Magic Secret (Half-Blood Academy #2) - Meg Xuemei X Page 0,59

voices from the party were muted. I’d strayed far away from the action.

The pair was leading me toward the south side of the pond where I’d once visited the elemental inside an ancient tree and had a brief, enigmatic, and unsettling conversation with it.

Magic pulsed around me, dark, thick, murky, and potent.

An alarm rang like hell inside my head.

A trap!

Fear washed over me, dimming my blind rage, and clarity started to regain its footing in me.

A chilly realization clicked.

I wasn’t following Axel. Whoever wore his face wasn’t him; they had different power signatures, though they shared the same power grade—the ninth grade.

I’d been lured into an ambush by a demon prince.

And he had brought a small army of powerful mages.

How had they breached the Academy’s wards?

“Hello, Marigold,” a male’s rich, dark voice purred.

Axel and Brittney appeared in my field of sight, his arm still snaked around the first-year student.

Terror and ice coursed through my veins. I tossed my stilettos at the fake Axel’s face and ran.

Only I didn’t get far. My face slammed into an invisible wall. Dark spells twirled in the air, smelling foul and enhancing the dark orb that encased me.

I conjured up my fire and tossed it at the barrier. I had only one urgent purpose—escape at all costs. Yet the barrier didn’t break at my onslaught.

Cold sweat dampened my armpits.

A dozen or so cloaked mages peeled out of the shadows of trees and closed in on me, their wands all pointing at me.

“Stop wearing a demigod’s face, asshole.” I shouted at the demon prince. Then I stabbed two fingers in Brittney’s direction. “Do you know whom you’re mixing with this time, bimbo? You didn’t get the Demigod of War. You got a prince from Hell.”

The demon prince shoved his female companion aside, no longer needing her.

Brittney face-planted into a tree trunk with a yelp of pain. If she weren’t an Olympian descendant, she’d have a cracked rib and a broken nose.

“Take care of the trash,” the demon prince said cruelly before turning to me with a lopsided smile. “So, you know who I am.”

Axel’s face melted from him, and a gorgeous demon prince stood in front of me.

Unlike other demons, he didn’t have horns and claws. He didn’t carry a weapon or wear their scaled armor that was damn hard to pierce, yet he was the most dangerous demon I’d met.

With my innate knowledge, I knew he could conjure up horns and fangs easily if he wanted to have them. Demons had all kinds of shapes. The ones with a humanoid form were the descendants of the most powerful fallen angels. They were cold, brutal, powerful, and merciless.

This dark prince’s power grade was only a scale lower than Lucifer’s. That was likely why he could get inside the walls of the Academy, the heart of the demigods’ territory.

His mage pawns, who were powerful magic users, had probably assisted him in breaking down the wards.

He’d worn Axel’s face and fooled me, taking advantage of my blind, jealous rage.

This demon prince could shift shapes at will, but now he wanted me to see his true form. I perceived his intention—he wanted me to see him.

Clad in a white shirt and a pair of dark jeans, the demon prince could blend into any setting and any human society. Humans would mistake him for a rich, bored heartthrob, and none of them would recognize him as a soul-stealer and the incarnation of a nightmare.

His face was perfection, like an angel carved out of dark gold. Only the material came from Hell. His long eyebrows were black and sharp. His bottomless, unfathomable eyes contained an infinite darkness that was born to devour light.

Yet he was the most sensual man I’d met, because he was the very definition of seduction. He created it and rewrote it. When his lips moved, no woman could resist him.

But I wasn’t an average woman, not at any time of the day.

Lust didn’t pulse in my bloodstream, as he had clearly intended. Instead, a chilly repulsion rolled in my belly.

“I know what you are,” I said. “I just don’t know your name.”

But he knew me by name. He’d gone through a lot of trouble to breach the wards, as no demons could have done before, just to get me. He’d even gotten a pawn—Brittney—to help him lure me here.

In my stupid jealousy, I’d thrown every caution and reasonable thought out the window. I hadn’t even bothered to distinguish the demon prince’s power signature from Axel’s when I’d