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

Anastasia was on her feet and halfway across the room before Gwen latched onto her and hauled her back. The furious growl that ripped from Anastasia’s throat said that if Gwen weren’t a more senior soldier, Charles would have claw marks decorating his smug face. If she could get near him, which I doubted.

Both women rounded on me. Gwen’s eyes pleaded with me to do something about a situation I’d allowed to go on too long. Anastasia’s frosty gaze was offset by the flush in her cheeks. Idiot that he was, Charles had turned into a blunt instrument of truth. And he had more than enough to go around.

“Out,” I ordered the leopards.

Anastasia frowned. “But–”

I cut her off with a snapped-out snarl. The door didn’t hit either of them on the way out.

Despite knowing exactly what nightmares nipped at his heels, my words were clipped. “Let me guess. One of them dared to breathe in your direction.”

Charles’s muscles locked in a quintessential soldier stance, his feet planted at exactly the right angle, his gaze neither challenging, nor submissive. It was a taunt of the worst kind. Before Lex disappeared, he’d shown promise of being a perfect soldier. If and when he chose, he could follow orders. The problem was, his chosen commander had gone missing in action. And I was no substitute for a loud-mouthed human with more snark than sense.

The beast inside my head snapped its teeth at the thought of her. It took all my resolve to push the thoughts aside. For both of us, she was a touchy subject. If I allowed myself to contemplate what might be happening to Lex, I would forsake duty and go hunting for her. A lone assassin wasn’t what the Reserve needed.

And I sure as hell didn’t need Charles weakening our defences at a time like this.

“Cut the shit, Chuck,” I said.

He smirked. “I will if you will, Maximus.”

One hit. One hit was all it would take to flatten him. Right now, with supernatural healing the way it was, and the magic flowing through our blood making us impervious to the malachim’s draining essence, Charles was a force to be reckoned with. Even without our heritage as an advantage, I suspected he’d be able to take on most of the Reserve besides the trained alphas. But he was still my kid brother. And between the two of us, he didn’t even have an inside track on aggression. Even if it felt like every fibre in him was being torn apart by traumatic rage.

“We’re not here to discuss me.”

This time, a speck of gold bloomed in his irises. “Then let’s get on with it. Punish me so you can go back to your self-flagellation over Soph–”

Her name was a ferocious trigger. If he were human, the crack of his skull against the office wall would have horrified me. Before I even had a sense of my own intentions, the lion had taken over. Plaster crumbled, followed by wooden frames, and then brickwork spat out into the hall as I launched him through it.

Bracing for the impact, he rolled with the natural balance of a predator and might have been on me had I not grabbed him by the throat, hauling him up and against the wall. With my right hand, I grabbed his prized weapon. The demon blade burned against my palm. It felt like a thousand hot needles sinking into the sensitive pads of my fingers, but I didn’t care.

A red haze filtered over my vision. Charles gave an eardrum-busting roar as I sank the tip of the blade into the brick beside his head. Smoke wafted from the injury where my hand touched the blade’s edge. It made my molars ache in a way that caused the irritation in my blood to ratchet into molten fury.

Charles’s nose became dusted with rough tawny hairs. His eyes turned into two shining orbs of liquid gold. But he breathed out his flattened nostrils, doing his very best to hold on to his humanity. If only as a way to piss me off.

His voice was barely above a rasp. “Ohh,” he choked out. “Did I hit a nerve?”

Twisting the demon blade inside the wall so that it was bare inches away from his brow, I contemplated hitting a nerve of my own. In the months since Sophie disappeared and it was made public that I’d offered her a mating, he’d done nothing but antagonise me. The offer had signalled to all the females in supernaturaldom that I was ready to settle down.

They had taken her rejection as the final word on our relationship. Way too many had turned up to stake a claim on the position she left behind. All of them tried to make me forget. But every once in a while, when I had almost convinced myself that I could live without her soft laughter and unflinching warmth, the gut-punch of her ripe berry and exotic spice scent hit me. Hard. For months I’d thought it was the beast inside me refusing to give up its quarry. Until Gwen stumbled on the tiny velvet bags of spices stuffed into the vents and tree branches throughout the Reserve.

It would have taken hours of painstaking patience to set those emotional traps. If he would direct an iota of that determination into his duty, there would be no telling what his potential might be. But Lex’s disappearance had broken something inside him. Something I couldn’t reach no matter how much I yelled and threatened. I didn’t have the luxury of time to spend nursing him the way I’d done with Kai after his family were murdered. Not anymore.

Inside my head, the lion sank its claws into my gut. Though he was currently doing his best to kill me with disobedience, Chuck was blood. And my duty should have been to him above all else.

Knowing that there was nothing