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

stunning pearlescent scales. As was the crown of her head. The tip of her tailfin curled around the front of her body, making imprints in the sand. She blinked black eyes at me and held out her arm.

As mesmerised as I was by the sheer beauty of her, I shook my head. Another mermaid joined her. They angled their heads together. By now I was adept enough with telepathic behaviour to understand when the supernaturals were conversing silently.

Isla charged out of the water after one of the other Fae splashed her. In her delight, she seemed to have forgotten she had wings. Her feet made dimples in the sand. She turned her head and saw the mermaids. Leaning down, she spoke close to them. The pitying looks the mermaids gave me made my eyes sting.

Relief flooded through me when the bell rang. I arrived through the portal in record time. But no matter how fast I was, Isla appeared a millisecond later. I refused to look at her. Brushing sand off my jeans, I grabbed my backpack and ran towards Weaponry and Combat.

It was unfortunate Isla was in the same class. When she wanted to be, she was like a mollusc. For some reason, she decided she was going to be a pain in my neck today.

“Do not say a word,” I warned her as we lined up to enter the class.

Her cheek puckered like she was biting the inside of it. I’d never known her to be so tactful before. “You’re really scared of the water, aren’t you?”

I never figured her for being dense either. “Nah. I just like to be dramatic.”

Sophie arrived and waved at me. Diana wasn’t far behind her. Seeing that we were about to have company, Isla grabbed my arm. My first instinct was to yank it back, but the expression on her face gave me pause. It was the same one the mermaids had given me. Pity. Like I was missing out on the best thing in the world.

“If you want, I can help you,” she said. The offer was followed by the immediate release of my arm. She stalked away to join her own friends.

I would have been less surprised if her hair morphed into a bed of snakes. My mouth was still gaping when the girls caught up to me. “You’re going to catch pixies with your mouth open like that,” Diana informed me. I snapped it closed and prepared for another lesson of torture. We were using bows again this lesson. Everyone else, including Sophie, had graduated to the more advanced models that were magicked to burst into flame or explode on contact. I was still stuck with your basic version that did nothing. Someone, I suspected Trey, had blunted the tips so I wouldn’t damage the walls when I inevitably missed the target.

I stood in my shooting lane that had been set up right on the edge of the class. Beside me, Diana was drawing and releasing like she’d been born with a bow in her hand. Her brother and Trey were waiting for Professor Eldridge to call a halt so they could safely retrieve their arrows. My last attempt had gone astray somewhere in another lane. The retrieval process usually involved me tiptoeing onto others people’s space as I apologetically picked up arrows.

As I stood there watching them, I was hit with a wave of incredulity. Sasha and Trey were now play-wrestling with each other. And by play, I meant Trey had Sasha in an arm bar and was trying to get the vamp to tap out. I heard muscle tearing but neither of them gave the impression they were in pain. In my periphery, someone struck the bullseye. The arrow caught purple fire. It warped the target into a sludgy mess. The sorceress then raised her hand and flicked. Both arrow and target rematerialised.

I gulped. Only a few days ago, I’d sat there at Terran and was horrified at the sight of rudimentary weapons meant to incapacitate supernaturals. For over a year I’d trained in this room of burgeoning death and hadn’t batted an eyelid. Something was definitely messed up.

I was so caught up in contemplation that I missed the signal for retrieval. The rest of the class passed in a blur. My distraction continued as I stood in the buffet line in the dining hall. Two goblin girls chatted amiably in the line in front of me. A little farther ahead, I saw Gwen, a leopard shifter who had been on my first semester exam team, bending a solid metal bar into a bow.

“Are you really eating that?” Sophie asked. I glanced down at where I was putting marinara sauce on my slice of cheesecake.

“Dammit!”

“Are you alright?”

I took in a long breath and tried to salvage the cheesecake by spooning the sauce off. Sophie made a face. “You can’t eat that now.”

Sure I could. I’d eaten worse. She took the whole tray from me and handed it to one of her friends behind the counter. The Fae boy gave me another tray. Somebody in line behind us tapped their foot. We were holding people up.

“What’s going on?” Sophie asked on our way to the table.

“Has it ever occurred to you that if they wanted to, the supernaturals could kill us in the blink of an eye?”

She did a double-take. It was terrible timing that we passed Max’s table at that very second. His laser focus settled on to her, and I heard him growling softly over the noise of dining hall. Something in Sophie’s expression closed over, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with Max’s interest.

“They’d get into a lot of trouble if they did,” Sophie said.

“If they did what?” Diana asked. We’d reached the table and I slid into the bench next to Trey. Sophie’s eyes shot warning signals at me. I wasn’t that dense. This was not a safe topic of conversation.

“Nothing,” I said. Sasha and Roland arrived. They brought with them