The Broken Academy 5: Bonds Read online

  The Broken Academy

  BONDS

  Jade Alters

  Contents

  The Broken Academy

  1. The First Strike

  2. New Tricks

  3. Rescuers

  4. Word of the Adversary

  5. Whispers in the Dark

  6. Broken Bond

  7. Conspiracies

  8. Tipping the Balance

  9. Blue-Eyed Devil

  10. The Unknown

  11. Battle for the City

  12. Retaliation

  13. On Top of the Wall

  14. The Lotus Library

  15. The Epicenter

  16. True Potential

  Epilogue

  Also by Jade Alters

  © Copyright 2019 – Starchild Universal Publishers Inc. - All rights reserved.

  It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental.

  Created with Vellum

  The Broken Academy

  Before you move forward into the final book of The Broken Academy Series, please make sure you haven’t missed out on the other exciting stories in this collection:

  Book I : Power of Fire

  Book II: Power of Magic

  Book III: Power of Blood

  Book IV: Pacts & Promises

  The First Strike

  Cece,

  The Broken Academy, Administrative Wing

  I can hardly believe I’m here. It’s like tripping backward through a window to a previous life. The Academy. The long hallways of offices that I used to walk at least once a week. My eyes wander inevitably toward the door to the cavern-like office of the Dragonlord. It’s not like I can see it through all the chaos.

  It’s one disaster after another. The Fiends. The Lotus. That big blue...whatever that was that spat us out here. At least it had the good sense to swallow Heren and those other Lotus fuckers. The scarred, the lost, good people, Dragons that will never fly again because of them… Good. I hope they get ripped apart and rot in that blue hell.

  Now this. I’m sure the Academy’s Administrative Wing has never seen so many visitors. It certainly wasn’t designed to. Survivors from the Academy and Kyrie sides of our tenuous alliance cram in tighter than a sardine tin. Voices bounce off of every wall. A subtle but shrill backdrop of whimpers and cries rattles my spine. Just minutes ago, our biggest threat was the Gray Fiends. My sole mission was to turn them into a cylinder of torchlight. Then I did. With Thise and Dorian, I reduced them to ash and blood.

  I never imagined the Lotus were even real. I’d never seen them. I’d hardly heard a whisper of them from Emery, and they sounded somehow less believable than any other part of what I’ve gotten myself into, the past few years. A purely natural, human faction capable of not just competing with the supernatural, but bringing them to their knees? If only I’d never seen it for myself. But I did. The Lotus had all of five minutes to take a crack at us, before that blue gate to God-knows-where opened. In that time, they killed thirteen of my friends from the Kyrie. They sliced Fey with wire that burned. They melted Magician brains with some kind of sound-orb. They blinked Vampires into limp helplessness with strobing light. And what they did to Dorian…

  “Dorian…” I hear my voice murmur, and time thaws from its frozen numbness. Suddenly I’m catapulted from past, beyond the present, straight into a turbulent future. A future without my father. The railroad spike from Heren’s bowgun spikes through my memory. It stopped him from transforming. It put him down. I stumble forward through the raucous crowd. “Dad?” I call out.

  I shoulder around people jabbering about everything that happened. About the Gray Fiends, reduced to ribbons. About the Lotus and the people they put down. About the portal that saved us and being back in the Academy and other inconsequential shit. All that matters now is finding Dorian.

  “Dad?” I call out, surprised by the crack in my voice. “Dad?” I squeeze between teeming bodies. I look high and low. There’s Lee, right next to River. Bryant leans against one of the office doors, heaving with exhaustion. Serge and Emery try to corral disoriented survivors who just emerged from their first trip through a portal. But where is Dorian? Where is my father?

  “Cece?” I hear a voice echo through the back of my skull. Though I hear it, the sound comes from nowhere near my ears. That’s when I remember: that’s right, I’m an Astral.

  “Steph, where are you?” I call back, without my lips. I remember Heren’s second bow-gun bolt clenched in her shimmering blue fingers.

  “By the Vampking’s office,” Stephanie tells me. I don’t know if I’ve ever shoved anyone so hard. Bodies trip out of my barreling path left and right. Everyone between me and my parents is forced out, creating a tiny ring of space around us.

  “How is he doing?” I ask as I kneel beside the toppled tan giant. The leader of the Kyrie hangs in the soft blue light of his former wife. Dorian can’t keep his exhausted eyes off of Stephanie, until I arrive. A single ruby bead drips from the corner of his smirk when he looks from her to me.

  “He can still hear you. A little touchup and I’ll be fine,” Dorian tells me. He tries to sit up more, which generates a booming cough from deep in his chest.

  “Nice try, old man.” I help Stephanie ease him over to the wall. Chuckles spray a little cone of red mist around him.

  “It’s got less to do with my age, and more to do with whatever the fuck that kid shot me with,” Dorian tells me.

  “The shot wasn’t directly fatal, but…” Stephanie trails off as her eyes wander to the wound in Dorian’s collar. The area around the dark steel spike that’s stuck in him has been altered. The skin immediately around the wound is no longer human. There are scales, but not healthy ones. They are pale compared to Dorian’s usual dark, rich hue, and look loose. I put a hand on his shoulder, which jostles him closer to the waking world.

  “Maybe a Fey healer can help? I’ll find something,” I tell him. I turn back for the crowd behind us. Suddenly, they seem a bit less useless to me.

  “Cecelia,” Dorian’s low rumble catches me a second before his hand does. It grips my wrist tight to stop me, then falls away. He’s too weak to hold on. “You did it. You helped incinerate the Fiends… I hope you know I’m proud of you.”

  “Save that beautiful thought for a more beautiful time,” I tell him back, and hurry off. “Where are they… Where are they?” I chant to myself. My dead eyes scout the crowd as I tear through it, just like a shark. By the time I get a whiff of the blood I’m looking for, it’s a full minute later. It might as well be a lifetime. It takes all I have not to scream. “I need you to help my father,” I say to Fey Rorelia. She doesn’t hear me over the voices of the other Kyrie leaders and the Council, gathered at the core of the chaos.

  “You don’t think those were some other type of Fiends in there....do you?” Lucidous asks.

  “I don’t care, as long as they keep those Lotus bastards tied up,” Chief Botan answers. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I can’t believe they don’t hear me. It’s paralyzing. Who cares about all of that? That’s past! We still have a chance to help people now.

  “Well, it was obviously a portal. It resembled something a Magician would do well enough, but the place… No Magician could open a gate there,” Horace says.

  “Then what-”

  “Hey!” I scr
eam over whatever Thise was about to say. Her eyes light bright with surprise and converge on me, along with the rest of our fearless, talkative leaders, Academy and Kyrie alike. Mine lock on Fey Rorelia. “My Dad needs your help. He might die without it.”

  “She’s right,” Thise surprises me in saying. “There are plenty of injured who need all of our help. And all this hysteria is hardly helping anyone. Fey Rorelia, go.” The proud sprite of nature hardly thinks twice about being told what to do, even by her enemy. Not when there are so many who could use her medical attention. She heads off in the direction I point her, to where Dorian lays bleeding against a wall. “You too, Cece.”

  “What?” I bounce back at the Dragonlord instantly.

  “We need to clear out this Wing, to help the injured effectively. Everyone else being cramped in here is only going to get in the way of that. We need to get people to rooms,” Thise tells me. She shares a nod with Lucidous, Botan, Horace and Reynold alike. Each of them breaks off to a different section of the hysterical crowd. The Council leads the Kyrie, from leadership down to the newest recruits, to dorms in wings with open rooms. “Your old room is still open.”

  “You think I’m going to what- sleep? While people are here bleeding out?” I bite back. People, meaning one particular Dragon. Some small part of me knows her giving me orders isn’t helping. Then she does that thing – that stupid thing I never thought she’d have the chance to again. She takes a little step in and lays a hand on my shoulder, right next to my neck. She smiles, like she can see the care and whatever else beneath it all, the stuff that really drives my anger.

  “I don’t expect you’ll get much sleep, but you do need to rest. While you can. I doubt Heren and that group was the last we’ll see of the Lotus. We have a rare moment of calm before what I fear will be a very terrible storm,” Thise tells me, “and you know we can’t effectively treat all those who need treatment with the crowding here. If you must do something, take some of your colleagues with you to empty rooms in your Wing. That is how you can help Dorian.”

  “God…damn you,” I whisper. I slide her hand off my shoulder, and trudge off. I don’t know how she does it. “River,” I call out as I pass her. The one word is all I need to signal come with me. “Steph,” I send out through the Blue Plane, “how’s he doing?”

  “Fey Rorelia just got here,” Stephanie tells me. “She’s…stabilizing him.”

  “Alright, good... Come find me and River by the stairwell to the D Wing courtyard,” I eventually find it in me to say.

  Cece,

  D Wing,

  The transition might be the most harrowing of my life. Going from the cramped, chaotic temporary treatment room of the Administrative Wing to our old room. The only light comes in from the silver moon through our window. River runs a finger through the dust on her desk, where she studied to tame her wild, uncontrolled Shifting. Stephanie glides across the air to the bed she pretended to sleep in until she could actually form a back to lay down. I crush a handful of drapes in my fist – curtains I burned in my first term with these two as my roommates. My family.

  None of us thought we’d stand here again. To be here now is too unsettling to have unpacked in a thousand years, but we don’t get even a fraction of that time. The dead silence is broken by a series of low thunks on the door. I turn around to open it without too much thought. It’s not like I’m about to sleep, no matter how stable Fey Rorelia says Dorian is. I pull back the door to a face I almost don’t recognize, in my disoriented exhaustion.

  “I…don’t mean to bother you,” says Bryant. The cracks of his dark, rocky face belie that he’s just as spent as I am. Maybe more. “It’s just…my old room has a new tenant. Someone too dangerous to let out. So I…I don’t have a place to…”

  “Come in,” I murmur, stepping sideways. I have to grab his shoulder to pull him in. Guiding Bryant is like walking a boulder to bed. I can see how uncomfortable he is on his face, as Stephanie and River turn to see him. But he’s not exactly in any condition to fight me off. After the battle with the Gray Fiends, how long he maintained that barrier for with Helena, I don’t know how he’s still upright. “Relax, Bryant.”

  “I…didn’t want to intrude. I…didn’t know where we stand,” he whispers the last part to me alone. His awkwardness makes me smile. Maybe he is really getting it, after all.

  “Very close together,” I whisper back in his ear. The goofy little grin he tries to hide from me melts the candy coating that’s been forming around my heart all evening. I drag Bryant to my bed and help him up. His glowering orange eyes are closed before I get the sheets up over his chest.

  “We’re all beat,” River sighs.

  “I feel like I’ll never sleep again,” Stephanie concurs. I prop myself up on the edge of the bed with both tired palms. I gaze down at Bryant in envy while he lightly snores himself to deeper sleep. He doesn’t even stir when an odd sound fills the air of the room. A sound I’ve never heard before. It’s something like a siren, but a bit more musical. It blares through our heads despite the lack of speakers in the room.

  “This is a security alert,” a voice too calm to be live announces. Some kind of automated, magical alarm. “There have been multiple breaches of the Academy perimeter. This is not a drill. This is not a test.”

  “Already?” Stephanie mumbles, while Bryant snores on. Her answer is a repeat of the message. This is not a drill. This is not a test. The last part grinds right through me. What it is, is the first strike of lighting. The beginning of the storm.

  Cece,

  Hidden Corner, San Francisco

  I don’t like to come back here. It’s just too confusing. The Academy Training Zone, tucked away behind an illusory curtain in the back alleys of San Francisco, has heavy memories attached to it. Memories that pull me so strongly in conflicting directions. Jason’s death. My first flight with Lee, the first time I ever even considered the possibility that Dragons could be real. The silent farewell to my adoptive parents, and my old life entirely. My weirdly awesome date with Bart that made me believe Vampires could be more than savage killers. And now, it looks like I’m about to add another tally to these confusingly charged alleys.

  I line up at the double doors of the Tether Teleporter alongside Stephanie, River and Bart. The doors swing in. Ribbons of light ensnare us and shoot us straight down for the city. Our remarkably brief briefing echoes in my ears.

  “We picked up about thirty distinct unregistered supernaturals inside the curtain around the Training Zone. This number was intermixed with a rapidly changing number of Normans,” Magister Reynold told us. The sweat rolling down his forehead served only to heighten the tension of the situation. “The numbers of both, actually. They’re fluctuating at an alarming rate. There shouldn’t be any Normans behind the curtain. To them, the alley should appear to dead-end. Our best guess is that there is some sort of altercation happening. Between whom, we haven’t the slightest idea. It’s definitely a security concern, considering how concentrated our forces are here.”

  Unregistered supernaturals, like I was when Lee first brought me back. Normans who have no business being on the wrong side of the curtain, like Jason. Rapid changes in numbers. With that to go on, my fists curl tight. I try to be ready for anything. The robed dicks that put a railroad spike in my Dad. A handful of Fiends we missed in the battle of the Truce Camp. A full-on assault from some party we haven’t even met yet. But the second our party bursts up the stairs from the little storage closet Tether Teleporter, I find we’re not prepared for everything. Not even close.

  “Oh my God,” I turn my head away from the alleys almost instantly. I bury my mouth in the inside of my elbow to cage the climbing acid.

  “What the hell is this?” River blurts. The only one of us who, disturbingly, seems to have seen this before takes point.

  Bart jumps up from the staircase, between us and a horde of pale-skinned people dragging bodies into any crevice they can find. Some of them are freshly deceased. T
hey twitch as their pale captors paint crimson streaks across the pavement with their dragging legs. Some of them are still alive. They kick with what little strength they have left. Gurgling screams jump from their opened throats, where tissues and blood vessels hang loose or severed. Every one of the pale assailants bears the same distinctly vibrant, dripping red ring around their lips.

  “Newbie Vampires. Last minute gifts from the Gray Fiends, I’d wager,” Bart tells us. His legs lock, ready to launch. When he turns back, his own pupils are disturbingly dilated inside the ring of his bright scarlet irises. “They’re in a frenzy. It happens when too many of them feed too close together. I’ve never seen this many all together. Someone must have corralled them in like this.”

  “Who cares how they got here?” Stephanie finally finds it in herself to pipe up. I race out of the opening of the stairs beside her floating blue frame. River trembles after us close behind.

  “Agreed. Our concern is getting them out,” Bart returns, astonishingly calm for the red paint of humanity dripping down the walls around him. “Keep close, but don’t share targets. If we separate them, they’ll calm down.”

  “Got it,” I growl as flame swirls up from my feet.

  I burst from a smoky flare in my natural, violet scaly armor. I bank along the side of the cement walls that still haunt my nightmares, straight into the body of the nearest Vampire. Her back slams into the ground while her chosen feedbag stumbles back, hand over his gaping neck. My mouth cracks wide with intent to incinerate. But, the tighter my scaly gauntlets grip into her shoulders, the more lucid she seems. Her muscles loosen in my grasp. Her fangs retract within the bright ruby outline of her lips, smeared from the throat of the boy sliding down the concrete wall.