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

on my shoulder. I found myself leaning into her palm. My insides turned into jelly. She stroked my hair while she spoke. “Our ridiculous human rules are what we govern ourselves with. You have no right to just take her.”

“I have every right. She attacked my mate!”

“She saved his life,” Mani said. “If Lex hadn’t blocked the attack from that thing in the hall, it would have taken Durin out.”

My mouth popped open. “You saw it?”

Mani frowned. “Of course,” he said. “Hard not to see it. Looked like a cloud of sand.”

Before I knew what was happening, I’d jumped on him and thrown my arms around his neck. My whole body was shaking. He squeezed me back and patted my shoulder. I breathed in deep, my chest feeling so much lighter.

“Thank God,” I said, when he let me go. “For a second I thought –”

Nora cupped my cheek. “You’re not crazy, sweetheart.”

That’s not what I’d been thinking. But I let them believe it. Better to be thought of as crazy than to be watching and waiting for the devil to come for you.

Yolanda was unmoved. “You’re trying to tell me that this little girl threw a demon blade at my mate to save his life?”

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” I said. “It was just...instinct.”

Yolanda’s right eye twitched. “You expect me to believe that? You’re a human with a demon blade. Such a thing is unheard of. Your word is less than credible.”

Nora’s mouth drew into a thin line.

“Is that all you can say?” I snapped. “I’m human so there are rules that apply to me and can’t be flexible?”

There was a point at which I was willing to take shit for the sake of not wanting to cause ripples. Being called a human in that tone was the straw that would break me.

“Careful,” Yolanda drawled. There was a spark in her eyes now. It was then that I realised I’d been playing this all wrong. I thought of the wolves I’d observed in Zambia. I was inside shifter territory. In here, I was either the hunter or the hunted. My skin might have been soft, but there was no way in hell I was going to settle for being prey.

“Why?” I stepped up to the desk. I could feel muscle shifting beside me and behind me. The air grew thick with a tension I couldn’t identify. “Why do I have to be careful? Because I don’t have anyone I can call to stop you if you decide I’m wrong?”

I placed my palms on the desk. They began to glow a luminous sky blue laced with sparks of silver and black.

“I didn’t try to kill Durin,” I said.

Yolanda got up off her seat. She matched my stance. “Why should I believe you?”

I felt my top lip curling. “Trust me. If I wanted to kill Durin, I’d be a lot smarter about it than to do it in front of the whole pack.”

An edge of a smile tipped Yolanda’s lips. “And how would you do it?”

I inhaled. “Probably by cloaking myself in an invisibility spell during a full moon. Lots of confusion to help me slip away if anything went wrong.” Exactly as the shadowed assailant had done.

Nora made a distressed sound. Yolanda tipped her head back and laughed. There was a maniacal edge to it. I had a sudden image of a hyena cackling. She wiped away an amused tear from her eyes.

“You low witches have a thing for drawing, don’t you?” she asked. She produced a pencil and notepad from the cabinet behind her. “Why don’t you see if you can draw what you think you saw?”

I made a face at Nora. “Might as well,” she said.

Yolanda passed the pad over to me. I picked up the pencil and closed my eyes. Professor Mortimer had always said that seeing things in my mind was often more accurate than trying to replicate it with my eyes open.

My wrist moved almost of its own accord. The image seeped from my memory, through the graphite and onto the page. I turned the pencil almost flat on its side and used the surface of the lead to shade in the part of the mist. Somebody gasped.

The hard grip on my shoulder said it had been Nora. My eyes snapped open to see narrowed hazel ones. “Are you certain?” Yolanda asked.

I looked down at my picture. It was disturbingly detailed. What I’d drawn was a humanoid shape inside a dense cloud of mist. Though it was blurry, there was no mistaking the silhouette of a woman in the shadow.

Kai leaned over, his shoulder straining. “Do you know what that is, Blue?”

I shook my head.

Yolanda tapped her fingers on the desk. “It can’t be true. There’s no such thing.”

“Every myth is borne of some small fact,” Astrid said. I wished she would stop trying to be so helpful. How was I supposed to hate her?

Yolanda reached out and took the picture from me.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

Nora’s hand gripped tighter.

Yolanda passed the picture to Kai. “You really want me to accept this?”

Kai took the notepad tentatively. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “They’re not going to like it.”

“What the hell are you all talking about?” I wanted to yank the picture back and tear it apart. Kai sensed my annoyance. He touched his finger to the edge of the clouded mist. “This thing you’ve drawn,” he said, “it matches the kind of paintings we’ve got in our archives for the Soul Sisterhood.”

A shudder ran through the room as he said the name.

“I thought that was an urban legend?”

He shook his head. “It’s what we like to tell ourselves because we don’t want to believe it. But sadly, they are very real.”

I sat down hard and pressed my forehead to the tabletop. Why? Why did I always get myself embroiled in these things? It was like I was some kind of trouble magnet or something.

4

They made me wait in the office while