Bloodline Diplomacy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 3) - Lan Chan (thriller books to read .txt) 📗

a legend. She was born of full Sisterhood blood. Her magic circles were the stuff of legends. But those kinds of people tend to also be the erratic ones. She saw things that others didn’t. It made her paranoid. Sleep often eluded her. I remember once finding her out in the ocean. She was just sitting there talking to the water like it was alive.”

“Maybe it was,” I said.

Samantha smiled. “Maybe. It was just an odd sight. But then, that’s what your great-grandmother was.” She shook herself of those memories even though I could have sat there all day listening to them. “She was fanatical about her personal life too. She didn’t want anything to do with any technology and refused to allow us to use methods that weren’t natural. In that way, she had a lot in common with your monsters. That’s why it was so easy for her to disappear when she did. We just can’t work out how in the world and for what reason she took Gaia with her.”

“How do you expect me to find Gaia for you?”

“We’ve tried everything,” she said. “We’ve used every spell and every circle in our arsenal. We’ve had human scientists on the payroll in the guise of trying to find stolen artefacts. All of it has been in vain. But you have something we’ve been without. You’ve got her blood.”

I heard the fervour in her voice. It made me shiver. Apparently, I had everybody’s blood, but it wasn’t doing me any good. “You want me to perform blood magic?”

She immediately shook her head. “That sort of magic isn’t something we condone. We’ve known too many witches and wizards who gave in to it for the power it would give them over the monsters. It asks too much. But we’ve tried to summon Hilary’s spirit to guide us, but we’ve never managed to make contact. We’re hoping you’ll be able to.”

Nora had been right. This was way too much pressure to be laying at my feet. But what choice did I have?

“If I do this for you,” I said, “you need to promise me that you’ll go into these negotiations in good faith. Some of the monsters you keep talking about are my friends.”

“You’re asking a lot.”

“So are you.”

We stared at each other. I felt the slightest brush of a foreign circle around me. “You look like her, you know.”

“Who?”

“Hilary. She had those same big, blue eyes that refused to cower for anybody.”

If she was trying to soften me up, I was sad to say it was working. “We have an agreement,” she said. She looked at the clock.

“It’s getting on in the afternoon. I’ll let you go and get settled in. Rachel will be ready for your first class in an hour.”

“Rachel? Isn’t she a student?”

“She’s a student for the other classes, but she’s our accredited Horticulture teacher.” Samantha grinned at the stunned look on my face. I left feeling slightly uneasy. Nothing here was as it had seemed. It was both good and bad. That was the part that scared me. I’d become so used to thinking I knew who the enemy was. What would I do if both the humans and supernaturals were good and they ended up trying to kill each other anyway?

15

Rachel wasn’t in our room when I went in to unpack. It didn’t take very long. I splashed some water on my face in the bathroom down the hall and then went outside. There was still a little bit of time before I had to meet Rachel, so I headed towards the animal pens.

After five minutes, I could tell that I had misjudged the distance between the house and the rest of the pastures. I picked up speed and walked past some chicken, geese, and pigs. Then there were the stables.

“Can I help you?” a male voice called out. I turned to the right and found Ashton striding towards me.

“Umm... I wanted to see my dingo.” Now there was a sentence I never thought I would ever say. It wasn’t illegal to keep dingoes as pets, but I hadn’t even had a goldfish. Now I had another animal dependent on me.

Ashton was dark-haired and even darker eyed. He was broader than Sean with stocky shoulders and legs that had been made for hauling heavy things. He smiled at me, his cheeks creasing. “You’re about two minutes in the wrong direction,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

He took me back along the path and showed me where I should have veered right. “It would be nice if there were signs.”

He contemplated this. “I suppose that’s true. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a newcomer.”

That shut me up. I found the dingo in an enclosure that was as big as a basketball court. He was walking around in circles, sniffing at the grass. It was so lush and green that I imagined it confused his senses after the red dust and scraggly desert plants. He spotted me and came running over. I lowered my arm over the fencing. He licked at me, and I couldn’t help flinching at the foreign feeling of his rough tongue. It wasn’t unpleasant so much as unexpected.

“Does he have a name?” Ashton asked.

“I suppose I better give him one.” I’d never even thought about it before. It wasn’t as though I’d had to name anything besides my demon blade. Even that was kind of a botch job. “What do you think?”

“Hmmm. He looks a little bit wild.” He frowned when he caught sight of the scars. “What are these from?”

“Chain-link fence.”

The frown deepened. “Did somebody tell you that?”

“No, I saw it.”

“Doesn’t look like a fence scar. It’s too clean a slice.”

“One of the Nephilim healed him after I found him.”

I wasn’t even sure why I was continuing the lie. Only that I didn’t want to cause more tension by suggesting things like this were happening frequently at Bloodline. “Ah right. What about Scar?”

“I’m sorry, but this isn’t a