Magic Kingdom (Dragon Born Alexandria Book 3) Read Free Page A

commented.
    “Yes,” Alex said, her smile spreading wider. “She makes me forget about all my problems. Well, at least for a time.”
    “You’re worried about Gaelyn.”
    “You know me as well as she does,” she said. “What am I supposed to tell Gaelyn?”
    “Are you considering telling him you’re Dragon Born?”
    “No,” she said. “Gaelyn is a nice old man, but I don’t know anything about him or his past. Maybe he’s the reason the Dragon Born were hunted. He has sway over the Magic Council’s biggest decisions. For all I know, he might have been the one to declare the Dragon Born abominations. They did have powerful magic. Maybe even more powerful than Gaelyn’s was.”
    “People fear what they can’t control or understand.”
    “Yes,” she agreed.
    “But Gaelyn is…weird,” Logan settled on. “He doesn’t seem to be the sort to let emotions cloud his decisions. Not even fear. He is friendly, but every decision he makes is calculated. I can see it in his eyes, that cool calculation that so few people possess.”
    “I can’t tell him about me.”
    “No,” he agreed. “Just because he isn’t emotional, that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t conclude that the Dragon Born have to be killed. We don’t know what led up to the Dragon Born being hunted. We only know Gaelyn the philanthropist as he is today. We don’t know enough about his personal views to be sure his philanthropy extends to Dragon Born. The Magic Council has no love for them.”
    And yet she and Logan had allied with them—with the very people who had sentenced her kind to death. They didn’t know she was Dragon Born. Yet. And right now, they all had bigger problems. The Convictionites would exterminate every supernatural in the world if they got the chance. Alex and Logan couldn’t defeat them without the resources of the Magic Council, and the Council was too weighed down in bureaucracy to act. They needed a big battering ram to throw at the Convictionite problem, someone outside of their organization. The dubious honor of ‘battering ram’ belonged to Alex and Logan.
    Alex’s jacket buzzed. “Speak of the devil,” she said as she read the message.
    “Our new friends?”
    “We’re being sent to deal with some magic flying insects. Giant bees with potent poison in their stingers.”
    “They sound like lovely creatures,” commented Logan.
    Alex gave the picnic basket a wistful look before closing the lid on dinner. She stared up at the darkening sky. “It looks like our nice day is over.”

CHAPTER TWO
    Night of the Beasts

    A WEREWOLF SHOT across the highway in two gravity-defying leaps, then disappeared into the forest on the other side. Not two seconds later, the rest of the pack—five wolves by Alex’s count—cut across the lanes in a stampede that brought the cars to a screeching halt. Logan swerved around the tail end of the pack and sped off before the traffic could swallow his Maserati whole.
    “Thank goodness for your super speed,” she said, glancing back at the stopped cars they’d left behind. Miraculously, none of them had collided, probably because the traffic had only been moving at a snail’s pace. “What is going on tonight?”
    First, they’d had to take a detour to avoid a battle between two centaur clans. After that, it had been the flock of crimson-beaked ravens attacking a small town outside the city. The Magic Council’s agents were already there, dealing with the beasts. At least she hoped they were now regrouping and coming up with a plan to counter the birds that had chased them into an old barn.
    Then, when Alex and Logan had finally made it to the highway, they’d found the entire entrance ramp covered in a sticky green goo that had caught on fire the moment Alex tried to dissolve it. She’d managed to put out the fire and freeze off the goo, but the mysterious substance had already eaten through all of the asphalt and most of the road beneath it. Logan had driven over it