Bloodline Alchemy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 6) - Lan Chan (libby ebook reader txt) 📗

“Let’s get to it before she starts crying again,” Agatha said.

Maybe I would have a little accident and blow her face off. Kneeling on the floor, I drew a magic circle to contain the inevitable explosion. “You might want to protect yourselves.”

“I think we can manage,” Hugh smirked. Suit yourself.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Noah, can you please move to the far corner?” At first he didn’t budge. “Please.”

After a long beat, he started walking. When he was as far away as possible, I opened the vial and placed a drop of Lex’s blood on the ground. The pool of alchemic magic inside me reacted to her blood like the awakening of a feral animal after hibernation. Even I didn’t know what I was in for.

Rather than stay away as I’d cautioned, Agatha and Hugh came closer, magnetised by the pulsing power of Lex’s blood. “So little,” Hugh said. “But I can feel the heart of it.”

Tired of giving them warnings, I engaged the alchemy flowing through my veins. Pink light pooled around my fingers. Where the blood blade might have appeared, I shaved off a tiny slice and it came away in a liquid drop. Combining the drop with Lex’s blood, I then grabbed at the little pool with my magic.

As soon as the pink light touched the blood, sparks burst behind my eyelids. Gritting my teeth hard, I forced my magic to engulf Lex’s blood. From there, I sank my alchemy into that little drop, trying as I always did to imagine the essences becoming one. Thunder rolled in my ears. The ground beneath me shook and split. Cracks appeared in the cement. Pushing all of the destruction aside, I threaded my magic all around the little drop of blood. With an effort that made the dominance stare with Noah earlier look like a bare sneeze, I forced my will into Lex’s blood and commanded it to furnish me with its power.

The pain in my head was unbearable. Distantly, I heard myself screaming. Something warm dripped down from my nostril. But bit by agonising bit, my alchemy began to make headway. When the pink light of my magic finally ate up the silver and black, I peeled my eyes open. The gasp seemed to come from a different throat. Across my vision was a landscape of all the brightest colours in the world. A network of stars scattered across a midnight velvet canvas. The Ley dimension as Lex saw it. So unbelievably beautiful that I could hardly stand it. And then, I actually couldn’t stand it any longer.

Lex’s blood kicked back, slamming into me and forcing me against the barrier of the circle. It chewed through my magic in an instant, and then exploded in a violent rage that consumed the room. The last thing I saw was Agatha and Hugh’s disbelieving faces as a silver-and-black wave smashed into them.

15

When the rumble finally died in my ears, there was no strength left in my body. I just lay there wheezing. Despair was too light a word for it. That was the result of a single drop of blood. I was kidding myself that I would ever be able to do this.

A warm hand touched my shoulder. Throwing off the Ley sight, I looked up into Noah’s frowning face.

Thankfully, it was unscathed. He searched mine. “You okay?” he asked.

“Not really.” I pushed myself up. Actually, he grabbed my shoulder and lifted me up. The sight that lay before me was barren. “Crap.”

I’d destroyed the room. A ragged cough caught my attention. Hugh staggered to his feet and helped Agatha up. So much for the most fearsome order in mage society. Rather than being grim, they were jubilant.

“Think of what we could do with that blood,” Hugh said.

They could think again. I’d never make the mistake of giving them any or telling them where it was hidden.

“You had hardly any control over it,” Agatha accused me.

“I’m pretty sure I told you that from the start.”

The door opened with a resultant bang. Jacqueline stood in the doorway. “This isn’t what I had in mind when I agreed to lessons,” she said, surveying the damage.

“Are you going to cry over a bit of a mess?” Agatha spat.

Jacqueline’s eyes landed on me. “You’re hurt,” she said. “You should go to the infirmary.”

“She’s fine,” the sorceress shot back.

I was not fine. When I tried to stand up, something was definitely stabbing me in the side. Noah helped me to stand by bracing his arm around my back. As we walked out the door to the infirmary, I heard Agatha saying that if Jacqueline was going to have a fuss about some plaster being broken then we could have our lessons in the fens.

I would have objected if opening my mouth didn’t mean that I would lose my lunch. The infirmary was unusually busy. I didn’t recognise most of the people and some of them were way too old to be Academy students.

Doctor Thorne plied me with ambrosia, and I had to lie down for a while. Noah was quieter than usual. It gave me time to check out what was happening. In between ministrations to their patients, the nurses and Doctor Thorne were busy packing all manner of concoctions and things into drawstring bags.

“What’s going on?” I asked the doctor when he returned and gave me the all-clear.

“We’re helping to make preparations for the upcoming battle,” he said. It was all too calm. “You’re okay now, Sophie. Try not to do that again.”

Easier said than done.

Despite having an extra class than the other students, it was still early when we arrived back at the Reserve. A gaping hole appeared in my schedule. “Do you know if I’ve been assigned anything to do?” I asked Noah.

“Not that I’m aware of.”

We made it to the edge of the portal field. “How am I supposed to occupy my time?”

“Beats me.”

“Okay, well then what are the parameters of my ‘confinement’ then?”

He simply shrugged. “Maybe you shouldn’t