Bloodline Contingency: An Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 12), page 50
The midnight blue and silver-laced black had billions of tiny little specks inside it, like pollution in the sea. My heart was shrivelled when Raphael returned our normal sight.
“It was difficult to search for without knowing what was wrong, but now I see that Alessia’s power is warped.”
“That can be easily fixed,” Lucifer said. He placed his hand on my forehead too. The light of the Morning Star flooded through me. It was almost painful in its intensity. Gritting my teeth, I tried to just loosen everything and go with it. Instead, my darker half grabbed a whole handful of Lucifer’s magic and chucked it back at him. Like Sophie, he went flying across the room.
Was it bad that my first thought was that I could still incapacitate him if necessary?
Lucifer didn’t hit the couch like Sophie did. He flipped mid-air and hovered there. Wheeling around, he shackled me with his icy stare. “What was that?” Lucifer asked. “Did you do that on purpose?”
“If I do something on purpose, you’ll know about it!” It was definitely smarter to lie, but I was too used to not watching my words around him.
Teleporting in front of me, he caught my face in his hands. The light of the Morning Star filled my eyes. He spoke a word that meant cleanse in Angelical. I thought it was meant to do the same thing a word of light did to exorcise a demon. Absolutely nothing happened to me.
Their ministrations went on for half the night. I was so dead tired I was falling asleep as they conferred.
“What’s the problem?” I asked. Any time I almost fell asleep, one of them would rouse me. It wasn’t until I jolted awake, and Lucifer threw another Angelical word at me that I realised they were purposefully tiring me out to see if something was hiding inside of me.
Finally, I was pronounced safe enough to be allowed out. “Perhaps you should stay at the manor for a few nights,” Lucifer suggested.
“Why? So you can hover around me and make sure I don’t go off again?”
“It doesn’t hurt to be cautious.”
“Cautious of what? Astaroth is gone, and you’re the ruler of the Hell dimension and the Abyss again. What else is there to be afraid of?”
He didn’t concede the point, but he did give me a strange look that made me just as apprehensive.
I was going to teleport away when I spotted the light in the room next to me was still on. Cassie and Rune had both been brought to Sanctuary as well. Rune had left in a huff as soon as he’d woken. He scoffed at the idea that he needed to stay under watch when he lived with nightmares while he was awake.
I understood immediately why Cassie was still here. There was a lion stalking the door of her room. “Permission to enter?” I asked.
Charles’s hands pressed against the doorjamb. I had been joking, but he reacted unreasonably. Phasing through him, I stepped into the room. Cassie was sitting up in bed. Her face was sheet-white, and her eyes were bloodshot. There was a blue tinge around her lips.
Charles grabbed my right shoulder and pulled me backwards. “What the heck?” I shouted.
Cassie flagged him down. “It’s alright. Lex can stay.”
“Lex is the reason you’re in here in the first place!” Charles snapped.
I never would have described myself as spoiled, but I had gotten used to Charles always being on my side. The snide remark caught me completely off guard.
“I’m sure she didn’t mean it,” Cassie said. If only she wasn’t looking at her feet and making herself smaller so that I didn’t come closer. Charles sensed it and went predatory quiet.
“Are you okay?” I asked Cassie. Suddenly I felt stupid for barging in here thinking I could somehow make her feel better. It never even occurred to me that I would be blamed as the one making her feel worse.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine. I’m just still adjusting to everything, and it hit me harder than I thought to see that.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “I really didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“Just don’t do it again,” Charles ordered. He came around to Cassie’s bedside and sat protectively in front of her so I couldn’t see any part of her besides her legs under the sheets.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Don’t do it again.” He enunciated each word like I was an imbecile.
“Listen, you little–”
“Get out!”
Cassie inhaled. I reeled back as though he’d gotten up and slapped me. The bone magic in me churned again, unsure if I was really hearing Charles talking back to me. He let out a soft, continuous growl that filled the room with a shifter’s dominance. It was a warning to other predators that they were about to step into danger.
I wasn’t another predator. I was prey. My darker half didn’t react well to it. Bone magic swelled in me. Aggression vibrated across Charles’s skin. His eyes turned copper as his canines elongated.
“Stop it,” Cassie said. “Stop fighting. You’re making it worse.” She grabbed Charles’s arm and shook it, but it was to me that she said, “Maybe you should go, Lex. I’ll see you another time.”
This was no longer about Cassie being unwell. I latched on to Charles’s alpha stare and wouldn’t back down. “What’s gotten into you?” I asked.
He raked his awareness over me. In that moment, he looked so much like his dad that I was suddenly aware I was in the presence of an alpha lion. One whose hormones were raging out of control.
“I’m not a kid anymore,” Charles told me. “I only just got her back. You’re not taking her away again.”
Every word was coated in malice. It was a challenge that dared me to contradict him.
“I was the one who brought her back!”
His nose flattened. So did his tone. “You were the one who killed her, Lex.”
“I had to–” I stopped, knowing it sounded like an excuse.
“You always have to do everything,” he said. “Always at somebody else’s expense. If Leia hadn’t been able to keep Cassie’s body alive, I’d have lost her for good.”
That made no sense. “What are you talking about? Cassie kept herself alive. We’re not even sure if her body can die!”
His eyes burned with an internal fire, and I knew then he was too full of the mating heat to listen to reason. Even I knew when to make a strategic retreat.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. I hope you feel better, Cass.”
I tried to call Charles every day for a week. He didn’t return any of my bulletins. He was suspiciously absent from the two herbology classes he was supposed to be enrolled in.
Not knowing where else to turn, I called Max. “Oh,” he said. “So, you do know how to use a bulletin.”
Karma was slapping me so hard today. Yet even being admonished didn’t make me want to speak to Sophie.
“Hey,” I said, pretending to bypass his sarcasm. “Have you heard from Chuck? I’ve been leaving him messages, but he’s not speaking to me.”
Something in my tone stripped the sharpness from his. “It was bound to happen sometime,” Max told me. “He’s reaching his ascension age.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“He’s an alpha. He needs to learn to think and act independently. You two have had a disturbingly co-dependant relationship since you started at Bloodline. Mum and Dad were worried for a while that he’d never grow out of it.”
“Grow out of it?” I stuttered. “You guys live by pack mentality. I’m his pack!”
Except I wasn’t.
Max cocked his head to the side pityingly to emphasise the point. “It’s been your word over the pack for so long,” Max said. “He’s finally becoming his own person. If you care about him, you’ll let him find his own way.”
“I don’t…” I rubbed my forehead. “I don’t understand. Why would he need to be away from me to find his own way?”
The pity was now just a glaring call sign in Max’s eyes. “I’m not going to sugar coat this,” he said. He shoved his hand through his hair. “Somebody needs to say it to you and nobody else wants to hurt your feelings. But you’re a lot to take. That same part of you that allowed you to stand against the demons is also the thing that dims everything around you. Nobody cares about the stars when the moon is so bright. We’re not at war anymore. It’s time to close down the Alessia Hastings show.”
I couldn’t remember if I actually bade him farewell. My head was so full of words, and the left side of my chest felt tight. Even though I had railed against it, I returned to the manor and went to find Lucifer in the kitchen garden. I wasn’t sure if he had already been there, or if his newfound awareness told him I needed him.
He was sitting on that stone bench. I deflated next to him. Without any kind of preamble, I asked, “Am I too much?”
He huffed out a breath of air. I couldn’t tell if it was a laugh or just exasperation. “You are my scion, Alessia. There was never any doubt that your star would shine brighter than everything else. You asked me once why seraphim don’t have companions. It is because we cannot compromise our will.”
“So, you think I’m a glory hog?” Why else would I react so badly every time someone insisted that it was Leia who had saved them?
“I think it’s inevitable that you outgrow the bindings of this society.”
“Nice runaround,” I said.
He laughed for real this time. “Yes, Alessia. You take up a disproportionate amount of attention. Having said that, I don’t agree that it’s a bad thing.”
That was the reason why he didn’t really have any friends. And probably also why he couldn’t make it work in a relationship.
The problem was that we were so much alike. Did I really want to end up in a situation where I had all the power and nobody to share it with? It all sounded so logical. All I had to do was not open my big mouth so much and let somebody else deal with things.
Piece of cake. I’d lived seventeen years of my life under the radar. How hard would it really be to go back to that?
It was amazing what you could convince yourself of while you were awake. It was at night, when the world was quiet, that my darker half whispered stubborn words to me, asking me why people who were meant to care about me were forcing me to dim my light.
61
For two weeks, I tested the limits of my patience by holding my tongue as much as possible. I bit my tongue in the dining hall as I heard gossip about how I’d wanted to relive my glory days by making Cassie take part in a summoning that had set back her healing.
I didn’t try to call Charles, even though a part of me felt like it was missing, and I desperately wanted to know if he was okay.
Worst of all, I reached out to Sophie. We had a terribly awkward conversation peppered with my long silences. She did most of the talking, while I counted down the minutes before I was allowed to hang up.
“I hate this,” Sophie cried at last. “I hate that we have to resort to this. I’m sorry. I don’t know what more I can do.”
Stop speaking to her. Childish and selfish, but true.
I didn’t say any of that to her. Old me would have, but new me was trying to let people grow. “There’s nothing you need to do,” I said. “It is what it is.”
“But–” Her eyes welled with tears. I drew blood where my nails were digging into my palms.
“I’m not trying to be difficult,” I explained. I’m just trying to get through this the best way I can. But I won’t force you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with. You’re allowed to be her friend.”
“I want to be your friend too!”
Not enough, I thought.
“I’ll always be your friend, Sophie. I just need a bit of space right now. And who knows, maybe this is good for you too. I need to go. I’ve got another shift.”
Who knew that I would be a workaholic. “It makes sense,” Diana said to me later on in the week. “You’ve spent so much of your time fighting demons that you don’t really know how to deal with peaceful times.”
“News flash,” I reminded her. “We’re both in training to be elite guards.”
“I think what she’s saying is that you need a hobby,” Harlow offered.
“I have hobbies!”
“Name one.”
“I like gardening!”
“Show me a garden that isn’t the one in the manor that you have Betty and Fred to look after.” Harlow was all smugness. “When we’re allowed on furlough, we have lives. You’re just…working.”
Diana and the girls were already on tenterhooks because I was hardly sleeping. I would crash maybe once every couple of days in the dorm room, but I’d been missing in action most of the time. My routine of avoiding people would have been aloof and cool if I weren’t spending all that time in the morgue with Donovan the vampire.
I wasn’t sure why, but there was something very calming about being where most other people avoided. “That’s great work,” Donovan said. “You have quite the steady hand, Alessia.”
“It’s easy when the body isn’t gushing blood at you.”
He made a grating sound that I interpreted as a laugh. “Have you ever considered going into Battlefield Triage permanently.”
“Refer back to my previous comment. When the blood is fresh, I tend to lock up. It’s gross.”
“Oh well. Their loss is my gain. There’s another body in the preservation circle you can start on.”
Was it wrong that stitching back mutilated corpses was kind of soothing? My hedge magic didn’t love it, but it didn’t revolt against it either. It was almost like putting things right again.
“Phew!” Diana said, as I walked into our dorm room to get a change of clothes. “You stink like death.”
“That would be the regeneration potion,” I informed her.
“Well, it’s not attractive.”
I snorted. “Yeah, because that’s my main aim in life.”
Hastily pulling off my top, I rifled through drawers for a comfortable change of clothes. Diana caught my arm. “You can punch me for saying this,” she said, “but it’s been almost six months. I know it sucks, but it’s not healthy to hide away forever.”
She scampered off after that because she was probably scared I would throw a punch. At the door, she called out, “Betty called, by the way. Also, we’re not your secretaries!”
I took that to mean she wasn’t impressed with my bulletin screening. To be fair, I got far fewer calls these days. Nanna’s bulletin was voice only. “Hey, big girl. If you’re free, we’re having a house dinner tonight at seven.”
That was weird. They always had dinner at seven. It was a standing invitation. I thought it was just a ploy to get me home for once, so I didn’t think anything of it. Until I teleported into the kitchen and saw Patricia sitting there with Garnet amongst a pile of jewels.
“Did you guys rob a bank?” I asked. Garnet hardly looked up at me, but Patricia raised her head and gave me a nervous smile.
“Betty!” she called out the back door. Odd response.
Nanna blew into the room with a half-filled basket of roses. “Oh, there you are. Time got away from me a little.”
I eyed the kitchen table and realised there was no actual food preparation happening. “I thought you said we were having dinner.”
“We are. Fred and Mary are upstairs in the formal dining room.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re a Nephilim house and we should do something nice once in a while.”
Ah-hah. I could see Patricia all over that response. Turning to the only actual Nephilim in the room, I asked, “What’s happening?”
Nanna sat down in the seat on my left and tugged at my arm to make me sit too. My alarm bells were starting to chime loudly in my head. After I was seated, Patricia pushed a thick white envelope in front of me. I knew enough about what fancy party invitations looked like to know when not to open a bomb.
Lucifer teleported into the room. Not a single person flinched. He glided over to me and picked up the envelope. Settling back into my role as background noise, I allowed him to open it. He laughed and tossed the envelope aside.
“These insects grow tedious,” Lucifer said. Even though I didn’t want to see what it was, it was impossible to miss the word Pendragon scrawled in gold writing.
“What does it say?” I asked.
Lucifer spared me the tedium. “After extensive research and testing that has gone nowhere, the Nephilim Council have decided that Leia is going to officially become part of Michael’s line. They’re throwing a ceremony to induct her picture into the Nephilim Hall. We’ve been invited.”
His reaction was far less irritated than mine. It made me second-guess the stabbing in my gut. “You don’t have a problem with this?” I asked. “Doesn’t she technically also belong to you?”
The words were bitter on my tongue. For so long, he’d despised her too much to even broach the subject. Never in a million years would Lucifer acknowledge Leia as his scion.
“If she wants to ingratiate herself to the Council, that’s her business.”
“It’s our business,” Patricia said. “Her alliance with Michael’s line means that House Pendragon’s alliance with Michael’s line will be strengthened. Our only support so far has been House Pendragon. We might not be able to negotiate well if we don’t have their undivided support.”
I wanted to make a comment about withdrawing as a Nephilim house, but I was still trying to keep my mouth shut. Something occurred to me.
“Is that why all the big rocks?” I asked, pointing to all the jewellery and gems. “Are we trying to bribe them?”
“Not a bribe,” Garnet said, “a goodwill gesture.”
Old habits died hard. “I have a piece of demon glass the size of an egg if you want to give that to her.”
Garnet’s grimace said he was trying his best to hold his tongue too. “Let’s hold off on the sinister-magic implements for the time being.” He gestured to the pile. “Is there anything here you’re particularly fond of that you’d like to retain?”
“I don’t have the slightest clue what half of this stuff is.”
Patricia dug around in it with her quill. “It does seem like a very assorted pile of treasure. Some of it is quite gaudy.” Patricia glanced up at me. “I think the best gift we can give them is our blessing.”
