Magic Kingdom (Dragon Born Alexandria Book 3)

MAGIC KINGDOM

Dragon Born Alexandria: Book 3

Ella Summers

MAGIC KINGDOM

Dragon Born Alexandria: Book 3

Copyright © 2016

Version: 2016.04.23

Cover art by
Rebecca Frank

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Story Summary

In the aftermath of the bloodbath in London, mercenary Alex Dering is just trying to get her life back to normal—whatever “normal” is for a mage with a newly-awakened dragon side. Her latest assignment: a job for the Magic Council, the leaders of the supernatural community and the people who sentenced Alex’s kind to death.

Apparently, normal just wasn’t in the cards.

A new and mysterious supernatural threat has arrived in Munich, someone who melts buildings, summons forth armies of the dead, then vanishes without a trace. If Alex can’t catch this rampaging supernatural, tensions between humans and supernaturals might just boil over.

Magic Kingdom
is the third book in the
Dragon Born Alexandria
urban fantasy series.

Chapters

ONE
 
Sunset Magic

TWO
 
Night of the Beasts

THREE
 
Monster Cleanup

FOUR
 
Big, Bad, and Gothic

FIVE
 
The Human Problem

SIX
 
Melting Magic

SEVEN
 
The Center of Hell

EIGHT
 
Monsters and Mages

NINE
 
Two Sisters

TEN
 
Abomination

ELEVEN
 
Ornaments of the Dead

TWELVE
 
The Witches’ Cauldron

THIRTEEN
 
The Magic Detective

FOURTEEN
 
Soul Crusher

FIFTEEN
 
Dark Magic

SIXTEEN
 
Supernatural Death Squad

SEVENTEEN
 
Death’s Army

EIGHTEEN
 
A Cell in Hell

NINETEEN
 
Borrowed Magic

TWENTY
 
Necromancy Party

TWENTY-ONE
 
Turnabout

CHAPTER ONE

Sunset Magic

THE AIR WAS thick with hot, sticky magic. Alex stood with the immense lake at her back, the gentle breeze that whistled across its glassy surface doing little to dissipate the miasma of burnt, soggy wood and the acidic splash of epic frustration. Opposite her, a large, dilapidated barn leaned at an awkward angle. The splintered wooden beams that held it up looked one good gust of wind away from collapsing. It was a wonder that the rickety old building hadn’t been torn down, but Alex wasn’t about to complain. The barn was the perfect target for this afternoon’s magic practice.

If she could only get her magic to cooperate.

Black scorch marks decorated the barn’s planks, courtesy of her last nineteen attempts to vaporize the building. She shook out her hands, jostling her tired magic awake. It popped and bubbled beneath her fingertips, the pressure steadily growing.

“Here’s hoping the twentieth time is the charm,” Alex muttered to herself, then released her magic.

It tore out of her in a surge of sweet relief. A thick fiery ribbon blasted toward the barn, swallowing it in an inferno of orange flames. Crackling, snapping, the fingers of fire licked hungrily at the wood.

“This isn’t working,” she growled, waving her hand to wash away the fire. The flames spat in protest as the cool water drowned them.

“What’s the matter, Paranormal Vigilante? Too weak to burn down an old barn?”

Alex spun around. The assassin stood a few feet from the edge of the lake, his silhouette framed against a sunset-splashed water streaked with orange and red. He was dressed entirely in black—from his buckled boots, to his leather jacket that screamed he was here to thoroughly kick your ass. Icy darkness dripped from his aura, a cold and heartless song that promised no mercy. Alex had faced down her fair share of frightening opponents in her eight years as a monster-hunting mercenary, but not one of them could get her pulse racing like Slayer.

“I’m not too weak to make you eat your words,” she told him, drawing her sword as she allowed a savage smile to curl her lips.

Laughing, he drew two daggers. “Am I supposed to be scared?”

“That depends on whether you’re really as smart as you think you are.”

She swung her sword at him in a nice, flamboyant move that was sure to get his attention. As he parried her strike with his daggers, she set off a firebomb of magic right behind him. As smooth as silk and as fast as lightning, he managed to avoid the fire and slid forward to push against her blade with his. The force of his thrust spun them both around. Damn, he was fast—and strong. He snapped a kick behind her legs in an attempt to trip her. She hopped away, nearly landing in the fire she’d made for him.

He laughed at her again. “Be careful not to burn off your pretty clothes, love. Or prick yourself with that sword,” he added with a smirk.

Alex drowned the flames in a gush of water magic, then returned his smirk. “I’m touched by your concern for me, Slayer. Positively touched. But I assure you that I’m in no danger of burning or pricking myself.”

“Oh?” His blond eyebrows lifted in wicked promise.

She cleared her throat. “Enough talk. Do what you’ve come here to do.” She pointed her sword at him. “Or are you afraid?”

“Of you, princess?” He snorted. “Please, give me some credit.”

“The last assassin who tried to kill me is now nothing but ashes.”

“Shadowstalker was a fool,” he replied. “And he was not as good as I am. Besides,” he said, his gaze sliding to the steaming barn. “At the moment, it appears you’re having some trouble with burning things to ashes.”

She gritted her teeth.

“Don’t do that, darling. You’ll give your pretty face wrinkles.”

“I’m through talking to you,” Alex said, knocking him back with a blast of wind magic.

He flipped around backwards in the air, slowing his fall. As soon as his feet touched down on the ground, he sprinted forward in a flash of movement too fast to be human. Before she could blink, he’d knocked the sword from her hand. Robbed of her steel, she turned to her magic. She tried to blast him again, but he’d already spun around behind her. His arms locked around her torso, pinning her arms to her sides. His grip was unyielding, as lock-tight as an iron cage. She grabbed hold of her panicking magic and thrust it back outward. It erupted from her, tearing across her skin in a burning, electric shockwave before sinking into him. His chest shook against her back, but his iron grip didn’t falter.

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” he croaked.

Unbelievable. No one was that resistant to magic. She hit him with another jolt.

“Harder.” The word caressed her ear, rough and hot.

“We’re fighting. Stop hitting on me,” she growled, shifting her weight to jab him in the chest with her shoulder.

“But you like it.” His hold tightened.

“You’re trying to distract me. It won’t work,” she said, kicking her heel against his shin.

He slid his leg away before she could make contact. “We’ll see.”

She could hear the smile on his lips. He sure was getting a kick out of this whole thing. She aimed for his other leg, but he evaded once again. He was really starting to get on her last nerve.

“The Paranormal Vigilante. The Black Plague,” he whispered her nicknames into her ear. “You’re not so tough.”

“Just wait and see.”

A blast of wind cut across the lake, hitting him hard in the back. As he staggered forward, his grip on her relaxed. She knocked his arms aside and slipped away to a safe distance—whatever a safe distance was when your opponent was an assassin with the physical prowess of a vampire, the magical resistance of a fairy, and the stamina of a mage. He caught his fall with his hands and spun around to face her as he bounced back up to his feet.

“Showoff,” she said.

The lingering remains of her wind spell hit the barn. The wooden structure groaned a final, defeated protest, then tumbled down in an avalanche of splintered planks. As the wood rained down, Alex rushed her assassin, tackling him to the ground. She quickly wove bands of fire across his wrists and ankles to secure him.

Alex sat on him. “I told you I was tough.”

He pushed against the restraints, hissing in protest as the magic singed his skin.

“Yeah, you might want to be careful,” she told him. “If you push against those flames, they’ll eat right through you.”

He stared up at her, his eyes burning with green fire. “When I get out of these restraints…” He allowed his voice to trail off in lingering menace.

She arched an eyebrow at him. “You’ll do what exactly? In order to escape, you’ll have to push through those bands of fire, which will cut through you like a hot saw. And while I have no doubt that you’re crazy enough to do so, how do you plan to fight me with no hands or feet? Even with your healing abilities, I’ll still be able to kick your ass ten times over before your limbs regrow.”

“You have a dark, deviant mind,” he growled.

“Why thank you. You sure do know how to win a woman’s heart.”

A sinful smile slid across his lips. He stretched against his restraints, his muscles hardening from the effort. The fire biting into his wrists must have hurt like hell, but his face betrayed no sign of pain. It remained perfectly serene.

“I already have your heart, Alex.”

His words were as soft as whipped butter. They stirred something inside of her—something primal, something dark. Her magic hiccuped. The fiery restraints withered away and dissolved into a sea of smoke. Before she could blink, he was on top of her, pinning her down.

“Now that I have you just where I want you, Vigilante,” Logan said, his aura bubbling beneath that frozen river of cold-blooded control. “Whatever am I going to do with you?”

* * *

Alex lay beside Logan on the picnic blanket, the fuzzy red fleece soft against her skin. Above them, the last lingering remains of the sunset were fading into the dark blue abyss. Nearby, the water lapped softly against the rocky shore, its rhythm soothing. Smiling, Alex rolled over to punch Logan in the arm.

He chuckled. “Was that supposed to hurt?”

She glared at him. “You called my magic ‘weak’.”

“I was trying to bring out your inner dragon.”

“By taunting me?”

“We thought anger might be your trigger.” He glanced at the heap of wood that just half an hour ago had called itself a barn.
 

“I was supposed to vaporize it with dragon fire, not knock it over with a mild breeze.”

That’s why they’d come here, to this quaint lake outside of Munich. Alex needed a secluded place to practice her newly-discovered ability of dragon fire, a purple fire that instantly turned her target to ashes. But she’d been completely unable to summon that power again since the night she’d linked with her dragon.

Alex was Dragon Born, someone who had a mage side and a dragon side. Dragon Born mages were rare, mainly because the Magic Council, the body who ruled over the supernatural community with an iron fist, had declared them abominations and hunted them to near extinction. The sentence for Alex’s existence was death, so she was pretty tight-lipped about it. Logan had figured it out on his own. He actually was as smart as he thought he was.

She had to master her magic, now more than ever. A month ago in London, the same night she’d finally linked with her dragon side, she and Logan had thwarted the Convictionites’ plans to use the Blood Orb, a powerful magical artifact—or so they’d thought. As it turned out, the supernatural-hating organization had set up the whole thing to lure them into the middle of a bloodbath. And videos of that bloodbath, the night the media had dubbed Bloody Friday, had spread across the internet faster than dragon fire. As a monster-hunting mercenary and an assassin, Alex and Logan hadn’t had the cleanest reputations before that night. Since Bloody Friday, their popularity among humans—and humans’ opinion of supernaturals overall—had taken a steep nosedive.

“I have to master this magic,” Alex told Logan. “I’ll need it if we’re to have any chance of defeating the Convictionites. Humans are flocking to their message of hatred. They have too many followers, too many weapons, and they are always one step ahead of us.”

He set his hand over hers. “We’ll get them.”

She intertwined her fingers with his. “And when we face them, I will need my dragon fire. I only wish I knew why I’ve been unable to summon it again.”

“Maybe this power isn’t about anger or adrenaline,” Logan said. “Maybe it’s about being at the edge of your strength. It’s like your final super boost. A last resort, a special magic you can tap into only at the end. When you used the dragon fire before, you were seriously wounded.”