Bloodline Sorcery: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 0) Read online

  Bloodline Sorcery

  A Bloodline Academy Novel

  Lan Chan

  Copyright © 2019 by Lan Chan

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, (electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  All names, characters, groups and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and all opinions expressed by the characters, whose preferences and attitudes are entirely their own. Any similarities to real persons or groups, living or dead are coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover by Christian Bentulan

  Editing by Contagious Edits

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

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  1

  The peal of laughter hit me as my hand went to turn the doorknob. I suppressed a groan. My roommate, Kate, and her friends were inside. She wasn’t due back from mid-semester break until tonight. I had hoped to drop off my suitcase and unpack before The Kate Show began. Timing: It was everything.

  I bit the inside of my cheek. For a moment, I considered turning around and going to hang out in the library until all this blew over. Then I remembered the jar of dragon’s breath in my suitcase. It wouldn’t keep for long outside of containment. I’d saved up all of my pocket money for two months to buy it. No way was I letting it coalesce just because my roommate hated my guts. What else was new, anyway?

  Blowing out a breath, I opened the door. Four heads turned in my direction. It was like that scene from a horror movie where the heroine walked in on a satanic ritual and the demon’s head turned one-eighty degrees. I hate horror movies.

  The carcass of Kate’s suitcase was wide open on my bed. A pair of leopard-skin panties was draped over my favourite silver braided wig on its stand along my windowsill. Great. I’d have to fumigate my stuff or something. Souvenirs from her safari holiday adorned her friends’ necks.

  Good grief. She’d gone and bought them all knockoff nkisi pendants. If she’d bothered to ask, I would have told her to steer clear. The market vendors in the African supernatural communities made a killing off them. They didn’t care if they sold those to unsuspecting humans either. You’d think as a shifter she’d have more sense than that. The ones she’d bought were wood carved into the shape of runes. The real deal used human bones and they often had unfriendly spirits lurking inside them.

  Kate’s light brown eyes were ringed in copper. Her dark hair flowed down her shoulders to frame the circular pendant sitting just above her breastbone. It was more solid than the ones she’d gotten her friends. The base was white with etchings I couldn’t make out from this far away. The cord was of black leather. Knots had been tied at regular intervals along the chain and there were coloured beads floating along beside the knots.

  A lynx shifter, everything about Kate was lithe and graceful. I knew the second her ruby lips pulled into a catlike smile that she’d done this on purpose. Hooking her finger into the leather strap of her own necklace, Kate beamed at me.

  “I hope these don’t make you feel homesick, Sophie,” she said. “I would have bought you one too, but I figured you’ve already got heaps.”

  Her friends tittered. I swallowed back the snark on the tip of my tongue. Experience had taught me that rising to the bait never got me anywhere. If I stayed calm, they would eventually lose interest. Back home, our coven cohabitated with a pack of shifters. I’d grown up with wolf and hyena playmates. Part of me understood her innate need to establish dominance. I just wished it didn’t always come at my expense. A leopard couldn’t change its stripes, though, could it? At least not without some major high magic.

  Forcing my mouth into a smile, I injected as much breeziness into my voice as I could.

  “I’m just going to drop my stuff off. I’ll be back by sundown.”

  Hoping she would get the hint that I wanted her things back on her side of the room by then, I carefully retrieved the glass bottle containing the dragon’s breath. Magicked to within an inch of its life, the glass was cool to the touch despite the lava-like flames swirling inside. I had plans to turn the dragon’s breath into an elixir that could counteract the effects of demon possession. It was my end-of-semester extra-credit project for Potions and Alchemy. If I could get this to work, I’d ace the exam. It wasn’t quite the Elixir of Life. That had ingredients I was too scared to even collect. One of which you couldn’t come back from. That’s why the making of it had been banned. My elixir was a watered-down version. It was still tricky enough that it baffled the seniors. I really wanted this to work.

  As suspected, Kate’s friends lost interest when they didn’t get a reaction. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kate watching at me as I opened the storage chest at the base of my bed. It was a large square chest made of hawthorn wood and basilisk hide reinforced with silver. The hide was ethically sourced from the basilisks’ annual skin shedding. The chest belonged to my great-grandmother on my dad’s side. The side that didn’t have a murderous lunatic tainting it. All of my most prized possessions were locked up in here. There was also a not-so-prized possession but that was more a matter of not knowing what to do with it.

  When I’d found out I was getting another roommate—a shifter, no less—I’d gotten the silver added to the chest. It has been a fortuitous decision. Kate was the inquisitive type. There were scratch marks on the silver lock to prove it.

  Mama said I should just tell her where to go. I didn’t see the point. It wouldn’t change anything. I just needed to stay under the radar for the rest of the year. In six months I’d be moving to the senior campus. Then I’d get reassigned to a new dorm. Many of the supernaturals would only be starting their Academy lives at seventeen after going to their specialist species schools. Or school in the human world.

  Hopefully I’d land a better roommate. I had my fingers crossed for a goblin or maybe a troll. One of the dwarves might be nice too. The para-human species tended to be nicer than the supernaturals that could pass as fully human. They were also not on the long list of high-magic supernaturals that my great-grandfather bled in his rampage to master dark magic.

  Right now I didn’t care for the inquisitive glint in Kate’s eyes. Curiosity killed the cat. Before I closed the chest, I reached into my small paper sack of black lava salt and silently sprinkled it in a circle around the chest. I thought of the magic protection circle in my mind. Only protection. The last thing I wanted was to really hurt somebody. I just couldn’t let Kate mess around with my stuff. Only child and all that.

  Spell completed, I hightailed it to the library. There was a buzz of excitement in the air. The day before classes began was always l
ike this. Everyone was hyperactive and desperate to tell their friends about their holidays. I’d gone home for mine. The compound was as it had always been. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it until my feet touched down on the red-brown dirt in Zambia. I had to bite my tongue to keep the tears from falling when the wolves greeted me with smiles. The only wolves who smiled at me here were the ones who knocked me on my butt in Weaponry and Combat class.

  I had every intention of locking myself away into a quiet room in the library when something caught my eye on the noticeboard. Amidst all the usual flyers for music lessons, study sessions and the very blatant black market swaps, was a genuine ad for the dining hall kitchen. They were in need of a kitchen hand. I was in need of another hair spell. The last one had worn off over the break. Now my natural hair was back with a vengeance.

  My hair took forever to grow. I’d let it free for nine months and it still wouldn’t budge past my shoulders. It conspired against me to curl into such tight ringlets that I had to flatiron it for hours to get it tamed. Don’t even get me started on braiding. It was hard to find a spare eight hours on the weekends. Not to mention the cost.

  I could be a kitchen hand. Who could be better for that job than a kitchen witch? Feeling buoyed, I didn’t even let the side-eye I got from the boys congregating around the manga section steal my hope.

  The feeling lasted until the second I stepped foot into the dorm hallway again. The hairs on my arms stood straight up as something insidious scraped up against my skin. It felt like someone pouring their ill intent over me. Instinct had me drawing a protective circle around myself. Low magic circles or arcane circles were a witch’s bread and butter spell. We couldn’t wield magical swords or levitate a building, but we could ask the Earth for protection. Grammy, Gaia rest her soul, had taught me circle magic since the day I could walk. In my mind, the glow of the circle was always a rich, rose pink.

  Without knowing why, I sprinted toward my room. A cold sweat gathered around the crown of my head. I shivered at the sudden drop in temperature. It might have just been a trick of the light but the alcove in front of my bedroom door appeared to be overcast in shadow.

  Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the paper bag of sea salt. The others made fun of me for always carrying it around. But I was a kitchen witch. Salt and pepper were part of my arsenal. I tested the doorknob with a sprinkle of salt. When the grains didn’t smoke, I grabbed the doorknob and turned it.

  The scream lodged in my throat when the door swung open. I pressed my fist to my mouth to stop it escaping. Kate lay prone on the ground a couple of feet from my storage chest. The lock was mangled but intact. The spell around the chest was not. Her dark hair was a wild halo. Bits of her nkisi pendant scattered around her. What really got my heart kicking out of my chest was that her eyes were wide open. Her mouth was twisted into a gruesome slash of a scream.

  I heard footsteps behind me. Somebody grabbed my shoulder. “Why am I not surprised?” the deputy headmaster’s cold voice said in my ear.

  Crap! All I wanted to do was lay low. School hadn’t even started yet and I was already in trouble.

  2

  Being manhandled was always a hard pill to swallow. Being vampirehandled was like swallowing razorblades. Unfortunately, I was too familiar with both experiences. The glacial expression on the deputy headmaster’s bloodless face was only slightly warmer than the touch of his hand.

  “What did you do to her?” His thumb pressed into my collarbone. I knew he had to be exerting a phenomenal amount of self-control to contain me and not shatter my bones with his vampiric strength. It didn’t make his hold any less painful.

  “I didn’t do anything!” My feet fumbled over each other as he steered me away from the doorway. “She was like that when I got here!”

  A pair of Nephilim guards rushed in behind us. They were both dark-haired with slim builds and clear, brown eyes. The deputy head pointed at the smouldered edges of the storage chest. “That piece of storage belongs to you.”

  I nodded, trying to wriggle out of his hold. “So?”

  “Was it spelled?”

  I snapped my mouth shut. This wasn’t my first rodeo with him. He was Deputy Head of the Academy and therefore in charge of the junior campus. I knew better than to say anything even slightly incriminating without proper witnesses. His black eyes narrowed. When he spoke to the guards, his bottom lip snagged on the sharpened points of his incisors.

  “Take her to the infirmary.” One of the Nephilim placed a hand on Kate’s shoulder. He closed his eyes and they winked out of existence. No matter how many times I watched a teleportation, the whole concept still fascinated me. I’d only ever been teleported once and that was part of the evacuation drills I’d learned when I first joined the Academy.

  The deputy head’s palm contracted against my shoulder.

  “I don’t think physically containing Miss Mwansa is going to make much of a difference, Dmitri,” Professor McKenna’s voice interjected. She was a tan-skinned sorceress with an impressive jet-black bob. What interested me were the two thick strands of magenta that framed her face. In her early thirties, Professor McKenna was the youngest teacher in the Academy. She taught Potions and Alchemy on both campuses.

  “I caught her red-handed.”

  Professor McKenna looked me up and down with sharp grey eyes. Her focus landed on my hands. My left one was jittery from where the deputy head’s finger was pinching my nerve. “Let’s presume she’s innocent until she’s proven guilty, shall we?”

  “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

  Instead of being intimidated, the professor bit the inside of her cheek to refrain from rolling her eyes. She shook her wrist and approached the perimeter of the chest. “I’m assuming the protection circle is disabled, Sophie?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Pointed nails scraped my skin. I bit my lip. He was slicing holes into my favourite blouse. I tried fruitlessly to twist free. I might as well be a tick bird on the hide of a rhino. My pecking did nothing to dissuade him.

  Far from it, he took a compact mirror out of his pocket and did the unforgiveable. He called my parents. I used to think the MirrorNet, the supernatural communication channel, was really cool. Now I cringed when I passed a reflective surface. They used mirrors for ease but I knew behind it was a complex network of intricate portals. A portal was how my parents managed to get shipped from Zambia so quickly.

  Half an hour later, I was sitting on the wooden bench outside the headmistress’s office. Dad on my left and Mama on my right. Both of them were quiet. I could tell Mama was spitting fire on the inside by the way she sarcastically smiled at the kids who came past to rubberneck at us.

  “You’re scaring the children, Nora,” Dad mumbled.

  “Be thankful it’s just a smile and nothing else, Emmanuel,” she shot back between clenched teeth.

  “Will you two please stop?” I tried to draw an invisibility circle around us but Mama waved it away.

  “We are not going to hide.”

  “Well, we can’t let Soph go on like this, either,” Dad said.

  I squeezed his wrist. Maybe now they would reconsider this ridiculous notion of sending me to Bloodline Academy when there was a perfectly good school inside the compound. Everyone I knew went to it. When I was ten, we’d gotten a mirror bulletin inviting me to the prestigious Bloodline Academy. Grammy had argued against it. I wish she’d won that fight. I had a feeling the board were just trying to make this place seem more low-magic friendly. They weren’t succeeding.

  As evidenced by the skin stripping glare that Kate’s mother gave mine when her parents marched out of the headmistress’s office. I didn’t realise that lynxes could get bees up their butt.

  Mama returned the glare with a steely face. She’d been just a little girl when the shifters had forced her coven into the compound. They had done it after great-grandfather was discovered. It was a way of keeping tabs of his descendants. Back then, the hostilit
y would have been unbearable. So if Mrs Barnaby thought a little dominance showdown was going to make my mama cower, she had another thing coming.

  Headmistress Pendragon, or Jacqueline as she liked to be called, appeared in the doorway. Her stiletto heels clicked on the linoleum.

  “Jacqueline,” Mama greeted.

  “Nora. Mani. It’s good to see you. I really wish it was under different circumstances.”

  This happened so often my parents were on a first-name basis with the headmistress. At the end of last semester they were here because one of the Fae was convinced that I had put a curse on her. Me. A curse. Never mind that her high magic was far stronger than my low magic. Sheesh.

  I watched Jacqueline march through the room. Yep, march. She might be in her navy pants suit today, but Amazons could march in anything. Her straight back and assured gait relieved the ball of tension in my chest.

  She tucked a strand of her blonde bob behind her ear as she sat down behind her desk. “Well,” Jacqueline said. She gestured for us to take seats. “That’s certainly a puzzling ailment.”

  I placed my hands on my lap, trying to appear as innocent as possible. “She was like that when I got there.”

  She held up a hand to stop me. She smiled like she knew what I was thinking. Maybe she did. There were rumours that Amazons had the ability to tell when someone was lying. Maybe she could actually read my thoughts. I eyed the rose-gold bangles on her wrist. They looked like nothing more than pieces of jewellery, but I wasn’t fooled. In Magical History in eighth grade, I’d seen pictures of Amazons during the Dimension Wars. That bangle was a part of their armour. I swallowed.