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

I was going to bust a gut keeping up this pace. He was doing nothing to help me. To make matters worse, we had rounded the corner on the path that led around the Academy. We came up to the lawns around the building. Plenty of students were up and using the early morning to socialise. Most of them were vampires. There were some advantages to not sleeping at night.

“Can you please stop?”

He edged ahead again. I put everything into it and still only just trailed behind. “Why would I want to do that?” he said.

“I need to ask you something.”

He slowed down but only marginally. The stitch in my side was burning. I wouldn’t be able to keep this up much longer, so I had to just blurt it out.

“I need some additional combat training outside of classes. I was wondering if you would consider teaching me.”

This brought him to an abrupt halt. We were standing in the middle of the path underneath a jacaranda tree. There was a wooden bench and a water fountain just behind him. Another jogger passed us by.

He grabbed the front of his T-shirt and used it to mop the non-existent sweat off his brow. I suspected it was just a low-key way to show off his washboard abs to the Fae girls who were sitting on the lawn opposite where we stood.

“Why in the world would I want to do that?” he asked.

Hmm. I hadn’t really thought that far. There was zero advantage in this for him. So I tried to appeal to what was supposed to be his nature. “You’re seraphim-blooded. Isn’t it part of your duty to help people?”

“You’re not people.”

I was taken aback. “I beg your pardon?”

His mouth twisted into a grimace. “I don’t know why Headmistress Pendragon insists on allowing you to continue living among us. There is no way in this dimension or in any other that I would consider helping you.”

The girls and some vamps close by started laughing. “You believe the rumours.”

He turned his head down. Once I had thought he was handsome. Physically there was no disputing it. At that moment, as his mouth curled into a smirk, I couldn’t help failing to pick out a resemblance between him and Michael at all. “They’re not rumours. Too many of us have seen the future for it to be anything but concrete. You will betray us.”

“If I had wanted to do that, I would have done it when Lucifer dragged me down into that cavern that your housemate opened.”

He gave me his shoulder. “Nobody believes that Lucifer was there. You’re just making up lies to make yourself sound better.” He stepped closer to me. “Mark my words. One day we will be enemies. And I will be more than pleased to be the one to finish you.”

I couldn’t do anything but stand there as he ran off. For the next five minutes I breathed in and out slowly, my heart thundering in my chest. I could handle Brigid’s snide remarks. She’d had it in for me from day one. But Bradley was Nephilim. It was his duty to protect humans. Knowing he now no longer considered me one made my tear ducts sting. For some reason a rushing like the ocean filled my ears.

Patience, Azrael’s voice said in my mind. I almost burst into tears. It was the first time he’d spoken to me in months. I didn’t bother answering. Instead, I tucked my tail between my legs and went back to my room.

“I don’t feel so well,” I said to Basil when it was time to leave for class.

He hopped onto my chest and held his arm over my forehead like he was somehow able to take my temperature.

“You don’t seem unwell,” he said.

“Well, I feel like crap.”

Sophie was sceptical too. So instead of sitting in the room being grilled by them, I did a trick Fred had taught me and checked myself into the infirmary. Doctor Thorne had seen me in so many scrapes that he didn’t question it when I said my head hurt and I didn’t feel like I could go to school.

He allowed me to lie down in the infirmary bed, his cool hand on the pulse at my neck. “How do you feel?” he asked. Strange that out of all the people in the Academy it was a reptilian species who made me feel calmer.

“Okay I guess.” I caught myself. “But not okay enough to go to school.”

I was pretty sure he knew I was lying. After all, he wasn’t doing any checkups on me. He just let me lie there feeling sorry for myself.

“I’ll get someone to bring you something to read.”

“Doctor Thorne? How old are you?”

I didn’t even flinch when he smiled and his fangs showed. “I’m given to understand that’s quite a rude question in the Earth dimension.”

“Only amongst humans. They have superficial hang-ups about age.”

“Says the seventeen-year-old. Why do you want to know?”

“Were you around when the Soul Sisterhood was still a thing?”

“Ah. I see they’ve dredged up those old stories.” He sat down in the seat beside my bed as though making himself comfortable for a long story. Before sitting, he swept his tail out from behind him and set it on the arm rest.

“You think they’re just stories?”

“Not at all. I think the things we tell ourselves about them are the stories. Much of what was known about the Sisterhood was destroyed by their organisation in a conscious bid to keep the secrecy amongst them.”

“Do they really hate us that much?”

“It’s hard to say when we know so little about them. What I do know is that they have no compunction about killing our kind. To them we are an infestation on this world.”

“Do you know where vampire blood juice comes from?”

He brought a claw up to his face and scratched. “There are branches of the vampire families who have special arrangements with human companies. That’s as much as I am aware