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

anyway.
    “Magic has gone wild tonight,” he said. “Did you see the saliva dangling from the werewolves’ mouths?”
    She nodded. “It was tinted with blood.”
    “The blood was werewolf blood. I could smell it.”
    “You could smell it? From inside the car?”
    “Yes.”
    Wow.
    “The werewolves were fighting one another tonight,” he said. “The question is why.”
    Werewolves, like other animal shifters, were a type of mage. And despite what the movies said, their shift was not a curse; it was a spell. Most mage shifters preferred a particular animal form, usually the most complex one they could manage. Werewolves were pretty high on the beast difficulty scale, and mages who could manage the shift tended to gather in ‘packs’, which were nothing more than exclusive mage cliques. Being overprivileged first tier mages, naturally these mages spent their time together drinking booze and getting high on magic drugs.
    “Did you smell drugs on them?” Alex asked Logan.
    “No. Did you sense drugs?”
    “No,” she said. “Well, not exactly. There was a strange magic clinging to them, but it wasn’t any drug I recognized. Maybe it was a spell.”
    “You think they were bewitched to go wild?”
    “Yes. And they aren’t the only ones.” She pointed up at the storm of bats flying over the highway like a bomber squad. God, she hoped they didn’t have anything to drop onto the cars. “Half the monsters and tons of supernaturals in the city have gone mad. All at once.”
    The highway spilled into the city. Eerie glowing eyes peered out from the leafy tops of the trees that lined both sides of the road. Whatever was hiding up there—and the magic felt like more of those bats—Alex hoped they’d stay put. She’d already texted Magic Cleanup about the centaurs, the storm of bats, the dissolved highway entrance, and the werewolves. She wrote up a message about the second group of bats and sent that one off too. Violet, the Monster Cleanup squad’s receptionist, would be absolutely overjoyed to get another one. The organization was obviously already working at full capacity. If she’d summoned Alex and Logan to battle, everyone else at Monster Cleanup was already out there.
    “After a whole week of late night monster hunts, this was supposed to be our night off,” Alex said as Logan turned onto a street of little box houses. “I told Violet not to bother us unless hell had arrived on earth.”
    “That’s a fairly accurate description of the city tonight,” Logan said, swerving to avoid two grappling flying squirrels drooping tendrils of golden lightning. The flying squirrels slammed into a fire hydrant, and the top of it exploded into a geyser.
    “I didn’t even know there were magic flying squirrels around here,” Alex commented.
    “There’s a magic zoo nearby.” He slid the car into a parking spot at the end of the road. “I can hear our giant bees up ahead.”
    “I feel them,” Alex said, grabbing her sword as she hopped out of the car. “Their magic is really bizarre.”
    They ran around the corner onto the next street, then Alex just stopped. Violet’s message had mentioned six giant bees. Well, she hadn’t been wrong about the ‘giant’ part. Each of the poisonous magic bugs was about the size of a house cat, but there were a hell of a lot more than six of them. Covered in a shimmering blue layer of dragon-like scales, there were over fifty giant bees. Their heads were tucked inside of thick helmet shells, and their poison-coated stingers were the size of daggers. Someone might as well have written ‘indestructible killing squad’ on their backs because that’s what they truly were.
    “Hello, army from hell,” Alex said.
    It was busier here than on the quiet residential nook where Logan had parked the car. Restaurants and clubs lined both sides of the flickering sapphire-blue river of scaled bodies buzzing down the street. The people had fled into the buildings, but the thick,