Chapter 8
Olivia opened her mouth, presumably to tell me what an idiot I was, when she turned as white as a sheet and collapsed.
“Olivia!” I shouted, fumbling over to her as her lingering magic evaporated all around me like a puff of air.
She held up a hand, stopping me from touching her. “I’m fine. I just… I need a minute.”
I felt like an asshole for making Olivia use magic. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered as I clutched my fists at my sides. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Olivia struggled to the sofa and gave me a frown. “Were you thinking at all? I know things are shitty, but it’s no reason to try and kill yourself.”
My eyes went wide. “What? No. Gods, Olivia, I wasn’t trying to kill myself.” I gestured to my useless wings. “I was trying to give myself a flying lesson.” I cringed at how idiotic that sounded.
Olivia chuckled, her shoulders relaxing. “You should leave the lessons to the teachers, Lils.”
Before I could ask if she meant someone in this gods-forsaken place could teach me to fly, a pillow zoomed past my face. “No talking before glow-rise!” Yuri’s muffled cry sounded as she dove back under the sheets.
Olivia snatched up a throw pillow and tossed it back at her, making Yuri squeal. Olivia and I broke into hysterical laughter.
“Would you two stop?” she complained.
Yuri rummaged out of her prison of pillows and glared at us, her ruby eyes framed by shadows. She was clearly not a morning person. “A girl needs her beauty sleep.” She gestured to the dark circles under her eyes. “Does this look like a pretty face to you?”
Olivia leaned on the edge of the sofa. “You’re the one who insisted on bunking with me, vamp. You could have been nice and comfortable in the Vampire Dorms, you know.”
Yuri pouted. “I’m here because I love you. You know that.” She frowned. “Except when you throw pillows at me. Or eat my food.”
Olivia gave her a flat stare. “I never eat your food.”
“Then why is it always gone?” Yuri asked, blinking.
“Because you eat all of it,” Olivia said.
Yuri thought about that for a moment. “Oh. I guess that’s possible.”
Rolling my eyes, I flopped onto the couch. Now that the adrenaline had drained out of me from the aborted fall and catastrophic accident, I felt drained. And hungry. My belly chose that moment to growl and both Olivia and Yuri turned to look at me.
“Looks like I’m not the only one who’s hungry,” Yuri said, grinning.
“Sorry…” Wincing, I covered my stomach with my hands and shrugged. “I guess it’s been a while since my last meal.”
“Ya think?” Yuri bounced up, clearly not that tired. “It’s only been a year.”
She had a point. I had refused any dinner when we’d gotten back because my stomach was already in knots, but my free-fall near-second-death experience worked up an appetite.
“I’ll order room service,” Olivia said as she picked up an orb from the table.
“Get something for me!” Yuri said, clapping.
“Room service?” I asked, raising my eyebrow at the orb.
Olivia pressed it to her ear and grinned at me. It lit up and she began rattling off enough food items to feed the west wing of the campus.
Yuri rocked side-to-side, licking her lips. “Perks of Elite status,” she said with a wink.
Before Olivia had even ended the call, a knock sounded at the door, making me raise a brow.
“They can’t be here already, can they?” I asked.
Olivia smiled. “I’m not the only one with magic at the Academy.”
Yuri, clad only in a skinny-strapped tank and panties, launched out of bed and opened the door before either of us could react. She was the laziest vampire I knew, but when food was involved, she moved at superhuman speed.
From what I knew of Yuri’s biology, she could eat human food, especially when infused with blood, and enjoyed it very much, too.
“Hello, breakfast buds!” Yuri exclaimed as she threw open the door.
“They’re not the food,” Olivia reminded her. Yuri’s excitement fell into a pout as the two students rolled in a cart laden with treats.
I spotted orange juice, ice water, a silver pot I guessed held coffee, and a bubbly pinkish liquid in a crystal pitcher.
“Oh! Blood orange mimosas!” Yuri squealed, running to Olivia as she squeezed her around the middle. “I love you even more, now!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Olivia said, laughing. “Just don’t bite me and we’re square.”
Yuri giggled at that, but I figured it was a very real concern when living with a constantly hungry vampire.
Yuri plucked up the pitcher and began pouring herself a drink. I decided we weren’t talking about blood oranges but rather blood and oranges. Yeah, I wasn’t going to try the mimosas.
My mouth watered for everything else.
Meats sautéed and grilled, cheese in cubes and melted over bread, and enough pizza to satisfy any raging dorm student made its way onto my plate.
Um, yum?
Olivia laughed at me as I filled up a second plate. “Wow, Lily. You really were starving.”
“Yep,” I agreed, using my teeth to tear off a crisp piece of bacon. I eyed Yuri as she wiggled her fingers over the entrees.
Olivia pointed to the pink hash-browns that I was very grateful I hadn’t sampled. Yuri added a few to her plate.
Skipping over the questionable breakfast food, I grabbed some sausages, pork, and a cup of yogurt. Those weren’t the best combinations, but my stomach didn’t know the difference right now.
“You’re still hungry?” Olivia caught me eying a plate of biscuits while I stuffed my face. “You know, now that I think of it, my levitation spell on you earlier took more out of me than I expected.”
Yuri spoke around a mouthful of food. “Maybe you should eat less, Lily, if you plan on jumping again anytime soon. Olivia won’t be able to lift you up next time.”
Jerking my gaze from the plate of biscuits, I glared at my best friend and her vampire roomie. “Did you guys just call me fat?”
Olivia waved a dismissive hand. “Not fat. Your tummy is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.” She leaned in, her gaze narrowing. “But the weight is coming from somewhere. Do your wings weigh that much?”
I picked up my coffee cup and leaned back, fluffing the said appendages that constantly felt like an extra hundred pounds—which given the latest comments, they might actually be. “Maybe?”
She frowned. “I’ve done a lot of reading lately, ever since I had the vision about you and saw your wings.
Angelic bodies are supposed to have unique bone structures, such as lighter bone density so they can fly easier.
But there’s nothing light about you. And of course, you’re not purely angel.
With you being a tribid…” Her words faded away and she looked down at her plate.
“Hendrik mentioned something,” I murmured. “Kaito had told him that I might actually be a quadbrid.” My brain hurt trying to think of how I could be a mutt of so many supernatural races in one body. Sure, let’s add one more onto the pile. Why not?
“Kaito and his theories.” She hitched up a shoulder. “I don’t know if any of us fully understand who—or what you are, Lils.”
Frowning, I pushed my plate away, no longer quite so hungry.
“Lily.” Olivia’s soft voice tugged my attention back to her. Her lips pursed in concern. “I didn’t mean anything by it, you know.”
“It’s fine.”
She didn’t look convinced. “There’s nothing wrong with being special.”
“Special?” I said on a harsh laugh. “Special doesn’t even begin to cover it.
I have two moms; one’s an angel, one’s a succubus turned Queen of Hell.
My dad is the Incubus King and he couldn’t knock up my mom by himself, so he had to solicit Sonya’s help and somehow magic from her Blood Stone was involved, giving me direct lineage to Hell from birth, not just from her ascension to the throne.
” Just saying it and hearing how bizarre it sounded had me shaking my head.
There had been a time when I hadn’t remembered anything about my past and if somebody had just blurted those little tidbits out to me, I might have thought they were crazy.
And that was just some of my twisted history.
Olivia rubbed her temple and leaned back.
“I’ve been looking into that, too. Blood Stones are powerful artifacts.
It would have helped in your formation, perhaps it was the key to your birth in the first place.
It’s where you draw your Demonspawn powers from.
The Blood Stone really makes things crazy—they’re only mined in Hell and depending on which level your stone came from, that will determine what sort of powers it might have passed on.
” She sank lower in her seat. “And then there are your mother’s mates. ”
“Which of my mothers?” I asked, buckling to yet another hysterical laugh while Yuri quietly gathered as many blood orange mimosas as she could pour and snuck off.
“Sonya? Never mind. Has to be Sonya—you’re talking about the Blood Stone.
But what do her mates have to do with me?
None of them fathered me.” At least I didn’t think they’d been involved.
“No, but she had connections to any number of supernaturals,” Olivia said. “What if she drew upon those, even unwittingly, while she was carrying you? She has runes on her stomach, doesn’t she? She had been linked to them even before she met them.”
My stomach dropped. That could mean I had a lot more than just four powers inside of me to deal with.
Maybe… I had them all.
Hendrik’s comments from earlier suddenly made a lot more sense. He’d wondered if maybe I could have vampire somewhere in my complicated parentage, since Sonya was mated to a vampire.
If I could rule that out, then the theory that I was some supernatural multi-hybrid could be put to rest.
“Well, I can tell you one thing.” Looking at Yuri’s ‘blood’ mimosas, I felt my stomach pitch. “I’m definitely not a vampire.”
“Good for you.” Yuri lifted her glass to me. “I miss eating food without that metallic aftertaste to everything.”
A melodious chime sounded and I looked around for the source.