Bloodline Sorcery
A Bloodline Academy Novel
Lan Chan
Copyright © 2019 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
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
Chapter 22
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1
The peal of laughter hit me as my hand went to turn the doorknob. I suppressed a groan. My roommate, Kate, and her friends were inside. She wasn’t due back from mid-semester break until tonight. I had hoped to drop off my suitcase and unpack before The Kate Show began. Timing: It was everything.
I bit the inside of my cheek. For a moment, I considered turning around and going to hang out in the library until all this blew over. Then I remembered the jar of dragon’s breath in my suitcase. It wouldn’t keep for long outside of containment. I’d saved up all of my pocket money for two months to buy it. No way was I letting it coalesce just because my roommate hated my guts. What else was new, anyway?
Blowing out a breath, I opened the door. Four heads turned in my direction. It was like that scene from a horror movie where the heroine walked in on a satanic ritual and the demon’s head turned one-eighty degrees. I hate horror movies.
The carcass of Kate’s suitcase was wide open on my bed. A pair of leopard-skin panties was draped over my favourite silver braided wig on its stand along my windowsill. Great. I’d have to fumigate my stuff or something. Souvenirs from her safari holiday adorned her friends’ necks.
Good grief. She’d gone and bought them all knockoff nkisi pendants. If she’d bothered to ask, I would have told her to steer clear. The market vendors in the African supernatural communities made a killing off them. They didn’t care if they sold those to unsuspecting humans either. You’d think as a shifter she’d have more sense than that. The ones she’d bought were wood carved into the shape of runes. The real deal used human bones and they often had unfriendly spirits lurking inside them.
Kate’s light brown eyes were ringed in copper. Her dark hair flowed down her shoulders to frame the circular pendant sitting just above her breastbone. It was more solid than the ones she’d gotten her friends. The base was white with etchings I couldn’t make out from this far away. The cord was of black leather. Knots had been tied at regular intervals along the chain and there were coloured beads floating along beside the knots.
A lynx shifter, everything about Kate was lithe and graceful. I knew the second her ruby lips pulled into a catlike smile that she’d done this on purpose. Hooking her finger into the leather strap of her own necklace, Kate beamed at me.
“I hope these don’t make you feel homesick, Sophie,” she said. “I would have bought you one too, but I figured you’ve already got heaps.”
Her friends tittered. I swallowed back the snark on the tip of my tongue. Experience had taught me that rising to the bait never got me anywhere. If I stayed calm, they would eventually lose interest. Back home, our coven cohabitated with a pack of shifters. I’d grown up with wolf and hyena playmates. Part of me understood her innate need to establish dominance. I just wished it didn’t always come at my expense. A leopard couldn’t change its stripes, though, could it? At least not without some major high magic.
Forcing my mouth into a smile, I injected as much breeziness into my voice as I could.
“I’m just going to drop my stuff off. I’ll be back by sundown.”
Hoping she would get the hint that I wanted her things back on her side of the room by then, I carefully retrieved the glass bottle containing the dragon’s breath. Magicked to within an inch of its life, the glass was cool to the touch despite the lava-like flames swirling inside. I had plans to turn the dragon’s breath into an elixir that could counteract the effects of demon possession. It was my end-of-semester extra-credit project for Potions and Alchemy. If I could get this to work, I’d ace the exam. It wasn’t quite the Elixir of Life. That had ingredients I was too scared to even collect. One of which you couldn’t come back from. That’s why the making of it had been banned. My elixir was a watered-down version. It was still tricky enough that it baffled the seniors. I really wanted this to work.
As suspected, Kate’s friends lost interest when they didn’t get a reaction. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kate watching at me as I opened the storage chest at the base of my bed. It was a large square chest made of hawthorn wood and basilisk hide reinforced with silver. The hide was ethically sourced from the basilisks’ annual skin shedding. The chest belonged to my great-grandmother on my dad’s side. The side that didn’t have a murderous lunatic tainting it. All of my most prized possessions were locked up in here. There was also a not-so-prized possession but that was more a matter of not knowing what to do with it.
When I’d found out I was getting another roommate—a shifter, no less—I’d gotten the silver
