Bloodline Secrecy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 2) by Lan Chan (best e ink reader for manga TXT) 📕

“So you don’t see him at all?” I asked Cassie.

She made a face. It was equally frustrated and sad. “It’s too close to the time his family was murdered.” I shut my trap quick smart, but I couldn’t get the catch in her voice out of my head. Or the way his eyes narrowed whenever he walked past Christmas decorations. Why had he offered to give me a white Christmas when he seemingly despised everything about it? I pushed the question out of my mind for the moment.

Basil had his hands behind his back, whistling to himself as kids cut a wide berth around him.

“It still freaks me out to see him like that,” Sophie said. Six weeks on from the fight, Basil had been given the official all clear. Several mages from the First Order as well as Astrid’s father had done a bunch of tests on him to see if he retained any of Skander’s traits. The story of how he’d been transmutated into Skander’s body couldn’t be denied considering most of the Council had been present. We had been ordered once again to keep the whole situation under wraps until they could figure out how to break it to the supernatural community that the Sisterhood were back.

“Tell me about it,” I said in answer to her observation.

He waved at us. What had been a cute gesture as a doll was not quite as cute from a man we had been conditioned to fear. Several of the kids sidestepped. One of them actually turned around and started walking back the other way. Sophie made an irritated sound in her throat. To compensate, she raced up to Basil and threw her arms around him.

I stopped in front of them and gave him a noncommittal wave. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy to see him. There had just been so many things on my mind that I couldn’t quite process it all. Not least because of the bombshell he’d laid on me about who my maternal great-grandmother had really been.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. Sophie flashed me a glare. As someone who had been subjected to ridicule for years, she was more empathetic to his plight. I still couldn’t get the things he’d said out of my head. Now that he was no longer under investigation, and no longer a doll, it was too strange for him to be living in our dorm room. He’d been MIA for three weeks while he “sorted himself out.”

Based on the number of romance novels he read, Sophie and I had deduced this to mean that he was off with Odette somewhere. If someone put a gun to my head, I could possibly admit that Skander wasn’t completely lacking in the looks department. He was also considerably younger than Basil had been when he was cursed. The whole thing was sickening. We tried not to bring it up after that.

“Hello, girls.” He turned to me. “Before you go to the Mwansas’, I was hoping to show you something.”

“You know,” I said, “Now that you’re not a doll anymore you can’t really get away with saying that kind of stuff to us.” Sophie elbowed me.

He rolled his eyes. Even those innocuous movements were no longer as acceptable. He gave the guard a new set of coordinates. When we stepped through to the other side, my mouth gaped open.

We were in a foyer of what I could only describe as a mansion. Not the big, bawdy McMansions you saw on television with their white-and-gold granite walls but the kind with grey stone and iron fixtures. Huge windows were cut into the stone to let in the light, but it was still slightly damp. I glanced up just in time to see the Fae lights on a magicked chandelier wink into existence. The light chased away any hint of darkness. I changed my mind. This wasn’t a mansion. It was a medieval castle.

“Where are we?” I asked. Sophie was staring wide-eyed through the doorway on the left which led into an industrial-sized kitchen.

“Our new home,” Basil said. His hands were clasped behind his back again. Definitely not a Skander trait. “If you like it.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking. “You know you’re actually not my guardian.” Would-be-assassin was a more apt title.

“I’ve looked out for you for almost a year. If I had wanted to do you harm, I could have done it while you slept.”

Sophie grimaced. “Super creepy.” She rubbed at her arms. Basil threw his in the air.

“You know what I mean, girls!”

My eyes swept over the enormous painting of a French landscape. “How did you afford this?”

“I’ve had manna in my account that has been accumulating interest for a long time. It turns out one of my early investments before I was cursed panned out.”

“Which one?”

“Light amulet.” We all cringed a little at the reminder of Fred.

“So you’re rich?” I was getting used to the pointed looks Sophie gave me by now. Basil cocked his head to the side.

“I suppose so.”

Sophie and I glanced at each other. How did a person respond to that? I rapped my knuckles on the glass side table with the lion’s-paw legs. It was hideous but looked like it cost a tonne. “I bet this is going to make you really popular on the MirrorNet,” I said.

Sophie cracked up. I succumbed shortly after. Basil wasn’t amused. He crossed his arms over his chest.

“I’ll have you know, I have a girlfriend now,” he said.

I gagged. Sophie pressed her fingers over her lips to try and suppress her amusement. “Gross,” I said. “It figures that’s the first thing you’d get up to when you got a body back!”

“It was not,” Basil roared. It echoed against the stone walls. It would have been frightening if not for the red blush that mottled his face.

“Was so!” I said. “There’s no way I’m living here if you and Odette are going to be shacking up together.”

“Lex.”