Bloodline Alchemy: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Academy Novel (Bloodline Academy Book 6) Lan Chan (uplifting novels .TXT) 📖

Agatha from invading my mind. Sunshine. The first blossom on the jacaranda tree outside the Academy dorms. Charles snoring softly in his sleep, the demon blade clutched in his hands. The rise and fall of Lizzie’s tiny chest while she slept after her ordeal. The blood-heating brush of Max’s gaze.

Something popped in my psyche. The demon spat a wad of black sludge from its mouth as I threw off the last of its mind control. Gripping the dwarfs head in one hand and its body in the other, the demon wrenched and decapitated him.

I screamed, my stomach lurching at the same time the crowd erupted in cheers and whistles. Behind my back, I heard the envious keening of the enslaved demons.

Tossing its dwarf toy aside, the demon stomped its way towards Celeste. Her wings had now wilted against her back. Even in their semi-retracted form, they were a burst of warm colour compared to the sallow grey of the demon’s skin. It didn’t appear to appreciate that very much. Slicing out with its claws, the demon tried to grab Celeste. Unfortunately, my blood circle got in the way.

It cleaved its claws against the circle, dragging a scream from me as darkness burst in the corner of my eyes. Knowing that an offensive attack was the only way I would ever win against a demon, I swallowed the screaming in my head and ran at it full pelt. Up close, its arm was about three times the width of my waist. The eternally irritating thing about demons and supernaturals was that bulk didn’t seem to hinder their speed a great deal. Professor Eldridge’s voice bellowed in my memory.

She’d been shouting at me and Lex for fooling around. “You have two choices in a fight with a demon, ladies. Either you learn to run very quickly, or you attack first with everything you have in the hope that you can incapacitate it. And then you run like hell.”

I had no option of running. Throwing everything I had into the protective blood circle around me, I ducked when the demon lashed out with its tail. The pointed tips slammed into the pole above James’s head. It sliced clean through the silver metal and came sweeping back for another round.

Ignoring the way the crowd jeered, I dived for the spear still in the dwarf’s grip. Trying to fight back my revulsion, I grabbed the spear and ran. Without contemplating how much it would hurt, I sliced the palm of my hand over the sharpened tip of the iron spear.

A whooshing sound made me flatten myself on the ground. I ate sand and rolled again as the demon’s tail whipped too close to my face. It played whack-a-mole with me until I dropped the spear because I could no longer afford to have my hands full.

Stomping over, the demon gouged a hole in the ground where my body had been just a millisecond before.

The muscles in my legs screamed as I forced myself upright. There was literally no cover. The only thing I had was the blood circles, and those were a pipedream, because I was bleeding profusely from the spear cut in my hand now. The scene in front of me wobbled.

Once more the demon lashed out with its tail. I jumped. Not high enough. The tip of its tail clipped me in the side. That small contact sent me sprawling head over ass. My back smashed into the brick wall.

The crowd’s laughter was a distant consideration.

“Pathetic!” Agatha yelled. “What are you resisting for? Fight or die!”

Seeing that it had backed me into a tight spot, the demon took its time herding me to where it wanted me. I had to give it to Agatha, I was pretty pathetic. When a whine tried to slip past my tongue, I bit down on it. I would probably die today, but by Gaia, I would do it with some dignity. Sort of.

The demon grinned. At least that was what I figured it was doing. The two long ropes of hair on either side of its mouth lifted. Its mouth opened slightly, and a tongue the length of my arm slipped out.

I felt the scrape of something unbearable against my mind again. It was like the leer of a hundred gross perverts at once. This time, the direction of the thoughts it pressed onto me were of a more sickening nature than my death. Before, I had just been a lowly, brown-fleshed creature that it would fillet for the fun of it. Now that it had scented the richness of my blood, it would revel in tormenting me in worse ways than death. The mating link boiled with rage, throwing itself wholeheartedly at the blood barrier.

I flinched when the demon’s tail swept up, my arms and legs heavy with terror. Instead of coming at me again, the dexterous tail wound around the spear and lifted the tip up to the demon’s mouth. I sat paralysed as its tongue slid out and lapped at my blood.

The demon projected its delight as the tang of my enriched blood hit its taste buds. I felt each slide of its suctioned tongue as though it had bent close and licked me from navel to neck. This time when the mating link bubbled its rage, my mind screamed with it.

I waited a second for my blood to slide down the inside of its throat before I reached out and drew on my blood alchemy. Fire heated in my veins as I catalogued every cell of my blood inside the demon’s body. Forcing them to vibrate against each other, I transmuted the blood into liquid fire. Thinking of the light inside the embers of an everlasting flame, I matched the heat until I heard the demon begin to choke.

Hotter and hotter, I felt the blood fire go from orange, to red, to a blue so deep it was almost black. I screamed at the same time the demon’s throat exploded. It splattered all