Bloodline Diplomacy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 3) by Lan Chan (best short novels .txt) 📕

“Why? So he can try to scratch at everything in sight?” he said. “As soon as we get to the other side, I’m letting him go.”

“The other side of where?”

“The portal.”

I sputtered. “Where does the portal lead?”

“As close to Terran Academy as possible.”

“That’s days away from where he lives. Why doesn’t someone take him back out to the desert?”

The looks on his face and Jacqueline’s said the thought hadn’t even occurred to them. “Is the tower repaired yet?”

Jacqueline nodded. “We had to get it up and running as quickly as possible. Wanda and Peter helped complete it.” Of course they did. Because yours truly was banned from stepping two feet outside her dorm.

“Can we see if he’ll go back on his own?”

Jacqueline peered up at the sky. “We’re cutting it very close to the exchange time. If we’re late, they’ll be even more unreasonable.”

“If they say anything, I’ll say it’s my fault.”

“I don’t think it’ll matter whose fault it is,” Jacqueline said.

“Then why did you bother bringing him here?”

“Basil was threatening to just throw him out on the street,” Kai said. Now that I was in front of him, the dingo sat down on his haunches. He looked up at me with eyes that appeared to still be haunted.

“I’m not going anywhere until he’s settled.”

Kai looked like he wanted to strangle the dingo, but he spoke through gritted teeth. “Fine,” he said. “But we’d better make this quick.”

Stepping forward, he touched his hand to mine and teleported us.

12

It never even occurred to me how much I’d gotten used to the climate control in the Academy. The sun beat down on us in waves. It made the horizon seem like a mirage. Everywhere I turned, red dirt with a few scraggly trees covered the land in a sweeping canvas.

“Jeez,” I said. The dingo whined. He tugged at the leash again as Kai stood there with his arm locked to his sides. I marched up and swiped the leash from Kai. He refused to give it up.

“The thing is a menace,” he said.

“That’s probably because you’re scaring him.”

Kai cocked his head to the side. After a second, he let go. The dingo went haywire. He tugged me forward. Since my body weight wasn’t much heavier than his own, the thing dragged me around on the leash like he was walking me.

“Need some help?” Kai asked casually. I didn’t bother looking at him because I could hear the laughter in his voice.

Ignoring him, I locked the end of the leash around my palm and rolled the leash up until there wasn’t much give left. The dingo whined and tried to use all four legs to back up. This was taking forever. Finally, I reached for the clip that was hanging to the metal ring on his collar. How Basil managed to get it on him was the question. I suspected magic. With some dexterous handiwork, I unclipped the leash.

The dingo went bananas. At first he bolted. A spray of dust billowed in his wake. For a second, I thought that would be the end of it. I was kind of glad. Going back to his natural habitat would be the best thing.

I was about to tell Kai we could go when the dust cloud came rolling back our way.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Kai said. The dingo returned. Twice more he did this until I realised he thought this was a game.

I knelt down and regretted it the moment my jeans hit the scorching hot sand. The dingo came right up to me and stuck his head in my face. This was not good. I couldn’t keep a pet. Half the time I could barely look after myself. “Go,” I said. “You’re free now.”

He sat back on his hind legs, tongue hanging out, eyes bright. Maybe animals had an even better mental block than humans did when it came to trauma. But when I tried to lay my hand on his paw where there was a scar that hadn’t fully healed, he pulled its leg away.

“Umm...I’m not sure what to do,” I said.

“What would you like me to do about that?”

“You’ve been around more wounded patients than I have!”

“He’s a dingo. I can’t exactly communicate with him.” Despite what he was saying, Kai knelt down beside me. The dingo eyed him warily but didn’t move. “I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as odd behaviour for a dingo. Most other animals would have disappeared as soon as you set them free.”

“What do you think would happen if we just left him here?”

He shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

He covered my hand with his. I yanked it back. “We can’t just leave!”

A frown edged on his brow. “I wasn’t going to teleport,” he said. He stretched up and started walking away. After a beat, I followed. My heart sank a little when the dingo followed on behind us.

“Guess that answers that,” Kai said.

“What if it’s just because he was somebody’s pet and not a wild animal?”

Muscle tensed under his grey T-shirt. Something told me he was flat out of care for the whole situation. “Then somebody just lost a pet.”

He grabbed both of us and we teleported back to the portal field. Jacqueline didn’t seem at all surprised when she saw us. “Dogs aren’t allowed in the dorms,” she said. “They’re not accustomed to our auras.”

“He’s not a dog. But it doesn’t matter. I’m taking him to Terran. And you can both stop trading glances like I’m blind.”

Right. I might have been more nervous than I made myself out to be. “We’re just concerned about not being there with you,” Jacqueline tried to hedge.

“I’ll be fine.” There was that word again.

“If anything should happen –”

I shook my head at her. “What’s going to happen that hasn’t happened already?”

She looked decidedly uncomfortable with the whole situation. There wasn’t all that much I could do about it. Finally she seemed to get with the program.

“Kai is going to take you to the