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

A gaggle of voices swept through the Grove. I knew nobody was assigned to any lessons here so it meant that everybody had been dismissed from the assembly. “You’d better go and make sure Cassie is okay.”

We both knew it was an excuse but neither of us made a fuss about it. When he was gone with yet another brooding glare at me, I sat beside the Arcana tree and let my head sink into my hands.

Over the few weeks of Christmas break, no thanks to the Sisterhood, I had been learning to meditate properly with some of the human mates in the Reserve. It turned out being mated to shifters could be rage-inducing at times. Their tendency to dominate made it difficult for any form of independence. I knew the feeling.

When I closed my eyes, I allowed my mind to linger on everything that had happened. My thoughts often strayed to Nanna. I had tried everything to unbind the threads around her, but it was no good. Though some of the strands that held her memory captive were mine, there was another element in there I could neither break nor pick apart.

The thought tried to drag me under. My eyelids moistened. But soon enough it was overtaken by other thoughts. I was Sisterhood. Bloodline was locking me out of all the parts of them that mattered. It was a wonder I was even allowed inside the Grove. The nymphs and I had come to a tenuous stalemate about my heritage. As long as I continued to offer them protection, they hadn’t yet kicked me out. How much longer would that remain the case?

Gaia was missing. Somehow her disappearance coincided with my great-grandmother’s absconding from the Sisterhood. Who was this woman who had defied an order of slayers?

And then finally...nothing. Everything fell away and my universe funnelled into a labour of breathing in and out.

The first spark of light was a green speck that pushed against the darkness of my closed eyelids. It grew in strength and then flung tendrils out on all sides. Those tendrils became arteries that threaded all around me. Each thread spilled out into more threads. They joined together into a network of webbing that turned my mind into a tapestry of blazing colour.

Even as my eyes snapped open, I knew the Ley lines would remain where they were. Professor Mortimer called it contained astral projection. My physical body was where it had been inside the Grove, but my mind had slipped into the reserve of power beneath the Academy that allowed all of this to be possible.

As always, I catalogued all of the swirling connection points which formed the foundation of my relationships. Brushing my hand across the swirl of Kai’s green-and-blue light, I frowned. Ever since the Sisterhood had tried to steal Kai’s soul, I knew that I had somehow bound him to me. But this was a new and slightly disturbing event.

I turned my head, resolving not to dwell on it. The Ley lines mapped everything that was within the borders of the Academy. But that didn’t mean they stopped there. The lines made up the nervous system of every dimension in existence. When the other dimensions fell, the destruction of those lines were what had caused so much chaos. There was power in every Ley line, and power wasn’t supposed to be extinguished.

Biting my lip physically, I tried to extend the reach of my mental mapping. At first, the thought of pushing out so far met with resistance. I got about as far out as the edge of the wards and then met with a void. It wasn’t so much that the lines weren’t there but that they didn’t seem to be accessible. It was like trying to distinguish something spoken in another language. I strained and tried to tap into the hidden well of darker magic to amplify the signal, but it was swiftly rebuffed.

My eyes flicked open as the Ley lines receded. I blinked again. The Grove was saturated in a coating of amber and orange. Somehow dusk had settled around me. Rubbing at my eyes, I tried to get up and found that my legs had gone numb. Stretching them out, I leaned back until I lay on the grass and massaged my thighs.

A streak of purple shot across my field of vision. It was followed by one of pink and yellow. The wood nymphs danced in a circle about me. They were chattering to each other. “How long was I out?” I asked, knowing by now that even if they weren’t present, they knew everything that happened around these parts.

I braced myself for the spitfire response. Even with practice I couldn’t quite get my ears to parse out what they were saying. “Slower, please.”

That earned me a swift kick to the cheek from the purple nymph. I sighed. When she spoke next, I latched on to her voice and threw some of my power at it. “five hours,” I heard in the slow groan of unnatural speed for her voice.

She made a gesture of haste and pointed to the pond that I used to water the Arcana tree. I was at a loss. Dozens of multicoloured lights were swarming around the edge of the water. I balked. The last time the wood nymphs had a gathering, it almost blew out my eardrums. The smart thing would be to get up and leave. When I tried to do just that, the three nymphs formed a line in front of me.

Purple Nymph shook her head. They herded me toward the pond where a gap was made and I was forced to sit down around the rim with them. “What’s going on?”

Purple Nymph skimmed the surface of the water. She appeared like one of those elegant figure skaters who were more at home on the ice than I was on two