by Lan Chan
There was a moment of poised silence. The blonde woman’s lips pouted. She glanced at her short-haired companion. I could tell she didn’t want to speak to Jacqueline directly. On her part, the headmistress was a picture of stoic calm. I, on the other hand, wanted to jump the fence and slap the blonde woman across the face.
“The arrangement has already been decided,” the blonde woman finally said. Her voice was pained. “Alessia will join us. End of discussion.”
“I don’t think so,” Nora responded.
“You of all people should understand why we don’t want our own mixing with the monsters.” She then eyed the way Sophie was peering out from behind Kai’s shoulder. “But I see it’s too late for your daughter. It’s not too late for Alessia.”
This time, Basil huffed. I could see his gaze slide towards Kai. Clearly he disagreed. He’d been having a rough time keeping Kai out of the mansion over the past few weeks.
“We can’t allow Lex to just abandon her education at Bloodline Academy,” Jacqueline interjected before Basil could say something snarky. “There are things she still needs to learn.”
The blonde woman laughed. It was a light chortle that was quite pleasant. “And you think she’ll have an easier time learning how to be a hedge witch and a soul splitter amongst your kind than her own?” She swept her hand across the wide expanse of sea. I almost shuddered. “This is where she should have been from the start. Just because you scooped her up first doesn’t mean you have any rights to her.”
“If you had known about her, you should have protected her,” Jacqueline said. “And her grandmother.”
The accusation caused a blotch of red to sweep across the blonde woman’s neck. I imagined she didn’t take kindly to knowing that my protection and sleep circles had kept me under their radar for most of my teenage years. “Well, now we do know about her. And she belongs with us.”
“Can you stop saying that?” I asked. “I’m not your property. Let’s get that straight right now.”
The short-haired woman approached the gate. She wrapped her pudgy fingers around the metal bars. “But you are ours, Alessia. Don’t you feel it? You were born to one of us.”
She glanced up at where Jacqueline and Professor Mortimer were flanking me. “I bet they’ve been telling you that hedge magic shouldn’t be very strong, haven’t they? I bet they’ve told you that you should be afraid of the Council that rules over them with such ineptitude. But you don’t have to listen to that anymore. Join us.”
I almost recoiled from the fervour of her speech. There was a note of obsession in it that made my skin crawl. At the same time, my ears pricked up at what she had said.
“What do you mean not all hedge magic is weak?”
The blonde woman smirked. “You’ll learn here at Terran Academy that not all of what you’ve been told by the monsters is true.”
“You’re welcome to your own beliefs,” Professor Mortimer said, “but please don’t misrepresent us. We’ve always had Alessia’s best interests at heart.” In the year that I’d known him, this was about as close to losing his temper as I’d ever seen him. Clearly, this meeting was getting us nowhere.
“Thanks for the offer,” I said. “But I don’t really need yet more schooling taking up my time.”
I was about to turn when the guy ambled up beside his companion. “So I take it you’re not interested in learning where you come from?”
I frowned. My gaze drifted naturally to Kai. His expression was wary. There was something dark-looking behind his forest-green eyes. When I’d first arrived at Bloodline, Kai had spent a great deal of time trying to figure out the source of my power. It was only when Azrael came forth to claim me that he dropped it.
“I come from where I come from,” I said. “When I figure out how to unbind my grandmother, she’ll be able to tell me.”
The blonde woman laughed again. “I’m afraid that might be difficult, sweetheart. I don’t know who that woman who raised you could be, but she’s definitely not your grandmother.”
Everything around me stilled. I turned back towards her slowly. Unsure how it happened, I was suddenly an inch away from the gate. “What did you say?”
She drew up in front of me and stepped closer. She wasn’t all that much taller than me. “You heard what I said.”
“You’re lying.”
“Why would I do that?”
“You’d say anything to get your own way.” My voice hitched.
“Blue,” Kai was beside me. Sophie came to stand on my other side.
The blonde woman smirked. “That’s probably a fair assessment. But it doesn’t serve my purpose to lie to you about this. We want you to stay. So we need you to know the truth.”
“I know the truth.”
She blinked. If not for the trash she was talking, I might have believed she wasn’t enjoying what she was saying. “She might have raised you unwittingly, but she’s not your grandmother. For one thing, she’s a magical dud.”
Something clenched around my heart. I felt Basil’s presence behind me. She looked up into his face and her smile turned feral.
“Let’s go, Lex,” he said. His hand was on my shoulder, but I didn’t budge.
“Now who’s lying?” the woman said. “You’ve known since you were unbound and you didn’t say a word.”
My breath was ragged when Basil turned me to look at him. Grooves bracketed his mouth. “Basil?”
“Let’s go,” he repeated. “We’ll talk about this at home.”
I shrugged out of his hold. The blonde woman chuckled. “That’s right. You say you’re doing what’s best for her, but you keep her locked up behind a fallacy. Bethany Hastings isn’t your grandmother.”
And suddenly, the swell of the ocean wasn’t the loudest thing in my ears. It was the sound of my own internal screaming.
6
Tears stung my eyes. Inside my head, my brain threw up objections. No, no, no, no. No! My entire life had been turbulent. We moved around so much I never managed to even get used to the street names. But Nanna had always been the constant. Nanna had read to me and taught me to draw and to garden. And now they were telling me she wasn’t who she claimed to be.
My lips quivered, but when I pulled my hands away from my mouth, my teeth gritted together. The world wavered in front of me. When Kai tried to grab hold of me, his hands slid right through my body. In contrast, the air around the blonde woman shimmered. She phased through the iron bars of the gate.
Reaching up, she placed her palms on my temples. They were solid. “Breathe,” she said. I shoved her away and rounded on Basil.
“The truth,” I said. He didn’t hesitate.
“I didn’t know before I was unbound,” he said. “I believed she was your grandmother. I believed it the entire time I was cursed.”
“And now?” The frantic throbbing in my chest turned cold at the look of pity and shock on the faces of the supernatural beings around me.
“I remember the day your great-grandmother cursed me. I didn’t know Bethany until then.”
“You said you watched her grow up.”
He rubbed his temple. “I thought that was true.”
“You see,” the blonde woman said. “They even lie to themselves.”
I ignored her. “Who is she then?” I asked.
Basil shook his head. “I don’t know.”
It wasn’t good enough. I started stomping away. “Blue!” Kai snatched at my wrist.
“Take me to Seraphina.”
I thought he would object but the world disintegrated into a ripple of green and silver lights. I shivered as the feeling of pleasure and pain permeated my body. We landed in the walled garden where Nanna now spent her days. Nanna. I couldn’t even call her that anymore.
“Did you know?” I stared at him. Those emerald green eyes of his were two stones of darkness.
“No. I would have told you.”
I believed him. He knew the consequences of lying to me. Basil didn�
��t really lie to me either, but that didn’t alleviate the shard of glass that was tearing into my throat.
“I don’t know what to do?” It was a squeak. What I wanted was to run through the place, find my Nanna, and figure out if the blonde woman was somehow lying. What I did was sink against Kai when he wrapped his arms around me.
“I knew we shouldn’t have gone to meet them,” I said into the hard muscle of his chest. It was muffled, but he must have gotten the gist of it because his fingers threaded into the hair at the nape of my neck.
“You could never have prepared for that,” he murmured into my hair. After a long beat he added, “Whether or not she’s related by blood, she still raised you.”
A single tear, the only one I would allow, slid down my cheek. I could feel my mind trying to push the notion into a box so that I could continue to keep a lid on the scream. The urge to lash out was strong. If I went down that road, I would probably phase, and that would bring down a troop of guards on us.
As it was, somebody had noted that we had appeared out of thin air. “Malachi,” a voice behind us questioned.
Kai unwrapped his arms from around me. The frown on the other Nephilim’s face deepened when he saw me. “Is something amiss?”
“We need to see the human,” Kai said. There was no give in his request. The other Nephilim nodded and swept his cloak aside. I wasn’t sure if it was a conscious gesture, but the action revealed the broadsword strapped to his hip.
He led us through the archway of the big white building where they always seemed to take Nanna away from me. As we passed under the archway, the sweep of a cloak had my head turning. I almost dropped to my knees at the sight of Raphael.
Kai lowered his head. “My Lord.”
Raphael nodded. I knew I should do the same, but the anticipation of what was to come had made me lethargic. My heart was pounding erratically in my chest.
“There is no need for this,” Raphael said.
“I want to see her.”
He blocked my path with his enormous arm. Kai stepped to the side. I knew he would throw himself at any threat that came at me, but he wasn’t going to defy the deity whose blood he had inherited. I wanted to kick him.
“Alessia. There’s no need to disturb her. I can give you the answers you seek.”
He wasn’t the one I was furious with. That pleasure belonged to one of his brothers.
You know, don’t you? I snarled at Azrael. There was silence in my mind. My whole body must have tightened because I heard something crack.
Raphael knelt down beside me. His blue eyes were ringed with concern. The stabbing in my gut eased. “There are things we cannot do,” he said. “So much of what we can reveal would make your lives more difficult.”
I clenched my mouth shut because I didn’t want to say anything contrary.
“I’m sorry.” His apology cracked something inside of me. The tears I’d been trying to suppress overflowed. Through my blurry eyes, I saw Kai step towards me, but I shook my head and swiped at my face.
“Just tell me once and for all. Is she my grandmother?”
Raphael sighed. “No.”
I swallowed hard. My pulse was pounding in my ears. I wasn’t sure how long I stayed that way, but the light outside was fading. When my tears eventually subsided, Raphael patted my hair before he teleported away.
“Blue,” Kai finally said. I continued to sit and stare.
“What if I free her and she still doesn’t know who I am?” I let the fear out into the world. “What if everything is a lie?”
He held me against his chest. “The woman I’ve come to know inside Seraphina loves bugs,” he said. “How could she not love you?” I knew exactly how. I wasn’t particularly likeable. I had so many childhood memories in which I’d stubbornly refused to do as she asked. Back then she had to love me because she was my grandmother. What about now?
“Maybe I shouldn’t mess around with her binding.” It was a statement borne of terror. Kai understood that and didn’t say a word. If Nanna never regained her memories then she would never remember I wasn’t her blood. So then who was I? Could I condemn her to being trapped because I was selfish? I balled my fists.
When I got myself under control, Kai teleported us back to the soul gates, I rattled the bars with my hands. “Teach me to unbind her and I’ll join you.”
The guy gave me another sardonic smile. If he thought he was charming in any way, he had another thing coming. After a year of living with supernaturals, human charm did nothing for me.
“We had a feeling you would want to know,” he said. Did he want a medal? It wasn’t exactly a difficult prediction to make.
“We should discuss the terms of your stay,” the blonde woman said. “If nothing else, the things you can do are dangerous. You’re not stable. You could endanger a lot of people.”
She looked at Jacqueline for the first time. “Isn’t that what you’ve been afraid of this whole time? You took her in because you couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. You couldn’t take the risk of exposing her to your world.”
“Please don’t put words in my mouth,” Jacqueline corrected.
Except that was exactly the reason why Bloodline Academy had taken me. I couldn’t help staring into Kai’s impassive face. He had locked me up after our first encounter and refused to let me out based on the fact that I was an unknown quantity.
“She’s not going to do anything like that,” Sophie said. She put her arm around me. “And you can stop trying to scare her.”
I leaned into her. The short-haired woman picked at her stubby nails. “We’re not trying to scare her. But she can’t just be at large any longer. She’s Sisterhood. She needs to be brought into the fold.”
This was starting to sound more cultish by the second. “I’m so not going to do anything just because you say I have to.”
“We’re not saying you have to, sweetheart,” the blonde woman said. “But you’ve been...persuaded into a line of thinking. Give us a chance to convince you otherwise.” She was everything Nanna wasn’t. Prim. Narcissistic, and worse of all, cajoling. If Nanna wanted something, she came out with it, and if I didn’t like it then tough luck.
“How can she decide if she wants to go here if you won’t even let her through the door?” Mani asked. He was massaging his quads. They had been standing around for a while.
“Alessia can come in at any time,” the short-haired woman said. “The rest of you are a different story. Why you felt like you could take it upon yourselves to trespass on our land is questionable.”
“It was either we came with her or she didn’t come at all,” Kai said. “Take your pick.”
The woman eyed him. Her cheek quivered. That’s right. Supernatural or not, he had that effect on people in general and red-blooded women in particular.
Jacqueline poked Kai in the ribs. He was trying very hard not to just barge into Terran Academy. The adults conferred. Sophie and I stood apart. We’d spent a lot of time together in the past year.
I knew some of the supernaturals possessed telepathy, but I would bet I could work out exactly what Sophie was thinking right now.
She had a tendency to try and rationalise things so that she could understand people. There was so much empathy in her it spilled over into her magic. I pinched her on her side.
“Stop it,” I hissed. I could just imagine she had insisted on coming today so she could be here if I needed her.
“I feel bad for her,” Sophie said. “She seems slightly unhinged.”
“Nuts is the word for it.”
She tapped her chin. “The whole Sisterhood seems to be slightly unnerving.”
“That’s because we spend so much of our time dealing with creatures that shouldn’t exist in our dimension,” the blonde woman said. I narrowed my eyes at her as Sophie cringed. What kind of old woman had such good hearing?
Jacqueline cleared her throat. “We would be willing to allow Lex to enter on the proviso that N
ora and Emmanuelle stay with her.”
“And me,” Sophie interjected.
“I’m not leaving her,” Kai snapped.
“I’m not going with them,” I offered.
Basil pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is getting nowhere.”
“Agreed,” the blonde woman said. “Alessia stays with us and the rest of you can leave. What do you think we’ll do with her? More importantly, what could we possibly do that you haven’t done to her already?”
They knew too much about me. And about what had happened since I joined Bloodline. Could it be possible that they had a spy? Or was it more likely that Giselle had lifted the information from me.
“We appear to be at a stalemate,” Jacqueline said. She tapped at the bangles on her left hand.
“If we were holding one of yours captive,” the blonde woman said, “how would you react?”
“They’re not holding me captive,” I snapped.
“It’s called Stockholm Syndrome.”
I was pretty sure she’d just insulted me. The suggestion that I might not really know what I was doing grated on me.
“Don’t you want to know where you came from?” the blonde woman asked. “Surely you’re curious as to why your abilities are so different?”
“Are you telling me that you know why?”
She shook her head. If she had come right out and promised me they could give me answers, I would probably have gotten on the bus and left.
“Ask yourself this,” the blonde woman said, “how much have the monsters been able to show you about what you truly are?”
I bit my bottom lip even as I dreaded the shadow that crept over Kai’s face. “How are you going to do any better?” I insisted.
“We have the patronage of Gaia. Unlike the monsters, she knows all of her children.”
I couldn’t deny that I was curious. Finding out what I was had been my goal from the beginning. But I was starting to think some things might be better left unknown. The blonde woman knew she had me when I glanced up at Nora. I almost refused just because of the smile that tugged at the woman’s lips.