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

tried to push my hedge magic into the surrounding dirt. It was curtailed by a wall of what felt like static electricity.

“We should have gone outside,” Rachel said. Her fists were balled. I had a feeling she’d tried to reach out with her magic too.

“That’s insane,” Ashton said. “This room is made of metal. It’s just a storm.”

By now I knew there was never just anything when the supernatural was involved. Rachel and I glanced at each other. It occurred to me that we were inside a metal room while a lightning storm raged outside. Despite the anger seething in me, I drew a circle around the group of us. Rachel reinforced it.

The first strike felt like pinpricks stabbing at my palms. The room groaned. In my mind, I saw the branches of lightning gathering pace in the density of clouds concentrated above us. They speared the ground above us again and again. The demon snarled each time the lightning surrounded us. Far from being hurt, it appeared as though the lightning was making it stronger.

My magic circle blunted the shock of the first few hits. By the third, I was losing ground. The first signs of destabilisation came in the form of bent cell bars.

“Shit!” the bouncer said. He and the others were huddled against the door. Boom. The left side of the room buckled like a soda can. As the cell bars bent, it gave the demon enough leverage that it managed to squeeze its misshapen body through the opening. Shit, indeed.

“Knife!” I screamed at Rachel.

“What?”

“I know you’ve got one on you. Give it to me.”

She took her left boot off and produced a multi-tool with a knife attachment. She’d sharpened the blade to a fine enough point that I barely had to put any pressure behind it and it cut my palm open.

The demon tore away the tubes that had been surgically embedded into its body. Around us, the storm hit even harder. George tried to ask the earth to cushion the blows, but his magic wasn’t strong enough to hold back the tide of water. It sloshed onto the cement floor. The demon kicked aside the leftover leg from a previous meal. There was fresh meat in its sight now. My bleeding palm hit the ground at the same time it made a running dash for us. The circle rebuffed it and sent it flying across the room. It landed on its haunches and dropped forward onto its arms and legs. Water dripped down from the ceiling.

“Alessia,” Rachel said. She spoke some other things, but I couldn’t concentrate whilst trying to keep the lightning from frying us and also stop the demon from killing us. When this was over, I was going to kick some serious human ass.

The demon snapped its rows of teeth at me. Something black oozed out of its mouth. That bitter scent curled around me once more. It was that dark substance that the humans had been harvesting for their supernatural poison. The thing reared. But instead of taking a run at me like I had anticipated, two bulging discs on either of side of its face inflated. When it looked like a reptile that had lost a battle with a dentist, the thing opened its mouth and spewed black lava at me. The substance hammered against the side of my circle.

Rachel screamed and toppled, clutching at her head. Every nerve fibre in my body was on fire. I grit my teeth and pressed my forehead to the pool of blood that I’d left on the cement.

I couldn’t think past the pain. In the back of my mind, I knew I should do something with that blood. Something to do with magic. But all I could concentrate on was trying to force the hot breath in my lungs to inflate.

Overhead, water dripped onto the barrier of my circle. It trickled down the sides. Where it touched the black saliva it sizzled and morphed into steam. Seeing that I was down, the demon crawled forward. It tested the strength of the circle by scratching one claw down the side. I whimpered. It felt like that time I’d been stabbed through the ribs. Behind me, I felt somebody moving.

“You can’t,” George said to Ashton. “It’s not an animal. Your magic won’t be able to tame it.”

The next lightning strike and lava spit hit at once. They braced against the barrier of the circle and smashed clear through it. The circle broke. So did I. Figuring out who was screaming was impossible. The demon snatched me from the damp cement. Terror blanketed my senses until I was unable to fight back. It latched onto my left arm and my right leg. The thing was going to tear me in two. For a split second, I imagined it sitting in the corner feasting on my body.

“Alessia!” Ashton screamed. The sound of his voice sent a hot lance of new rage through me. They’d done this. They’d summoned a demon and now it was going to kill me.

Is it? Lucifer’s voice interjected in my thoughts. I made you better than this.

I tried to shut him out of my head, not wanting the last voice I heard to be his. Instead, he rapped against the well of my power. The blue hedge magic shrank away from him.

The dark power beneath it swirled into a funnel. The demon tugged. A dam inside my mind broke free. This time, the flash of light didn’t come from a lightning strike. It burst from me in a flood of anguish. It acted like a drop of water inside a still lake. The ripples cascaded from my body in circles the way it had done in the ocean. It sliced through the demon’s body and pushed back against the lightning. I fell to my knees as the demon disintegrated. A groan that sounded like it came from the atmosphere blanketed my thoughts. It was the same one I’d heard in the ocean. An