Bloodline Divinity: An Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 13), page 1
Bloodline Divinity
Bloodline Academy Book 13
Lan Chan
Copyright © 2023 by Lan Chan
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, (electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
All names, characters, groups and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and all opinions expressed by the characters, whose preferences and attitudes are entirely their own. Any similarities to real persons or groups, living or dead are coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover by Christian Bentulan
Editing by Contagious Edits
Proofread by Tiffany Purdon
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
22. Kai
23. Lex
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
52. Sophie
53. Cassie
54. Lex
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
60. Kai
61. Lex
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Did You Enjoy This Book?
Connect With Me
1
I blinked at Kai’s smile that was tinged with sadness and knew that I was wearing the same one. Lopsided and pinched, as though someone else were controlling our mouths. As usual, Kai wore it better, even though I was the better liar. It was the healer thing, for sure. Everyone could very easily believe that the flare of green in his eyes was protectiveness and not envy or bitterness.
On me, it looked deranged. So much so that Sophie faltered as she passed her new baby, her cub, back to Max. Her steps towards me were tentative. I could almost hear the apology about to shoot from her lips. Sorry I can bear a child and you can’t, Lex. Sorry that I can give my mate the one thing that will make us whole.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I’d heard it countless times now. From Yolanda and Durin. From Rebecca and Professor Mortimer. Heck, even from the so-called casual hook-up that was Eugenia and Ivan.
In the years since we defeated Astaroth and the dimensions settled back into a less demonic rhythm, Kai and I had had to don different masks. Kai, the elite guard, and Lex, the devil’s scion, had been retired. Now we were Kai and Lex, the doting godparents. We poured our love into other children because we couldn’t have our own.
I raised my hand and wagged a finger at Sophie. Her bottom lip quivered. “Don’t even think about it,” I said through the hot coals in my throat.
The edges of her eyelids moistened, and I could feel tears stinging in my own eyes too. A rush of overwhelming emotion permeated every cell in my body. Too much that for a second, the world became awash with the midnight-sky canvas of the Ley dimension. Confusion made me stutter. The comforting words I meant to tell Sophie didn’t make it out of my mouth. Instead, I found myself whispering, “Why are there so many auras?”
Hedge and bone magic fluctuated inside their pools. A now familiar tingling ran along my shoulders, as though my wings were trying to pierce through but were unable to do so. Unease made me pan my sight over the clearing in the Reserve.
The christening party hadn’t yet begun. The only people around were the shifters setting up the clearing under Shayla and Nora’s strict supervision. The auras I saw in the Ley dimension didn’t correspond to the few people scattered around. The more I saw, the tighter my muscles locked.
It wasn’t just the quantity that was off. Shifter auras generally came in earthen tones. Dusky golds, silken ambers, and forest greens. What I saw in the Ley dimension was a great wash of glittery silver. It was celestial.
“Lucifer!” I screamed. More than one person in the clearing winced as I threw the Ley dimension off me.
The devil appeared in a shimmering of that same silver. His soured-milk expression broadcast his feelings to the shifters. They bared their teeth at him in return.
“How positively beastly,” Lucifer observed.
“Lex!” Max roared at me.
“Lex,” Lucifer mimicked. He added a mincing gesture with his hands that made rings of gold flare in Max’s eyes. I didn’t need the Ley sight to recognise the flare of aggression that darted through Max.
Heat caressed the left side of my face where Shayla was standing with her arms crossed. Fire licked harmlessly at her feet. Nora tapped her foot beside Shayla.
“Get rid of him!” Shayla scolded me.
“Just a minute!” I shot back. Grabbing Lucifer by the collar, I dragged him down so that I could see into his eyes. “Are you doing this?”
He slapped me away and righted his tunic. Fae in origin, of course. “Doing what?”
Pulling the Ley dimension around us, I showed him the quicksilver sky. His response was a smirk. “Most assuredly,” he said. “At least one thing understands the gravity of my presence.”
“It doesn’t feel like you.”
He cleared his throat, and when I glanced up, the smirk had evened into something worse. Pity. “You haven’t felt like you either, scion of mine. It’s understandable that your Ley sight is off.”
It would have hurt less if the barb had been more pointed. But for once, he wasn’t trying to get a rise out of me. It was almost a surrender. I could feel it coming out of him like a sigh. We just didn’t talk about the scars left behind by our encounter with Astaroth. Correction, I didn’t talk about it.
Packing it all away, I waved Lucifer off. “Okay, fine. You can go now.”
He did nothing of the sort. Taking my call as his invitation, Lucifer decided that he was very interested in the bonfire.
All the shifter eyes burning into my back dampened the feeling of unease from the Ley dimension. “Seriously?” Charles asked me.
Shrugging was the only response I could muster. “I’m sure he’ll behave.”
Charles snorted. He blew steam, and I knew he was trying to tamp down his own protective instincts. “If he gets near Lex, I’ll take his head off.”
“Huh?”
Sophie grabbed my hand. Her watery smile was vying with the tightness in her breath. A mix of joy and anxiety. “We’ve decided to name him Alexander,” she told me. “Lex for short.”
The avalanche of emotions detonated inside me. It brought with it the protective embrace of a Nephilim. Sophie melted away as Kai’s angelfire saturated my skin well before he teleported in front of me. The invisibility circle enveloped us. Kai leaned down, pressing his forehead to mine.
“You okay, Blue?” he asked.
“I am now.”
It was the absolute truth. Kai could chase away the monsters even Lucifer couldn’t reach. It killed me that I couldn’t…
“You’ve always been enough, Blue. You always will be.”
Kai broke the circle, knowing that if I didn’t take a step immediately, I would bog down. It wasn’t in my nature to sit still. So, he pushed me when I couldn’t push myself. The invisibility circle disintegrated.
Sophie’s grief-stricken expression slapped sense into me. I was happy for her. So happy it hurt. It was the crash from that dopamine hit that I dreaded. Putting on a brave face was harder than facing down the Hell dimension. But I’d done the latter before and survived. I would survive this.
“Lex.” I mulled over the choice of the cub’s name. “Don’t you think that’ll get confusing real fast?”
“What the matter?” Max asked, coming up beside Sophie with Alexander–Lex–in his arms. “Worried about not being the one and only anymore?”
My response was curtailed by Max offering me his cub.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Lucifer said over the t op of me. Lucifer scooped Lex away.
The thunderous roar of not one but three lion shifters rocked the clearing. “Hey!” I shouted, kicking at Lucifer’s shin. He didn’t even notice because he was too busy screwing his face up at the baby.
“It’s disgusting,” Lucifer said. “Why is it so hairy already?” This last part he directed at a red-faced Sophie. “I expected more from you, Sophie. You’re touched by the heavenly realm, after all.”
“If you drop him, it’ll be the last thing you do,” Sophie warned, though there wasn’t much of a threat in her voice. Lex was the closest thing Lucifer would get to progeny by proxy. Selfishness beat homicidal when it came to Lucifer. He wouldn’t hurt Lex so long as Lucifer could influence him.
That thought was what worried the shifters.
“Get my grandson away from him, Lex!” Alastair shouted at me.
“Are you daft for bringing him here, lass?” Durin roared.
Lucifer pressed Lex to his chest, covered Lex’s exposed ear with the palm of his hand, and roared back at them. The sound was like a peal of thunder building up until it reached an unearthly crack. Nothing like the roar of any animal, but that of the heavens giving a solid rebuke.
Everything in the Reserve–shifters, bugs and plants–stood still for a fraction of a second. Supernaturals had long memories. Too bad Lucifer had muddied the waters so much that we could no longer see the world in shades of black and white. The effects of Lucifer’s heavenly roar lasted barely a few seconds before all hell broke loose.
Shifters charged, discarding their clothing in favour of fur and hair. Lucifer kicked them away, holding Lex above his head out of reach.
“This seems about right,” Nanna’s voice piped up in my ear. She arrived with Astrid and Mary.
Astrid tipped her head in the direction of the kerfuffle. “Should we be doing something about this?” she asked Kai.
“What’s the bloody point?” He huffed. “It’ll just break out again. Let them blow off steam.”
He beamed at Sophie as she slumped over to us. “He’s perfect, Soph. He’s not crying or anything.”
It was true. Though he was being jostled and swung around like a football, Lex wasn’t making a peep. Sophie tapped her fingers against her chin.
“Should I be concerned that he sleeps through anything?” she asked. “Luther and Chuck were training for the Unity Games in our living room and Lex didn’t even turn over.”
“It’s the lion shifter in him,” Shayla explained. I ducked behind Kai to get away from her scowl. “They literally just sleep and eat. The world could fall apart, and they wouldn’t notice. Max was the same when he was a cub.”
She reached around Kai and dragged me towards her. “Why does everything always end with Lucifer?”
It was a good question. In the bond, I felt Kai arching his entire aura at me. Yes, Blue, he seemed to say for the millionth time. Why does everything have to involve Lucifer?
Sophie voiced the thing everyone was thinking. “He’s never going to leave, is he?”
Black-tipped blue magic swarmed around me at the thought. It crawled across my vision one pixel at a time until the world became tunnelled to where Lucifer was now levitating with Lex in his arms. Charles launched himself in the air, but his claws only sliced into the edge of silvery light that encased Lucifer.
“I swear–” Charles started, only for the dozen points of the morning star to spear around Lucifer and cut off Charles’s threat. My vision stuttered. For a moment, I heard urgent voices in my head. Distant voices that were familiar but which I couldn’t locate.
Being bathed in celestial light was too much for Lex. Finally, he let out a little growl of his own. It snapped me out of my reverie. As did Sophie’s sudden grip that almost dislocated my shoulder. I got the message loud and clear.
Reaching inward, I caught hold of the bond with Lucifer and yanked hard.
“Incoming!” I shouted to Charles. The moment my bone magic touched the bond, everything inside me went still.
Outside, Charles caught Lex as Lucifer’s arms lost their strength. Shifters swarmed around Charles, forming a protective circle until Charles could return Lex to his parents. Nanna’s mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear what she said.
All I could focus on was the way Lucifer’s light dimmed. The beauty of the Morning Star transformed into something far more sinister until another celestial being peered out at me from Lucifer’s form.
Astaroth.
Something slugged me hard in the chest. The world spun on its axis, and I lost my balance.
“Blue!”
Around me, Kai hadn’t moved or spoken. His hand was still on the small of my back. His head was cocked to the side, watching the commotion with equal measures of exasperation and longing. Inside my mind, I felt a desperate urgency that clawed at every cell in my body.
Without knowing why, I dived inward and searched again for the part of the bond that belonged to Lucifer.
Why does everything always end with Lucifer?
Except it didn’t. As the taste of bitter brimstone began to coat my tongue, another face appeared in my thoughts. An irritating quiet blotted out everything as I watched a solemn figure standing cloaked on the banks of the river leading to the Sea of Souls.
Vile hatred dripped from my heart. I imagined peeling strips off Azrael’s essence and watching him writhe with agony, listening to the voices of the pitiful insects he had unleashed upon the plane of existence.
Silver light slammed into me again. All the colours winked out for a fraction of a second. The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes.
“Blue,” Kai said, relief in his voice. “You have to stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
The world rushed back, and the Reserve was now blanketed in stars to rival the Ley dimensions. Bonfires lit up the clearing as soft music and elated voices murmured throughout the Reserve. Everyone had come out to celebrate Lex’s arrival.
“When did this happen?” I asked. “How long was I out?”
Why were the pools of magic inside me not aligning? Whenever I tried to look in on them, I felt like upchucking. It was like watching the real tide ebbing and flowing, only it felt like I was doing it from a tin can boat that made me seasick.
Kai’s expression turned soft. “You knocked Lucifer out again with the bond. You know that always messes with you both.”
He helped me up to sitting and pressed a glass of water to my lips. It was laced with something sweet. My tastebuds dried up. Instinct told me that I needed to spit, but logic couldn’t find the origin of that fear. Angelfire traced down the column of my throat, easing the muscles, and I let the liquid slide down.
“Okay?” Kai asked. I nodded, and he helped me to my feet.
“You know, you don’t have to hover around me all night.” It would have appeared braver if I hadn’t pressed my forehead to his side. Kai cupped my left cheek.
“I’m going to be hovering around you for the rest of eternity, Blue.”
Somebody made a gagging sound behind me. “I don’t know what’s more sickening,” Andrei huffed. “This, or the way fur-face won’t let Sophie out of his sight.”
I turned, only to grin maliciously when Sophie appeared beside him minus said fur-face. She was clutching Lex in her arms. “You were saying?” Sophie threw at Andrei.
He huffed again. “My point is still valid. Gimme.”
