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

As I turned, something flashed in the back of my mind. I could swear I heard that echoing voice whispering my name. I turned around but there was nothing there.

Great. On top of everything else, I was now hearing things.

Rachel was also back by the time I returned. After breakfast, I met her and Ashton in the parking lot. “You sure you want to come along?” he asked. He had traded in his coveralls for a pair of black jeans and a T-shirt with a heavy metal band logo on the front of it. He wore aviator sunglasses to keep the morning glare off his face.

“Yeah.”

“They’re a suspicious lot. I’ve called ahead to let them know we’ll have someone new with us, but it’d be best if you kept a low profile. Let Rach and me do the talking.”

Rachel was already in the front seat. The drive to Melbourne took over an hour. I breathed a sigh of relief as the urban sprawl blocked out the water. Yeah, I was a weirdo. Most people loved the beach. I could get used to the country lifestyle, but there was just no way I wanted to be near the water any more than I had to be. We crossed over the freeway and drove into the city proper.

You would think the city would be less busy on a weekend. In a way, it was. The usual business people who worked in their office jobs were blessedly absent. In their place were the families and people out shopping and meeting up with friends.

Ashton drove up towards the underpass where the Crown Casino and the Docklands met. I shuddered thinking about the rats I’d encountered in my exams for the first semester. This had been the background.

By some miracle we found parking on the street a couple of blocks away and walked to a really dodgy-looking store that was directly under the railway bridge. The sound of the train speeding by above intermingled with the noise of traffic and seagulls squawking. I was hit with a pang of nostalgia. How odd to miss this place when I was standing right here. One thing I didn’t miss was the stench of urine everywhere we walked.

A warm breeze brushed across my cheek. Rachel swiped the back of her hand across her brow. She glanced up at the orange tinge in the sky. “What the heck kind of weather is this?”

“It’s Melbourne,” Ashton reminded her. “Four seasons in one day remember?”

I bit my lip. The leaves on the plane trees growing through the pavement felt like they were curling. Through my hedge magic, I sensed the roots in the compacted soil trying to weave deeper. It felt as though they were battening down the hatches. Pollen floated in the air. I coughed to dislodge it from my throat.

Rachel glanced around uneasily. I understood. My hedge magic – our hedge magic – was firing on all cylinders. The bauble of the sun hanging in the clear blue sky contradicted the feeling in my gut. It was as though my insides were twisting around themselves.

Ashton led us to a place that could have moonlighted as a nightclub. It was a rundown two-storey building with a façade now covered in graffiti. It looked to be boarded up from the outside, but when Ashton knocked, somebody opened the door. I tried to breathe through my mouth as the bald guy on the other side waved us through. He looked like a retired bouncer but there was something in his sluggish movements that had me drawing a circle around myself.

Just to be sure, I did the same for Rachel and Ashton. Her head whipped around to regard me when I felt the edge of her hedge magic brush up against the circle. The inside of the dilapidated building was much tidier than the outside. Thick brocade curtains blocked out the light from the windows. We went up two short flights of stairs to be confronted by another corridor. Ashton approached the door to the left. It would have seemed perfectly ordinary if a layer of dread hadn’t started to slime its way down my spine. It replaced the earlier feeling of anticipation. I wished then that I had the demon blade with me.

I still wasn’t great at using it, but suddenly the thought of having something sharp at my disposal was very enticing.

“Can you feel that?” I asked Rachel.

“Shhh,” she hissed. Right. I took that as a yes and that it was the normal way of things. It didn’t help knowing that. I wrapped my arms around myself. We stepped through another door on the other side of the courtyard and I almost tripped. The threshold held a repellent spell like the one outside Terran Academy. Halfway through the magic snagged onto me. It whipped around my body, wanting to understand what I was. It would have to get in line.

When the barrier finally spat me out, Rachel and Ashton stood in front of a black wooden service desk with a stranger. All three of them were watching me. The bouncer was now looming at my back. He was so close I could feel the sweaty heat coming off his barely restrained gut. I took a shuddering step forward.

“What is she?” the stranger at the desk asked. It was difficult to parse out his words because the bottom half of his face was covered in a surgical mask with a Rorschach inkblot on it. My attention was split between the strangers and the heavy smell of chemicals burning in the air. They hadn’t been prevalent outside, but once past the barrier, they hung around us like a cloud of smog.

“She’s human,” Rachel said.

The gutty bouncer appeared on my left. He inhaled deeply. Something akin to electricity danced over my shoulders. “She’s got Nephilim stink on her,” he said. It was impossible for my eyes to have bugged out any farther.

“Of course she does,” Ashton said. “We’ve been hunting them.” With that lie,