from him.

  The dark power beneath it swirled into a funnel. The demon tugged. A dam inside my mind broke free. This time, the flash of light didn’t come from a lightning strike. It burst from me in a flood of anguish. It acted like a drop of water inside a still lake. The ripples cascaded from my body in circles the way it had done in the ocean. It sliced through the demon’s body and pushed back against the lightning. I fell to my knees as the demon disintegrated. A groan that sounded like it came from the atmosphere blanketed my thoughts. It was the same one I’d heard in the ocean. An entity so filled with anger and unbearable sorrow. I blinked back tears as a face appeared in front of me. The woman was stunningly beautiful with tanned skin and lustrous dark hair. As I watched, her face sank. Lines cracked her lips and cheeks until she turned into a crone. She opened her mouth and tried to spit at me. I threw up a shield and the image dispersed.

  I heard Rachel cry out as the circles smashed against hers. With the last scrap of wherewithal, I tried to direct the wave of magic away from her. The light was so bright it was blinding. I fell to my knees and tried to blink but my eyes were watering. I stayed that way until I heard sirens in the distance.

  24

  Somebody lifted me up. “We have to go,” Ashton said. I shrugged him off.

  “She’s in shock,” Rachel said.

  “Don’t touch me!” I snapped.

  “Alessia,” she said. “The emergency services are coming. You can’t be here when they arrive. They won’t understand.”

  I didn’t care. My mind was a maelstrom of confusing thoughts. My body was shaking from the expenditure of energy. This time, when somebody grabbed me, I didn’t try to resist. I might have blanked out a bit because the next time my eyes opened, I was lying in the back seat of the car. The streets were in chaos. It meant I had probably been unconscious for a while.

  “Far out,” Rachel breathed.

  Ashton was white as snow as he steered through the debris. The roads were gridlocked but he didn’t seem to mind. As long as we were in the crowd we’d be able to blend in. Even though the rain appeared to have stopped, Ashton hadn’t turned the wipers off. Tree branches littered the roads and sidewalks. Most of the cars around us looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to them. Our windscreen was a hairline crack away from shattering. It was a miracle the car was working. But that was nothing compared to the damage to the buildings. Structures that had always seemed so solid and imposing when I was living on the streets now stood sad and broken. There were scorch marks on the side of some of the buildings where they had been directly hit by lightning.

  Rachel noticed me stirring. “You okay?”

  I didn’t bother to answer. My head felt like it had been used as a rattle. In contrast, my stomach felt like it was completely hollow. “Here.” Rachel pressed a chocolate bar into my hand. If I had any dignity left, I would have thrown it at her head. Instead, I tore it open and gobbled it up in two bites. We inched forward at a snail’s pace. The traffic lights within a four-block radius were all out. For a while we barely moved. Rachel had time to get out and buy food at a convenience store and get back into the car without us having gone more than a few metres. I didn’t thank her for the meat pie or the vitamin water. All I could do was sit there and try not to think about the fact that two supernatural entities had tried to kill me. Or that it was Lucifer who has attempted to help me.

  Every now and then Ashton snuck glances at me in the rear-view mirror. It took an hour and a half to get clear of the city. By the time we arrived back at Terran, all I wanted to do was sleep. We went around the back entrance.

  A group of the students and Samantha were gathered around. I hopped out of the car on shaky legs. “Are you alright?” Jessica asked.

  I hoped the look I gave them was a withering glare. I suspected it looked more like a constipated grimace. Either way it seemed to work. They parted and allowed me to move between them into the building. I dragged my sorry butt into my bedroom and slammed the door. I stared at the bed that didn’t feel like mine for a few seconds and then curled up on the floor instead. I pressed my cheek to the cool wooden boards.

  It took an age to get my heart rate to slow. Only when I could feel my body relax and turn cold did I wrap my arms around myself. I was too weary to even cry. Somebody knocked on the door.

  “Alessia?” Samantha called.

  Her footsteps only receded after I let the query hang. I was grateful that, unlike Nanna, she didn’t think knocking was all she had to do before barging right in. And of course, it was the thought of Nanna that shattered the cocoon of apathy inside me. I was an ugly crier. Bu
t there was nobody here to see my cry. I let it all out in huge hacking sobs. The muscles in my face locked up. I used the hem of my shirt to wipe my snot and tears.

  It was late afternoon by the time my tears dried up. It occurred to me that this was the first time in a long time when something had shocked me so much I couldn’t keep my composure. It made me wonder if that was because Sophie had always been around to make me something soothing or if I just felt better knowing Kai was a single thought away. Or at the very least, I could knock on Jacqueline’s door and feel safe inside her office. Here I felt exposed and vulnerable. I felt...human. Why did that unnerve me?

  I was still mulling that over when Samantha tried again. This time, I opened the door for her. Rachel lingered in the hallway beside her. “May I come in?” Samantha asked.

  I stepped aside and let her enter. Rachel made a gesture to show me she didn’t mind if we locked her out. I didn’t argue.

  Alone inside my room with Samantha, I chose to sit on my bed instead of the floor. She perched on the edge of Rachel’s desk.

  “I understand you had a bit of a shock,” she said. Understatement of the century. The smart quip fizzled on my tongue. Goodness. I didn’t even have the energy to snark. Somebody call an ambulance.

  “Did you know?” I asked when I could find my voice again. She knew exactly what I was referring to.

  “We don’t have the luxury of being merciful,” she said.

  “You’re sacrificing supernaturals. It’s called murder.”

  She was quiet for a moment. I imagined she was trying to find some way to placate me. “Imagine the position we’re in that we would go to these lengths to protect ourselves.”

  “This isn’t about protection. The supernaturals aren’t hurting you. Were you the ones behind the recent attack on Bloodline?”