Azure Dragons (Supernatural Shifter Academy #2) - G. Bailey Page 0,41

dad is David Bartholomew Ash, and he’s on the school board for the U.K. Academy. I have a blood bag for him.”

“A blood bag?”

“Hello - he’s a vampire shifter.” Hunter’s tone is making him sound eerily like his sister. “He needs to feed or he’s going to pass out.”

“I… didn’t know vampire shifters worked that way.”

“Well, of course you wouldn’t. Where did you get your education? The American Academy?” he snorts. “Honestly, I’ve heard your school system was bad, but I didn’t realise it was that-”

“All right, all right, enough,” the bouncer says, sounding exasperated. “You’re giving me a migraine. Get your dad his blood, or whatever, and then I want you out of there. Do you understand?”

“Absolutely,” Hunter replies, sounding overly chipper. There’s the sound of a door opening and closing.

“I’ll be damned,” Shade says, shaking his head in disbelief. “He actually got through.”

“He really ought to pull out that Amelia voice more often,” quips Landon. “He could get us whatever he wants.”

I hold up my hand to silence them; the sound of more voices is coming through. It’s muffled, like they’re on the other side of a partition, but if I concentrate, I can just barely make them out. “...I really think we should be focused on the matter at hand, Hawthorne,” comes an American voice. Russo’s, if I’m correct.

“This is the matter at hand,” comes another voice, this one I recognise as Hawthorne’s. “You’ve heard how the peace talks are going. The politicians are deadlocked. How many more skirmishes are there going to be before you realise that the humans are outmatched, here?”

“Outmatched?” This one I don’t recognise. “You’re making this sound like it’s a war, Hawthorne.”

“It is a war,” Hawthorne insists. “You all know this; I’m just the one brave enough to say it out loud. We’re woefully unequipped to deal with the shifters anymore. Not with them mobilising, threatening to rise up. The dam is going to break, ladies and gentlemen; the only question is when. The only way we’ll have any hope of surviving when it does is by leveling out the playing field.”

“You’re talking about restarting the hybrid experiments,” someone else pipes up. My eyes go wide as I look up at the others; they look as stunned as I feel.

“That’s a dangerous proposition, Hawthorne,” Russo replies. “The U.K. Academy already tried that; we’ve seen how it ended.”

“There were… outside factors,” Hawthorne concedes. “It’s unfortunate that we weren’t able to continue our research. Don’t you people understand? Granting humans shifter abilities will make the whole conflict irrelevant. We won’t have to worry about regulations and integration if we do this. Hell, we might not even need Academies anymore.”

“But it’s a dangerous procedure,” pipes up another board member. “Even if it does work, we’re talking about hundreds of shifter lives lost. You can’t just replicate magic like that without a sacrifice.”

“And what would you rather sacrifice,” Hawthorne fires back, “a few thousand shifter lives, or a few million human lives? Because these are the stakes we’re talking about, here.”

“That’s hyperbole!”

“I do think President Hawthorne has a point,” Russo says with a sigh. “It’s clear that the landscape is changing for us, and this conference isn’t getting us anywhere. It might be time to take things into our own hands.”

“What you’re suggesting is unethical,” protests another board member.

“Not to mention unsanctioned,” adds another.

“Enough,” snaps a new voice, this one deep and authoritative. “Hawthorne, you’ve said your piece. We will… need to think about this, before we take any further action. Maybe it would be best to take a recess for a few days and consider this proposal. We can reconvene and take another vote when we’re all fresh.”

There’s an uneasy murmur from the assembled board members, followed by a rustling sound that signals some of them are getting to their feet. Hunter begins to move away, making it harder to catch what they’re saying, but it hardly matters; we’ve gotten the gist of it.

And the gist is not good.

Chapter 16

The next twenty-four hours pass by in a haze. Whatever sense of excitement permeated our group before has vanished entirely in the aftermath of the board members’ meeting, replaced by a shroud of unease that has us all on edge. Everything said at the conference suddenly feels like white noise, a bunch of nonsense compared to what we know is happening behind the scenes, and the worst part is that I should have known it would come to this sooner or later. This was exactly what