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

Harlow threw her hands in the air. “Well, what choice do we have? Nothing else has worked. I’m so sick of hitting dead ends. Your great-grandmother did this. You need to fix it.”

I wanted to point out that I didn’t need to do anything. But behind her outburst, her eyes were becoming glassy. She balled her fists. Those nails would have hurt like a mother as they cut into her palms.

I glared at the three of them. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

Alison glared back. “We’re been training to do this our entire lives.”

The starkness of her words startled me. It struck me then the amount of pressure they must have been under. I’d only experienced it for the past few months. To have been told incessantly that I was humanity’s last line of defence would have worn me down too. I covered my face with my hands and exhaled.

“Okay, fine. But I swear if something goes wrong, I’m going to throttle one of you.”

If my warning bells weren’t already chiming, they would have done so when Harlow suggested we needed to head out into the fern forest at nightfall to establish the ritual. Fool me once and all that.

She huffed. “We can tell an adult if you want.”

I did want. Though I didn’t really count Matilda as a responsible adult. More like a woman-child with a penchant for chaos. “This I’ve gotta see,” she said. And now she was tagging along with us. We piled into one of the cars. As the shortest, I had to sit squished between Alison and Winnie in the back seat. They drove towards the same fern forest where Kai usually dropped me off.

Evening was drawing a cloak over the forest. Rather than use flashlights that would disrupt the energy of the forest, each of the Evil Three drew small illumination circles around themselves. It occurred to me that I was walking into the murder scene of every B-grade outback horror movie. It didn’t help that Matilda was humming an ominous tune. Harlow stopped our procession when we hit a natural clearing. The scent of summer heat wafted off the dry earth. I inhaled the clean scent of dirt and greenery.

“You know how to draw a summoning circle, right?” Harlow asked me. I took it that I was going to be the one doing this then. She tossed her backpack at me. Inside I found a satchel of sea salt, five stubby, red taper candles, a small porcelain bowl with blue daisies on it, and a Swiss Army knife.

“For the record,” I said, “I’m not looking forward to any of this.”

“Speak for yourself,” Matilda said.

Professor Mortimer had taught us the rudimentary theory behind summoning circles. Ever since my initial run-in with Behemoth, the last thing I wanted was to open up a gateway to another dimension. But there was too much at stake for me to be squeamish about it.

“No time like the present,” I muttered. Using the salt, I poured a physical circle onto the ground whilst creating the same pattern in my head. When I was done with the perimeter circle, I drew dozens of corresponding central circles and then a five-pointed star intersecting all of the circles.

It was at that point that I got stuck. This kind of specific summoning circle required intimate knowledge of the shade you were hoping to make contact with. I knew nothing about Hilary Hastings.

“What was she like?” I asked Matilda.

She tapped her chin. “Take a look in a mirror.”

“I didn’t mean what she looked like!”

“I stand by my assessment. Hilary was…obstructive. There was no authority she didn’t rail against. No rule she didn’t question.” She locked eyes on me. “Even Gaia didn’t escape her wrath when she was convinced of her mission.”

“So, scary as hell?”

“You betcha.”

It didn’t give me a whole lot to work with. As I completed the last of the runes, I tried to imbue thoughts of my great-grandmother into the purpose of what I was doing. Unlike the supernaturals, I didn’t need to chant a dead language to strengthen the spell. The Evil Three did it for me in plain old English. Each one of them came to sit cross-legged at even intervals outside the circle. This circle was meant to keep the undead spirit trapped. It was why I sat outside it too. I blocked out their prayer to the spirits and called out to her.

Absolutely nothing else happened. “Ahh…is this normal?”

“Yep,” Harlow said. “We’ve done this hundreds of times. Sometimes other spirits show up. Sometimes we get nothing.”

We waited for what felt like forever. I started feeling drowsy. My attempts to call to Hilary using my hedge magic proved fruitless. “Okay. I guess it’s going to have to be blood.”

I blew out a breath and blooded my palm with the knife. The crimson of my blood was barely visible in the dying light. Until I pressed my bleeding hand against the salt circle. I hissed as salt scraped against my wound. At the same time, the circle blazed silvery black.

As a safety measure, I closed my eyes and slipped into the Ley dimension. I almost crapped my pants when my third eye opened to the sight of a cavernous hollow at the base of the circle. My magic encased it in a tower of light. Surrounding it were dimmer circles of magic corresponding to the Evil Three. I glanced into the centre of the hollow and something inside the core of me shuddered. It tugged at the swell of dark magic inside of me. Feeling vulnerable, I redirected some of the Ley lines to intersect the circle and act like a barrier in case something went amiss.

Having completed my paranoid precautions, I blinked open and joined the Evil Three in their incantation. “Darkest night in darkest light. Bestow on us the Earth’s sight.”

I wasn’t even finished the last word before a howling wind ripped through the clearing. The temperate dropped twenty degrees. My heart stuttered thinking