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

by Lan Chan

  I turned towards the fire mage. Of the three of them, he had the most even temperament. He shrugged. “It’s only half the money I have,” Luther said. “But when you win, I’ll more than triple my stash.”

  It wasn’t until they were walking me back that something else hit me. “Wait,” I said, “you bet for me to win, not just for me to beat Chanelle?”

  Charles grinned at me. “After the way you cracked it last semester, we don’t even think Kai has a chance against you.”

  They dropped me off at the edge of the kitchen garden. I was still grinning until I walked into my room. “There you are!” Sophie said. “I’ve been worried sick. Giselle is spitting chips that you didn’t show up to training.”

  I waved it away and told her what happened. She was so stunned her comb got stuck in her hair. She dropped her arms. The comb stayed tangled in her tight curls. “He didn’t!” she said.

  “Afraid so.”

  “I could kill him!”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She came over and hugged me. “I don’t think Giselle will care,” she observed.

  I laughed. “Me either.”

  I slipped into bed and was out like a light. It would have been a night when I slept like the dead, except I was torn awake by the sound of the ground shaking.

  20

  Sophie stomped out of bed and flung our door open. I was a bit slower on the uptake. The Evil Three and some of the Fae were already out on the landing when I caught up with her.

  “No,” she said. “I am not having another sleepless night. Whatever is making that noise better stop.”

  “It’s Kai,” Max said. He emerged from the top of the boy’s wing landing wearing only pyjama bottoms. Sophie stopped hopping down the staircase. Even in the dim light of the dorms, I could see her face going still. I had a feeling she was only just now realising she was in her pyjamas too.

  I took in what I thought was a calming breath. It felt like it heated through a boiler in my chest and came out steaming. “I’ll deal with it,” I said.

  I knew where that sound was coming from. I had committed some of the new layout to memory. When I reached the illusion training room, there was already a crowd lingering out the front of it. Most of them were Bloodline kids, but I could see some from the other Academies coming from their directions.

  “Scram!” I snapped at them.

  I expected to walk in on another deranged training session. My muscles stretched taut in anticipation of demons springing at me from either side. Instead, the ground became a rock face jutting out against the sheer cliff of a mountain. Kai sat on the very edge with his legs dangling over the side. His shoulders were hunched in a way I’d never seen before.

  In the distance, smoke wafted from the fires and clogged the air in dark plumes. The towers of Seraphina rose up into the sky. They too appeared grim and foreboding. In the air, Nephilim in soot-covered armour clashed with demons whose wings were membranous with clawed tips. Some of flying demons were humanoid. Others were horrific amalgams of para-human creatures. A demon with blood-red scales swooped down on the city below. It blew smoke out of its nostril that lit up the spires of the city. When the fire turned blue, the spires shattered. The ground rumbled. That was the sound I’d heard earlier.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the battle in the sky. But I had been conditioned by the prophecy to look up. To look out for Kai and watch him die. In this twisted memory, his sight was riveted below. My ears weren’t sharp enough, but I thought I heard the distinct sounds of screaming. My heart palpated. I knew you weren’t supposed to wake people while they were having nightmares, but he’d seen this enough times that he didn’t need the illusion magic to recreate it.

  “Turn off the simulation,” I said. The room immediately dismantled the image. It was almost like it had been waiting for me. Like it knew this was a bad deal. Without the illusion, Kai was just sitting on the floor.

  “Get out,” he said. “You don’t need to be here.”

  “Yeah I got that. But since you’re disturbing the peace and I’m not going to be able to sleep, I thought I might as well stick around.”

  “Really?” he said. “You mean you don’t want to take another cheap shot at me? Or accuse me of wallowing in my grief?”

  I shrugged and lowered myself down on one knee beside him. “Believe me, the urge is definitely still there.”

  The growl that he emitted was so sharp it scraped at my skin. He flipped from his sitting position to crouch in front of me. His fists slammed into the concrete floor. It sent cracks blossoming out into a half-dozen circles. All of the hairs on my body stood to attention. I’d seen him in this kind of killing rage before, but it was never directed at me. My eyes must have been two big saucers of white.

  “I said leave! I don’t need your pity. You’ve made yourself very clear. If I wanted to listen to someone spewing sarcasm I would –”

  My fist clipped him right in the jaw. It didn’t do much besides cause his cheek to ripple a little, but he got the message. Way back when we’d first met, he’d told me I had no flight response. Even with a manticore breathing down my neck, I didn’t have the good sense to run. So of course, when I had an enraged Nephilim shouting at me, my first instinct was to hit back. That’s about where my bag of tricks ended.

  His arm shot out. He grabbed me around the waist. I tried to scramble away but he was much too fast. There was barely enough time to formulate a plan of counterattack before he strode to the door and was yanking it open. I had a feeling he was going to toss me out. I drew a circle around the both of us and tightened it inch by inch so that it became a tether. Where I went, he went.

  “Undo the circle,” he seethed. With the circle hampering his ability to move, his chest was pressed right up against my shoulder. I could feel the heat of his breath against my neck. The door yawned open. My earlier command had had very little influence. Those that had scattered returned with other lemming friends. Every single one of them was watching us like we were some kind of half-time show.

  My attention locked on Chanelle standing there wrapped in a light shawl. Of course she slept in a silk slip. Why not? It wasn’t as though we were living in dangerous times. Kai saw what I was looking at. If possible, his eyes narrowed even further.

  “Undo. The. Circle.”

  I clenched my fist. The circle constricted. My cheek mashed against his collarbone. “I’m not joking, Alessia.”

  I had a death wish.

  “I’m not joking, Alessia,” I mimicked, letting my voice drop. He didn’t seem to appreciate what I thought was a pretty good imitation. I exercised impressive restraint. After all, I didn’t beat at my chest or anything. There was enough room for him to turn me around so that we faced each other. The sound of the door slamming shut had me gasping. He pressed my back against it. His hands came down on either side of my shoulders, caging me in place. I lifted my gaze and stared him right in the eye.

  The pool of green had turned into a murky swamp. Still I found myself swimming in them. “You don’t get to pick and choose when you want to be around me,” he said.

  I snorted. “Tell me about it. I certainly don’t want to be around you at the moment. And judging by how scarce they’ve made themselves, neither does anyone else.”

  “Then why don’t you just leave?” he snarled in my face.

  “Because me being here is annoying. Right now, I’d rather you be annoyed than watch you hurt yourself over and over again with something that you can’t change.”

  He scoffed. “It’s only real if I still hurt.”

  “Disagree. Want me to kick you in the balls again to see if you remember the pain?” He flinched and moved his hips away from me. I let out a laugh, but it was humourless. It made me think about why I’d kicked him in the first place.

  “If you’re so hell bent on doing this, Chanelle’s outside. Why don’t you do this with her?”

  His face twisted into a mask of irritation. He’d been angry at m
e, but this wasn’t anger. It was something else. “Then tell me,” I said. When he looked away, I grabbed the scruff of his shirt and dragged him back. “What’s happened to set you off? When you close your eyes at night, what monsters are chasing you?”

  It was the only thing I could think of that would reduce someone like him to such blinding fury. On the same day last year, he hadn’t been like this. So whatever this was, it was recent. I could only think of one thing that made me want to claw at my own skin and that was being helpless in the face of something that terrified me.

  “It was nothing.” His voice was a harsh whisper. I didn’t think he noticed that his hand had moved to my hip. He balled my shirt in his fist. It was clenched so tight I heard material tearing.

  All of a sudden, I knew. “You saw the prophecy,” I said.

  “Blue.” The pressure of his mouth was bruising when he kissed me, but I didn’t back away. He jerked me forward with the hand on my hip. I moved with him, whimpering when he shaped my butt and lifted me up. I wrapped my legs around his hips. My back arched into him. His tongue swept over mine. Heat curled in my gut. I whined when he pulled away.

  Kai dropped his forehead to mine. “What did you see?” I asked again.

  His answer was to crush me in his embrace. The loud thump of his racing heartbeat made me apprehensive. I’d seen many iterations of his death, but something about him being the recipient of a vision terrified me. “Do I die?”

  He gripped the door frame so hard it fractured. “Don’t,” he said. At the same time, he tightened his hold on me with his other arm. Angelfire lit up the aura around him. I felt the first strains of a teleport but didn’t have the slightest idea where we would go right now. When we remained suspended, it struck me that he didn’t intend to light himself up. Almost as though he was scared something was coming and he was preparing for us to run.

  I grabbed a chunk of hair at the base of his neck and pulled his head back. “Kai,” I said. “I can’t be the meek little human for your Council and the girl who survives the wrath of the devil at the same time. It’s mutually incompatible. If what you saw is Lucifer coming for me, I can’t run. I won’t run.”

  He looked into my eyes, searching for a second. The way he turned his head away made me think that wasn’t it. “Kai! If I don’t know what’s coming, I can’t prepare for it.”

  He finally let me go to the tune of a vicious growl. “I saw your death,” he said. “But it wasn’t Lucifer. On the field of battle, when you turn on us, I’m the one who kills you.”

  The light around him fluctuated into a tone so dark it was almost black. “I keep seeing a vision where you’re the one who brought the armies of Hell to Seraphina to murder my family. And I’m forced to kill you to save them. That’s why...” he made a sweeping gesture at the room. I finally understood. He was in here reliving this memory not because he wanted to torture himself, but because he needed reassurance that it hadn’t happened this way.

  “It’s not real,” I reminded him. “You of all people should know that.”

  He started pacing, his fists balled at his sides. “All this waiting around is really pissing me off. But what else can we do? We can’t kill him.”

  That was the bloody catch-22 in all of this. Lucifer was our biggest threat but to kill him meant unmaking a seraph, and that kind of energy displacement would destroy our dimension. But with Lucifer alive, the prophecy in all of its iterations would always hang over my head. It was an impossible riddle. One I was too tired to contemplate tonight. I stifled a yawn behind my hand.

  Kai watched me rub my eyes. His gaze lingered on where my pyjama bottoms had ridden down and the top of my panties were showing. I yanked my pants up hurriedly but he was already smirking. “What?”

  “Little snowflakes?”

  I could feel the blush creep over my skin. But I tilted my chin up. “It’s seasonally appropriate,” I said. “Actually, I’m kind of cold.”

  Neither of us pointed out the thinly veiled ruse to get him to hug me. He did it anyway. I pressed my nose to his chest and inhaled. “I’m sorry about your family,” I said. “I promise to try not to die.”

  He stiffened. “That’s not funny.”

  “I know it isn’t. I’m not trying to be.”

  I could feel him swallowing hard. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about today,” he said. “It’s hard enough for you at the moment. The last thing I wanted to do was dump this on you. Obviously that failed.”

  “I don’t need you to save me, Kai.” I chewed on the next words. It was still difficult to put myself into a vulnerable position. “But I can’t walk around the corner and see you holding her. I have enough problems with trust as it is.”

  He held me closer. “Got it,” he said. “For what it’s worth, she just kind of grabbed me and she was crying and I –”

  “Stop talking.”

  He cupped my face in his hands. “Can I just say one more thing?” I nodded reluctantly. “You didn’t show up to training today –”

  I groaned and slapped his hands away. “You’re the worst.”

  “I’m just saying you’re already at a disadvantage so it’s not the best idea –”

  I opened the door and started to walk away. He didn’t follow. The crowd outside had dispersed a little, but I didn’t need radar to know Chanelle was still among them. I was all the way to my door before I huffed at the sight of him leaning against the hallway.

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “Do you see my point?” A monkey would have gotten the point by now. I was going to be competing against supernaturals who, amongst other things, could teleport. If I kept skipping training, I was going to get my ass handed to me. Even if I went to training, I was probably going to get my ass handed to me.

  “I’ll have you know the kids think I’m going to win.”

  He chuckled. “The kids still believe in some of our fairy tales.”

  “Just you wait.”

  He reached out and grasped my hand. “One way or another, I’ll nullify this blood vow. Just try and stay alive.”

  Trying to stay alive seemed to be my motto these days.

  21

  Both Sasha and Roland scowled at me over breakfast. “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re annoyed I didn’t go to training last night.”

  They just glowered. “Oh, get over it,” I said. “It was one day.” I was already in a sullen mood. Giselle had left a threatening note under our door this morning.

  “You’re not taking this very seriously,” Sasha finally said.

  “Give her a break,” Diana said. “There’s more going on than just the games.”

  Roland almost choked on his eggs. “You’ve been talking non-stop about the games for weeks.”

  “That was before I found out our friend is going to die in them.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She zipped her lip. I was feeling slightly buoyed this morning. It turned out all of my friends had signed up for Magical Artefacts. It was nice to be able to go to class knowing I wouldn’t have to fend for myself against a bunch of supernatural jerks. I didn’t question anything at all until Sasha moved ahead of our group a few paces. Roland and Trey branched off, one on each side of me, and Diana dropped behind.

  “What are you guys doing?” I asked. Sophie linked her arm in mine.

  I tried to stare past Sasha, but he was too tall.

  “Hey, guys,” Isla said. She oh so casually walked past with the Evil Three. They had become friends since the semester began.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  We approached the big golden doors at the entrance to Pantheon Academy. Students from all three Academies were mingling in the commons.

  Sasha turned around and Sophie nodded at him. He pushed open the doors. “Seriously, what’s up with you guys?”

  My foot hit the top step. I walked through the doors and came to a dead stop. Sophie’s arm grew tight around me. “Keep walking,” she said. I didn’t move. I
was too busy starting at the picture of myself. At least it had been a picture of me. It was an image of my face blown up and pinned to the notice board just inside the entrance. It was about the size of a poster. Beside my portrait was one of Chanelle. While she looked effortlessly graceful in hers, someone had gone over mine in red paint. They’d filled my eyes in and drawn devil horns on me.

  I could feel the steam coming out of my ears. Trey stopped me when I stepped forward. “Don’t bother,” he said. “They put up a new one every time someone rips it down.” There was a scoreboard next to the poster not unlike the ones Bloodline Academy used to tally their House points. In this one, Chanelle’s score was at least ten times mine.

  When I could finally find my voice, I glanced at Sophie. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Her expression turned soft. “We didn’t want to upset you unnecessarily.”

  “It’s bloody pathetic,” Harlow spat.

  “Come on,” Sasha said. “Class is this way.”

  For a second, I considered backing around and running away. And then my focus landed on the demon version of me. For a fraction of a second, the self-control I’d exerted over myself cracked. The Ley dimension threatened to take hold of me, but I beat it back. It was beginning to become a security blanket. The last thing I needed at the moment was to feel secure. All of this was going on under my nose and I hadn’t even known it. If they wanted to see a demon, I would give it to them.

  Sophie noticed me bristling. She rubbed her hands up and down my arms. “Don’t let them get to you,” she said. “They’re just scared because it’s so bloody obvious Kai chose you over Chanelle.”

  “Yeah, and you’re going to wipe the floor with her in the games,” Diana said.

  I stamped my foot. “Five minutes ago, you said I was going to die!”

  “Yeah, but you’ll at least outlive her!”

  I couldn’t help laughing. A part of me had accepted long ago that I would never be Miss Popularity. I would certainly never be Miss Congeniality. But I sure as heck could be Miss Never Take Shit Lying Down.